A renaissance man for the twenty-first century!
I thought it would be fun to capture police cruisers in different countries. In Switzerland they paint them with a high-vis orange:
What’s more amazing – even unbelievable – there is nothing inside! My Uncle is a police officer in Cleveland, Ohio, and his cruiser is loaded with a rifle, a shotgun, several other weapons that I have promised not to publicly mention – a computer, a high-powered search light. Interestingly, the computer does have games.
Nothing remarkable, I walk by this place on my daily 15 km Nordic walk, and I just thought this was a pretty snap of my local cement factory in the sun, especially with the brown of the building matching nicely with the blue sky:
OK, it is not a prairie but rather the center of Winterthur – but nevertheless quite a unique house!
There are a lot of cultures that have legends of “Big Bad People,” such as Paul Bunyan and Babe the Big Blue Ox. Here’s another one, Saint Gall (550 AD – 646 AD):
According to legend a bear attacked from the woods, but once encountering the saint it became tame and followed him around thereafter.
Anyway, he is the namesake of a truly magnificent abbey, which in turn is the namesake of a truly magnificent city in northeast Switzerland, St. Gallen. I haven’t shown many pics of this city in my blog until now, but I think it’s time to start sharing them – but slowly, otherwise your brain could explode from the majesty of the architecture, as this snap shows:
And here’s a follow up that I captured during the winter in Solothurn,
Solothurn was founded by the Romans and is one of the very few city-states in Switzerland. I captured this magnificent shot showing the Jura mountains in the background:
For those of you who may be unaware, the Jura mountains are the namesake of the Jurassic Period in geology, since the rocks they expose date back to that era.
The Hindu religions have hundreds if not thousands of gods – but don’t let that deter you. If you have good knowledge of just a small handful of the most famous you’ll have a much more enjoyable and culturally enriching experience in India.
This is one of these must-know gods, the warrior goddess known as Durga:
Fortunately she is one of the good gods, so evil spirits are well advised to keep clear of all these terrible weapons she is holding.
But she’s not the tough lady I’m talking about.
Interestingly, about the same time as Christopher Columbus realized he missed his goal of India and wound up in the New World instead, there was a famous woman living in the deserts of northeast India named Karni Mata. Something of an ascetic, she founded a number of temples, including this famous temple in the village of Deshnok:
This is what the temple looks like from inside, and in the shot below you can see from the rats drinking from a bowl of milk in the center why it’s known as the Temple of Rats.
Here’s a closeup that I took around breakfast time:
And here’s a shot of the kitchen:
The truly faithful will sit on the ground and eat together with the rats out of the same bowl – and there were plenty of them doing that when I visited – but out of respect I didn’t take any snaps.
By the way, as shown in the snap above and as with all holy places in India, no shoes allowed: so when you go into the temple your feet may be clean, but when you come out they will be covered with rat feces so thick you‘ll need a butter knife just to scrape it off.
Captured in Alsace, France, next to the Rhine River,
This is the famous Schilthorn nestled high in the Swiss Alps,
And at the cable car station just below this at 2677 m lies the peak called Birg, where they have installed a massive outdoor attraction called the Skyline Walk consisting of chainlink and glass walkways suspended almost three thousand meters above the ground.
You always ASSUME they design these things with huge safety factors in mind. But on a recent visit there part of the glass walkway was cordoned off, and this is the frightening image I saw:
I work in a building next to a creek – and just next to my building is a small natural spring out of which a stream of water runs into the creek. They’ve turned this into a natural biosphere:
At this time of year it’s filled with algae and water plants and frogs – probably well over a dozen big frogs. See if you can spot the frog:
He’s more or less in the middle:
I don’t know how common these things are outside of Switzerland, but at least in Switzerland they are becoming more and more common.
This is it – a weed shocker:
I think their official name is steam weeding machine. Sadly, I don’t know what these machines are called in German, but it wouldn’t surprise me if it was something along the lines of Dampfunkrautvernichtungsanlage or Dampfunkrautbereinigungsmaschine.
The idea is to kill weeds dead by blasting them with extremely high temperature steam, rather than by the use of chemicals. Presently, the Swiss Federal Railways use a carcinogenic weed killer to keep their rails clean and free of weeds – they plan to convert to 100% weed shockers in the next few years.
These are the Venusfigurinen von Petersfells, historical works of art discovered in South Germany that date back to Ice Age times:
And this is the Bruderthal Bridge in southern Germany:
Technically speaking, it is not a bridge; it is a viaduct.
The Bruderthal, or Brother Valley, is an interesting place located in the heart of a region (Hegau) that is home to many dozens of extinct volcanoes. It is the home of the Eiszeitpark – or Ice Age Park. And it’s here where scientists in the early 20th century discovered the remains of a massive human settlement. When you consider that the glaciers of the Wurm ice age in this part of Europe were many kilometers thick, it is truly amazing that our human ancestors could eke out a living at all!
Just about two minutes before a massive downfall just outside the Zurich airport in Opfikon:
Next to the famous Kornhaus restaurant in Bern you’ll find a magnificent golden elephant:
It’s really a sad story. It’s there to commemorate a real circus elephant who, in the late 1800’s, went amok and killed people near Bern. It was finally captured and shot.
This is late Swiss artist H.R. Giger (1940 – 2014):
He is famous as the creator of the terrifying extraterrestrial creature in the Alien movie series, which looks like this:
Well, there is also museum in the Swiss town of Gruyère that has literally hundreds of his works spread out over many floors. Sadly, you are not allowed to take photographs inside the museum, so I tried to respect that. But outside of the museum there are a few of his pieces, such as:
And
And
Now to be honest I don’t really know anything about H. R. Giger, although I am sure there are people who do, so what follows may seem a bit absurd – but please bear with me.
The first thing that hits you is that all of the hundreds of pieces are very nearly the same, the Alien creature being perhaps the penultimate version of what you see. But they are all just tiny variations on this theme.
Now keeping this in mind when you see the flabbergastingly huge number of pieces, most of them very large and requiring a signficant time investment to create, the first thing I thought of was obsession – as if he were a mad character with a single image in his brain that he could not free himself from.
And THAT led me to the speculation that perhaps he was not mad. Perhaps he was the victim of a disease similar to toxoplasmosis gondi. There are in fact hundreds of different “zombie parasites” that infect animals and cause dramatic changes in their behavior. Perhaps a parasite had infected his brain and was creating images he could not free himself from.
Even if when threatening to attack you, good cows make for good photographs:
I simply stopped to take a snap during my daily 15 km Nordic walk through the Winterthur hillside, when not only this cow but all of her sisters started running towards me. Since there was only a very thin single strand of electric fence, and since this cow looked easily more than 500 kg, I didn’t hang around long enough to see what would happen.
This is the view of Castle Kyburg (Schloss Kyburg) that I see every morning on my long 15 km Nordic trekking through the forests in Winterthur:
It’s over 1000 years old. You can’t really see WHY anyone would want a castle here, from this perspective, but in fact the castle sits above a river, and therefore it has a very strategic location – at least from a middle ages point-of-view.
This is not the building where I live:
But it is in the same complex, and when the complex was renovated last year I got to meet and exchange some experiences with the project manager for the double-digits renovation. We seemed about the same age and the same level of experience. But although I manage projects in IT, I thought we really had a few good things in common. For example, quality.
According to him the source of some of his biggest headaches was “I told you to drill a hole in this wall, at this height; you drilled it in the wrong wall, at the wrong height.” Now, maybe I‘ve just been lucky to work with great people, but my quality issues have always been along the lines of developers who want to goldplate their solutions – not developers who don‘t deliver the expected quality.
But about a year later, I took on the role of building facilities manager at Swissport, where I managed the consolidation and move of the entire IT department into a brand new building. And in fact, sooner not later, I ran into exactly the same challenge: our network architect spent an entire day and he very, very carefully measured our WLAN signal strength and determined exactly the right spot to mount each and every wireless access point for optimal strength and coverage. But the contractors I hired did exactly the wrong thing, despite both drawings and verbal instructions, mounting them on exactly the wrong walls in exactly the wrong locations!
It was an amazing privilege for me to get a little insight into projects that are a bit different than IT. And it was a treat to experience the same project struggles that a real building renovation project manager told me about!
Valencia, Spain, is the home of the majestic Valencian language – although most people know its dialectical form, Catalan, somewhat better. And deep in the Valencian countryside sits a hill, and high on the hill sits the medieval village of Morella. The village dates back to Roman times, and in fact it is surrounded by ancient Roman aquaducts:
It’s one of those difficult places to capture photographically, just because it is so big and impressive. But what I remember the most was thinking what it must have been like for the Romans living here, raising their children in the hopes they become great Roman Legionnaires, warriors, fierce gladiators, or lion hunters.
Today, the situation with children is a bit different: the swords are gone, none of them has slaughtered a wild animal, and instead these children are sitting and playing Nintendo.
My passion when I travel is to identify those local things, well known in a place but unheard of outside of it. In this part of Spain, this would have to be flaons,
Continuing the series, a familiar sight to anyone who visits the cheese factory in Gruyères – but probably not well known outside of that. Cheese is produced in an ongoing process, in which the day’s shipment of milk is processed into “wheels.” The wheels are are stored very neatly in a climate controlled warehouse the size of a football field.
And a robot, shown here in the center, attends to their daily needs, flipping each wheel over on its face, dusting off the surface, and – unless I miss my guess – spraying it with a light saline solution.
This is a snap from arguably the most important of all passes through the Swiss Alps, the Gotthard Pass:
Again, since I never re-touch or edit my snaps in any way- what you see is what I got! – this has to be one of my favorites, with the intense green contrasting a very thin white band of atmosphere just above the horizon.
Although you can see it here, several hundred feet below the ground is an Autobahn tunnel, that I mentioned in a recent blog post.
If you are interested and get the chance, there is a fabulous historical movie that depicts the tunnel building efforts. It’s fascinating because it addresses things you might think about (the horse caravan industry that transported goods across the Gotthard Pass in the summer was threatened existentially) and things you might not (huge problems with disease, simply because the long tunnel and sanitary conditions at the time did not permit the transport of human waste out of the tunnel).
By no means an uncommon sight in Switzerland, and known as a purple heron, or Ardea purpurea. I spotted this one resting on a boat in Lake Zurich:
Continuing the series, it’s one of my favorite snaps, completely unretouched as are all of my photos: I do not post-processing whatever, so what you see is what I got! I like how the colors of the sky, the statue, and the leaves at his feet are all from the identical color palette.
But when I spotted this huge statue of Buddha in the Buddhist monastary in the South Vietnamese village of My Tho, right on the Mekong River, it also made me think:
I’ve seen huge “Big Buddhas” in many famous places, like Vietnam, Thailand, and probably one of the most famous, Hong Kong. And I’ve seen huge Hindu statues all over India, arguably the largest being a stone monolith depicting Gommateshwara.
But when it comes to Christianity, sculptures of Jesus are usually limited to small crucifixion scenes – and I guess for obvious reasons (big assumption on my part!) – a huge 100-foot crucifix is not so aesthetically pleasing. The big statue of Christ in Brazil may be an exception. But there are large statues of other Christian figures, as anyone who’s ever been to South San Franciso knows (Father Junipero Serra).
I wonder why?
This is Ansel Adams, who everyone knows is the most famous photographic artist since the camera was first invented:
Interestingly, at least according to what I read, he never identified himself as a photographer, but rather as “an artist that used the medium of photography.”
And this is one of his masterpieces, the church at Bodega Bay:
Well, now it’s my turn!
Recently, at about the midpoint of my daily morning 15km Nordic walk, I captured what I thought was a magnificent snap of a church in Winterthur, basking in the early morning sunlight:
This snap has not been retouched or enhanced in any way. It’s snaps like this – fresh out of my little point-and-shoot camera – that really keep me going!
Vietnam is an Asian country, previously settled by the French: from the late 1800’s to around 1954, when they left, it was known as French Indochina.
In a recent blog post I talked about how you can still see the French influence in Vietnam today, even though it’s been an amazing 65 years since the French left:
