Though the long days do limit my exposure to city lights, they also give me more enerty to notice things like the glorious lingering light in a 10pm / 22:00 sky, and the city clock on Valeriusplein, as I walk home from another lovely concert at Concertgebouw :-).
As noted in yesterday’s post, I connected through Istanbul again at the end of January. Since citizens will be voting in a rather important runoff election there today (Sunday the 28th, I believe?), these photos taken during the approach to Istanbul’s airport on that flight feel appropriate for today’s entry. Full confession, I’ve never been outside the airport in Istanbul, so though I’ve looked at maps and fantasized about its storied history, to be honest I have no idea what we’re looking at in any of these Istanbul images 🙂
When I flew back from that last trip to Iraq, we flew north towards a connection in Istanbul. That flight path took us directly over some of those historic, high and lovely mountains which house the sources of the Tigris, into which the various streams I’ve been showing you in some of these earlier posts flow. As you’ve seen also in at least one prior post, even the closer mountains were nicely snowcapped when I was there. So I stared and stared out the window, uncertain whether the white things I saw could be mountain tops, and whether I was maybe seeing some of the mountains named in ancient texts, or just more cloud peaks. Can you tell?? 🙂
This one is a bit more obviously a little island; I’d just never noticed it before. These must be heaven for the birds and small mammals of our urban park, since no one boats and I’ve never seen people swim in these canals, and dogs only going in to retrieve sticks…
Last Pacific coastal shots for a while…though I might have something left from Hong Kong that I could drag out if I had to, but not a very high-quality shot, for sure :-). Bodega head, looking south toward Point Reyes peninsula in the shots below.
Having shown you some graffiti art of more or less this very thing in a recent post, imagine my delight when, on Sunday, for the very first time I saw vintage trains (related to the tram museum which is also somehow affiliated with this whole affair) rolling down these very tracks and right past that very mural, clanging their bells loudly since most pedestrians walk along the tracks these days. 🙂
(so much world, so little time....) 