Photo gallery: children of the world

by Sean McLachlan on


When I’m on the road, children make some of my best new acquaintances. A foreigner with a backpack is a surefire cure to a dull day, and a crowd of giggling kids will make even the most tired traveler smile.

Take this great shot by Robin Lerner, for example. Two Indian kids being silly, like silly kids everywhere. Sad to say, Robin tells us these children were begging at a bus station. When they realized they weren’t going to get any money, they stayed and goofed off with Robin and his travel companions. Poverty hadn’t dampened their spirit and they had a good time with the foreigners practicing their two words of English: “Hello” and “banana”.

I wonder if they taught Robin any of their language? Kids make great language teachers because swapping vocabulary is a game they never seem to get tired of. Most of my Amharic was taught to me by Ethiopian schoolkids, and I learned a lot of Arabic from kids when I used to work in the Middle East. The fact that my ability in both languages is pretty poor is my fault, not theirs!

Rob’s photo summarizes why children are one of the highlights of travel, especially budget and adventure travel that takes you to places where visitors are an uncommon sight. Check out the gallery below for more images of kids around the world, all taken by the talented photographers in Gadling’s flickr pool, plus a couple of cute shots by my wife, who fell in love with the wonderful children of Ethiopia.

Have some nice photos of children in far-off lands? Share them on flickr and you might see your artwork up on Gadling!

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No skeletons on the New Delhi metro, please

by Sean McLachlan on


A friend of mine, freelance photographer Jane Shepherdson, was recently in New Delhi and rode on the city’s metro (subway system). She captured this odd sign about what’s prohibited for passengers to carry.

Some of it is predictable, such as explosives, guns, and radioactive materials. You also can’t carry “manure of any kind” (including your own, one would suppose) or rags. That includes oily rags in case you’re wondering.

What really caught her eye was the prohibition against passengers carrying “Human skeleton, ashes, and part of Human body”.

Makes sense to me. When I’m on public transport I only want to share it with the living. What’s scary, though, is that they wouldn’t have put this sign up unless someone had actually carried body parts on the metro. So if you’re going to New Delhi, please, leave the body parts in your hotel room.

Italian art in London

by Sean McLachlan on


One of the best collections of Italian art in the world can be found in an unlikely place: a quiet street in the London borough of Islington.

The Estorick Collection of Modern Italian Art is housed in an elegant Georgian mansion and boasts a comprehensive collection of Italian Futurist paintings. Futurism was a style born out of the havoc of industrialization and the carnage of World War One. It emphasized the speed and technological advance of modern society.

Typical of this style is Umberto Boccio’s The City Rises, shown here courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. This totally blew me away when I saw it at a special Futurist exhibition at the Estorick a few years ago. The people and buildings seem to be swept along by a windstorm of colored motion. It’s currently at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Other paintings show Futurism’s trading ideas with Cubism, like Gino Severini’s Portrait of Eric Estorick, the museum’s founder. It’s more a study of angles and shading than an actual image of a man.

It’s not all Futurism here and the current exhibition, United Artists of Italy, is a collection of photographs of leading Italian artists. You can also get a taste of Italy at the cafe, where they serve up excellent cappuccinos (hard to find in London) and snacks.

Creepy and beautiful cemeteries around the world

by Sean McLachlan on


Cemeteries aren’t the first places most people go to while on vacation, but they can tell a lot about a culture and its history. We all have to die sometime and the way we deal with the dead says a lot about ourselves.

Some cemeteries are overgrown and covered in moss. Others are orderly and well-kept. Some are beautiful, and can inspire wonderful photographs like the one taken here by user Perrimoon over at Flickr. Sometimes graveyards can be downright dangerous, like the cemetery in Haworth, England, famous as the hometown of the Brontë sisters. The dead were literally stacked ten deep in this graveyard and the stream that provided the town’s water flowed right through them!

Some of the best free sights in Paris are cemeteries. The same goes for New York. My pick for the best place to see cemeteries is Rome, the city of the dead, which has splendid Renaissance tombs, ancient Roman gravestones, and mummified monks.

Do you have some good cemetery shots? Join us over at Gadling’s flickr pool and show us your art. You might just get picked for Photo of the Day!

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Photo of the day – Cocktail hour

by Meg Nesterov on


It’s always cocktail hour somewhere in the world, they say, though if you’re 8 months pregnant like me, it’s not for another 5 weeks or so. Even as a non-whiskey drinker, I looked at this and wanted a nice warming glass of scotch and perhaps a fire to drink it by. Flickr user JRodmanJr snapped this drink (and presumably drank it) in Basel, Switzerland; it’s a 14-year-old single malt from the Scottish distillery Oban. A beverage like this one can inspire a trip to taste the drink at its source, or just provide a mini-vacation in a glass.

Photograph any refreshing beverages on your travels? Upload your pix to the Gadling Flickr page and we may use it for a future Photo of the Day.