Tor-ism

Uploaded 2021-03-20

2005 was a lot closer to 1989, when I was old and aware enough of News stuff to appreciate what was happening, so it was noticeably weird to visit a Popular Historical Event Location and he able walk through it and across the wee line in the paving on the other side marking where the wall had been.

After finally getting a chance a couple of weekends ago to spend a few minutes with Google's Maps, Earth and Streetview in conjunction with all the non-blipped photos from NZ in 2008 to work out the locations of where we stayed where not explicitly recorded, I popped into an old hard drive to fish out some other old photos taken without the benefit of GPS on either phone or camera to try and work out when I was in a particular place and/or which particular place it was for other holidays, primarily trying to work out where our hotel was in Berlin in February 2005. Pre-Blip, this is tricky. The actual things we visited are all reasonably clear and were at least taken in a camera with reliable date recording, but I only have photos from inside the hotel room, vivid memories of there being a channel on the hotel telly dedicated to showing people driving along filming caravans in front of them and a vague memory of the shape of the windows in the breakfast room to go with the vague location somewhere off the Karl-Marx Allee. It turns out I was only approximately in the right area after my mum fished out a diary containing the directions we gave them from the nearest S-bahn station. The hotel Agon, further out than I had been looking.

At least I was using a digital camera by that point. Things like trips to France in the earlier 2000s before I had a digital camera will rely on things like bank statements or exhibit tickets to work out dates, though I was pleasantly surprised to discover that Nicky's APS film camera sometimes recorded a date stamp which is sometimes reproduced on the back of the print or on the index print sheet. I also have a few date-pinpointed earliest-phone-camera photos which I'd like to try to pinpoint a location for and which I need to upsample in order to meet the minimum dimensions to upload here.