Woof woof! Neigh? Greetings from Mongolia, friends!Hi friends! Whew, summer is almost over. Where did it go? I can tell you where I went ... to Mongolia. LOL. I get to travel to so many places I must be the luckiest pup alive. It gets quite boring to just talk about one place, though, so today I’ve picked five of the most colourful places to visit. Just imagine the trove of holiday pictures you could get from them.
First up for its craziness is Rainbow Village in Taiwan. Who let grandpa have the Crayola? Okay okay, I know. This crazy colouring in of the village – see, even the road is coloured – was started by a soldier in the Nantun district of Taiwan. He moved there in 1949.
Huang Yong-fu began to paint houses in this village to stop them from being demolished.
Interesting side note: Huang was actually a Hongkonger who joined the Kuomintang to fight the communists during the civil war. When the communists won, Huang fled to Taiwan where he was sent to a refugee camp. That became the village.
The village was going to be redeveloped so people moved out. Feeling lonely, Huang painted a bird on the wall of his home, and he never stopped painting. Now the village is preserved because of his artwork.
Sometimes someone designs a building that is just so way OTT that it becomes awesome. That’s what happened with the Kansas City Public Library, in the United States.
This section in the picture is called “The Community Bookshelf” and it features 22 “books”. It’s on the wall of the car park. I can’t help but wag when I see it; it’s very pupular.
Blue seems to be quite a popular colour when it comes to painting whole towns. But Juzcar, in Malaga, Spain, used to be white. Not very many people knew about it. There it was, just minding its own business, when the Smurfs came to town.
Someone persuaded the townsfolk to paint everything blue for the launch of the movie in 2011. Then, boom! Suddenly it was on the tourist map and visitors started flooding in by the thousands. When the movie was over, those townsfolk Smurfed about things for all of about two seconds and then decided to keep the village as Smurf HQ. Smurftastic!
It’s a rainbow, but made out of the land, and I know it’s going to send all of you scurrying to Google to see if it’s real. China’s natural rock formations in Danxia, Zhangye, in Gansu province, is enough to make your eyes spin. But if you are going there to get awesome pictures, you have to make sure you have just the right light so that it looks dreamy. That would mean getting up before sunrise, or hanging around for sunset, so put that in your plans.
It’s not easy to get the most colourful photos of this place, but if you’re a bit of a shutterbug you can play around with the mid-range contrast, bump up the colour saturation, or work on the individual colours. Some pictures of these mountains make it look like the uncle from Taiwan has been busy here.
When I was in Santorini, Greece, I couldn’t help but notice that all the buildings were very white, and their windows and doors had been painted blue. It was as if the mayor had ordered a giant bucket of a certain colour and given it to the residents. The one in the picture looks like the paint came straight out of the Mediterranean, #amirite?
Some daring folks have painted their doors green. But I always wondered what would happen if you lived there and you wanted an orange home.