The last remaining part of the second city walls of Brussels, the Porte de Halle (FR) / Hallepoort (FL) / Halle Gate (EN) is now part the Royal Museums of Art and History, ergot Ah, Royalty material. It was originally built in the 1300s, same general time frame as the Keep at Vincennes. It’s been remodeled often since. I happened past it during my walk to the train station after some meetings in Brussels back in April.
In earlier posts from Vincennes, we told you about the Keep, which you see rising to the right above. We also promised to tell you more about the later buildings which you could see in a few shots taken from inside the Keep. Herewith those last explanations and indeed pretty much last photos from Vincennes. Louis XIV, often referred to as the Sun King, built The King’s Pavilion above in the 1650s. (Along with the Queen’s Pavilion, behind me when I took this photo but visible behind construction scaffolding in a few other shots below. Sheesh: royal spouses apparently aren’t satisfied with different bedrooms, they want whole different buildings, in this case on French tax budgets. No wonder those French peasants started their revolution – and no doubt the Bourbon descendants rue the fact that they hadn’t yet drawn enough attention to immigrants as the cause of all problems, in order to direct the guillotines away from royalty and towards far more defenseless individuals. Of course, for our North American first nations, we immigrants sure as heck were the root of some pretty major new problems.)
But back to old Sunny, the King: his was the last royal court to live at Vincennes. Unsatisfied with Vincennes’ proximity to the actual city of Paris, he built and moved to Versailles, deeper into the suburbs, about thirty years later.
This is it, folks: last of the Swiss mountains, some from my walks in and around Morcote (above), Bissone and Lugano, several from around the Centovalli town of Camedo, and also some from the hanging-bridge walk in the mountains on the north of the valley that runs between Bellinzona and Lago Maggiore / Locarno. (E.g. the bigger photo at the bottom with a lovely crescent moon.) It’s a lot, but some of them sure are lovely, eh?
The ground-level photos in this post are our last of Lago Maggiore at its northernmost end, in Locarno. I’m pretty confident that the shot at the very bottom of the post shows most of the rest of Lago Maggiore, and even a wee bit of the westernmost arm of Lake Lugano (the part you can see, looking down from an amazing overlook in Morcote, in this photo from an earlier post), as seen from the airplane on Sunday afternoon the 15th of June, as our plane flew south from Amsterdam to Rome.
A collection of “signs” images from the past few months in A’dam, including two at the bottom from the national memorial service on the 80th anniversary, to those lost in WWII and the colonial war which followed and led to Indonesia’s independence.
Every photo in this post was taken between 3:15 and 4:31pm on the 22nd of January, as the boat traveled north towards the arctic circle which we crossed shortly after 8am the following morning.
The joys of a contemplative, stress-free walking exploration of one’s local park & lake. E.g. I finally climbed up the top of a little hill with a sculpture on top, which I’d always just looked at from that path down below, previously. I’m lying on said sculpture in the image above. Also, a photo exhibit at the south end of the lake about building dialogue between communities.
(so much world, so little time....) 