The Feel of a Place

Love these architectural sketches by sunga park:

more here.

(via)

Two Good Reminders that We're Small

1. TimeLapse Video of the Night Sky


2. The Earth's Oldest Trees:
"In the White Mountains in eastern California, 15 miles east of Bishop, you'll find the oldest living trees in the world. The gnarled beauties, called the Great Basin Bristlecone Pine, are believed to be 1,000 to around 4,800 years old."

 (See more here and here.)

Audrey in Rome

More here.

Wanderlust: A Bookworm's Paradise

My jaw dropped when I saw these pictures of the Shiba Ryōtarō Memorial Museum Library in Japan. There is peace here. And light. and order. and beauty. and an overwhelming number of delightful possibilities.

Planet Earth, Earth Noises

I stole my dad's copy of BBC's Planet Earth over the holidays and am making my way through it for the first time now. I know I'm not the first to say this but I'm constantly amazed by the footage. (Seriously, how did they pull this off?) The plots are riveting. David Attenborough's narration is pitch-perfect.

We live in a beautiful world.

On a similar note, I just came across Cornell Macaulay Library's scientific archive of audio and video nature recordings (the world's largest and oldest) - it's now all online for the first time, and it's remarkably thorough and interesting!

The Most Beautiful Opera Houses in the World

I fell upon this list of the most beautiful opera houses in the world and I thought I'd share a few.
Aren't they marvelous? How regal and dignified one must feel when sitting or walking around inside!

(1. Metropolitan Opera House NYC, 2. Sydney Opera House, 3. Margravial Opera House Bayreuth 4. L'Opera Royal de Versailles 5.Teatro Di San Carlo Naples - images via)

Wanderlust: New Zealand

When my friends and I studied abroad our junior year of college, we flew to opposite hemispheres: I went to London. They went to Australia.  While I fell in love with London deeply (oh those old bookstores and theaters!) I couldn't help but be a bit envious of my friends' adventures outdoors– driving around New Zealand, sky-diving, ice climbing.
All things utterly foreign to me. All things I now hope to do one day.
 
Some stunning photos of Hobbit country:

(credits: 1. Hadar Israeli 2. Guillaume Madelin 3.Berkley Bedell 4. Daiga Buike, all via)

Wanderlust: Ukranian Cafe

One day, I shall go to eastern Europe, and sit in an exceptionally cozy cafe.
The one below looks like it will suit me perfectly.

Lavender Farms

I've been having a real infatuation with lavender farms lately. So beautiful. 

(via:)

Questions of Travel

These beautiful travel photos of Aya Brackett  made me dream of far off places today.

About travel: Something about being a wandering gypsy really appeals to me.  Just being able to live the philosophy of waking up to a new horizon every morning, of swallowing the world whole - that's the way to be! A cage-free existence!

Where's the one place you could travel to right now if you could?

Ever since I read Elizabeth Bishop 's poems about Brazil in college, I've always wanted to go there. At the time, it seemed like the complete opposite of the world I knew.
I fell in love with this poem, in particular, about Bishop's mixed feelings about Brazil and travel, in general.


QUESTIONS OF TRAVEL

There are too many waterfalls here; the crowded streams

hurry too rapidly down to the sea,

and the pressure of so many clouds on the mountaintops

makes them spill over the sides in soft slow-motion,

turning to waterfalls under our very eyes.

--For if those streaks, those mile-long, shiny, tearstains,

aren't waterfalls yet,

in a quick age or so, as ages go here,

they probably will be.

But if the streams and clouds keep travelling, travelling,

the mountains look like the hulls of capsized ships,

slime-hung and barnacled.

Think of the long trip home.

Should we have stayed at home and thought of here?

Where should we be today?

Is it right to be watching strangers in a play

in this strangest of theatres?

What childishness is it that while there's a breath of life

in our bodies, we are determined to rush

to see the sun the other way around?

The tiniest green hummingbird in the world?

To stare at some inexplicable old stonework,

inexplicable and impenetrable,

at any view,

instantly seen and always, always delightful?

Oh, must we dream our dreams

and have them, too?

And have we room

for one more folded sunset, still quite warm?

But surely it would have been a pity

not to have seen the trees along this road,

really exaggerated in their beauty,

not to have seen them gesturing

like noble pantomimists, robed in pink.

--Not to have had to stop for gas and heard

the sad, two-noted, wooden tune

of disparate wooden clogs

carelessly clacking over

a grease-stained filling-station floor.

(In another country the clogs would all be tested.

Each pair there would have identical pitch.)

--A pity not to have heard

the other, less primitive music of the fat brown bird

who sings above the broken gasoline pump

in a bamboo church of Jesuit baroque:

three towers, five silver crosses.

--Yes, a pity not to have pondered,

blurr'dly and inconclusively,

on what connection can exist for centuries

between the crudest wooden footwear

and, careful and finicky,

the whittled fantasies of wooden footwear

and, careful and finicky,

the whittled fantasies of wooden cages.

--Never to have studied history in

the weak calligraphy of songbirds' cages.

--And never to have had to listen to rain

so much like politicians' speeches:

two hours of unrelenting oratory

and then a sudden golden silence

in which the traveller takes a notebook, writes:

"Is it lack of imagination that makes us come

to imagined places, not just stay at home?

Or could Pascal have been not entirely right

about just sitting quietly in one's room?

Continent, city, country, society:

the choice is never wide and never free.

And here, or there . . . No. Should we have stayed at home,

wherever that may be?"

(photos via: cup of jo )