I’ve always had a thing for how skies slowly change.
When I was young, my father used to take me out for bike rides. We’d ride the same paths and see the same sights every time. Our bike ride route seemed like something unique to us, that nobody else could imitate. Now as adults, people pound the same old roads and pavements every day and its clear their paths aren’t unique, and the roads don’t belong to them (unless you drive a 4×4 Audi). I remember looking at the clouds with my dad and feeling incredibly sentimental as it changed, and as clouds formed and separated. As you can see, sentimentality seems to be the order of the day in terms of this blog!
Anyway, when I look at the sky it’s forever changing and unique, just like human lives. And when it changes it’s never exactly the same again. That’s what I hope to get across with the atmosphere of Rivers.
To make Rivers between 5.30am and 7am I took my GH1 down to the Chiang Kai-shek memorial hall here in Taipei city centre.
Coming from the UK, it’s rare to find people on the street at 5.30am in the morning in English cities. If you do, usually they’re either drunk or murderers, but in Taiwan it’s very different. Here, there are old people doing yoga in the park!! Shortly afterwards the sun comes up and at around 6.30am many people walk or drive to work and even school-kids get up super early at 6am, to start classes as dawn breaks. The atmosphere in the park feels really strange but very refreshing – a mixture of laziness and supreme orderliness. A mixture of oldies participating in healthy activities, office workers walking to work, and school kids beginning sports lessons at 7am in the morning. Crazy stuff.
In short, it feels like an Asian tiger economy waking up, ready to pounce on the west.
But all I could do was look at the sky, point my GH1 at it and think of my father, somewhere up there behind it all.
