Just over a week ago I took the proprietor of PattayaDaze for an outing to Silverlake. We were delighted to find a large collection of sunflowers, less delighted that the sun was behind them so we had to use flash to get some shots.
We decided a return trip was in order, at a time when the sun would be shining on the sunflowers, and we duly presented ourselves at the ticket office at 0830 this morning. The place had been open since 0800, but there was nobody in the ticket office to take our fifty baht; so we wandered down to the park and were duly stopped at the gate.
*Need ticket. No have, office empty. Need ticket. How can? Office empty. Need ticket. We’ll buy it on the way back. Need ticket. Here, have a hundred baht and you can buy the ticket for us; or keep the money, we just want to enter your park of loveliness. Need ticket. Oh fuck. * So we walked back up the hill and eventually extracted a young lady from the toilets who gave us our tickets in between examining the contents of her nose.
Not a good start and it was about to get worse. Last week there had been a huge bank of sunflowers, now there was just a mound of soil and some shoots of something that wasn’t a sunflower. Someone had killed all the sunflowers. I collared a gardener.
Where are the sunflowers? All gone. You do realise that this is ethnic cleansing and I will have to report you to the Flowers Rights Tribunal in the Hague? And let me tell you, I have lived in the Hague and there is dog poo everywhere and they put mayonnaise on their chips. You won’t like it. Eh? Oh fuck.
Sensing my disappointment, and fearful of twenty years sharing a cell with Radovan Karadžić, the gardener offered to show me some blue flowers. They were indeed quite pretty, but they did not make up for the sunflower massacre. It’ll be a while before I go to Silverlake again, just to spend half an hour trying to find someone to give me a ticket, only to discover that they have ripped up all the previous attractions and replaced them with soil.
Panasonic GF1 with 75mm Navitar TV lens. Like the bokeh!
Panasonic GF1 with Olympus 45mm
Panasonic GF1 with Olympus 45mm
Fuji X100
Panasonic GF1 with Olympus 45mm
Panasonic GF1 with 75mm Navitar TV lens.
Comments 🔗
2011-11-17| Barry saysThat photo with the windmill can’t be in Thailand. It’s all too clean. Where’s the garbage? Ah, now I know. There’s no Thais in sight. Probably because there’s no som tam or grilled chicked stands. And I bet the windmill is fake. Bah. Humbug. Seriously though, it looks quite nice. I should get out more instead of writing comments on Pattaya Days.
2011-11-17| Spike saysOh dear Barry, we are going to have to rename you Angry Barry. Garbage, contrary restaurants; it’s all part of the magnificent chaos that makes this place such fun to live in. You want order, try Singapore for a week. You’ll be back, embracing the glorious mess that is Thailand.
2011-11-17| Wally saysLike the bokeh! I bet that is what the ticket lady said following her digital excursion up one of her nostrils !
2011-11-18| TheSon saysExcellent framing on the X100 windmill shot! And that Navitar is great fun, although a bugger to focus as I remember (at least when trying to focus on catwalk lingerie models)
2011-11-19| Spike saysThe framing options were somewhat constrained by the fact there is a sodding big red radio mast just to the right of the shot. The Navitar is nuts, and the Olympus 45mm is just astonishing.