George T. Bagby State Park in southwest Georgia is a small park with an interesting variation of ecosystems. Walking through a pine forest in its red clay soil one comes across a sandy vein of creepiness in which hardwood trees are covered in Spanish moss. Looking out into the middle of the lake, one can see a grove of cypress trees spiking up through the water. Someday the grove will form an island or a peninsula.

Szentendre is a town in Hungary north of Budapest and off the west bank of the Danube. It’s a mecca for tourists who don’t have the time to really get out of Budapest, but who want to see something besides the city. It’s full of tchochki vendors selling carved wooden objects, leather goods, distinctive blue and white linen garments, and, on the pricier end, porcelain.

Andersonville National Historic Site is home to the National Prisoner of War Museum and a National Cemetery that began as the prison cemetery but continues to take veterans from subsequent wars, in addition to the grounds of the infamous Confederate prison.

Andersonville Prison housed approximately 45,000 Union prisoners of war during the Civil War in an open air stockade over the last 14 months of the war. Almost one in three prisoners died. There is a great controversy over whether this was the result of savage treatment or simply the fact that the Confederacy didn’t have the resources to feed and care for its own soldiers let alone enemy prisoners.

In the cemetery, the prisoners’ grave markers are almost touching, reflecting the fact that, with fatalities of 100 per day at times, the Confederates dispensed with niceties such as pine boxes and just buried the prisoners shoulder-to-shoulder in shallow trenches. One can see the difference between the closely spaced Civil War tombs and those of more recent wars.

The National Prisoner of War Museum does not focus on Andersonville, though it does have exhibits from the Civil War. It covers World War II and the Vietnam war extensively.

Albany is a city on the Flint River in southwest Georgia. It is said to be among the top ten poorest cities in the country. If one is downtown, near the river, this may seem a bit surprising because of the considerably resources that have been put into civic development. It has a new visitor center in a restored building that offers a nice overview film presentation about southwest Georgia. There is a riverine aquarium, called the Riverquarium, that has an aviary in addition to many displays about the flora and fauna primarily of the Flint  and Apalachicola Rivers. There is also a riverwalk trail that begins from the prominent Ray Charles plaza and covers about three miles of riverbank with a nature trail. The cypress trees along the river’s edge and the many other types of hardwood, often covered in Spanish moss, offer an ecosystem out of the ordinary.

Radium Springs is on the outskirts of Albany, Georgia. The site looks like ancient ruins. “Ancient” may miss the mark, but “ruins” doesn’t necessarily. Though the site was known to Native Americans, and visited by them for its perceived medicinal benefits, long before a resort was built there. There is a placard showing the high water mark from a serious flood that occurred in 1994 when the remnants of a tropical storm stalled in the area.

 

 

In nature, sand and clay come in a surprising range of bright and vivid colors, and many of these colors appear in the Providence Canyons of southwest Georgia. While chalky white in places, more often the soil looks like orange or raspberry sherbet.

It’s an easy walk around the lip of the canyon, though only the road-adjacent side offers good views. The other sides have barriers to keep one from getting too close to the edge. This is laudable because there might only be a couple of feet of clay under one’s feet, and, beyond that lip, nothing but a three or four-story drop.

One can also walk into the floor of the canyon. I highly recommend canyons 4&5 as among the most picturesque and easily navigable.

These canyons, which sort of look like a scale model of the Grand Canyon, were formed by poor farming practices in the 1800s, and it is fascinating to see what mother nature can do to a plow furrow given less than a couple hundred years of time.

Tallinn, capital of Estonia, is medieval and cyber-age. It’s Scandinavian and Russian – both and neither. Here exorbitant wealth mingles with punishing poverty. Decaying Soviet factories breakup views of tinted-glass office buildings. So I figured it wouldn’t hurt to throw up a bunch of photos that really observe no commonality or theme other than being Tallinn.

The photo above is of a monument to Marie Under. Under has been said to be one of the greatest European poets. I have enjoyed the few of her poems that I have been able to read. Of course, one can never judge poetry in translation. Poetry, by its fundamental nature, cannot be translated with the same fidelity as is prose (which is not itself perfect.)

…The streets are breathing; the houses have wings on their shoulders – everything is festive:

It’s called the Fisherman’s Dream, and it’s one of many pieces of three-dimensional art adorning the park that lay just outside the walls and moats of the Old City.

The inscription, in four languages, reads:

Church to the Blessed Virgin Threetlands. She is protector of the innocent who have been wrongly convicted, deceived, and sinned against. You can describe your problem and put a letter in the box. The priest will pray for the settlement of your question.

This sums it up nicely. It sums up Tallinn, and it sums up our visit.

No snow at the moment, but our nation’s capitol is definitely in the swing of the holiday season. There’s Christmas music playing in the streets, let alone blaring in the stores, and all the usual adornments are out.

Budapest is a Christmasy town. In Vörösmarty Square you can hear a black-bearded blacksmith pounding out a rhythm on anvil and orange steaming steel as you smell the warm bread and greasy grilled meat. The weary sun never ventures too high and casts the world in amber glow and long slanting shadows when the grim ceiling of clouds allow. When the sun retires a thousand plain and perfect lights shine along the Váci boulevard as bedraggled shoppers move in fits and bursts of inexplicable energy.

Gellért Hill is located on the Buda side of Budapest between the foot of the Erzsébet Bridge and that of the Szabadság Bridge. The hill, topped by a citadel, rises over Danube and offers spectacular views both north and south.