Natural splendour, real musics, wines, wordpower
As a newcomer to another nation and/or to a different kind of society or ecosystem, the surprises that await, almost inevitably, will prove a very “mixed bag”.
This post celebrates a very happy, beautiful surprise, recently experienced in Germany’s only alpine national park.
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As the featured image “clearly shows”, when in Palermo, ape-men enjoy exclusive use of special, clearly-signposted, simian-friendly taxis.
The photo (copyright Doug Spencer, taken in Sicily’s capital city at 12.32 pm on 23 September 2023) has not been “doctored” – it contains no “fake news”.
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Presumably, many of you have at some point stood on a skyscraper’s observation deck and marvelled at how very long is the “drop” to the streets below.
From the Sydney Tower’s “Eye”, it is 250 metres.
From the Melbourne Edge’s “Skydeck”, it is nearly 300 metres.
The Empire State Building’s top floor sits 373 metres above Manhattan’s streets.
This post’s featured image was taken from the summit of the Jenner (1874 metres ASL), looking down to the Königssee; the vertical “drop” to that lake’s surface exceeds the aforementioned “drops”, respectively, by more than five times, more than four times, and more than three times.
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The featured image, taken in Germany’s only alpine national park, shows something which would be “impossible” in any Australian national park…well, illegal… and highly unlikely.
Four dog-owners – and three dogs – are clearly visible, descending from the summit of the Jenner, in Berchtesgaden National Park.
To German eyes, the dogs’ presence would be entirely unremarkable.
(to anybody’s eyes, the view from the Jenner’s summit is stupendous…as you will see in #14 of this series)
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If the pictured wall were Australian, ceramic ducks might “fly” on it.
In Altomonte – a very pleasant, historic, hilltop town in Calabria – this wall’s ceramic decorations celebrate a member of the cactus family.
Along with all but one other of the circa 127 members of the cactus family, prickly pears originally grew only in the Americas.
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I am almost entirely sure that – for everyone who looks at today’s featured image – your answer to the question posed in this post’s headline would be a resounding “no”.
I am equally sure that almost all of you have seen the face of this particular Sicilian villager, albeit as it was in 1971… a little more than 52 years before I photographed her, in the very same village, on the morning of 1 October, 2023.
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This sequel to #9 in this series takes us to the edge of the same Calabrian mountain village.
Civita sits within Italy’s largest national park; Pollino National Park is named after the Pollino massif, which reaches a little higher than does anything on the Australian continent.
The brink of a very deep gorge, carved by the waters of the Raganello, is just an easy, short walk away from the centre of Civita.
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The featured image shows a very relaxed, aged, large canine resident of Civita – an attractive, historic, and spectacularly located Calabrian hill town.
Visual evidence – over five enjoyable weeks in southern Italy – suggests that Italian dogs are well-loved by their human “owners”, but that dog owners comprise a smaller percentage of the Italian population than the Australian one.
On Italian streets, however, one’s feet are almost never far from “fresh”, soggy dogshit.
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For an observant “stranger in a strange land”, local signage often proves a rich source of amusement and/or misunderstanding – sometimes, the latter, therefore the former.
The pictured sign ensures that monolingual English-speakers do “get” the intended message; nonetheless, you are looking at the winner of my personal award for “our European trip’s most amusing signage”.
Many tourists walk the feline monarch of Alberobello’s street.
Almost all are obedient, so the king – or queen – usually sits on his/her “throne”, undisturbed.
Q: Why do tourists from all over the world flock to this small town in Puglia, southern Italy?
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Almost everywhere we went in southern Italy, cats were abundantly evident.
Generally, they roamed freely, and were neither belled nor tagged.
Their state of health was hugely variable; it was often impossible to know whether an individual was a “feral” or (notionally, at least) a “domestic” cat.
I suspect that the above circumstances have more than a bit to do with another surprise, at least to us: that birds are usually strikingly less evident/abundant/diverse on southern Italian streets than on West Australian ones.
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