Category: Europe
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Weerribben
An old peat bog: after centuries of peat production now a nature reserve to explore leisurely by canoe or silent electric boat. Peat once was popular fuel enabling people to make it through the long, cold winters. With shovels it was dug and cut into bricks, row after row, layer after layer, creating the channels that…
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Giants in the wind
In the last decade the number of electricity generating windmills in Holland has increased considerably. In some regions even to the extent that one can speak of an uncontrolled proliferation, with action groups as a result that protest against the pollution of the horizon. See for example the situation in a part of Flevoland, Holland’s youngest…
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Flatland
Maybe it’s thanks to my Dutch origins that I still remember with delight the little book Flatland, in which Edwin Abbott gives full rein to his mathematical imagination in his description of a two-dimensional world. Although the Dutch landscape – especially its immense, flat polders reclaimed from the sea – does come rather close to…
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Inner worlds
Aesthetically this may not be such a great picture, but it has something beautiful about it that pleases me. Four girls on a lawn dotted with little flowers by the waterfront, and each of them totally absorbed by her own playful discovery of the world. Although they probably have descended here together, each one now…
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Still no sign of spring?
When is this snow finally going to melt so that the world will wake up from its winter sleep? We are dying to graze again in the sun on the green mountain slopes! That’s what these chamois seem to think while staring into the cold white distance. Photo of the week: Chavannes, Villars-sur-Ollon, Switzerland 2001
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There’s a story for you
“They love each other, marry, in order to love each other better, more conveniently, he goes to the wars, he dies at the wars, she weeps, with emotion, at having loved him, at having lost him, yep, marries again, in order to love again, more conveniently again, they love each other, you love as many…
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Leonardo between the Sunday painters
Krakow is the proud owner of a real oil painting by Leonardo da Vinci: Lady with an Ermine. So maybe it shouldn’t surprise us to find a copy or reproduction of it in this open air stall in Krakow. It’s hanging there in the middle – even in duplicate -, unpretentiously hidden between work of…
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Where is Mandela?
I am not particularly keen on paying attention to the news of the day in this blog, but today, when the remains of what once was Nelson Mandela are carried to the grave, I do feel tempted. The world of man doesn’t know many like him. Maybe it’s also the vivid memory of my own…
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Threatened with extinction
Nuns openly on the street, that truly isn’t a common sight anymore in Europe! With the exception maybe of places like Rome, or – as in the photo above – Krakow. Rome because of the Vatican and the Papal throne; Krakow as the place from where Archbishop Wojtyla was called in 1978 to become Pope.…
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Bird’s-eye view (3)
Like in last two posts, we’re again looking down at paving stones, this time on the main historic square in Siena, Italy. But now the bird’s-eye is so high above the ground that we can perceive the people down below only as tiny little puppets. They are too small to notice any remarkable, distinguishing features.…
καιρός remembered 