City of Lights

I left my walk until after dark today because Karen wanted to go over and see the Christmas lights at Victoria Park before they're turned off. They've been left on longer than usual this year, apparently the city's idea of a pandemic morale booster. 

Karen had read that they're supposed to be one of the best city Christmas light displays in the province - or maybe it was in the country. They are impressive.  

The skating rink is also open now that London has moved into the red zone - for how long remains to be seen. The ice looked surprisingly good. Apparently you have to order a ticket, and you can only skate for a maximum of 40 minutes from your ticketed time.

St. Peter's Cathedral & One Richmond Row

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Another day down the photographic rabbit hole. This time, I ended up in Montpellier, France, 2015. Instead of looking in the folder with edited photos, I went instead to my archive of RAW files for the period at the beginning of our stay in France that year. The object was to find overlooked photos with some potential. 

This one taken on our first full day in the city, shows one of the most distinctive sights in Montpellier, the ultramodern streetcars decked out in pop-art paint jobs. We spotted this one a couple of blocks from our rented flat that first morning.

A week or so into our stay, we took a bus to a place 15 kilometers or so away called Aigues Mortes - Dead Water - named for the marshes around the town. It's famous for having an intact medieval city wall - that is, a wall that still goes all the way around the old town. The modern city has of course grown well beyond the walled part, but it's the walled part we went to see, a great tourist attraction.

Here's a shot in Aigues Mortes - again, one that I had completely overlooked when I was first editing these photos - that shows part of the wall and a building just inside that attracted me because of the arresting colour scheme. We don't see buildings that look like this in Canada.

And this knock-kneed critter was sitting on the canvas cover on a pleasure craft in the riverside marina just outside the old city wall - an egret, I think.