ajira.eu

No words, just yummie food and a superb atmosphere with co-workers

A few weeks ago I was driving home from groceries, when I passed by a house that was completely hidden by trees and foliage. Curious as I was, I decided to check it out.

As you can see on the photos below the door was covered in moss and the windows were so dirty on both the inside and the outside that it was almost impossible to see inside. The furniture was covered in spider webs and there was a crapload of newspapers and books scattered all over the place. It gave me the strong impression that it was abandoned, and still in pristine condition.

Today I was driving home from a seminar with my co-workers Thom and Reinout. I told them about the “abandoned” house and we decided to check it out. After we arrived and were on the doorstep, Reinout said “There’s someone inside”. At first I said “Nah that’s just the hood of a lamp”, but after inspection there was indeed someone inside. An elderly, bearded man was reading a newspaper in one of the spider-web covered chairs. That was quite bizarre. Apparently someone lives in that house

It was Saturday, the weather was kind of "meh", so it was time for some Urbexing. On this particular Saturday, Daniel and I visited the abandoned factory of the Royal United Leather complex in Oisterwijk, The Netherlands. The constant dripping of water on concrete gave a very soothing atmosphere; but the presence of some pigeons that were constantly making noises, and the barking of a dog nearby made it quite spooky as well.

Unfortunately, we couldn't visit the entire compound, because there is also a motorbike rental company that uses part of the building; and we didn't feel like getting arrested for burglary.

My B.F.F Daniel and I were actually planning on paying a visit to the abandoned coalmine of Hasard in the village of Cheratte, Belgium; but for some reason it didn't really happen. When we arrived in Cheratte, however, we noticed an abandoned and decaying office building just down the road. We decided to check that out instead of the Hassard complex.

Getting in was easy, the factory next door had its gate open and we could just walk into the office building via the back entrance. While we were inside, we heard a car/truck driving really close. When we were ready to leave, we discovered that the gate was closed. Fortunately for us, they (people working at the factory, I presume) placed a huge concrete block in front of the gate. This was without doubt to prevent people from getting in, but it also made the climb over the fence a lot easier

Thanks dude!

Almost a year ago, I wrote about a piece of art called Son-O-House. By coincidence I was in the area today with my new apprentice Reinout, and happened to have my HD camera and fish-eye lens with me. Time for an update

Sometimes you look out your (bathroom) window, and the sky just puts a smile on your face.

After buying some fried fish, I decided to go for a little drive. After driving for a bit, I decided that it was time to go home; so I looked for the closest crossing of the Maas river and drove there. A few hundred meters from the ferry I suddenly noticed some donkeys standing in front of an old collapsed building. I decided to check it out.

The building turns out to be an old regional office of the national waterworks agency. Unfortunately the foliage was so dense that it wasn't possible to go inside. But the building was so small, that there probably was not much to be seen inside anyway.

After patting the donkeys for a bit I continued my way home. After crossing the Maas river I also ran into a very nice gazebo, but since there were some people having a picknick in it, I didn't bother to make a photo of it.

While driving from the movie theatre in Lanaken, Belgium to a restaurant in Maastricht, The Netherlands; I happened to pass by the remains of an old factory right in the middle of the city. I've always liked ruins, and fortunately, I had my photo camera with me .

I have absolutely no idea why this truck was covered in plastic, but there was a lot of garbage in the factory. My best guess is that it is being used by homeless people for shelter, or has been used for it in the past.

As promised; you - the visitor to my website - can now post comments on my blog entries. It probably needs some tweaking here and there to keep the spam bots out, but it is working as it should be at the moment.

You may also have noticed that the photos are working as well since a few days. Good grief, it might actually turn out all-right with this self-made code

As you can see, the blog is more or less back online. It’s still in a very primitive phase, and lots of stuff still isn’t working. On the top of the to-do list are:

• The ability to add comments on a blog post.
• The ability to search in the text of the posts.
• The ability to see photo’s in the posts again (Photo’s aren’t working yet, video’s however are).
• Etc...

Once those things are working again, more modules (such as FAQ, Projects and Downloads) will be added.

On the topic of video’s... I’ve made some changes to the system for the videos that result in much higher quality. The old videos were encoded in Adobe’s Flash Video format at 15 frames per second and used up 512 KBps. The old videos have been resized and re-encoded in H.264/MPEG-4 format at 512KBps. The difference is very noticeable, I think. New videos (such as the videos I shot at the Amphi Festival) are encoded in H.264/MPEG-4 format at 30 frames per second and use up 1000 KBps.