Quote:
Originally Posted by bartman
Congrats Gary!!!!
I have a few Ideas for the Cafe challenge ......just you all wait!!!!  |
Hi Bartman,
Thank you.
There was a
recent thread in General Chat where people talked about how much coffee they drank.
Coffee and astronomy go together and it got me thinking about how ubiquitous cafes were. For some, they will be a daily ritual.
Looking forward to your submission!
Quote:
BTW not to disrespect your entry.... but is it really a door?
Tis more like a window with shutters.....
|
No problem.
Indeed it is a door where a cart would have pulled up to the side of
the building. The town is right on the river, so back in the French colonial days
the boats would come up the river, goods and produce and champagne or
whatever would then get loaded onto carts and then rather than get unloaded through the
main entrance of the shop at the front where it would disturb the clientèle, in the
alleys at the side they had a more discrete loading door. There is a little
concrete plinth on the side to allow them to step up. Architecturally, the
French were undoubtedly interested in style, so superficially they would make them
look similar to a window. However, with the windows, they would make the
shutters louvered to assist with ventilation (it is very hot and humid there) and
with any on the lower floors, also added iron bars.
Indochina in the 20th century is a fascinating chapter in history.
Though it may not be immediately apparent to some, if one asks why there are no bases
on the Moon today, one can trace part of the answer all the way back to the
follow-on ramifications from those French colonial days! For interested readers,
please bear with me.
The French colonials, like many empire builders, were hard taskmasters in those days.
All the manual labour, including the burdensome task of loading the cart, pulling
it by hand and then unloading carts through that loading dock door, was done by "coolies".
To give some sense of how brutal life was like in that part of the world in the early 1900's, on the
southern coast of Cambodia the French wanted to build a casino/hotel as
a "hill station" on top of a mountain called Bokor but to reach the top, they needed
to blaze a road up through the jungle. Built between 1917 and 1925, construction
of the 40km stretch of road reputedly resulted in the deaths of
several thousand
labourers! Just for the colonials to enjoy the cooler breeze at the top whilst
they drank cocktails and played baccarat. Today Bokor is a ghost town and you can
find some images here I posted a while back -
http://www.iceinspace.com.au/forum/s...4&postcount=17
http://www.iceinspace.com.au/forum/s...6&postcount=18
http://www.iceinspace.com.au/forum/s...7&postcount=19
http://www.iceinspace.com.au/forum/s...9&postcount=20
In the end, it all comes crashing down for the French Indochina Empire in May
of 1954 in a famous, or infamous, valley called
Dien Bien Phu in what is now
the north-west of Vietnam. The French had airdropped 9,000 of their elite
paratroopers into the valley. The Vietnamese, under the command of a brilliant
military strategist,
General Giap, pulled off the seemingly impossible and
wiped them out. Surrounded by mountains, the French believed they were safe,
but Giap, in a maneuver similar to the impossibility of Hannibal crossing the
Alps with elephants, had 50,000 Vietnamese troops man-haul huge artillery guns up the
other side of the mountains. A monumental effort. It may not at first seem likely,
but the follow-on effect of this battle ultimately has a connection with manned space
travel. Dien Bien Phu leads to the 1954 Geneva Accords, which then leads
to the division of Vietnam, which leads to American involvement in Vietnam
and eventually war and the Vietnam/American War eventually becomes a major
distraction and concern for the American public that eventually takes a lot
of the wind from the sails of the Apollo Project, resulting in it being canceled earlier than
planned. It was not the only reason why Apollo came to an end, but it was
an important historical factor. Otherwise, who knows, we may have had bases
on the Moon by now.
.
