Another milestone! This is the 200th post on this Blog, which I started almost exactly six years ago. These days I’m not posting as often as I had used to in the earlier years but the individual Blog posts have gradually become longer and more elaborate. Out of the 200 posts, ca. three dozen were “themed posts”. And to mark this anniversary I decided to pick 20 of my favourite photos out of those themed posts.
Going roughly in reverse chronological order, this first photo is taken from the most recent themed post “DT & Toilets”:
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How often have you encountered a window in a toilet cubicle on a plane? This photo was taken on a small plane from Vienna to Moldova (from where I travelled to Transnistria).
The next photo is from the themed post “DT & Shadows”, and shows the stark shadows thrown by the twin engines of a Titan II missile on open-air display at the National Museum of Nuclear Science & History in Albuquerque, New Mexico, USA:
The themed post “DT & Beds” included this next photo, taken at BunkArt 1 on the outskirts of Tirana, Albania, showing the country’s bunker-loving former dictator Enver Hoxha’s bed inside his government nuclear bunker … paranoia meeting kitsch:
This next photo was taken from the post “DT & Graffiti” and shows a small mural in Belfast, Northern Ireland celebrating the legendary RMS Titanic (which had been built in Belfast) – to which some jokester had added “it sank”:
One of the more unusual and probably unexpected themed posts was “DT & Beaches” (given that dark tourism is pretty much the opposite of escapism and beach tourism); but indeed some beaches can be dark too, such as this one in front of the ghost town of Varosha in Northern Cyprus called Palm Beach (note the absence of any palm trees!):
The themed post “DT & Reflections” is one of my personal favourites overall. I already featured several photos from that in the 100th Blog Post anniversary post and didn’t want to repeat any of them here. So I went for this photo, taken from a small seaplane in Sri Lanka showing the underside of one wing with a little mirror attached to it reflecting the nose and propeller of the plane:
Another favourite themed post of mine was “DT & Hands” (do take another look!). From that I picked this photo, taken at Budapest’s “Memento Park” collection of socialist art:
I like the way in which this image invites over-interpretation, along the lines of “broken comradeship”, “socialism has cracked” or some such thing. For me personally it could also be “good, let all handshakes be broken and forgotten as soon as possible”. I hate handshakes – and I particularly hate the importance some people attach to this ritual (e.g. that a firm handshake signals confidence and could decide a job application interview in an instant, or similar such rubbish). After the Covid-19 pandemic, during which the handshake was banned (and replaced with those comical elbow touching moves or fist bumps), I sincerely hoped that the handshake would remain banished to the history books … but now it seems like, no, on the contrary, handshakes are not only back, but back with a vengeance (and even common in Britain these days – which was absolutely not the case when I first went there). Nowadays, I usually get out of shaking hands because I have an autoimmune skin condition on the palm of my right hand, which means I have to patch or glove up the hand, or, when not covering it, keeping the palm softened with regular application of urea cream (and who would want to shake a freshly creamed hand?!?) – but having to explain all that every time is awkward. By the way, I’m not alone in finding handshakes abhorrent – see e.g. this entertaining article (external link, opens in a new tab)! And another by the way: it’s not just personal viewpoints, there’s also a pragmatic perspective: the palms of our hands are the parts of our bodies carrying the most bacteria and other pathogens (far more than lips). So from a purely hygienic point of view, shaking hands is just about the stupidest ritual humans engage in. But rant over, let’s move on to the next photo …
Perhaps one of the must unusual themes on this Blog was “DT & Pianos”, which included this photo (same one as the featured photo at the top of this post):
This photo was taken in the ghost town of Pyramiden on Spitsbergen, Svalbard, which has the status of a territory of Norway. Pyramiden used to be a Soviet, then Russian coal-mining settlement (made possible by the 1920 Svalbard Treaty) and was abandoned in the late 1990s. Since then it has become something like a holy grail for urbexing in the high Arctic. During the guided tour I went on we visited the settlement’s cultural centre (every prestigious Soviet settlement had to have one), and one hall featured this grand piano on an otherwise empty stage. Funnily enough, though, I actually could hardly see the piano, as the hall was pretty dark. But I took a 30-seconds long-exposure photo with my dSLR, which acted like night-vision equipment (boosting residual low light).
Another unusual theme was “DT & Food”, and this featured the following photo:
This is a serving of “fugu”, or pufferfish, in raw sashimi form, which I had at a restaurant in Tokyo, Japan, in 2009. The dark thing here is that this type of fish is extremely toxic, especially its innards, hence only specially trained and licensed chefs are allowed to prepare it. Many people having prepared it themselves have died (and a nasty death it is, as the toxin paralyses victims so they can’t move or speak and then slowly die of asphyxiation as the lungs become paralysed too). At this Tokyo restaurant, however, it was safe enough – although it did come with a slight feeling of apprehension and a little nerve tickling. Was it worth it taste-wise? I would say, no, not really; it was rubbery and tough and didn’t have much taste until you added a bit of soy sauce …
In the themed post “DT & Toys” this photo was featured – a fluffy toy space shuttle (with eyes!):
This photo was taken at the Onizuka Space Center on Big Island Hawaii, named after Ellison S. Onizuka (born on Hawaii), who was one of the astronauts who perished in the Challenger space shuttle disaster of 1986. Had this fluffy toy been an item in the museum shop I would have been very tempted to purchase one, but it was an artefact in the exhibition and as such not for sale.
A unique juxtaposition of dark and cute presents itself in Japan on Okunoshima Island, aka “Rabbit Island”, where I took this photo of one of the hundreds of (semi-)feral bunnies that live on the island and later included it in the themed Blog post “DT & Animals”:
The dark element is that Okunoshima used to be home to a top-secret chemical weapons factory of Imperial Japan’s military during WWII. And today there is even a museum about that topic.
In the themed post “DT & Broken Glass” one of the featured photos was this:
This photo was taken in a temporary special exhibition at Alcatraz, San Francisco, that was about old age in prison. I like the way the one eye of the person on the black&white photo behind the broken glass seems to be peeking through that small hole. I think there’s a certain serene sentimentality in the atmosphere of this image …
Next comes a photo of something that actually no longer exists. It featured in the themed post “DT & Lakes” and shows the lava lake inside Pu’u O’o crater on Big Island Hawaii, part of the Kilauea volcano system as it was in 2015, seen from a scenic doors-off helicopter flight:
In the meantime the crater floor of Pu’u O’o collapsed in 2018, draining the lava lake, while Kilauea’s main crater Halema’uma’u also collapsed in a large-scale event that completely changed the landscape. Later a new lava lake formed there.
In the themed post “DT & Christmas” I featured this funny juxtaposition of a man dressed up as Santa aboard a rubber dinghy in the tropical waters of Antigua in the Caribbean (they were probably en route to some Xmas festivities at one of the resorts on the island):
The theme of one particular Blog post was ambiguous: “DT & Bars”. And indeed the post features both bars like those you find in prisons as well as bars in the form of places to drink in. One special bar was the private “house bar” of Ernst Udet that he had on board his plane (‘Bordbar’ in German):
Ernst Udet had been a German flying ace in WW1 and in 1933 joined the Nazi party and was given an administrative job in the building up of the Luftwaffe in preparation for WWII. But he hated bureaucratic work, became increasingly disillusioned with his superiors, took to the bottle, developed psychological problems and eventually committed suicide. His ‘Bordbar’ survived the war and is now on display at the Deutsches Technikmuseum in Berlin.
The themed post “DT & Clothes” featured a photo that has my first name in it (though here it is most probably a surname), namely on a soldier’s folded shirt on display at the Military History Museum in Dresden:
Another Military History Museum, namely here in Vienna, has as one of its “star” exhibits the car that heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne Franz Ferdinand was travelling in when he was assassinated in Sarajevo. If you look closely you can see a bullet hole just above my copyright watermark. This photo featured, unsurprisingly, in the themed post “DT & Cars”:
For the themed post “DT & Villas” I selected a photo of one particular specimen that you can find in Dresden near its former Stasi prison. But this villa was once resided in by one Vladimir Putin, when he was head of the local KGB:
And now for something really spooky that was featured in the themed post “DT and Mummies”, namely this photo of a mummy near Uyuni, Bolivia, with a coin in one of the eye sockets (locals take little gifts to their dead, hence):
And finally to the theme “DT & Books”, for which I will repeat a shameless bit of self-advertising, namely of my own book “Atlas of Dark Destinations” which came out in late 2021. And in spring 2022, to my surprise, I spotted a copy of it in the bookshop at the airport in Tirana, Albania:
If you don’t yet own a copy of my book – well, shame on you! If you do have a copy, maybe now is the time to pick it up again and have a browse 😉
But with this I shall bring this anniversary 200th Blog Post to a close. Having gone through all those themed posts made me think I should do a few more, and let you vote on the themes, as before. Next time perhaps. First I have to see what new themes I could come up with (it’s not getting easier over time).
