The City of Petra was hidden in the mountains of Jordan for thousands of years when a young Swiss explorer Johan Ludwig Burckhardt rediscovered it in 1812.Temples, tombs, monasteries and other buildings are all carved out of the sandstone cliffs, which also gives it the name the “rose red city.” UNESCO has described it as “one of the most precious cultural properties of man’s cultural heritage.”
You reach the ancient city of Petra by going through a narrow corridor in a mountain of rocks.This corridor is about a mile long and just wide enough to fit a small truck – although most people go through on horseback or on foot. When you emerge, you enter a little hidden valley, which is mountain-locked. Continue reading ‘Exploring The Ancient Jordan’s City of Petra’
Among many LEGO Video Games sets you’ll find on Flickr, Probably This Set a masterpiece.Skinny Coder has recreated some classic video games with the colorful plastic building blocks including NES Castlevania, Mortal Kombat (Arcade), Shadow of the Colossus (PS2) and 8 more classic video games.
Meaning ‘suspended in air’ the name Meteora includes the entire rock community of 24 monasteries. There were no steps and the main access to the monasteries was by means of a net that was hitched over a hook and hoisted up by rope and a hand cranked windlass to winch towers overhanging the chasm. Monks descended in the nets or on retractable wooden ladders up to 40m long to the fertile valleys below to grow grapes, corn and potatoes.
Studies suggest that the pinnacles are formed about 60 million years ago during the Tertiary Period . Weathering and earthquakes then shaped them into their present shape.
Although it is unknown when Metéora was established, as early as the 11th century AD hermit monks were believed to be living among the caves and cutouts in the rocks. Continue reading ‘Amazing Clifftop Monasteries of Meteora, Greece’
The seven deadly sins, also known as the capital vices or cardinal sins, have long been a source of inspiration for writers and artists, from morality tales of the Middle Ages to modern manga series and video games.
Mantises, Mantes, Mantids or whatever term you prefer to use for their plural form, are among the most fascinating and at the same time scariest insects in the world.The 2,300 species of praying mantises comprise an order of insects called Mantodea.The word ‘mantis’ is Greek, and means prophet or fortune teller. Praying prophet? Very appropriate. Mantids so often look like they know something we don’t.
Israeli artist, Sigalit Landau, has a sumptuous wall-spanning projection, on view at museum of modern art (MoMA) in New York through July 28,in which she emerges from a coil of watermelons, buoyant in the Dead Sea.
This is how Landau explains her artwork:
A cord of two hundred and fifty meters penetrates five hundred water melons forming a six meter spiral raft in the saturated salt waters of the Dead Sea. The spiral turns as a whirlpool reversed from its normal direction. I am floating locked inside the spiral layers between the center and the periphery of the sweet raft.
I am reaching out against the direction of the turning raft towards a small area in the spiral where the fruit is wounded, red and exposed like myself to the sting of the salt. The salt solution of the dead sea enables everything to float on its illusive surface. The spiral gradually becomes a thin green line abandoning the viewer.
