In the left-hand photo below, you’ll see stalls from Funchal’s little Christmas market, something I noticed in pretty much every town and village we passed through.
This year’s installation for the Amsterdam Light Festival in a little park near my office. You can see last year’s here. The whole festival is installed in and around canals on my office’s side of town, so I’ve seen some of them biking to and from work already, but do plan a boat tour some evening soon (not locked down this year, so I can do it a bit more warmly than last year!), and hopefully share some photos with you in future posts.
Funchal really does Christmas lights in a big, big way. Notice the lighter blue lights in the peaked roofs on this waterfront cafe, just above? Those are volcanoes erupting, and though I tried, I couldn’t get the video to upload well nor did it really show the eruptions well enough to bother… Last holiday-lights show from Funchal here, and then some from Amsterdam next, which as you may recall from many posts last year does its own winter lights quite nicely :-).
Agreed, it’s a bit late to be posting photos of Christmas trees…but at least I managed to fit it into January, right? And I bet you’ll agree: after these days of lovely night-time light photos, it’s rather nice to know that a few times in the past month, the sun’s agreed to break through the cloud cover, eh? Thanks to my friend Kiki for making this lovely escape to for a sunny xmas day in the country possible.
And to wrap up my presentation of this seasonal extravaganza, a video to show how the lights and trains in the photo at top left, and the tongue-and-lamppost installation, all work when in motion. Hope you’ve enjoyed this exploration of seasonal cheer / late-consumer-capitalist displays :-).
To close out this series, I’m highlighting a lovely neighborhood whose residents have chosen the low-tech, hand-painted approach on their lawns. And they certainly show a wide range of personal styles, eh? 🙂
(so much world, so little time....) 