missing delft...: November 2005

Me with some New Immigrants, Ceuta . 11/05/2005

Me with some New Immigrants, Ceuta
Originally uploaded by chlum79.

Trip Photos of Gibraltar Trip

Finally finished organizing the photos from the Gibraltar & Ceuta trip. Since it was a study trip, not many pictures were that scenic, plus the fact that the quality this time suffered due to the fact that I was using a dummy Canon compact instead of my trusty Panasonic FZ10. Anyhow, I must say the trip was eye-opening especially when I researched into the illegal immigration issue on Ceuta, which is one of two European territories in Africa. The reason why I was using a compact camara was because I didn't want to be too conspicuous, not that being a Chinese in such a non-touristy place was inconspicuous; just a few weeks ago, several Africans had been gunned down by Moroccan border police as 300 of them stormed the border. Anyway, the trip was supposed to verify a hypothesis that the adventurous tourists on Gibraltar used the city in a similar way to the new immigrant 'tourists' in Ceuta, based on the naive supposition that being so-called wanderers, they ought to behave similarly. Of course the result was that they experienced space differently and used the city differently as well, but the aim was to discover the kinds of spaces that were attractive to these two types of tourists. But I did find something unexpected from the research into the difference of these two types, which was that the spontaneous spaces the new immigrants created for themselves were similar in configuration to those of the middle-class residents of Gibraltar who were living on the lower slope of the Rock.