museum

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The earth saves some human history - Ercolano - Herculaneum

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The previous post in this series is here..

Original plan was to get the car in Naples and use it only to drive to and from airport. We looked at the maps, parking, traffic etc. and realized that in order to save time, it is best to drive to the buried city of Herculaneum first and enter the archeological site as soon as it opens. From there drive to Pompeii and finally drive back to Sorrento to the hotel, change and go to the Kayak starting point.

The morning traffic was surprisingly not bad to Ercolano where the Herculaneum buried village(or town) was. Once there, we missed a turn and ended up in a one way street that was as wide as the car. Pretty much had to fold the mirrors and drive through that lane and make it to a wider lane. Then folks directed us to the right parking spot. It was harrowing.

Nothing compared to what those poor folks felt in 47 AD when they were all buried in ash in a few moments.

Thanks to that event, we get to see what their life was like. The walls, the floors, the amphoras, statutes, frescos, graffiti, everything was just fascinating.

If you ever go to the Amalfi coast do not miss seeing Herculaneum. It may be smaller in size than Pompeii, but the houses and villas are grander. This was the rich peoples area of the time and you can clearly see the difference. By the time we got out of this place the temperatures were already climbing.

Here are some photos.. took me some time to process them in HDR. Knew when I shot them that it will need HDR processing, so did not worry about the light at that time.

some more images..

A long video of this site.. there was so many rooms and I tried capturing 10 second clips of every room or new thing and it all added up to almost 10 minutes!

We got some bottles of water outside the parking lot and made a dash to get to Pompeii after this. We were told to expect long lines everywhere, traffic and a parking nightmare in Pompeii.

So off we went..

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An 83000 square meter palace - Istanbul Day 2 afternoon

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The previous post in this series is here..

Afer a quick stop at our hotel to wash and change clothes we had to make it back to the German water fountain to meet our guide and other group members. The little one who was busy studying for the exam of a lifetime, decided to stay put in the hotel. The three of us made it in time and went for a long long walk with the guide to Topkapi palace.

This was a monstrous palace. There were way too many sections and this is also a very large museum. There were sections that showed life as it was during the Sultanate 500 years ago, to the French style addition in early 1900’s.

This is some diamond on display at the museum! Not going to go into the details here.. but it is 86 Karats and is called the Spoonmaker’s diamond! Has a very interesting story behind it!

Two vertical pano shots and a horizontal pano.. the views were amazing both inside and outside the palace. We would have spent more time here if we were not on such a tight schedule and it was cooler outside.

We covered as much as our legs would let us. There is no AC in the rooms. On a hot afternoon where temperatures were in the 90’s it was tough covering what we did. Not adding too many pictures of the artifacts save for a very special diamond! You can see the entire experience in the video highlight reel..

After this the tour was done. We could disperse when we wanted. So we took an Uber from the main road and went to the Galata Tower. This was one attraction that was on the other side of the bridge. Once we reached the tower, the crowd was overwhelming. The line to go up the tower was more than 500 people. So we decided to skip going up. We saw a nice rooftop restaurant right next to the tower and had some snacks while enjoying the views of the tower and Istanbul.

Once done we had a tough time finding an uber back (this place is extremely crowded). You are better off walking out a few blocks to get the Uber. We made it back in time to the hotel for another change of clothes. We had an hour to take another long ride to go on our last adventure for the day!

That one alone has 250 photos.. so might be a few days before I edit them all and post..

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Vienna - a sampler visit

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The previous post in this series is here…

We left Budapest by train and reached Vienna later that evening after an almost 3 hour journey. We watched a glorious sunset on the way. The first order of business after reaching Vienna was to move our return to a later train. There was no way we were going to do every stop on the bus tour in Vienna and be back to pick up luggage at hotel and come back for a 5PM train the next day to leave Vienna. So we found the ticket place and moved to a 7PM train. We also paid extra to get a first class ticket. We were celebrating our 25th anniversary and after a very short discussion we both agreed that the extra money for losing the earlier ticket and getting new tickets was worth it. We were tired and running around all day. So why not get the extra leg room!

Once that was taken care of, we walked out of the massive train station wondering how long the walk was going to be to the hotel and would we find anything to eat. Just as I was about to pray to Lord Ganesha to give us some food, lo and behold, he was staring at me in the face in what appeared to be a psychedelic dream!

We got some naan, daal and rice to go and walked to our hotel which was 4 blocks away. The roads we walked on were deserted but the hotel MOOONS (with 3 O’s) was very nice. The staff were courteous and helpful. We told them we are going to crash, wake up, check out and leave luggage there and will pick it up later that evening and be off. It was going to be a day in Vienna. The receptionist said “I am not sure you can see what Vienna has to offer in a day!”. We told her “we will at least see all the main spots from the outside and get a feel for the city. If and when we come back, it will be great!”

The room was nice and the breakfast spread was great. We walked a half mile to get an Uber to the first stop of what would be an all day hop on hop off bus tour of Vienna.

We covered every place there was in this bus tour. There was no time to go into the museums. We did get tickets and go into the main palace and we walked with a self guided tour and finished it in under an hour.

There is a Public service warning to tired guys like me. There is two routes on the bus tour map. A Blue Bus tour and a Red bus tour. Here is the kicker. ALL THE BUSES ARE PAINTED RED OUTSIDE. IT ONLY SAYS BLUE OR RED LINE IN A SMALL INSET IN THE FRONT OF THE BUS!!!”. At one point we got off at a stop and when we came back I boarded a red bus (they are all red, duh, except I didn’t know it) and we were on the blue route. This cost us 30 precious minutes on a busy day. The buses also don’t operate like clockwork. There are more red than blue line buses and we waited for 45 minutes at one stop. We complained to the representative at the end, not that it made a difference. We took Ubers at two spots to go from one stop to another just to save time. Hindsight being 20/20, maybe we could have Uber’ed more.

There were lot of pictures from Vienna. It has taken me ages to process and select them.

This is what “happiness” looks like!

here are two galleries in portrait and landscape format.

A few Panos..

In the middle of the tour we realized that one of the stops was the train station! so some good happened out of that bus mixup. We changed our plan. There was an Indian restaurant a 10 minute walk from one of the stops. We would finish seeing everything important, go there for a late lunch (we found they were open.. again Lord Ganesha came to feed us), then get back on the bus and finish the rest of the stops and on the last bus get out at the train station. We rush to the hotel to pick up our suitcases and run back to catch our train!

My wife is brilliant. When she said it out loud, I thought she was crazy but I love it when she goes nuts like this. A million things can go wrong on such a tight plan, but surprisingly nothing did. We did exactly as we planned in-spite of losing 45 minutes at the last stop before lunch. There was some running from the Hotel back to the train station with the carry on baggage, but we had a good 15 minutes to spare before the train showed up!

Then we were off to the next stop.. we got treated to yet another amazing sunset. The ticket upgrade was totally worth it. They served us hot cocoa every hour ! We left Vienna with a smile on our faces!

A video highlight reel of the day in Vienna….

Did everything we wanted to in a day!

One of our biggest takeaways from visiting Vienna was the change a single woman leader brought, not just to this country but to Europe at large by getting girls and women qualified and into the workforce and giving them equality. Maria Theresa did wonders for the world! We have a lot to learn from history!

Copyright © 2012, Sundar Narayanan. All rights reserved.