Sunday, March 06, 2011

Waking to a new world

Many years ago, I developed the habit of taking a photograph out of my bedroom window whenever I woke for the first time in a new place. Since one so often arrives in darkness, with little or no idea of one's surroundings or orientation, a delicious sense of shock attends the moment of revelation on the first morning. I have particularly fond memories of a striking shot I took on a school trip twenty-odd years ago - pure reflex rather than conscious craft, still fumbling half-asleep - in a little family hotel in the Peloponnese, of the clay-tiled rooftop opposite and the fierce blue Mediterranean sky above.

This was what greeted me a fortnight ago in Kuala Lumpur: a ramshackle backpacker hostel behind my hotel (not much less grungy), and half a mile to the north, the city's enormous TV Tower.  (I'm not sure what the pink, classical-looking building that looks as if it's hovering in mid-air is. The Telekom Museum perhaps?)

2 comments:

JES said...

What a striking photo. The TV tower, from that angle and at that distance, looks almost exactly like a stylized rocket a second or two post-launch. (I actually thought that's what it was at first!)

Froog said...

You see, if I had a functional version of Photoshop any more, I would now be busily grafting images of TV towers on to Apollo and space shuttle launch scenes, just to feed your whimsy.

The 'floating museum' at left - which I didn't even notice at the time - is what I find most striking in this.