[Leica] Wales pics to come.

[lrzeitlin at gmail.com (Lawrence Zeitlin)]

Since Gee Bee is no longer posting his lovely pictures of the English
countryside to the LUG, perhaps I can take up a little of the slack for
those that need a UK image fix. Ten years ago I spent some time as a
visiting professor at the Univ. of Wales - Bangor to write a book on
international management theory. My chair was endowed by Unilever, a company
that wanted to sell cosmetics to people who traditionally used yak butter as
cold cream.


The reason I'm writing this is that I just discovered a long forgotten CD
with dozens of photos taken during our stay. Although the trip was not
intended for photography I had few academic responsibilities, other than to
act profound, write and attend a few conferences, so we had plenty of time
to explore the countryside. Most of the pictures were taken to send home so
that the children would not worry about the trouble that the old folks were
getting into. I had very little photographic equipment with me, just a
trusty Rollei 35SE, and an Agfa ePhoto 307, a very first generation digital
camera suitable only for low resolution web photos. Clearly not up to the
LUG's standard.


North Wales is totally unlike the Lake Country that Gee Bee documented.
There are few bucolic rural scenes. Coal and slate mines are long gone. But
there are plenty of mountains and rugged coastlines. So many that it took
the English over 300 years to conquer Wales. And they had to build a ring of
castles to do it. It is the Afghanistan of the UK. We lived on the island of
Anglesey, just across the Irish Sea from Dublin, separated from the Welsh
mainland by the very tidal and rapidly flowing Menai Strait. Our small home
offered a beautiful view of the strait and the Snowdonia mountains beyond.
We bought a tiny automobile, a SEAT with 108 thousand miles on it, and
roamed the Welsh countryside. I'll post a few pictures every week or so, not
as a travelog but as a picturesque documentary of a UK backwater.


If anyone is interested, here is a link to the diary of our stay in Wales:

http://www.scribd.com/doc/18642688/An-American-in-Wales


Here is a link to the book, actually the first draft, written during my
stay:

http://www.scribd.com/doc/18505256/Applied-CrossCultural-Research


Finally, here is a link to the paper that got me the opportunity to free
load for a year off the British taxpayers:

<
http://www.scribd.com/doc/18742093/How-Much-Woe-When-We-Go-Predicting-culture-shock
>


I'll post the pictures starting tomorrow.


Larry Z