Novosibirsk, Russia

Siberia! At sunset. The Church of the Savior. Russian Orthodox. Built of native larch. Circa 1700. Originally located north of the Arctic Circle. Relocated to Novosibirsk's outskirts. Now part of an open-air museum. [1999]

Kraków, Poland

Landscapes, still lifes, and portraits: all on the wall. To which one are your eyes drawn? Probably, the portrait. And, you are probably asking yourself: "Is that Gandalf?" It could be, since the Lord of the Rings movies were released in 2001, 2002, and 2003. BTW: The years in brackets throughout this blog are when the pictures were taken. [2004]

Antwerp, Belgium

In Belgium, waffles dusted with powdered sugar are served as street food everywhere. In the U.S., they are bought frozen, popped into the toaster at home, and eaten with syrup. It used to be that every American home had a waffle iron, and waffles were eaten for breakfast or for dinner (as chicken-and-waffles). Today, that is not the case. [2015]

Malacca, Malaysia

In an effort to connect with their Islamic foundations and negate all the attention paid to the Portuguese, Malaysians rebuilt a long-gone nouria on the Malacca River. It's ancestors are in medieval Syria. Although this one is just a showpiece, its original purpose would have been to serve the famous trading city on the Strait of Malacca. [2011]

Toledo, Castile-La Mancha, Spain

Successful innovations are followed by diffusion. From the Near East spread the idea of using a wheel to lift water, in this case not to the fields but to the city of Toledo. Of course, the Spanish like to think it was their idea alone, but nouria technology actually originated in Syria at least two centuries earlier. [2009]

Hamah, Syria

The river is the Orontes (3 syllables). The water wheel is called a nouria, a technology that dates from medieval times. The power of  the flowing stream is used to lift water up to the level of the fields where it is dumped into a canal (see below) for irrigating crops. Hamah has the most famous collection of nourias in the world. [1993]

Miami, Florida, USA

Barnum's Animals are out of their cages and back on the African savannah, where they have flourished since 2018. That is when Nabisco redesigned the box for its animal crackers. What do we mean by "out of their cages"? See the gorilla in his cage on the old box below. [2019]