Whaddya Reckon It Is Up There?

As I said a couple of days ago, Ailsa’s ‘Up” theme this week put me in a bit of a pickle – with hundreds of ‘up’ shots to choose from in Colombo alone.  After going through them again and again, I decided to put together a gallery of ‘what’s up there?’ shots I took on Christmas Day.

I was thrilled to see the Dutch Hospital isn’t the only old building in the city that’s being given a facelift – in fact it seemed renovations were going on almost everywhere I turned in a couple of streets.

Sadly, after thirty years of neglect, many of the old buildings are in pretty poor shape and though I took photographs of many of them, I’ll leave their story for another day.  What I did enjoy though, was looking up – as I said, it’s always a treat here in Sri Lanka, no more so than when you don’t have to worry about being bowled over by rushing traffic!

This little gallery isn’t always ‘picturesque’ but I hope you’ll find it interesting.  And don’t forget, I want to know what you think it is up that ladder (on the last shot)!

I think I might have to create a bit of a cliffhanger with this one because I don’t want to tell you what I think just yet, and if I do a poll, I might miss something wonderful that you think, so … watch this space, as they say 🙂

Venice and London have their pigeon problem, here in Sri Lanka it’s the canny crow. I was taking pictures of the work being done on the building to the left when I saw through the viewfinder that those black things on this recently stripped brickwork were crows. If they don’t hurry the building will need another cleanup job before they can proceed.

I loved the idea of the little balcony out from those old windows, but was alarmed at the number of seedlings that have taken root in the mortar.

It’s an optical illusion, of course, because the white box isn’t balancing on the pointed tile roof – but how on earth did they get approval to build that room and adjoining terrace?

Isn’t that pretty, looking through the lacy leaves?

But look what all those lacy leaves have done! They’ve turned into mulch and the roof is growing a garden.

On an adjacent old market building some naughty stallholder is storing old crates and they’ve created the environment to make mulch as well.

Not that the bodhi tree – ficus religiosa – needs much help propogating itself as you can see – it’s a weed of a tree really and does much damage when it gets its roots into the wrong places.

Space is at a premium in these old parts of the city – any old city really. This house went up (and back too, I guess as funds became available) but what intrigued me was what was behind that upper tiled balustrade.