Tag Archives: blog It is no wonder that Budapest is called one of the most beautiful cities in Europe! Approaching it from the Danube River that runs between what were originally the separate cities of Buda on the right bank and Pest on the left, renders it magical: this section of old city along the Banks of the […]  She’s not the first, and she’s not the only one, but she is still a rarity these days: a female Kazakh eagle hunter. Hunting with golden eagles is a long-standing custom among the Turkic peoples (particularly the Kazakh and Kyrgyz) across the Eurasian steppe. During the 1930s, large numbers of Kazakhs fled from communist-controlled Kazakhstan through the Altai Mountains to Bayan-Ölgii Province in […]  A serpentine track of crushed rock switches back and forth across the almost-empty Mongolian landscape. One has to wonder why there are so many bends in a road of ruts and rocks and puddles when it only has to cross a relatively flat plateau! Yet, our Russian UAZ (Ulyanovsky Avtomobilny Zavod) four-wheel-drives refuse to follow a straight line […]  When I think of northern India, it is the incredible Rajput (Hindu) and Mughal (Islamic) architecture of Rajasthan that I remember: fortified walls and sandstone edifices climbing across hillsides; exquisite turrets floating in the hot, dusty air; delicate lattice work shielding windows and casting intricate shadow patterns in the cloistered rooms behind them. But, I also think […]  Charlemagne (c.742-814), the medieval emperor who ruled much of Western Europe from 768 to 814, dreamed of traversing the European continent, from the North Sea to the Black Sea by water. All that was needed, in theory, was a trench around 3,000 metres (9,843 ft) long, connecting the Rhine River and the Danube. In the absence of pumps, […] |
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