Beauty in Ordinary Places

I like to carry my camera with me wherever I go. That's because I never know what kinds of interesting things I will run into, or what I will see that will suddenly strike me as beautiful. Sometimes those things are right outside my door.

Take, for example, these scenes that I have here. I have passed by these places many times, but they never really caught my eye until today, when all of a sudden something, maybe a trick of the light, made them take on a resonance I hadn't seen before. It is very easy to see the beauty so obviously displayed in the Lake Gardens, which are only a few meters away, hidden by trees and undergrowth. It is not so easy to see the beauty in scenes as commonplace as this. Some might see these as scenes of decay, not beauty. Yet even decay can be beautiful. To me, these pictures say something about the endurance of life.

The houses above are located right around the corner from our apartment. They belong to a couple of elderly Chinese people, who seem to have lived there forever. They are old, but still quite sturdy. Both the houses, and the people who live in them.


These seem to be old miners shacks. They are all still occupied, and not just by the elderly, either. They are either remnants from when Taiping was a rough and tumble mining town, or at the very least, from the British colonial days. They constitute a little hidden village, right next to the Lake Gardens and the downtown.



Some of them have been upgraded, with rooms added to the back, cable TV dishes, fairly recent coats of paint, etc.

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Life goes on in Taiping, just as it always has, and just as it always will. Taiping changes and grows, but life stays the same.