Sometimes it is much trouble coming up with a single good image, and sometimes the trouble is, that I have so many that are quite nice, but not a single one that really stands out.
This is what we call a Mofa. That’s the abbreviation for “Motorfahrrad” or “motor bicycle”. This is an old one and it is a Puch. We had quite some of their bicycles so far (just check out my collection of Bicycles, a lot of them are Puch), but they have made motorbikes as well, some bigger, some like this one. I remember, when I was a child, the postmen used them. Well, that was at the end of the sixties, early seventies.
Monday afternoon was very hot and I slowly strolled home, taking one of the routes that I especially like on such hot lazy afternoons. It leads through one particularly sleepy part of Vienna’s 8th district. 
This is neither a historic region nor a shiny one, much of the architectural body is from the 1920s/30s, it seems to have been heavily bombed in WW2 and hastily mended in the fifties, but even that is now some time ago, and this part of the city has the charm of a place where people live but are quite not there. In fact that may well have been on that hot afternoon. I guess everybody but me was swimming 🙂
Originally I had wanted to stay at work longer, but I was still tired from my late-night arrival from Carinthia, and instead decided to go home. For part of the walk I used the Sigma 70/2.8, for the other part the Sigma 30/1.4. Both are among my favorite lenses.
Sometimes I wonder what people think when they see me standing or crouching there, and sometimes they even tell me. Just as I was taking an image of ivy on the garden side of a house (i’ve omitted it here), an old man came by and said “What are you photographing here? The ivy? 
But that’s everywhere!”.
He is right, and that’s exactly the way most people run around. Ask them what they’ve seen, and you get a “Oh, nothing special”. That’s wrong. Everything is special around us, everything is unique, so are our lives, and if we fail to see and recognize it, then we fail to live at all.
The Song of the Day is “Lazy Afternoon” from the fabulous Holly Cole’s 2003 album “Shade”. Sorry, no lyrics, not even sound samples, Amazon does not like Holly or Holly does not like Amazon. I don’t know. There is no video on YouTube either, but it’s still the Song of the Day. You have to believe me 🙂
There are 3 comments
Thomas (2008-06-25)
You certainly have a point when complaining about peoples indifferences. Unfortunately that often doesn't stop at visual impressions but continues to most parts of life.
So, it's all the more nice to get those photographic impressions of a relaxed roam through vienna.
Just for the record, I hate Mofas. Loud and stinking, acustic and olfactory environmental pollution. Good that your photos are so quiet... ;-)
Ted (2008-06-30)
The bicycle collection transports (no pun) me to where kids live. A big bike equipment company recently tried to discover why fewer people were riding bikes bikes less, and why many had abandoned riding them altoether. They thought maybe folks were getting too fat and lazy. So they went and asked hundreds of non bike riders worldwide what had happened.
And they learned that people loved bikes. That they yearned for the experience of their childhood... wind in their hair, sitting upright, pedaling backwards to stop.... They recalled the fat seats and the bright paint, chrome, horns and bells. The remembered baskets and streamers and fat tires whispering along the roads and bumping over old roads.
And they looked at the new bikes and all their gears, and their exposed greasy chains, razor thin tires, the many things that break, and the perfectly muscular gearheads who sold them while wearing humiliating costumes and ugly hats... and they felt a disconnect between their memories and the Tour De - whatever or the cross country Xtreme sporting and they figured it was all competition now. That prizes were the objective, or fat burning, or earth saving or... or... Or anything other than sitting upright, wind it their smiles, and the bump bump bump of freedom under their fannies.
By marketing intensely to people who saw bikes as tools the bike makers left the great majority who remembered them as a pleasure process. And as works of popular art.
The result of this study was the introduction of the Coaster Bicycle which is now the best selling type of bicycle in the world.
Quinn (2008-06-25)
I particularly like the cafe shot, for the colours and the perspective, but I find that I want to see the menu.
Maybe I'm just hungry. 🙂
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