Please send in your good wildlife/street/landscape photos.
Today we have travel photos from Joe Dickinson. Joe’s captions are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.
Here for your consideration is the first of two sets of photos I’ll just call “Street Scenes”
This is a well-known pub in Edinburgh called Bobby’s Bar, named, I believe, for the faithful dog of a regular patron.Bobby reportedly hung out by the pub for months after his owner died.
JAC: I went to this pub fairly often when I did my sabbatical in Edinburgh. This is also the only pub where I found the wonderful Fraoch Heather Ale (made with heather flowers) on tap.
You will recognize this as a famous site in Chicago, the skating rink at Millennium Park with the “bean” in the background.
This is a view of the people lined up to take the elevator up the Eiffel Tower seen, I believe, from the first platform.
A refreshment stand in Lhasa, Tibet. The fellow second from the right is multitasking by spinning a prayer wheel.
Also in Tibet, an industrial size prayer wheel installation allows highly efficient prayer while on the way, for example, to market. Just hold your right hand at about shoulder height and give each cylinder (hexagon?) a twirl as you go by.
Still in Tibet, this is the Jokhang Temple, sort of the mother church for Tibetan Buddhism. The idea is to process around the temple complex. The common theme here and preceding is that prayers are activated when set in motion. Two of my prized possessions are a prayer wheel and an elaborately decorated conch shell “trumpet” obtained in the gift shop at that temple. Think about how, historically, conch shells made it to Tibet and you can understand why they were valued. Similarly, we saw women at some festival proudly wearing large beads fashioned from coral.
This is the gate to a little cottage that we rented a couple of times when attending the Indian Market and the Opera in Santa Fe. Conveniently, those two events overlap.
These next two are the Ponte Vecchio in Florence, one at sunset and the other at night.
This is the first village first village, Manarola, when walking the Cinqua Terre in Italy in the usual direction.
This is the front of the Pantheon in Rome. Generally, I avoid getting strangers in photos of historic or scenic views, but I think this young couple adds some interest.
This is Volendam in the Netherlands. Again, the children playing in a boat adds some human interest.
Beautiful photos Joe. Love them. I frequently try to get figures in the landscape. This was a specialty of Galen Rowell, of whom I am a big fan.
The Tibetan pictures reminded me of a short story, “The Nine Billion Names of God” by British writer Arthur C. Clarke.
In a Tibetan lamasery, the monks seek to list all of the names of God. They believe the Universe was created for this purpose, and that once this naming is completed, God will bring the Universe to an end. Three centuries ago, the monks created an alphabet in which they calculated they could encode all the possible names of God, numbering about 9,000,000,000 (“nine billion”) and each having no more than nine characters. Writing the names out by hand, as they had been doing, even after eliminating various nonsense combinations, would take another 15,000 years; the monks wish to use modern technology to finish this task more quickly.
They rent a computer capable of printing all the possible permutations, and they hire two Westerners to install and program the machine. The computer operators are skeptical but play along. After three months, as the job nears completion, they fear that the monks will blame the computer, and by extension its operators, when nothing happens. The Westerners delay the operation of the computer so that it will complete its final print run just after their scheduled departure. After their successful departure on ponies, they pause on the mountain path on their way back to the airfield, where a plane is waiting to take them back to civilization. Under a clear night sky they estimate that it must be just about the time that the monks are pasting the final printed names into their holy books. Then they notice that “overhead, without any fuss, the stars were going out.”
Thanks. A. Clarke is a favorite.
I’ve always loved that story.
For those interested, https://urbigenous.net/library/nine_billion_names_of_god.html
Great photos. 19 century Greyfriars’ Bobby was famous for spending 14 years guarding the grave of his owner until he died himself. For myself I’d rather he hung out at the pub..
Yes, Greyfriars Kirk and Kirkyard is to the rear of the pub pictured.
Very fine pictures! On other occasions, it will be a simple matter to digitally remove people or other items with cloning or healing tools in a photo editor.
I was intrigued by the Bean in the photo of the skating rink. It is as much a structural work of art as a sculpture. It reminded me of the Sydney Opera House, neither could have been constructed without computer technology. Great photos, all. Thanks. GROG
Great and interesting photographs but the one that does it for me is the picture of the gate/door to the cottage you rented. There’s something about worn and ageing doors people have walked through for tens or hundreds of years that I find ever so appealing.
Excellent! Thanks, Joe!
Great photos. I visited Chicago for the first time a few years ago – I stayed downtown and was impressed by the architecture – I particularly liked “the bean”. Too cold for me, though. 😉
D.A.
NY