Free, fun Amazing street art, statues and murals, outdoors in the sun or sheltering underground

Where is street art which you can see for free - or join a walking tour for a small fee or donation in good weather? The places which spring to my mind are:

UK London's Amy Winehouse trail and Camden; Brixton; Croydon. Bristol and Banksy.


Brixton mural from Wikipedia.

Big Splash, on Glenelg Road (London, SW2) by Christine Thomas, assisted by Dave Bangs and Diana Leary – 1985.

 Iemanja75 (talk) LeticiaGolubov 10:56, 15 March 2010 (UTC) - self-made.

BRAZIL Rio de Janeiro's slums or favelas transformed in rainbow colours.

Praça Cantão, 2011

André Sampaio - Own work

Foto panorâmica da Praça Cantão, situado na Favela Santa Marta, em Botafogo, Rio de Janeiro, Brasil. Esta foto foi tirada para ser incorporada ao site www.wikirio.com.br e disponibilizada ao público sem restrições.

INDIA - the Mumbai makeover, painting slum houses into street art and happy homes. (Mumbai, previously called Bombay.)

POLAND Wroclaw has a trail of tiny not even nearly knee high statues, 20-30 cm. Most are on the ground, a few higher up or even overhead.

e	23 August 2017
Source	Photographed during 2017 IFLA Conference, Wroclaw, Poland.
Author	Photographed by Bobby Bothmann.

Muzeum Poczty i Telekomunikacji, ul. Krasińskiego 1, I piętro 

USA Philadelphia's mural trail

Singapore
In Singapore one of my favourite streets for colourful buildings is Waterloo Street.

Waterloo Street, Singapore, for colourful buildings. Photo by Angela Lansbury. The bright yellow of this building, with the green shutters is immediately obvious. Look up and you can see the pink of an HDB skyscraper behind on the left, and blue and white on the right. Copyright.

Where do you work or live? In the yellow building. In the pink building. In the blue building.

Over in Chinatown the traditional houses have coloured tiles and co-ordinating flowering trees. Notice the green tiles with embossed patterns. the salmon pink wash, with deeper contrasting lines. the white window shutters with the white fretwork above. the double doors are white with wavy edges and orangey salmon pink lines. The tree is green and white.

Chinatown traditional house. Photo by Angela Lansbury. Copyright.

Many of the modern government built housing blocks, called HDB, are in bands of colour.
If you are lucky, the block you are visiting has a different colour or design or murals of flowers so that children and adults and strangers can quickly identify it.

If the weather is bad, you might have to take a tour of the underground stations.
Singapore has art on underground stations such as Newton.


UK and London Underground

Sherlock Holmes on Baker street station underground platform. Photo by Angela Lansbury. Copyright.

Baker Street in London, UK, has a platform featuring Sherlock Holmes.

Who and where is this? It must be Victoria station, London, England.

Photo by Angela Lansbury. Copyright.

Fun for tourists, and transform the lives of those who live there.
Fodor's travel picks 12 cities, starting with:
Dublin,
Glasgow,https://peoplemakeglasgow.com/things-to-do/city-centre-mural-trail
and several more destinations, including: Melbourne, Mexico City, New York, New Orleans, Paris and Rome. Enough to keep you busy for a year.

Useful Websites
The Effect on the community - a TED talk.
https://www.ted.com/talks/haas_hahn_how_painting_can_transform_communities
Places for tourists to visit.
https://www.fodors.com/news/photos/these-12-cities-are-home-to-the-best-street-art-on-earth
Philadelphia mural walking tours
https://www.muralarts.org/tours/
https://www.straitstimes.com/lifestyle/arts/mumbai-slums-get-colourful-makeover

Underground stations and railway stations
https://travelwithangelalansbury.blogspot.com/2019/01/my-favourite-humorous-artwork-on-newton.html

TRAVEL AND TOURISM
Singapore Airlines
singaporeair.com
visitsingapore.com
visitbritain.com
visitbritain.org
visitlondon.com
incredibleindia.org
visittheusa.co.uk

Author
Angela Lansbury
Travel writer and photographer, author and speaker. I have several more posts on murals, at stations in London, Russia, and Singapore, plus more pieces on destinations and the weird and wacky and wonderful. Please share links to your favourite posts.

How to remember 23 Portuguese words - or any foreign language

Flag of Portugal. From Wikimedia Commons.

Problem
I am learning Portuguese. I need a working vocabulary of about 300 words, which I can do in a month if I learn ten a day. I need to practise every day or I will forget the words.

Answer
The simple solution is to keep the word list on a page in my diary. I write the foreign word first, then the English translation.

Alphabet Letters
I list the letters of the alphabet down the left hand side. How many lines do I have? I have 26, enough for one line per letter of the alphabet. (In theory if I know there are few words, an few I need to know, starting with x, y, z, or any letter that language does not use, I could drop that letter or put two on one line, leaving space for a each use letter, such as c in French or S in English.

I started with the letters of the alphabet at the beginning of the line, but I was short of space. So I wrote over the letters, making the initial letter in the margin. When I started the next page, for German, I had the system more condensed.

Margin
Now the initial letters are in the margin. I write as close as I can get to the edge of the page.

Saving Space
I started by repeating the letters, leaving the initial letter separate. However, now I use it to start the first word.  So instead of
A agua - water
b boa / bom - good
c carta - letter

I write
agua - water
boa / bom - good
carta - letter

Save Space With Dots
The hyphens between the Portuguese and the English were taking up too much space. I changed the line for a dot.

agua.water
boa.good
carta.letter

In this blog post I am not so short of space. I also want to make the words easier to read. Therefore here I am sticking to the hyphens.

If the word is the same in English I write the letter s in brackets.
pizza (s) 

Why Not Capitalise Initial Letters?
I could write
Agua
Boa
Carta

However, I have been trained as a sub-editor to use small letters to start words in dictionaries. That way the reader knows when a word always starts with a capital letter.

Folding
The page is narrow and I need all the space I can get. I fold the page in half vertically and then in half again. So I now have four columns.

Four across by 25 down makes space for 100 words on a page.

Here are my first 23 Portuguese words with my memory aids:
(Only 20 are listed in this blog post under labels because the limit is 20 labels)

agua - water (like aquaduct)
abacaxi - pineapple (P and B sound and look almost the same. AP - pineAPple - apple pine, pine apple, cut it down with an axe - ee! I might not remember translating from English to Portuguese, but I am well on the way to remembering it when I see it written on a menu in Portugal or Madeira)
boa / bom - good (As in Bombay. Good bay. How do I remember it's good and not beautiful. If it's beautiful it's good.)
carta - letter, a carta or uma carta is a letter. (How do I remember 'a carta', feminine? I visualise a lady writing a letter.)
com - with / to / by
de - of
é - is
ele - he / him / it
eles - they
eu - I
falamos - we speak
gosto - (I) like
jornal - newspaper (o / um jornal) (like the French journal but drop the u, just as the Americans drop the u from British English c o l o u r and make it c o l o r.)
lê - you read
leio - I read (I remember: Add i for I, + O for I as in Latin Amo amas amat meaning I read, you etc)
livro - book
menino - boy (I remember men, but little ones, o as in boy for masculine)
mulheres - women
nós - us / we
um - a / one / some
você - you (I remember vous with v in French. V looks like Y.) 

Other useful posts:
http://travelwithangelalansbury.blogspot.co.uk/2018/01/port-and-portuguese-wine-labels-and.
http://travelwithangelalansbury.blogspot.co.uk/2018/01/how-to-ask-for-food-and-drink-in.
http://travelwithangelalansbury.blogspot.co.uk/2018/01/learn-your-first-ten-words-in.
http://travelwithangelalansbury.blogspot.co.uk/2018/01/how-do-you-say-please-in-portuguese-is.

visitportugal.com

visitbrasil.com

http://www.visitmadeira.pt/en-gb/homepage

duolingo.com

earwormslearning.com

http://travelwithangelalansbury.blogspot.co.uk/2018/02/polyglot-poem-by-angela-lansbury.html

Author
Angela Lansbury, travel writer and photographer, author and speaker, learner and speaker of many languages (a polyglot). Please bookmark and share links to your favourite posts. I have several more on Portuguese, Spanish, German, Chinese, Hebrew and other languages and countries.

Incredible India: Miriam Margolyes, Hotels, and Buddha

I love Mark Twain's comment, quoted at the Incredible India presentation at The World Travel Market in London, November 2016.



What is incredible about India? Everybody knows about the Taj Mahal, which is a Moslem mausoleum to the wife lost after numerous childbirths, all elegant patterns and curves but no pictures. Contrast this with the wonderful Hindu temples, covered with figurines, including the amazing erotic carvings at Khajurao.

India also has most of the sites connected with Buddha.

Hotels and Miriam Margolyes
At the Incredible India presentation we heard from ministers and the actress Miriam Margolyes, who featured in the film about the Marigold Hotel. Miriam spoke about the warmth of the people. Of course, actresses are all about people and how they relate to each other. Miriam, like many of the ministers, is not tall, and when I stood at the back of the hall it was easy to hear her well projected, resounding voice, but harder to see, so I wished that she and the other VIP speakers had stood up to address us.

Miriam is a distant relative of mine, through a common ancestor, and we had corresponded and hoped to meet previously but she moved from England to Australia and back and I was off to Singapore and we never made a meeting. So it was a delightful surprise to meet her at last.


Hotels In India
India is known for its hotels, many being converted palaces, others designed to resemble palaces. I have stayed at a couple of the older ones, one at Jaipur. I insisted on stopping just for a look and walk around to visit another modern six star hotel on the road from to Agra to see the Taj Mahal. (A day trip can be taken to see the Taj Mahal, but it is said to be best at dawn and sunset, so staying overnight is recommended.)

Kerala and Tamil Nadu
I have been to Delhi, known for its gold sellers' quarter. My favourite seaside city is now called Mumbai, although the old name Bombay, from the Portuguese, sums up its attraction for tourist, meaning Beautiful Bay. My first trip to India I translated French into English at a lawyers' conference. It was back in the 1970s, the days of the typewriter, and I remember being the only female typist in a room of male secretaries, who all jumped to their feet when I walked into the typing room.

As an author and English teacher, on my next trip to India I hope to visit Kerala and Tamil Nadu, which have the highest literacy rates. They are also in the south, which will be a contrast of food. Instead of meat curries favoured by Muslims, and Hindus, in the north, there will be more vegetarian food, favoured by Hindus, and Muslims, in the south.

(If you are in London, England, you will find 'Indian' restaurants everywhere. The oldest ones, such as Veeraswamy, near Piccadilly, date back to the days before Pakistan separated. In London centre there are even chains serving spicier food. We have lots of Tandoori and Balti restaurants in the suburbs. In Hatch End (Euston line to Watford) you will find Coriander, which serves meat. In Rayners Lane (Piccadilly and Metropolitan line) you will find several vegetarian restaurants and sweet shops, even a giant grocery store, JB, at North Harrow, for sacks of rice and loose vegetables with names I have to look up in a dictionary on my phone. (For pictures see my previous posts.)

Over in Singapore, Little India has restaurants serving fish head curry on banana leaves. (For pictures of restaurants in London and Singapore see my previous posts.) For details of Buddha, pearls and flowers

Angela Lansbury, travel writer and photographer, author and speaker.





Angela Lansbury, travel writer and photographer, author and speaker.

Ten Level Human Tower in Spain, more in Mumbai and Chile

Why and Where Did It Start
Human towers are feats of teamwork as well as endurance and a spectacle for a festival, a competition.

Heights
It's not just about trust, strength, endurance, teamwork. This is not a sport for those afraid of heights. How high can you go?

Judging A Contest
How do you judge a contest? You have to build the tower neatly with nobody dropping out as you build it or dis-assemble it.

Teamwork
Teamwork? The people at the bottom are a larger group creating a cone, yet their faces look quite exhausted and strained as they support the weight of those standing and climbing above. You can't lean back, move, you have to stay in position. The lightest are at the top with a child at the pinnacle.

Speed in Contests
The quicker you can climb up, the quicker you can beat the record, beat another team, and save the shoulders below of the strain.

I must admit I would not want one person standing on my shoulders, let alone a tower of ten.

Where To Watch
A ten level human tower has just been achieved. If you like human displays you can watch the video. The video was on Red Bull TV. I shared it on my Facebook page.

Where did it happen?
Vilafranca del Penedès, Tarragona, Spain.
October 4 2016.
Video on the BBC.
www.thehumantower.com

Villafranca is also known for chocolate coloured eggs, not dyed but from Penedesenca chickens laying chocolate coloured eggs, and the wine museum. P e n e d e s is a wine area, one hour south west of Barcelona. P e n e d e s (I am inserting spaces because autocorrect prefers the word pennies) is known for cava (bubbly) as well as red, white and dessert wines.

Where Worldwide?
Teams train all over the world, in Spain in Europe, in South America in Santiago and Valparaiso, Chile, in Asia in Mumbai, India.
Another took place in Mumbai, India, trained by an enthusiast. (Mumbai used to be called Bombay, beautiful bay in Portuguese, on the west coast of India.)

India
On aug 17 the BBC reported that a Mumbai court had banned children from under age of 18 as it was deemed dangerous and also banned towers too high, not over 20 feet, six metres.

* India
* Chile
* Spain
Check spelling of v i l a f r a n c a. Autocorrect keeps changing it to double ll.

Villafranca, Catalonia, Spain
* Wine Museum
* Chocolate coloured eggs
* Human Tower competition

Angela Lansbury, travel writer and photographer, author and speaker.