With my 400-day goal (of daily posts) set to be reached in slightly more than a week, I’ve decided it’s time to splurge all my remaining Seine-bridge images from last October’s short stay in Paris.
16:55 the 22nd of January, above; 08:58 the next morning, below. In between, roughly 20 minutes before the photo below, our boat entered the arctic circle. I thought this series would mostly be northern lights photos, but the general lingering light in these short northern days was endlessly fascinating as dawn and dusk lasted so long.
No, that ice bear is not staffing the actual reception at the Snowhotel Kirkenes – that happens in a brick and mortar type building with heating, computers and so on. But this is the entrance the actual place you sleep on your actual (literal) ice bed. (Ice = water = source, as a reminder of this weird little series I’ve begun.) When I first showed you Kirkenes, I promised a photo of said ice beds. But it turns out I neglected to photograph the actual beds themsevles- sorry. I really thought I’d done so. Allow the various other ice furniture shown below to spark your imagination, along with the instruction manual from the (regular building, heated) changing room. For orientation, the ice sculptures below are just inside the entrance in the snow mound you see at the bottom. That mound is the thing itself, but to be clear: one only sleeps in the room; one does not linger in it during the rest of the non-sleep time of one’s stay. One instead catches King Crab or hangs out in the heated guest lounge drinking hot tea :-)…or feeds the reindeer, pets the huskies or sits by the outdoor fire, all of which we’ll show you in future posts.
…and the next day our port call at Trondheim was long enough for a lovely walking exploration of this city, which I used to think of as quite far north until I went much farther north in the days after our boat pulled away at the end of the port call in which I took all these photos :-).
Above, the view as we pulled away from Ålesund, which of course is Møre og Romsdal county’s largest city. Below, everything else we still have from that lovely little city :-).
A selection of entrancy photos from various parts of Ticino on my visit there more than 5 months ago. I need to accept that I’ll never get all those photos posted…
In this entry, royal dungeons from the oldest portion of the keep at the Chateau de Vincennes — since, as the tour notes below indicate, when one has a hereditary absolute ruler who is thus also the final arbiter of justice, that hereditary absolute ruler must have a dungeon in which to lock up those whom he deems out of line with the laws that he created. This particular dungeon saw some famous prisoners such as the Marquis de Sade during that highly unstable first French revolution, when France went in the course of about 15 years from absolute monarchy to various phases of pretty vindictive and murderous republic, back to empire once Napoleon decided he like the absolute-monarchy idea after all, then finally after Waterloo (nope, not just an Abba song) back to the house of Bourbon with the “Bourbon Restoration,” for its own last hereditary-royalty hurrah prior to the various other revolutions, empires and republics that tried to govern France over the course of the 1800’s. France is a repository of so many lessons on how to do or not do governance, should once choose to study it or even, crazy notion, learn from it and apply lessons :-).
I probably share too many of these wonderful views of my local lake and park, but when the simple act of looking out one’s windows, or taking a stroll around the block, can give one such lovely views…it’d be wrong to not enjoy and share, eh? 🙂
A few of you may notice the signature finial that ornaments the front of my home city’s lovely Concertgebouw, hidden away to the left side of this photo. From a walk to the a concert there in early September last year; and since I’m using up my last A’dam 24 photos, below just a last two from my own neighborhood that caught my eye in 2024.
(so much world, so little time....) 