A renaissance man for the twenty-first century!
I have been fortunate to see a few of the most visited places on Earth, at least according to Travel and Leisure.
In place 1 is the Grand Bazaar, in Istanbul:
In place 3 is Times Square, on Manhattan Island:
In place 4 is the Las Vegas Strip, in Las Vegas:
An Alpsbird is one amazing bird!
I call them Alpsbirds, mainly because I always forget their real name. I just looked it up (for about the zillionth time) and they are called Alpendohle in German, or Alpine Chole in English.
They inhabit the Swiss Alps, and they have absolutely no fear of humans. So if you are hiking the Alps and take a break for lunch, you can be sure to have a flock of these birds join you – naturally you should avoid feeding any wild animals, but if their cuteness and persistance win, they’ll eat your lunch right out of your own hand!
Germans are fanatic about bubbles.
In the case of their drinking water, Germany probably has the cleanest, purest, best tapwater in the world. But despite of this, Germans insist on drinking only bottled carbonated water. Here is what this water looks like, called Sprudel in German:
Because they are big heavy glass bottles, Germans buy this water in large quantities from special stores called Getränkemärkte, which look like this:
Germany’s Schwarzwald (or Black Forest) contains a surprising number of sparking water factories that bottle the mineral-rich spring water of the forest hills. Along one particular route through the Schwarzwald, each of the water bottling companies has a free pavillion where you can get their water for free.
This one is blue and quite modern looking public fountain:
A few kilometers away is a more ornate looking public fountain:
And this one has the most marketing flair, with the name of the water company on the side:
Trichy is what the locals call the city of Tiruchirappali in Tamil Nadu. And shown here is the amazing Sri Ranganathaswamy Temple, and in an almost unbelievable coincidence, I was brought here by a good friend of mine of the same name, Ranganathan:
The building is far too large for a single photograph to do it justice. What the locals told me: there is a holy day called Vaikunta Ekadeshi in which tens of thousands of devotees travel here to walk through the portal shown above, in the belief that by doing so during this festival, their cycle of re-birth will be broken and their next incarnation will be in Heaven.
I’ve only ever been to Venice once. All I can remember are mobs of tourists, but looking back on my photos I did manage to capture one tourist-free snap:
After reading the Gabriel Allon series of books by Daniel Silva, I’m anxious to go back. He writes in detail about a hidden Jewish quarter in Venice, and even though I am not Jewish, it would be fun to see the places he’s written about.
I don’t know what they are called: basement storefronts? Half storefronts? Lower storefronts? In Bulgarian they are known as “klek shops,” since “klek” means “to squat.”
But whatever they are called, I was quite surprised to find a number of these in Sofia, Bulgaria:
The shopkeeper is located in a basement, and he / she sells things through the basement window.
I was quite surprised to find a real life example of this, since until now the only places I’ve seen pictures of these are very old photographs of London.
Indians are fanatical about their cricket. Here you’ll see a fairly common sight during any important cricket match: pedestrian traffic has come to a standstill, and a huge mixed group of people strain to look at even the tiniest television set!
The wonderful thing about blogging your travel photos is that you can begin to see similarities that might otherwise not have been obvious.
While travelling recently in Santiago de Compostella, in the region of Galicia in Spain, I took this snap, which showed the tower framed very nicely by the narrow street:
Here are my feet in the Great Thar Desert of India, enjoying the cool breeze and the warm sand as the sun sets.
I am about 15 km from Pakistan. This is as far as my driver would take me. There were a few villages closer to Pakistan, but all he would tell me in his limited English is that “they are not safe.”
If you’ve ever been to Dubai, then you know almost everything about it is amazing.
Someone told me the government of Dubai has a policy that nobody in the city should ever be more than 25m from the nearest mosque, or about 80 feet. Now, if true, I have no idea why they adopted this policy.
The result of thie policy is that the inner city has a vast network of mini-mosques. They are numbered (below is Mosque 16) and they are spaced about 50 meters apart from each other:
I visited Dubai in the high summer, and I took this picture around noon – when it was just over 45 C = 110 F. Aside from me and the Indian construction workers, nobody was out and about. I am eager to go back sometime during cooler weather to see whether people really do venture outside.
Rome is overwhelming. Even the birds in Rome do things that other birds could only dream about.
Here is the skies above Rome I tried to take pictures of tens of thousands of starlets:
The huge masses of starlets (there can be thousands of them in just one group) fly in formation, and you just can’t help but stop and admire the complicated dance they do in the sky. According to David Attenborough, nobody knows why they do this.
Dating back to the year 1173, the Leaning Tower of Pisa takes on a whole new perspective when it is shown not alone, by itself, but rather in the context of all the other buildings nearby.
Here is one view of the tower:
And here is another view:
Rome is overwhelming. Probably everybody else already knew this, but I learned that the famous Colosseum was really a highly sophisticated theatrical stage. Here you can see the very complicated infrastructure, which would have been hidden underground. In a very short time, all sorts of things could be raised and lowered: trees and plants, people, lions and tigers, etc.
These are Jodpurs:
I don’t know if they are originally from Jodpur or not – and I also don’t know the fine subtleties between these and “Hammer-Pants” – although believe it or not, M.C. Hammer and I lived in the same town for a while. And, he once treated my brother and his friends to ice cream.
But getting back to Jodpur, which is the topic of this blog, this is looking UP at the great Mehrangarth Fort, in Jodpur:
And this is the city of Jodpur, looking DOWN from the great Mehrangarth Fort:
Jodpur is called the Blue City, because the dwellings are painted blue.
Most tourists quickly come to know there is a mystery: nobody knows why the dwellings are painted blue. Some historians think this was for religious reasons associated with certain castes; other historians believe it might have had to do with protection against termites.
For me, the real mystery is a different one altogether: you’ll find the dwellings are not completely blue, but just the sides facing the fort! I’ve never learned who supplies the paint. I’ve never learned what happens if a resident refuses to paint their fort-facing facade blue. I’ve never learned who inspects the dwellings to make sure they are painted. And I’ve never learned who pays for the paint.
I always love mysteries like this, because they give me a good motivation to come back and clear them up!
Rome is overwhelming. I tried visiting on Christmas, thinking I could escape the hoards of tourists – and I did. But even still, Rome is just too much: too much history, too much ruins, too much interesting sights.
I thought it would be good to take things slow, and so I photographed a nice horse:
You can’t take a bad picture of a good cow!
This cow looks a bit self-content, and that’s probably because she lives in Jaisalmer. As of 2017, Jaisalmer tops my list of the most incredible place I’ve ever visited. It is a very rural village deep within the Great Thar Desert of India – nothing modern about it, and in fact only about 60,000 inhabitants. But this was a key stop along the Silk Road out of China and to the sea, and you can still see this today: every single stone building in the entire village is as complicated and brilliantly designed as the Alhambra, in Granada, Spain. It’s a world heritage site – and if you ever get the chance to visit, do not pass it up!
This is Alec Guiness, in front of the fictional Bridge over the River Kwai, in the 1957 film for which he won the Academy Award for Best Actor:
And this is the real Bridge over the River Kwai, as it looks today:
To accomodate the flocks of tourists, the bridge is built with side platforms, so that the tourists won’t get run over when a train comes:
It’s temptingly easy to enjoy beautiful view . . . but the nearby cemetary and museum is a strong and moving reminder that this bridge had its origin in large scale atrocities carried out in WWII.
Continuing my series about big bugs in Southern Germany, here is a spider I found along a hiking trail close to the Schwarzwald Hochstrasse:
I have no idea what kind of spider this is, but it is on my to-do list to one day find out.
I arrived by train, and this is one of the first sights you see:
It’s a pretty city, to be sure, but generally I prefer cities equally as pretty but without all the tourists.
In the deep south of India, not too far from the Kolar Gold Fields and just on the border between Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh, is the amazing Shiva temple called Kotilingeshwara.
It is not a temple in any conventional sense of the word. It is more of a indoor / outdoor park, filled with thousands upon thousands of small, identical statutes called linga, which is actually a representation of the Indian god Shiva. Here you can see a few of them, with a huge statute of the sacred cow Nandi in the distance:
Interestingly, I arrived on the day of a festival, and thousands of visitors were expected and beginning to line up. But a cousin of a friend of mine is a police officer who is assigned to this temple, so he let us in early before the crowd. (That’s him above in the dark khaki clothes, carrying his big long stick that police offices in India are famous for.)
Here’s another look, showing some of them as large as a building (it’s one of the largest in the world), and others as small as tea cups:
I don’t know the details, but I think for the price of a donation to the temple you can arrange to have a lingam dedicated with your name.
Oh, and for those who think that Indian names are quite long and difficult, this name provides a wonderful segue to an upcoming post about Indian names: koti means 10,000,000, linga we talked about above, eshwara means god – hence the name Kotilengeshwara refers to the 10 million manifestations of the god Shiva.
As far as modern nation-states to modernize in the 20th century go, Switzerland doesn’t exactly rank first. The homes in many American cities, for example, began to get indoor plumbing as early as the mid-1800’s; but in Switzerland, particularly in rural Switzerland, many homes did not get indoor plumbing until after WWII.
But what does this mean?
My neighborhood in Switzerland is filled with DOZENS of communal water fountains, many of them within a stone’s throw distance of one another. Here is one:
And here is another:
What could be viewed negatively (modern plumbing arriving quite late) has in fact left a very positive legacy, with Swiss neighborhoods filled with these wonderful old fountains that still deliver fresh drinking water today!
When I lived in New York during the 1980’s, a visitor to this area of Manhattan had a life expectancy that could be measured in minutes. Today, this whole area on the west of the island is a park, and you can even find a driving range.
Sadly, a tragic side effect of transforming an impoverished, crime-ridden area into a wonderful tourist location was to drive up the cost-of-living so that only very wealthy people can afford to live here.
Geologically speaking, these things are not uncommon. A river or estuary that empties into a saltwater sea will sometimes form a lagoon. Over time, the sediment causes the lagoon to become a closed lake, and the water changes from saltwater to freshwater.
That’s what happened here, just south of Valencia in Spain, not too long ago, in the 17th century, L’Albufera de València:
Today it is a wonderful, relaxing place to visit – especially in the warm Spanish evenings.
You can see a wonderful old map I discovered hanging in the local village bar.
The small villages are connected to the lake by a series of narrow canals:
By the way, the astute reader will notice that I wrote L’Albufera de València, which is the Valencian language version of the Spanish La Abufera de Valencia. My Valencian friends tell me that Catalan, although somewhat more well known, is a dialect of Valencian.
This is a snap of desert area of Qumran, just next to the Dead Sea, and you can even see some caves high in the hills (they look like little black dots). One of these caves is where, back in 1950’s, explorers found the Dead Sea Scrolls.
Every mid-September thousands if not zillions of tourists around the world descend on the Bavarian city of Munich to drink beer, dance on table tops, eat enormous quantities of pork – and generally enjoy the Oktoberfest. From time to time, you can still see a native German at this festival, but with all the tourists it is getting increasingly more difficult to do so.
But what a lot of people don’t know: at about the same time the Oktoberfest is held in Munich, a real festival is held in Stuttgart: the Bad-Cannstatter-Volksfest. It’s the second largest outdoor festival in the world (next to the Oktoberfest) – but if you come, you’re likely to only see Germans and their south-German neighbors, Schwabians.
