France

You’ve got to hand it to the French – they are an amazing, amazing people who firmly believe a Zombie revolution is unstoppable. So they are taking incredible measures to limit contact between humans, which both lowers the risk of vulnerability to a possible attack as well as lowers the risk of exposure to any Zombie-causing pathogens.

I’ve written about the  French Robo-Hotels, where you can pay via a kiosk, check yourself in, and avoid all contact with humans.

And I’ve written about the French Robo-Stores, where you can select your merchandise online, travel to a pick-up center, and have it loaded directly into your vehicle, and avoid all contact with humans.

And now . . . just when I though I had seen it all . . . French Robo-Food!  It’s a kiosk that displays menus from local restaurants. You can order your food, pay for it, then have it delivered to your doorstep, and avoid all contact with humans.

This is the world famous Gare de Lyon – but it is not located in the French city of Lyon, but rather Paris:

With around 90 Mio PAX per year, it’s the third busiest railway station in France!

Update on 17. October 2019: Interestingly, I just learned that the city of Lyon itself is the third largest city in France. This is quite some coincidence: the namesake of the third largest railway station in France is the third largest city in France!  How cool is that?!

This is a magnificent summertime snap of the famous Château du Haut-Kœnigsbourg castle high above the Alsacian village of Kintzheim:

It’s not just in the Amazon! What looks to be coming from a farm in Alsace, the anvil shape of the smoke is a good allegory for how the smoke is violently hammering the climate:

Continuing the series, this is Marvin the Martian:

Children today might not recognize him as easily as I do, having grown up watching Looney-Tunes cartoons on television. He dates back to 1948.

And Marvin-the-Martian is what I always think about when I see these garbage receptacles at the rest areas of the autoroutes in France:

I captured this breathtaking snap of wind turbines nestled deep within the Bourgogne countryside of France. It is a bit misleading, because when you get up close you realize how truly large and monstrous these wind turbines are:

If you’ve been to France, then you know how it is. There are literally thousands of wind turbines all over the country.  I could not find the data for 2019, but in 2015 France had a total of 5’956 turbines.

Continuing the series, here are more flowers I spotted while walking around the medieval village of Châteauneuf-en-Auxois deep within in the Burgundy country of France.

When I see a sight like this – something very pretty adorning what was once a military fortification, it always drives me crazy! I incessantly wonder when and how something militaristic was transformed into something nice, and whether the transformation came suddenly or rather just little by little. A good example is my blog post entitled From war to peace.

Continuing the series, here are more flowers I spotted while walking around the medieval village of Châteauneuf-en-Auxois deep within in the Burgundy country of France.

I took this snap early in the morning, literally laying on my stomach on the ground. I probably would not have tried that later in the day with more people around, or they might mistake me for a real photographer!

The Burgundy countryside of Bourgogne in France is an incredible, is an amazing, incredible place. You’ll find many dozens of kilometers of walls of stone, like this one:

Since there isn’t a lot of square stones laying around on the ground, it really begs the question of the absolutely tremendous effort it took to quarry the stone and transport it to create the walls.

Well, I don’t know how incredible they really are.

But I do know it drives me absolutely nuts to see an almost identical set of towers all over the French countryside, and yet not know where to get the details. Are they for radio – or television – or both? Why are there three platforms?  Why is the central pillar so large?

The tiny village of Charbonnières-les-Sapins is nestled so deep within the Doubs department of the Bourgogne-Franche-Comté region of France that it is likely no tourists have ever been here – or ever will.

But if you do make it here, which itself would be an amazing feat, you still have a long, long way to go. For deep, deep within the forests adjacent to Charbonnières-les-Sapins lies a truly incredible park, La Parc Prehistorique, filled with dinosaurs!

But let’s please get one thing straight: these are not real dinosaurs!  The real dinosaurs died out a long, long time ago. These are just models of dinosaurs.

OK, now that you know these are not real dinosaurs, you can really enjoy the park, because they’ve gone to incredible lengths to show what it would be like if there really were real dinosaurs in the forest.

Some of the models are quite good, such as this one:

Most of the models really make dinosaurs seem real, by portraying them as they might have been in life – this enormous giant below is scratching his back:

But some of them are a bit more cheesy:

There may be a big question that pops into your mind: why a dinosaur park here? As I’ve highlighted several times in my blog, the mountains of this region are the Jura mountains, the namesake of the Jurassic period. Even today there are zillions of fossils just laying around and waiting to be discovered by paleontologists brave enough to venture this deeply into France.

Continuing the series, here are more flowers I spotted while walking around the medieval village of Châteauneuf-en-Auxois deep within in the Burgundy country of France. These flowers were high in the village overlooking the Bourgogne countryside.

For me it is a deeply emotional scene, with the flower on the right looking longingly at the French countryside, somehow wishing it could go down there but not being able to.

I’m actually not a very big fan of flowers per se – but I am trying to understand the in’s and out’s of the aperture setting on my little point-and-shoot camera, which makes the foreground image very sharp, but the background very blurry. I’ve had the camera for around two years now, and it was always on my to-do list to figure it out!

Continuing the series, here are more flowers I spotted while walking around the medieval village of Châteauneuf-en-Auxois deep within in the Burgundy country of France:

 

Very similar to the famous Plane Trees of Provence, I captured this snap deep within the Bourgogne countryside of France.

The plane trees in Provence have a history: they were planted on the orders of Napoleon, in order to provide shade for his armies when they marched. I’m not so sure who and when planted these trees, but the view is just spectacular!

Continuing the series, I took this snap while walking around the medieval village of Châteauneuf-en-Auxois deep within in the Burgundy country of France.

I haven’t used it much until now, but I am experimenting with the aperture settings on my little point-and-shoot camera, so that the foreground is in sharp focus, but the background is blurry. So far I am finding it a bit difficult to get the “right amount of blurriness” – too much or too little and it can be distracting, and on the tiny display screen it’s quite difficult for me to see the finished results.

France is an amazing place. Small by US terms, nevertheless there are very distinct regions with their own cultural and architectural flair. Recently I spent some time exploring the countrysides of Bourgogne region, home to the famous Burgundy wines, when I accidentally stumbled across this site on the hilltop village of Chateauneuf-en-Auxois:

It was originally a castle built in the 1100’s but then was turned into a luxury chateau for an ultra-affluent family that started the Chateauneuf title in the 1400’s.

In a separate blog post I’ve shown the medieval French village Gordes from above, and here it is looking up from below:

I never re-touch or edit my photographs in any way, except a bit of cropping – so I’m always pleased when I capture magnificent blue skies like this that get pale near the horizon.  (That’s not a polarization effect, just the usual “blue sky” effect coupled with a progressively deeper slice of atmosphere as you get near the horizon: more air = more scattering.)