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That isn’t snow on the ladder and tools; it’s an encrustation of salt crystals, built up over I don’t know how long — decades at least. This part of the Wieliczka Salt Mine looked like a winter wonderland.
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Bodies of water are a mixed bag in photography: they’re very boring and flat and featureless, unless they’re reflecting stuff well or have something floating on them. This is a case of the latter making the image far more interesting than it would have been otherwise.
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Maybe it’s a gazelle? I don’t know; I can’t tell my ungulates apart. It’s some kind of four-legged creature with horns, and it is one of the countless animal figures adorning random bits of the Natural History Museum in London, aka the Victorian cathedral to St. Darwin.
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Okay, so it isn’t a menorah. (Actually, these candles are in Notre Dame, so really not Jewish.) But I love the image of little flames burning against the dark, and this is the most suitable picture I have to mark the beginning of Hanukkah. May those of you who celebrate it have a wonderful few days — and those of you who don’t celebrate it, too!
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I mentioned earlier this year that you have to walk barefoot up to Sravanabelagola, the Jain temple we visited in southern India. This is what the staircase looks like: steps carved into the enormous barren rock on which the temple itself stands. They bake in the sun, and therefore bake your feet, which is possibly part of the reason you’re supposed to walk there barefoot — I don’t know for sure.
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This is one of the more thoroughly reconstructed bits of Ephesus in Turkey. The people in charge of the place only rebuild a structure if they have enough pieces and enough sense of where they originally went to be confident of what they’re showing you; this one is obviously still missing quite a bit, but you can get a good sense of what the temple looked like back in the day.
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This tree, in the Lal Bagh Gardens of Bangalore, is just utterly spectacular. (Nor is it the only spectacular tree there — but it’s the one I was able to get the best picture of.)
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I have a deep and abiding love for this kind of green. Add in the warm tones of the wood and the beautiful architecture — this is another traditional-style church in the Zakopane region of Poland — and I am exceedingly happy with the result.
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I miss the style of architecture where things would be decorated just because. Even in “elite” buildings nowadays, the sorts of things where we pour lots of money into the construction, we’re very minimalist; we don’t have random little dragons holding up basins on the walls. Which is a pity, because I do love the posture and the expression on this guy’s face.
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Another shot from the garden of Fukushu-en in Naha, because it was so bloody photogenic. 🙂 I actually don’t know whether the little figures on the roof points ought to be called “Buddhas” or not; that’s just what I mentally label that style of statue. Boddhisatvas? I welcome corrections in the comments.
