View allAll Photos Tagged Hosting
a visit after the long confinement to meet friends. View across the medieval bridge to thr city portal, the castle and the cathedral.
You can licence my photos through Folio.
facebook | Gustaf Emanuelsson
blog | www.gblog.se
instagram | gustaf_emanuelsson
One may be excused for borrowing cliches from the realm of popular utterances. Then, that is how it does feel when you see sights such as this in real life.
A perma frosted river slam bang in the midst of tropical coconut trees in Bangalore.
This is Bellandur in Bangalore, a place notorious for foul smell, skin rashes and breathing troubles and a prime spot of ecological disaster.
Bellandur Lake is the largest water body in the plateau that is Bangalore. The terrain made it a huge reservoir which cheked the flow of water from the Koramangla and Challaghatta valleys and then slowly discharged it into the Pennar river that flows into Andhra Pradesh and Tamilnadu.
Till the 1980s it was a ecologically sound lake with fishing, irrigation of crops and potable water being drawn from it. The city population exploded in the late 1980s when it became the hub of IT business. Houses and offices sprung up everywhere at a frenetic pace. The income and cash flow generation was enormous. Money flowed everywhere. Business flourished, more people came in. In a few years time, the lake lost its potability, its fishing and its pristine beauty. The clear water became a turbid black pool with hyacinth growing wild.
The storm water drains which used to bring in the excess rain waters into the lake became channels of sewage that the residential and commercial buildings discharged unfiltered into the waterways. The lake just died a quick death. The overpowering stench of hydrogen sulphide and allied sulphur & phosphorus compounds infused the atmosphere all around it. A stench that we in India are familiar with where letting pollutants freely into the eco-space is not regarded as a danger.
Today the lake is about 700-800 acres big and is overgrown with hyacinth and weeds and it has two outflow channels that takes its polluted waters downstream. The public works departments have made two spillways which are narrow and it is here that on rainy days the lake water generates lather and foam that rises up many feet high and it piles up. The rustling wind over the lake ever so often raises large suds in the air and they keep on floating up like soap bubbles in a child’s play toy. At times the foam covers the bridge over the spillway and people have perforce to pass through it.
It is from one of these places that this photograph has been shot on a post rainy day in July 2016.
In the year 2016, we still have this problem and looks like will continue to have it in the near future as well. It is to do with how things are done in India. The Sewage treatment plants filter and throw the water into these water bodies. Even if you consider this as a clean and not a reprehensible act, then you must know that almost 50 percent of these plants do not even work and untreated sewage goes straight in. Secondly the number of STPs are not enough. The government of Karnataka expresses it inability by quoting lack of finances.
The situation is the same as governments in India have always expressed. Take urban transportation. UN, World Bank and a whole host of other nations and institutions had always been willing to fund a metro system in Delhi etc but the government would not take the money as such projects did not have kickbacks and opportunities for contractors to generate bogus bills as a tight fiscal discipline was always a pre requisite for such grants. So it took decades for the Indian government to agree to have the metro system.
That is how the cookie crumbles in India and I guess people in Bangalore as well as the ones living alongside the holy Yamuna river must wait for some succour and common sense to prevail in the corridors of the government where one day they may agree to being funded under a tight fiscal control.
_DSC4749 nef
Probably the hosts of a small Ryokan.
From the album of a german (?) tradesman living and working in Yokohama around 1908.
Ciudad histórica, Camino de Santiago, Imprescindible, Gótico, Renacentista, Visitable, ¡Recomendado!
S. XVI.
El actual edificio fue mandado construir en 1501 por los Reyes Católicos para atender a los enfermos y peregrinos del divino Xacobe, según se puede leer en la inscripción latina que recorre el friso superior de la portada. Su construcción, no obstante, se decidió ya en 1492 coincidiendo con el descubrimiento de América.
El proyecto de las obras se debe al arquitecto real Enrique Egas. Delante de la fachada podemos ver una fuerte cadena del siglo XVI sostenida por pilares esmeradamente tallados que delimita la propiedad del hospital y que tiene su origen en las disputas de propiedad entre el Ayuntamiento y las autoridades del Hospital. Cuenta con una hermosa portada plateresca obra de los maestros franceses Martín de Blas y Guil lén de Colás. En las pilastras de esta portada podemos ver de abajo arriba, las figuras de Adán, Santa Catalina y San Juan Bautista en la izquierda y las de Eva, Santa Lucía y María Magdalena en la derecha. En el friso de la puerta, estructurada a modo de arco triunfal romano aparecen alineadas las figuras de los doce apóstoles. En las pechinas sobre el arco podemos ver los medallones que recogen los bustos de los reyes Isabel y Fernando. Sobre el friso, en el cuerpo superior se abre la ventana del Aposento Real, reservado para hospedar a los monarcas cuando acudieran a Compostela y flanqueada por las imágenes de Cristo, la Virgen, Santiago, San Juan Evangelista, San Pedro y San Pablo. Dos grandes escudos, con las armas de Castilla flanquean así mismo, la portada. Recorriendo todo el frente del edificio vemos los balcones diseñados por fray Tomás Alonso, apoyados en ménsulas muy trabajadas que representan figuras fantasiosas. La cornisa se decora con una minuciosa cadena en la que sobresalen grotescas y obscenas gárgolas.
El espacio interior está estructurado en una planta rectangular con cuatro patios. El más artístico de estos patios es el primero que encontramos entrando a la izquierda, en el que destaca sobre todo, la puerta que conduce a la antigua sala de San Luis. El interior del Hostal alberga una hermosa capilla ojival, declarada Monumento Nacional en 1912. La parte más interesante de esta capilla de planta de cruz latina, situada entre los cuatro patios, es el crucero al que se accede a través de un enrejado de hierro de hermosa factura, obra del cerrajero francés Guillén. La bóveda del crucero, confeccionada en piedra litográfica de Coimbra, es de una bellísima filigrana.
