What a beautiful country.  I always love traveling just at the beginning of the winter season.  The light is ten times more dramatic, far less tourists to contend with and the mood is always kind of more festive with the oncoming of the December holidays.  Last year I walked the streets of Auschwitz almost alone, saw the festivities of the holidays in town squares like Berlin and Vienna and Warsaw. It’s just more amazing than the blue sky and green grass of summer in my opinion.  So this year was a great follow up.  The skies poured on us often but left such amazing scenes to photograph.  You just don’t get that in summer.  So please enjoy my somewhat touristy photos and more artistic visions that happened during my time in Ireland.

This is absolutely my favorite time of year and especially in New York City.  The crisp air, colors and light is just the best.  Here are a bunch of photos I took on my average 6 mile per day walk.  It’s the best way to see the City by far.  I used the Canon Mark II for this to test as I’d just gotten it which was fun but I sure missed my film camera!!!  Remember when you travel always keep your camera with you!  You just never know what you may see.

Would retire here in a second!  These are just some touristy snaps with my little point and shoot.

So I generally take a brisk walk every day (sans rain) and decided to take a new camera I got with me.  It’s the Nikon Coolpix with touch screen.  I admit I did like that Ashton Kutcher advertises it.   But I had this old crappy one that has that delayed response.  You know you push the button and 54 minutes later you get your photo that is LONG gone.  So I had fun with it I must say.  Here’s a few outtakes just for kicks!!!!

I’ve always been a fan of history and am highly intrigued by WW2.  So when I went to Eastern Europe last winter it really brought some things into perspective.  Walking through Prague, Warsaw, Krakow, Berlin, Vienna, Slovakia and Budapest was an inxperience I won’t forget.  I think every American should walk the streets of a Third World country and a country with a history of 1000 years or more.  It truly puts a perspective on what we have and need to appreciate.  I took these photos with a Holga which is a cheap, Russian made camera I have to tape together to make sure light doesn’t hit the film!  If you would like to see more go to mistilayne.smugmug.com/. I look forward to any comments you may have!

Fingerprints and footprints, as we all know, are one thing that can identify us because there are no two prints that are the same.  Six billion people means six billion different prints.  Astonishing isn’t it?  We have only a few different hair colors, hair textures, eye colors and skin shades but there are billions of options when it comes to human prints.  Now this begs the question as to whether that number is actually infinite, but you can ponder that one on your own.
I took this photograph in Mexico while on holiday.  I love, love, love Mexico!  That is a subject for later however, tangents can be fun memory trips.  I was walking up some steps near the beach, which is why the steps were covered in sand.  As usual, I had camera in hand and my eyes were wandering and looking for the next photo opportunity.  When I looked down to find the hidden steps so I wouldn’t trip, I saw the footprints and thought how amazing they were.  Tennis shoes of different types and bare feet of different sizes all so perfectly presented.  Each print was perfectly discernible but yet they overlapped in the most striking way.  When I got the photograph back, I started to wonder about the people to whom those prints belonged.  Admittedly, at the time I was more interested in my next cerveza so pondering the prints then, was way too complicated.
Which brings up the question now (after another obvious tangent) of who are you and me for that matter?  Our prints belong to us and cannot be changed.  Yet, I think people have the tendency, definitely the ability and sometimes just a strange desire to present themselves as who they are not but who we think they should be.  These prints represent people.  People I never saw and people I can’t even imagine.  They could have been locals or tourists, men or women, girls or boys or all of the above.  I can only let my imagination run wild as to whom these prints belong and who these people really are.  But you can know someone for a long time but even then, can we really know a person?  Had I found the owners of these prints could I have looked at them and known who they are as individuals just from the physical appearance?
Sometimes I question my intuition, not always, but sometimes.  Recently a couple things came up in my life that really made me question my intuition.  Something was telling me my impression was wrong but emotions and feelings seemed to corrupt my reaction to listening to my intuition.  Why do we deny our instincts when they are absolutely screaming at us?  I had an impression of someone in my life that I thought was dead on.  I thought the footprints were obvious, naked and hid nothing.  I was wrong. The shoes that were worn presented what the wearer wanted me to see.  The evasiveness that I see now plain as day was brushed aside by my feelings, while my intuition was just blaring in the back of my skull, and I simply didn’t listen.  My impression was based on what was presented to me and intuition was saying, “honey, something is off, way off.”
Admittedly, when I meet someone for the first time, my tendency is to look at his or her shoes.  They reveal everything!!  They make a much better first impression, well truer impression, than the face that is before me at eye level.  Scuffed shoes means the person doesn’t care about the details.  Old shoes means the person could be lazy or doesn’t care.  New shoes that are obviously uncomfortable can mean a person who cares about how they look but is perhaps shallow or a person who cares how they look and will just plain suffer for fashion.  I’ll fall into that last category quite often admittedly.  Tennis shoes are not in my vocabulary.  Oddly, this shoe discussion has come up four times in the past four days.
There are many things we do or wear that reveal who we really are and then there is that mask we wear to hide who we think we are.  That mask may even change according to mood, the person we are with or who we think we are supposed to be at any given time.  It is very sad I think.  I’m guilty of it likely because of personal insecurities.  Is it the same for everyone?  I certainly don’t know and neither do I want to presume.
So, what do I know now?  I like tangents.  Seriously, though, those footprints from the photograph are definitely long gone.  I have woken up and plainly heard my intuition.  I’m sure I will not listen to it again in the future more than once.  The plans in regards to what my intuition was warning me about have not yet come to fruition and most of all, my shoes will always be uncomfortable and highly fashionable.