Location Taken: Baltimore, Maryland
Time Taken: May 2010

This is not my usual sort of photo. I’m not too fond of cities, so I spend little time in them and take even fewer photos. Still, every so often, on the rare times I’m passing through a city, I take a photo that just speaks of the city to me.

This, this is Baltimore.

Well, ok, the sign’s saying “This is Birdland”, rather than Baltimore. That’s because I took this photo in the stadium district of the town, where the teams are the Orioles (baseball) and the Ravens (American football). So yeah, birdy teams. The one right ahead of us in this photo is the Ravens Stadium, not the Orioles’ like you would think with all those Oriole-themed billboards right in front of it. You can tell because of the purple seats. Well, I suppose it’s officially the “M&T Bank Stadium”. Not that anyone really calls it that. Whoever came up with letting companies put their names on stadiums wasn’t the smartest. No one calls it that, outside the sports announcers (who have to) and the sponsors themselves. The Orioles play at Camden Yard, and that’s what people call it, but the Ravens? If you say you’re going to the M&T Bank Stadium, most people would look at you blankly until you clarified “I mean, the Ravens Stadium”. Well, at least I think that’s the case. I pay very little attention to football and even less to baseball (at least for football my Grandpa watches it).

Even then, I see the stadiums every time I come through Baltimore. I also see that tall building in the background, since it’s the tallest one in town. I recall standing right next to it at one point when I was younger and staring all the way up, impressed at the height. I wouldn’t be quite so impressed now. Living in Chicago, if only for a few months, makes all the other cities look short.

The other aspects of the photo are more subtle. The haze, the somewhat rundown buildings, the traffic lights, all speak softly of Baltimore to me. But those are things that if you have never been to this city you would not understand, or would say “but those are in my city too”. And they are, but not in the same fashion. Every city is different.

Oh, a somewhat amusing story related to this picture. Do you see how the road heads up and turns into a causeway/bridge? Well, it’s a rough place to get a flat tire. This is one of those “learned it the hard way” things, by the way. There’s no shoulder at all, and the road is curving so visibility is not the greatest. And this is Baltimore, so people following the speed limit or any form of navigational sanity isn’t really done that often. So while the other people in the car were working on getting the spare on as fast as they could, my sister and I stood a bit back down the road, in a more visible spot, and waved people into the other lane. Why is this amusing, you ask? Well, we were heading to a Science Fiction Convention, and both my sister and I were dressed up. So there we were, two young ladies in strange outfits, waving cars to the side with the long flowing scarves we had been wearing. I really do wonder what people thought when they saw us. It’s certainly not your everyday sight.

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