Category Archives: travel

And now for something completely different

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I have spent my life living in places where the culture is foreign. Years living in strange cultures. Building landscapes and gardens with people from other cultures. So I have become an observer of signs that focus on cultural differences. Please see the image below. Then try to draw your own conclusion.

From experience, I have noted that these drawings are to help certain people adjust to strange cultures. In this case one might suppose that people who are not accustomed to toilets with seats or not accustomed to plumbing that functions well might need this kind of help. How can they afford to travel as tourists?

Working on landscaping projects, I have often found that labourers employed by contractors receive a very low salary. Sometimes those labourers have not entered the country legally. Sometimes they have never yet encountered cars or trucks. Believe it or not. People of the earth.

Vegan World

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Here is a collection of images I have taken of plants and landscapes the past days as winter descends and the first frost arrives.

Winter descends. Previously we had snow only 2000 meters elevation and above. Last night, I fell asleep listening to the slow and peaceful pitter patter of rain falling softly on the roof. I woke up this morning to find the snow had snuck down to 700 meters elevation.

After this tree’s branches and trunk have built barns, built and heated homes, the remnants have become the nourishment for how many other living entities? Everything gets eaten in the end.

Frost bite, frost burn, yet there is some beauty in this image. Is there a lesson to be learned?

The frost is not the end but a tell that the end is near. In the background, the babbling brook runs away from that truth.

Free Beer

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Most of the time I take photos of plants, gardens or landscapes where I attempt to share something beyond sense perception. That is my fun.

The other day, not far away, I found this sign. Tomorrow is when? Tomorrow never comes. Now isn’t that the funny truth?

And after all, it is not a stretch to say beer is the ideal people and plants linkage. Ethnobotany at its finest.

See you there tomorrow for free beer.

Sneaking In

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It happened last night.

Woke up this morning and winter had snuck in. Winter! And I had not yet even finished the requisite autumnal post.

Snow down to 3,000 meters. Above image shows in the foreground two valleys at 600 meters. The valleys drain the north side of the Jungfrau Massif, part of the Berner Oberland in the Swiss Alps. If you magnify, you can see Jungfrau, Monch and Eiger in the left center background.

Envy

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If I could…and then the fairy appeared before me. Yeah, in my dreams!

If I could write with the emotion and mystery of these clouds moving ever so slowly but always with magnificent beauty, incredible balance.

And challenges. These clouds offer visual, emotional and intellectual challenges that encourage science to escape Pandora’s box, something I’ve never done.

Weeds or Wild Flowers?

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Weeds or Wild Flowers?

This is a discussion, a debate, an argument that never fades away. 

Today, on a walk, I came across these beautifully flowering plants on the edge of a parking lot. Made me think. Made me remember all the discussions, debates and arguments with colleagues and government authorities.

But then I thought that any time someone plants seeds or ‘makes’ a garden, it is a statement that says yes, I have free time. Yes, I have disposable income. We could easily infer that such a person is ‘well-off’. Nice place to be…well-off in a garden, isn’t it?

Too much thinking for me. I’ll go back to my walk.

Railing

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Railing about what?

Once upon a time…and then it was yesterday…and you are reading this today.

In a land of mountain trains–funiculars, cable cars and narrow gauge cogwheel trains. They are slow and they get you high.

Why? Why get high?

I’ll let the following photos tell the story. You will be in the Bernese Highlands of the Jungfrau Region, the northern pre-mountains, above 2,000 meters in the Swiss Alps. Why build these mechanical contraptions to get high?

Here are the trains that get you high.

Passenger cars–note narrow gauge and cogwheel. Start at 600 meters, finish at 2,300 meters.

Passenger cars and engine–small and strong–electric power. 

Engine close up–attached in front of the engine is a cart for transporting goods and construction materials.

Once you are high…the air is thin, fresh, cool and the distances…magical.

Mountains–Eiger, Monch, Junfrau with the Mannlichen gipfel amidst the clouds in the foreground.

Paths to explore, paths for discovering.

Discoveries.

Going deep in.

Can’t get enough.