International Women’s Day 2022

Just a short one for once … Today is 8 March, Women’s Day. And this has to be marked in some way.

Last year on this date I gave you a post featuring various more or less gigantic female statues.

One of them was the humongous titanium-clad Rodina Mat (aka Motherland Monument) in Kyiv, featured in the photo above. The statue is a staggering 62m tall (with the sword), combined with the plinth she towers over the city at a height of over a 100m.

The photo was taken when I was in the city prior to my second Chernobyl trip in May 2015. Also on that occasion I took a photo whose composition now seems strikingly evocative:

Rodina Mat against big guns

This was of course only a play with perspective. The WWII-era guns in the foreground were of a perfectly regular size and formed part of the larger war memorial complex around the giant statue. But from this perspective she looks a) small, and b) threatened.

Suddenly that has taken on a fitting symbolism for the current situation in Putin’s war against Ukraine … and I wonder if this Rodina Mat will actually be physically threatened at some point as this nasty conflict drags on …

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Krakow in Winter

As Europe is heading into summer, and before long quite probably into another series of heatwaves, I thought I’d post something about my visit to the great city of Krakow, Poland, where I was in mid-January, i.e. in the depths of the southern Polish winter.
After visiting Auschwitz I also had a few days in Krakow itself and managed to fill a number of significant gaps in terms of dark tourism that I’ll present in the course of this Blog post.

The biggest of these gaps was probably the

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Hamburg & Berlin revisited

Around the Easter period I travelled to northern Germany once again. Primarily this was to visit family and to see to some bureaucratic things that needed doing. But I also managed to squeeze in a touch of dark tourism here and there.

Hamburg is the city I was born in and where I grew up (mostly), went to school and studied. Since I left in the mid-1990s I’ve been back numerous times, yet there still remained things I had never managed to slot in before. One thing I had long wanted to do was going back to my former primary school in Hamburg on Kielortallee. When I

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Wanli urbexing

Since the previous Blog post about Auschwitz was topically about as dark as it can get, I decided to offset that with a post about something at the lighter end of the dark-tourism spectrum: urbexing (from ‘urban exploration’, visiting abandoned structures for fun if you, like me, enjoy the aesthetics of dilapidation and decay – in fact on my website I say that urbex only overlaps with dark tourism, but as it’s one of the least touristy categories it’s one I often enjoy a lot).

Wanli is a largely abandoned beach resort park on the north coast of Taiwan. Officially it is a district of New Taipei City, but is actually far from being ‘urban’ in the literal sense; instead

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