7th Jan

3rd Jan

London back alley. Had to avoid stepping on hundreds of empty phials of helium or whatever the kids are doing these days...

Merry Christmas!

Day 262

got to Frankfurt hoping to get Christmas market photos but it has already gone except for the tree.

massive tree

Day 261

Bought a 15mm Canon fisheye on eBay and giving it a test run. One thing I noticed, there's a little vignetting wide open and it's less sharp right in the corners but it is clinically sharp as a knife! If anything, it could even be too good. Everybody is into retro filters and making things look less than digitally perfect but even this extreme wide angle has limited colour fringing in high contrast areas and blows other lenses out of the water!

elephant's trunk

Day 252

Yellow Peugeot

Day 218

this is the kind of door you want to knock on just to see how thin the people inside the house are.

The Abandoned Hotel

Last year I started getting interested in the large number of buildings in Japan that are going unused, unoccupied and falling into disrepair. According to a news report there are hundreds of thousands of homes which are no longer occupied. Apart from the prohibitively large cost to tear such places down (I believe it was in the region of 50,000 Euros), if the occupants move out with nobody to replace them, or die of old age with no next of kin, then such buildings could stand dormant for years before anyone even notices. I expect this to become a major issue in Japan in the future as the population continues to age and younger generations move away from the farming cultures and remote locations of their family homes.

an example of an abandoned family home in a small hamlet in the mountains of Kagoshima

I was surprised to find that even holiday resorts seemed to be contracting too. There doesn't seem to have been any investment in maintenance of some spa retreats in the mountains since the bubble burst in the 90s. Unfortunately, there just aren't enough customers to keep many places going and I suspect such a situation befell this hotel. My partner is convinced there must have been a tragic accident or Bates Motel style owner but I suspect it is just the effect of the Japanese economy for the last 20 years that gave this place its final blow.

reception

It is quite sad to see all of the rooms falling to pieces. Some of them are even tidy as if they had been slept in only recently while other rooms were full of objects, furniture and ceramics that really should have been sold on rather than let rot where they were.

storage

important documents

Guest room

tidy room

lower floor room

room with fridge and fittings

Open plan