Common Sense and Whiskey

Friday Photo Quiz #154 - Where in the World?

Utterly discouraging architecture from a European capital:

Can you name this European capital? The country?

The answer is below.

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Trouble Everywhere, All at Once

The Middle East was the center of the universe last weekend, as the world watched the Egyptian election results and Syria's downing of that Turkish F-4. Tomorrow the North Atlantic moves to the center, with the Obamacare ruling on this side of the ocean and the 1,437th Euro summit on the other.

As the potential first country out of the Eurozone, you'd think Greece would be under enough pressure. But consider its geographical position.

To the east: The Aviationist blog has published a video alongside an article that contends that,

“It is almost a daily practice for the Greek artillery that its radars lock Turkish fighter jets as they illegally enter Greek airspace. However Greeks do not push the button….”

Hard to see how they sort that out anyway, since the distance between many Greek islands and the Turkish mainland is trivial. The island of Samos, for instance, lies scarcely a mile off the Dilek National Park on a tip of Turkish coast.

Then consider Greece's long unhappy relations with its northern neighbor, The Former Yugoslavian Republic of Macedonia, a name Greece insisted on at FYROM's independence from Yugoslavia in 1991,  because it felt that "Macedonia implies a territorial claim by Skopje to a province in northern Greece with the same name." Not that anybody calls Macedonia "FYROM."

Now Macedonia and Greece are in an argument ... over license plates. RFERL suggests that this photo from the internet suggests that Greek officials are covering the Macedonian "MK" with FYROM stickers on cars admitted over the Greek border.

 

Just a Wee Spot of Confusion

Havana, Right Now

With travel to Cuba now open to Americans, here’s what you’ll find if you visit right now.

Havana, Cuba, March 2012: We jump into a priceless, ‘50s vintage yellow convertible taxi and ask for a ride to ‘Old Havana.’ Where in Old Havana? We don’t know. We shrug, everybody smiles and we just go.

Ramon the Cabbie pulls to the curb, fumbles in the glove box, pulls out a preposterously big cigar, stuffs it in my mouth, gives me a light and puts his cowboy hat on my head. Everything is fabulous.

We’re out on the Malecón, Havana’s beloved corniche, the sea to the left, Havana on the right. There’s a couple of side-by-side soccer matches going on in front of a Communist-era grandstand. You can tell Communist design. Not a lot of traffic on the Malecón even though it’s midday.

Down toward the old center buildings fast shedding paint look to have been real showpieces in the past. The past is slipping away fast, though. Water came over the sea wall in one hurricane or another, flooded this part of the city for five long blocks inland, and nothing’s been done to fix it.

Ramon drops us beside the Plaza de Armas. It’s a gorgeous day with a breeze off the sea. People doze in the shade, kids play. There’s a game of checkers. A dog chews a bone.

The little park is a flea market of revolutionary history books, musty encyclopedias, Hemingway novels, and Tarzan comics, but the booksellers aren’t terribly mercantile. They read their books.

Cubans are proud of their collective literacy, a pet Castro project of the early revolution. Kids as young as 14 were sent into the countryside to raise Cuban literacy, from 23 percent at the time to nearly 100 percent today. Literacy and free medical care – those are the Castro legacies you’ll hear about again and again. 

The whole afternoon we’re lost in old Havana. We do the slow walk up Obispo Street, the cobbled pedestrian thoroughfare into town. Hemingway’s old haunt, the Hotel Ambos Mundos, is in fine repair. There’s a shrine where they say he wrote The Old Man and the Sea beside a turtle pond. Each turtle is perched on its own rock.

Five old men sing and play over a big spread of sidewalk. A lady shakes a maraca and holds out a hat. Can’t tell if she works for them or she’s the boss, driving these doddering old guys to keep playing.

•••••

We hear a good, salacious rumor that famous Americans have been here lately for medical treatment. Who?

Friday Photo Quiz #153 - Where in the World?

Oh, very very strange. Where could this be?

Looks like the desert. But this country ranks 17th in the world with 7,200 kilometers of coastline, much of it lined with expensive resorts. Care to take a guess?

The answer is below.

Weekend Reading

Two commendable reads:

Jumping Through Hoops - on the London Olympics
If Only They Could Talk - about the moai on Easter Island

Ethiopian Wednesday HDRs - Churches

 

 

 

Don't know why, but photography from some places seems to lend itself to HDR conversion better than others. Could be the photographer's inspiration. Some of the best HDR work I think I've done comes from Vietnam (Here are a few), a place I love, and I really liked Addis Ababa and the Ethiopian people a lot more than I'd expected to. So maybe that's it.

The top photo is from St. Mary's Church on Mt. Entoto, outside Addis. In the middle are worshippers at Trinity Ethiopian Orthodox church in Addis, and at the bottom we're back on Mt. Entoto. Click them to make them bigger. All these were shot with Nikon gear, converted in Photomatix and finished in Photoshop with Nik filters.

There are 390 photos in the HDR Gallery at EarthPhotos.com.

What We've Come To

Unbelievable.

Welcome to CS&W Blog

And thanks for the nice emails from people who heard the radio interview that aired Friday on South Carolina ETV.

New Tibet Travel Troubles. Same Old Story.

You've been thinking about it for years, and of course you've been planning for months. You HAVE to. After painstaking research and dogged persistence through the bureaucracy, you've finally got your Tibet Travel Permit in hand. And now you can't go.

Numerous news sources report that, like they did in 2008 - 2009, Chinese authorities have banned foreign travelers from Tibet.

The move comes after two Tibetans self-immolated on 27 May outside the Jokhang Monastery in Lhasa, pictured above.

Spare Saturday Sports Shot

Irish football fans at Euro 2012

via Twitter.

Friday Photo Quiz #152 - Where in the World?

It's a cute little country with old sailing ships like this:

And big, imposing volcanoes like this:

Can you name the country?

The answer is below.

It's Not Easy Being Royal

Rainy conditions prevail over southern England, and, reports the Telegraph:

"The Duchess of Cornwall, fresh from her Jubilee duties, braved the poor conditions as she toured the annual Royal Cornwall agricultural show in Wadebridge.

The sheep section had to be closed and some judging moved inside."

The horror.

Baltic Buildings - Wednesday HDR

There were so many people walking the streets of Vilnius, Lithuania on a Saturday in summer, most of them visitors like us, that there was almost no point in taking photos, unless you like loud, irritating children or paunchy retirees in shorts with those skinny little white legs, or drunken single men on a weekend binge trip in your pictures.

But if they were all out living it up on Saturday afternoon, maybe they'd be sleeping it off on Sunday? Sure enough. These first three are the streets of Vilnius, waiting for the sun to come up over the buildings on a Sunday morning.

These next two are the rooftops of Tallinn, Estonia. I first visited Tallinn almost twenty years ago, and it couldn't have felt more Communist-run down. Nowadays you just flit over on the fast boat from Helsinki and because of the Schengen agreement, there's not even any pass control. Which has the Finns lamenting that "Every fifth crime in Helsinki is committed by foreigners." And that "Estonians committed the most crimes of any national group." The nicest hotel in town twenty years ago was looking a little tired this last visit. Tallinn has a cute litle old town, though.

After their entanglement with the Soviet Union, such is the Baltic states' longing to integrate with Europe that Latvia still plans to adopt the Euro in 2014 (Estonia already has) even if some say now is the worst possible time.

Riga, the capital of Latvia, is the biggest Baltic capital and it has a certain bustle that the others can't muster. Except in its old town. Which really does feel old. First a typical alleyway, then the imposing doors of Riga Cathedral, and a little walkway under and behind the cathedral.

These photos were all taken with Nikon cameras, processed in Photomatix and Photoshop with Nik software. See the HDR Gallery for 388 HDR photos, and the Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia Galleries at EarthPhotos.com.

Mali: Grim

Like we said a couple of months ago, Azawad Doesn't Sound as Fun as Timbuktu.

Friday Photo Quiz #151 - Where in the World?

 

Chances are, this will just come down to a guess. So if I were guessing I would note that the competitors look vaguely eastern, and I'd note what look like Soviet era apartment blocks down on the plain. And the plain... I'd note the vastness of the landscape.

Can you name the city? The country?

The answer is after the jump.