Toledo, Spain. January 2015
Riga, Latvia. January 2015
Athens. Greece. February 2015
Baalbek, Lebanon. February 2015
Paris, France. March 2015
Brussels. March 2015
Liege, Wallonia. March 2015
Kelmis, Former condominium of Neutral Moresenet. March 2015
Vaals, Netherlands. March 2015
Aachen, Germany. March 2015
Eupen, German Speaking Community of Belgium. March 2015
Pomerol, France. April 2015
KrakĂłw, Poland. May 2015
RuĆŸomberok, Slovakia. May 2015
Nida, Lithuania. June 2015
Liepaja, Latvia. June 2015
Szczecin, Poland. June 2015
Heringsdorf, Germany. June 2015
Bad Segeberg, Germany. July 2015
Brussels. July 2015
Antwerp, Flanders. July 2015
Baarle-Nassau/Barle Hertog, Netherlands/Belgium. July 2015
Breda, Netherlands. July 2015
Vama Veche, Romania. August 2015
Durankulak, Bulgaria. August 2015
VikĂžyri, Norway. August 2015
TĂąrgu MureÈ, Romania. September
Edinburgh, Scotland. September 2015
Tempelhof, Berlin, Germany. October 2015
Ramsay, Isle of Man. October 2015
St Malo, France. October 2015
Istanbul, Turkey. November 2015
TatranskĂĄ Lomnica, Slovakia.November 2015
Malmo, Sweden. December 2015
Copenhagen, Denmark. December 2015
Shanghai, China. December 2015
Some seriously awesome photos here, Michael.
Ah, Yodafon, remember it well, I do.
Hey, just because they have a McDonalds doesn’t make them Bad!
Michael, those are just stunning. I’m speechless.
Thank you so much for sharing them with us.
(But you mean they eat burgers ‘n’ fries in Holland??? Gosh!)
What do you do for a living that you go to all these places?
Very good.
Where the heck is Wallonia?
What impressed me was that the Dutch burger and fries was served with (amongst other things) a strawberry. You’d never get that in England.
Ah, I found Wallonia. It’s a region in Belgium.
Ten of what? There are 36 pictures.
LOL! Maybe not in England, Michael, but imagine my surprise when, after spending years using an example I had dreamed up as the height of the ridiculous, food-wise — namely, shrimp in raspberry sauce — I was actually served that exact thing at a fancy lab dinner, held in the restaurant at Chicago’s Art Institute!
Reminds me of how long it’s been since I’ve been to Riga. đ It was the weekend of the Eurovision Song Contest back in ’92, the first time I ever got to see just how daft it really is. Amazingly, the next morning the British students we met wanted to know how the UK did.
When you were in the Eupen area, did you get to drive on the Spa-Francorchamps circuit? Those are real roads in normal use the rest of the year, I think; at least they were a quarter century ago when my German relatives and I didn’t realize exactly where we were until we passed by the grandstand. It also explained why the quality of the road had suddenly improved.
Great pix, but I’m with RR. Ten? Unlike “Wallonia”, you can’t just look it up on the internet.
I think he means ten years of these “year-end” photo collections.
And Mike wins the prize. Well, no prize. He wins the glory, though.
And I am just a generic International Man of Mystery. Not much to explain.
This year, I watched the Eurovision Song Contest in an Armenian shashlik restaurant at a Lithuanian beach resort. (Actually, I mean *the* Lithuanian beach resort. Lithuania doesn’t have a lot of coast). Somehow, that was perfect.
(Also, I tend to be deliberately cryptic with these posts. Some people have occasionally asked that I provide a little more explanation for some of them. So please ask away if you do want some).
Wallonia, Walachia, Wales, Galicia, Galicia, Gaul. The Gauls are everywhere.
Don’t forget Galatea, Patrick. đ
There’s a great text in Galatians, once you trip on it, entails
Twenty-nine distinct damnations, one sure if another fails…
–Although I’m not sure how far the Gauls actually got into Galatia.
[(Grrr, there go, my heart’s abhorrence! Drown your damn spell-checker*, do!)
*Scans better than the original. ‘Strewth.]
Ignorant thing has an immensely minuscule** vocabulary. Never heard of “damnation”!]
And I suppose you have to consider Goliath as well, just so as not to exclude, however faintly, the eligible either inadvertently or through failure of thoroughness.
Ruddy thing kept cutting high-school lit class, I guess. Never heard of “damnation.” Probably spent its entire life on the streets, a Child of the Nineties or worse. When the most-used word in American English was a pithy Anglo-Saxon term having four letters and beginning with “f.”
All because Patrick’s remark, followed by Alex’s, made me think of the Gaels, relation aural not tribal or sanguinary by all accounts (that I’m aware of anyway). Wallonia, though, one would naturally think to do with the Walloons. Which brings up Wachovia, which has nothing to do with any of it, except again some aural similarity and the fact that I’ve been listening to people rehashing the bailouts and the problems with Wachovia, Country-Wide, etc.
Words, words, words, I’m obsessed with words!
Fun, isn’t it. :>))
. . .
*I believe it’s in The Years with Ross. Thurber lists a couple of adverbs contradicting the adjectives they modify, that are often used together in writing that desperately needs editing. If I remember rightly, he gives this example:
“The building is pretty ugly, and a little big for its surroundings.”
Just for grins, there’s also some New Yorker writer’s penchant for what today we might think of as the Yodistic style: “Backward ran sentences till reeled the mind.” :>)!
Very good.
At this time of year (an important qualification) I think I would choose Toledo to visit.
Although it is unlikely I will see any of these places.
I have visited Paris (France) and Ramsey on the Isle of Man. Edinburgh also.
St Malmo I am not sure about – I may have been there, but it would have been a very long time ago.
The high plains of Castille are cold in winter, as we discovered on that trip in January.
“The high plains of Castille are cold in winter, as we discovered on that trip in January.”
Indeed they are. I live on them, in fact partly on the meseta and partly in the nearby mountains, and it’s a lot colder than people realize in the winter. It’s also much hotter than they imagine in summer. And since we have no spring to speak of, and very little autumn, it’s hard to recommend a good time to visit.
“Generic International Man of Mystery”? I hate to criticise, but you have your picture on your gravatar, and we always know where you’ve been, if not where you actually are. Are you sure you’re doing this right?
Michael,
Should you make it to Kyrgyzstan, please don’t make jokes about the local food, one unfortunate Scot got deported, not even for importing haggis.
It’s not that McDonald’s is Bad that I found amusing. (“Bad” just translates as approximately “Spa”). It’s that it is in Hamburgerstrasse, which in that part of Germany is the equivalent of a “London Road” in the south of England.