Saturday, July 24, 2010

A Fistful of Testicles

I'm going to start this story by telling the aftermath first.

Lying in bed, he awakens and gingerly opens one eye to see the sunlight filtering through the slats of the venetian blinds. Oh boy. The dread and anticipation of the inevitable repercussions of one too many beers, vodkas, and prairie fires sets in - wait for it, he thinks. It's coming. But as his one opened eye gauges the surroundings, all is as should be for a mid-Saturday morning. His head isn't being used by amazon women as war drums, and his stomach only churns like the delicates cycle rather than the usual heavy soil cycle of the laundry machine. That's odd, he thinks, but he also knows better than to believe this mirage. The hangover train can be stealthy, and it is likely hiding under the bed, waiting to give him the shit kicking of a lifetime the minute he foolishly attempts to sit up. And so he lays there, one eye opening and closing every few minutes in a continual attempt to refresh his status - has it arrived yet? Nope. How about now? Nope. And so after a good 20 minutes of this, he mounts the courage to truly awaken, only to find that by some miraculous act of every deity known to man, he really is NOT hung the eff over. Life, she truly does work in mysterious ways.

Rewind to last night - Tytus' 30th Birthday Party, subtitled A Fistful of Testicles. It was a joke we'd come up with last week during lunch when we thought it would be hilarious to find some balls, and cook em up during his BBQ. Little did we know that Lizzy would actually follow through on our crazy scheme and actually go out to buy (pardon the pun) a bagful. And so after an evening fuelled by the beers Asahi, Zywiec, Tyskie, Mississippi Mud, Chang, Singha, PC Honey Red, followed by Zubrowka vodka, some five dollar tequila for prairie fires, and homebrewed wine, we fired up the barbie and got our festival of testicles on. They were lamb balls, and they, surprisingly, weren't as disgusting as I would've imagined. I was given the task of preparing them - which involves slicing them in half lengthwise, and then de-skinning them. I'll let the photos tell the rest of the story.








Notice the blood running down Tytus' finger. Awesome!










This is like the equivalent of circumcising a nut.


Shake 'n' Bake, or as Tytus called it: "Crunchy Sauce".












I love the look of horror and disgust on Kathleen's face.
















And because Liz wasn't able to actually come to the party, we saved one for her too.




Birthday boy had a bit of a run in with the knife earlier.

There are a couple hilarious videos, which I haven't quite figured how to resize down to something that would be web friendly, and also more photos, but I'll leave those for facebook. Happy Saturday everybody.

-Nut Sous-Chef G

Tuesday, July 20, 2010

Out of sorts

I'm still feeling a bit out of sync with local time - mostly because I haven't gotten a proper night's sleep since we came back. And now I've got a few evenings of work ahead of me to process a wedding shoot from this weekend. I don't even know where to begin.

So while I really ought to be processing those shots, I took a break and scanned one roll of Kodak Portra 160NC that I ran through the Holga in Cesky Krumlov, Czech Republic. One of my favourites from the roll:


Will post more in the coming days when I need more breaks from this wedding thing. Okay, time for bed. G'night.

Monday, July 5, 2010

The melancholy of departure

As with all good things, our journey through Eastern Europe has come to a close. It has been an incredible 73 days here, and we've covered a ridiculous amount of ground in that time. We are spending our final few hours in Gdansk, Poland doing the one thing that I absolutely detest about travelling - packing your shit up. It's almost 2 in the morning, and we have a 7:00am shuttle to catch to head to the airport, where we will then fly Ryanair (AKA discount air carrier hell) to London to meet up with friends for a few days. Then we head off to Brussels to visit some family, before jetting off back for home next Wednesday. Hopefully then, I will finally have some time to really go through my photos, post a few more sets, and shed a few tears about how I wished I had shot more film (I'm only at 41 rolls).

In the meantime, check this out. Media: Right index finger, on soft Baltic Sea sand. Quite possibly the best drawing I have EVER done.


Alright, time to finish unique beer number 94, then go to bed. Ciao!
-G

Saturday, July 3, 2010

Schindler's List

These images were taken at the Auschwitz and Birkenau (Auschwitz II) concentration camps (except for the last two, which were taken in Krakow while we were hunting for the site of Oscar Schindler's factory).



Electrified barbed wire fence enclosing the concentration camps.






The infamous 'Death Wall' at Auschwitz, where prisoners were shot. These were used in special circumstances where the prisoners needed to be killed immediately, and the SS didn't have time or didn't want to wait for them to be sent in to the gas chambers.


Prisoner barracks at Birkenau (the actual site of the extermination chambers). The buildings were converted from stables designed to house 52 horses into barracks that would house hundreds, and at times, thousands of Jews.




Latrines for the prisoners to use. To further add to the cruelty, there were far fewer latrines than prisoners, and only twice a day for 10 minutes were prisoners given a chance to fight over the use of these.


The real Oscar Schindler's factory.