Friday, July 20, 2012

I Used To Have A Travel Journal

The years fly by. It has been nearly a decade since I first had a blog, which I thought was better called a travel journal. I'm not a lifelong diarist, but I did keep a detailed travel journal during a semester of college spent abroad in Florence, Italy, and briefly thereafter. I wanted to remember that experience beyond the evidence in my sketchbooks.

I was about to move to London, and enlisted my longtime mate Mitch Goldstein in setting up a website for me that had a blog component. The website had a great homepage, but little usability other than the blog and an email account. My old website was www.christopherpizzi.com, which I have since abandoned. The blog could have helped me keep in touch with family and friends, but it didn't. It was really a travel journal loosely linked to my frequent weekend travels and related Ofoto postings - which were where the real updates surfaced, via brief narrative introductions to the photo albums.

That old blog was lost, along with its contents, due to my digital ambivalence and Mitch's metamorphosis from closeted visual savant to design world wunderkind. And all the Ofoto postings were eventually deleted by Kodak. Though maybe it all lives on in one of Google's server farms in exurban Oregon.

I wanted to call this blog TravelSketch - connecting traveling with sketching as a way to enhance and retain memory - but that was already taken. I settled on using my name as the blog address, for directness and clarity, while inserting TravelSketch after my name in the title.

I was in London for over two years. I worked at a small but renowned architecture firm in Bloomsbury, travelled frequently, took thousands of pictures, and designed often. But I did very little proper sketching, like this composition of sketches from a sunny Saturday afternoon at Pitzhanger Manor, the weekend home of architect Sir John Soane.


For many years I've been looking, albeit casually, for the right online place to share thoughts - writings, drawings, pictures. I think this may be the right place.

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