The mind-blowing painted houses of Stein am Rhein – 2

kenritley

Continuing the series,

If you are not from Switzerland, you MUST exercise extreme caution before visiting this village.

Otherwise, there is a real possibility that your brain will explode!

Stein am Rhein is a little medieval village in north central Switzerland, and it’s famous for its medival houses that are elaborately painted, as these snaps show.

Here is one of many houses:

And here is a close-up of the bits that are elaborately painted:

 

The mind-blowing painted houses of Stein am Rhein – 3

kenritley

Continuing the series,

If you are not from Switzerland, you MUST exercise extreme caution before visiting this village.

Otherwise, there is a real possibility that your brain will explode!

Stein am Rhein is a little medieval village in north central Switzerland, and it’s famous for its medival houses that are elaborately painted, as these snaps show.

Here is one of many houses:

And here is a close-up of the bits that are elaborately painted:

 

The mind-blowing dormer cranes of Le Landeron – 2

kenritley

Continuing the series, Le Landeron is a medieval village in central western Swiss canton of Neuchatel that is one of a very tiny minority of Swiss villages in which most of the houses have been equipped with medieval dormer cranes, used for lifting things to the highest level:

For a long time I wondered about this, until I spoke with a historian in the German village of Villingen-Schweningen. He told me that people are lazy, if they can they prefer to keep their grain in their basement, and only in cases where the water table was very high were the higher floors of buildings used for grain storage. Et viola, dormer cranes.

The mind-blowing painted houses of Stein am Rhein

kenritley

If you are not from Switzerland, you MUST exercise extreme caution before visiting this village.

Otherwise, there is a real possibility that your brain will explode!

Stein am Rhein is a little medieval village in north central Switzerland, and it’s famous for its medival houses that are elaborately painted, as these snaps show.

Here is one of many houses:

And here is a close-up of the bits that are elaborately painted:

Stein am Rhein – autostretched

kenritley

Stein am Rhein is a very unusual medieval Swiss village, in which a majority of the historical buildings have painted facades. I’ll show more snaps in upcoming blogs, but first a view of Stein am Rhein from high on a hilltop, looking south:

In this region there is no way to describe the border between Switzerland and Germany except to say highly irregular. Sometimes Germany is north of the Rhein, sometimes it’s south, same with Switzerland. The border takes zillions of twists and turns.

Bern houses

kenritley

Not much to say

OK, maybe a bit to say. What you can’t see here is the other side of the street, behind me, which is in fact a valley with a river below it. So the idea here is that the buildings are competing to get a good view of the valley and the river below.

Eschenberg Cow

kenritley

Continuing to demonstrate the universal truth that it is impossible to take a bad snap of a good cow, I can’t tell you whether this cow self-identifies as an Eschenberg cow. But I can tell you I took this snap during my daily 15 km Nordic Walk in the forests of Winterthur, in a spot known as the Eschenberg:

This cow was one of 49 other cows being led to a new grazing field.

Riomaggiore – is there where I got Covid?

kenritley

Continuing the series, a snap of colorful hillside village of Riomaggiori in the Cinque Terra region of Liguria,

Interestingly, I was here during late December 2019 when – unbeknownst to anyone at this time – Covid was beginning to ravage North Italy. Around 2-3 weeks later after returning to Switzerland, I suddenly came down with all the classic symptoms of Covid. But this was weeks before the disease was even recognized in Europe, much less had the name Covid-19!

Unfortunately, I cannot put my finger on exactly when and where I was infected. I also have no evidence to prove I was really “Patient Zero” for Switzerland – although in terms of timing, I certainly could have been.

While in Italy not only did I have a few strange encounters with people who were coughing – but I also stayed in Alsace, France, in hotels filled to the brim with Chinese tourists. In fact, at once hotel in La Spezia I was checked in by a woman who had to step away from the computer, just to cough.

The Ligurian coast

kenritley

OK, not strictly the Ligurian coast. In fact, I am not quite sure where the Ligurian coast actually begins.

But nevertheless, a nice snap looking south from an Autostrade in Italy on my way to Genova, which is where the Italian region of Liguria officially starts:

Pressing Saint Margaret to death in the Shambles

kenritley

This is Margaret Clitherow, a Catholic woman who lived in the north English town of York from 1571 to 1586:

And this is The Shambles – today really nothing more than a narrow street in York, but very famous back in the day as York’s slaughterhouse:

But this is where it gets interesting. Because today Margaret is something of a folk hero for the residents of York. She was executed by “being pressed to death” by the English church at the age of 15 years old (that was her age, not the age of the church). Her crime: hiding Catholic people who were being persecuted by the church. Here is the plaque at the Shambles that commemorates her execution and, much later, he recognition by the Catholic church as a saint:

And here is a house, not too far away, where apparently many Catholics were hidden:

At least in my case, it really goes to show me that I don’t understand very much. Today the differences between religions such as the English Church and the Catholic Church hardly seem grounds for executing people. Back in the day, did the religion itself play a role – or what it more of a power grab? Or perhaps some general prejudice and discriminations that people felt then but also still feel today?