I visited Lăng Minh Mạng, the mausoleum for Emperor Minh Mạng:

...and made it to a few others – Chùa Thiên Mụ overlooking the Perfume River, Lăng Khải Định a little out of town, and so on. The heat was getting to me by the time I reached the Imperial City, so I only explored a small part of it.

I reckon ~90% of the people I saw wearing an Áo dài in Vietnam were doing it for photographic purposes, with a guy juggling camera gear hovering nearby (the male gaze, and all that). Wandering around in Lăng Tự Đức, the tomb of Emperor Tự Đức – “the last Vietnamese monarch to rule independently” (ref) – I saw this:

Just as I'd arrived in Huế, an old colleague asked if I was going to visit Chùa Từ Hiếu (the Từ Hiếu Pagoda), where Thích Nhất Hạnh had started his life as a monk and recently returned to live out his final days before passing away earlier in the year. I managed to add it to my driver's itinerary. Having racked up so many miles in temples in Thailand, I'd be lying if I tried to say this one felt particularly “special” somehow – every temple has something – but it was certainly peaceful. Thai temples always seem to have an underlying buzz of activity that seemed absent here, at least this morning.

Perhaps the most pleasant time I had was walking the long way around the lake in Lăng Minh Mạng, hearing birds and distant noises as I caught shade from the trees and trudged through the grass. There weren't any people nearby, and it was almost like time stopped. I enjoyed it so much I don't have any photos from it, but it wasn't too far off this:

(what was I listening to while assembling this? you'll never guess).

#travel #Vietnam #Photography #FilmPhotography #history #temples #pagodas #mausoleums

This was a post from Cos.

You can follow this blog on the Fediverse at @cos@apintandaparma.club or subscribe in your RSS reader.

I’ve reached out to my old peers – most of us relentless journallers & bloggers back in the early ’00s – to ask not just “are you still using anything on this server?” but also “how are you going?” I’ve been pretty awful at actively keeping up with folk, instead relying on the passive nature of seeing updates floating past in the mix of news from the doom-scrolling apps that vacuum our time. Many of us moved away from Melbourne. One or two I never met in person, even. Some folk I’m almost too frightened to reach out to, but I’ll find a way. I’ll see how we go for responses, and hopefully one or two of them might write something we can publish for the archive, as it were.

What did I get out of running that host for all those years? Mostly I just wanted to feel useful, and I felt useful helping folk out, helping them say something no matter how small, and helping them connect with others in those earlier, potential-rich days of the Internet. In return, I received plenty of system admin practice that fed my day job (and vice-versa). I’m curious to hear from the others now – what did they get from it?

More soon, I hope.

#history #hosting #internet #memories #friends

This was a post from Cos.

You can follow this blog on the Fediverse at @cos@apintandaparma.club or subscribe in your RSS reader.