Every picture is a memory. Every time we press the shutter on the camera we are freezing a moment of history so we can preserve it forever. It sounds monumentous doesn't it, but it's not: Facebook will certainly tell you otherwise. I log on each day to see the myriad of photos that my so-called 'friends' vomit onto my homepage. Not only do people upload a sequence of the same picture - I have two of them so why not use them - but the other people in the picture will also post their versions of it. The result? Monster albums clogging up the internet providing the CIA with plenty of material should anyone need blackmailing in the future...


It is an age-old question, though. How do we make our holiday photos interesting to the general public? How do we step away from the necessity to have 'been there' to really appreciate someone else's pictures? And, while we're at it, how can we remove this insane fashion for de-tagging and portraying this hideously false image on Facebook? There is no hard and fast solution - no tried and tested method to solve this, but I think I may have hit upon a compromise.


May I invite you to read on...

Saturday, 21 January 2012

Living La Dolce Vita

So by now you may have twigged that things were about to change for me at university because I was moving away for a year. After lots of farewells, zero hour approached and I was whisked away by Easy Jet to Italy. Well actually to France because I flew to Nice, and then I got the train to Italy. But you can read all about that here.

I spent a month in Italy teaching, sightseeing, and falling off bikes. I was itching to jump in front of Lake Garda, in front of the castle in Brescia overlooking the city, even with my fellow tutors at our English camp. I didn't manage any of these. Instead all I could muster was jumping off my bike on a steep descent on Mont'Isola leaving a large amount of my skin on the gravel.

The problem was that I was staying with a host family, the kind of people that you could offend if it looked like you were mocking their hospitality. 'Thanks for taking me to this beautiful place, can you take a silly photo of me?'

Anyway, that meant for a month, jumping was off limits. But fear not jumping fans! After spending a month teaching, I went to do a month of learning and I found myself in a little hilltop town called Camerino embarking on a language and culture course.

This was one of my favourite experiences on my year abroad - I met loads of fantastic people and managed to inspire their love of jumping too: I more than made up for my dry month.

So without further ado here is the first jumping picture from way over in Italy:

We'll Buy Him a Patch in the Tuscany Hills...
Camerino, Italy, 2009

So it isn't quite Tuscany, but it was one of the most beautiful places I've ever had the fortune to stay in. Neither is it the best jumping picture I've ever seen - but like my year, things were certainly on the up.
Posted by at
Labels: , , , , , ,
Location: Camerino Macerata, Italy

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)