Yes, the “Indian cuisine”, which is actually British. It’s also my favourite Indian cuisine. But, there’s more to my affection with the dish than how delicious it is.

I first came across Tikka Masala when I moved from Finland to England in 1994. In St. Ives (Cambrideshire), we went to our local grocery store shortly after moving there. Amongst the shelves we discovered a jar bearing the label “Tikka Masala”. To me and my mother and brother this was slightly amusing as we had moved to St. Ives from a small town of some 5,000 people west of Espoo in southern Finland called Masala. We bought that jar of indian sauce ande a love affair for it began.

Fast forward to 2009 and I’m again living in the UK, in Glasgow this time, far north of St. Ives. Living there I came across the story and history of my favourite “Indian” dish. Tikka Masala is actually a Glaswegian invention.

Some go so far as to call it Britain’s National Dish. For me, it’s still the dish I’m most likely to cook or buy a dish of at an Indian restaurant. The mildly hot creamy chicken served on rice is still my favourite Indian dish, after so many years. It’s now been some 16 years since I moved away from Masala near Kirkkonummi in the south of Finland and I am now living in the birthplace of my favourite Indian dish, Glasgow, Scotland.

I only just noticed this interesting sequence of events that my life has followed. If you want to get philosophical about, it’s predestination. And it will always remain my favoufrite Indian dish, especially having grown up in in it’s namesake in Finland and going to University in the place where it all began.

P.S. Considering the amount of photos I take, I don’t have a photo of Chicken Tikka Masala. Yet. Will update this post when I do.

Tonight the West End of Glasgow had a different aroma to it: woodsmoke. The smell of sitting by a lake, grilling sausages on a woodfire in the summer, a wood sauna. Unfortunately it wasn’t a BBQ or a sauna, but the roof of a church on Victoria Crescent Road in Dowanhill.

I missed the majority of the fire, on account of the England-USA World Cup match. Headed to the library after the game to take a peek at the plume of smoke covering the West End, and then headed closer for a better view. Most of the roads surrounding the fire were blocked by emergency vehicles, but there were a few corners where one could sneak a peek.

The woodsmoke covering the West End came from the wooden roof of the church on fire, situated right next to (or even a part of) the Notre Dame Primary and/or High School.

The church building boarded up, as you can see in the photo above on the left. Assuming it was an empty building, arson or reckless fire games? Waiting for the news agencies to get their stories out so we can find out what happened.

Food for thought: the last time there was a significant fire in Glasgow’s West End was back in November 2008 on Great George Street and Lilybank Terrace, next to the Lilybank Church, when the old boarded up listed building which used to house the Hutchensons Grammar School. Tonight’s fire was in a boarded up church next to a school just a few hundred meters away. Let the conspiracy stories commence!

The beginning of the academic year at Glasgow University is preceded by a week dedicated to welcoming the newest students to the University, the Freshers. It’s one of, if not the liveliest week of the year at the University of Glasgow. This year’s Freshers’ Week took place September 14th to 18th.

The week’s events are kicked off by the Freshers’ Address in Bute Hall, where high-ranking members of the University staff, the heads of the student unions, the chaplains and the rector welcome the new students to the University. The Address has a secondary purpose for the students unions, as they have a further opportunity to convince the new students to join their union, as demonstrated by the Freshers’ Helpers from the unions sitting on both sides of Bute Hall, with the GUU on one side and the QMU on the other (GUSA and SRC are on the sides too, but to a lesser extent and in smaller numbers), chanting away and hurling witty abuse at each other over the heads of the Freshers.

For days two and three of Freshers’ Week Bute Hall is turned in to a hub for the societies to set up a stall and try to recruit new members for their respective societies, during Freshers’ Fair. Due to the huge number of societies, there was also a tent in the East Quadrangle for the societies that didn’t fit in Bute Hall.

I spent both days of the Freshers’ Fair at the Politics Society stall, recruiting new members and occasionally running around and taking a bunch of photos of everything that was going on around Bute Hall.

Along with the student societies and services, outside companies and especially brands, clubs and bars were out in force advertising their products and whatnot. Here’s some more photos of the events and scenes around the University:

I’ve also created four collages of the photos I took during the first four days of Freshers’ Week (there was really nothing going on on the fifth day. Click on the thumbnails below to see the collages in larger versions on Flickr.

More photos from September 2009 on my Flickr page.

Cross-posted at Scotlandish.com

I’ve started the monumental task of organizing and uploading the best of my photos going back to September 2009 and I’ve come to a conclusion about my photography habit: I take too many photos. What do I do with all these photos? Right now they’re filling up my hard drive on my laptop and my external hard drive, clogging up my computer.
So, what did we do last September? Took a trip to Edinburgh to visit the Edinburgh Zoo, just to see the penguins. Well, we saw quite a number of animals, but like most people who visit the Edinburgh Zoo, we went there mainly to see the penguins, like the curious little fella in the photo above. (In case you’re wondering, there’s a window between me and the penguin. If there wasn’t, I might have a pet penguin at home. I have a Set on Flickr dedicated to photos from Edinburgh Zoo, which you can see here. I also took quite a few photos within Edinburgh itself, such as the panorama of the Old Town which you can see immediately below this paragraph. Clicking on the panorama will take you to the corresponding Flickr page where you can view larger versions of the panorama.

Right, so, as I already said, I’ve started to finally upload my photos to Facebook and Flickr. I’m planning (always with the plans, too many plans) to post some of the best photos on my blog, just to air them out a little bit, instead of collecting dust on my hard drive or merely on Facebook and Flickr. Below are a further three photos from last September, and there’s plenty more on Flickr. The link to the September 2009 Set is at the foot of this post.

A long exposure of Byres Road one evening, caught an ambulance passing by.

The Tower of the University of Glasgow, as seen from Kelvingrove Park. Rain kicked in a few moments after taking this shot, but before that I managed to use the rain clouds as an effective backdrop to the photo.

This one was one of those “Just one more photo quickly and we’re done for the night, ok?” kind of shots, where I propped the camera on the ground, on a small tripod, and took a 15 second exposure of the Memorial Gates at Glasgow University. It turned out surprisingly well. Oh, and the “moon” in the top left corner is lens flare, but I decided to keep it in, instead of taking the time to manually remove it.

Realizing that I take too many photos is the first step to recovery. Next step? Take more photos, because I like it, it’s my hobby, and as long as I enjoy taking photos, I will take too many photos.
You can see all of my photos from September 2009 on Flickr at http://www.flickr.com/photos/janihelle/sets/72157623177910386/

The foam in beer can sometimes create some quite intricate and interesting visuals, such as this image of a monkey found on a pint glass on Ashton Lane. It is a monkey, right?

Or is that the alcohol talking? What do you see?

Let’s file this under “Random”, shall we?

Happy Halloween!

Armed with a brand new camera and a huge pile of photos from my first year at the University of Glasgow. So what to do with all the photos and the scores more which I will take in the next 3 years?

Starting today, I will begin another blog, a photo blog this time, the Glasgow University Photo blog at GlasgowUniPhoto.com.

As a brief introduction, the photo blog will be comprised of a daily photograph about the buildings, students, studies, and curiousities of Glasgow University. For the first three months, the time between the acedemic years, I will post a photo from my 2008/2009 archives once a day at noon GMT. Starting in September 2009 and Freshers’ Week 2009, I will post a current photograph on a daily basis. To find out more about the photo blog, visit the inaugural post or the About page.

To stay up to date with the (daily) photos, you can visit the site on a daily basis at GlasgowUniPhoto.com, you can follow the RSS feed in a reader of your choice, or have a daily email sent to your inbox. [More info]

So head on over and check out the first photo(s)!

GlasgowUniPhoto.com

-Jani

Click here for more from Glasgow’s West End

(c) Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported
http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Click here for more from the University of Glasgow

(c) Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported
http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

A strange light phenomenon (well, strange in Scotland anyway) seen through the leafless trees at Glasgow University.

Click here for more from Glasgow University

(c) Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported
http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/