Soya Hirano -- Holland Park, Thursday May 6th

Despite being an English major, I love inspirational pictures more than words. I may not fully or rhetorically reason why I post these pictures, but bear with my writing and pictures, please. (Alas, uploading more than two pictures on this blog is technically time-consuming and difficult to organize.)

I missed to go to York, which was an optional bus trip, but visited by chance Holland Park - originally owned by Lord Holland - in the late afternoon after a relaxing morning without time pressure. The park was about a 5-minute walk north-northwesternward from London Lodge Hotel in Kensington, at which our study abroad group stayed. Founded in the 1870s (I think), the buildings of Holland House, a couple of which are shown in the pictures above (you will see the same fountain from two different angles), took only a little space in the park. Rather, the park consists mainly of different gardens and lawns for sport or amusement. I had good hours of watching trees (lol) and birds like peacocks. The peacock on the left did not allow me to near him closer than 3 or 4 feet; yet, I made it! Here's the picture of me and him. A bunch of male and female peacocks were wandering around without confinement, avoiding humans. The males looked beautiful, but their ugly and sort of glottal cry surprised me.

I was tricked: The man on the right is not real. It's a statue, Walking Man (1998) by Sean Henry. I thought that the statue's location surrounded by the trees is unique.

Here I attach some pictures of a Japanese garden, Kyoto Garden, founded by the Kyoto Chamber of Commerce and Industry and The Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea on 17 September 1991. I found this garden in the middle of the park. I hope you have noticed the picture of a reflection of the tree below in the Kyoto Garden is upside-down. :} The stone garden lantern and a small column stone with a square concave on the top for water are typical items of Japanese gardens (see the picture on the left). The picture may have more Japanese signifiers, but I don't know very well about Japanese gardening, even though I'm Japanese.

The statue below is Boy with Bear Cubs by John Macllen Swan (I don't know what year he carved it). I took four pictures of the statue because I'm crazy about perspectives. To my limited knowledge about statuary and kinesics, Swan's expression of the boy and bear cubs' motions is animated and impressive. You could also see a cub's hard palate and tongs separately.

This is merely my personal trip apart from the study abroad program, but the dusk sky was my favorite scene. The picture was taken from the passage alongside the Sports Field of Holland Park. I had to darken my camera's picture's brightness to vivify the sky's color more than the leaves in the frontdrop of the picture.

My interpretation of the scene may or may not be relevant to our class discussion about Addison's essay on our vision, imagination, and understanding. I was imagining a central point amidst the leaves and clouds. The sky and clouds are pictorial like a fanciful painting maybe because I dropped my camera's exposure so much, or/and because the shapes of the clouds were too fuzzy to be vivid. Clouds are not altogether under the same sunlight, since some of them are gray in the shadow, and some aren't.

Changing exposure at dusk could show you two points of views, as you see below the two comparison pictures of the same tennis court in the park. In a way, our eyes are able to see both terrestial and celestial views; however, my camera apparently can't but see the scene with certain brightness, offering different impressions of it.

At the end of my stroll, I took two pictures of a cherry tree. The fallen patals of the tree over the ground were restful and peaceful as well as melancholic. Some of them were still beautiful.