Posts Tagged: houses

hidden behind the dune

Life in Flavigny-sur-Ozerain

Living in Burgundy

в России
(In Russia)

У Лермонтова был прекрасный дом
(Lermontov sure had a pretty house)

(at least I hope that’s what it says …)

Le Gorge du Tarn II

Syltscapes

Sylt Gateways

DC reporting in, #18: Presidential Mansions (3-5)

Montpelier

Close to the southern end of Shenandoah National Park one can find the plantations / mansions of three former US Presidents – Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello, James Madison’s Montpelier, and James Monroe’s Ash Lawn-Highland. Over the course of the weekend I went to see all three (they are pretty close together), and listened to three different versions of “how one might best try to integrate the fact that they owned slaves with still adoring these guys 100000billion%” – none of them worked all that well, frankly.

Ash Lawn – Highland The yellow part of the house was added on by later owners.	Monticello

What is left of the old Ash Lawn – Highland is tiny, but apparently there was an annex right where the yellow part of the house now is – still, it remains the smallest of the three Presidential homes, by far. Of the three I liked Montpelier best, both because it was far less busy than Monticello and because they had an interesting tour on James Madison and the Constitution, which meandered slowly from empty room to empty room and took you around the Estate in 2.5 hours, rather than the 30 minutes rush-rush affair that the overrun Monticello is.

Although at Monticello, in my opinion, they do the better job of dealing with the question of slavery.

And, that all said, the tour guide at Ash Lawn-Highland probably knew the most about her subject, of the three.

Monticello

DC Reporting in, #14: K&S in DC!

To decrease the backlog a bit here’s another report from DC, right on the heels of yesterday’s one! Also connected to it, so … for, you see, right after FKO and our CN Tower adventures K & S spent a week in DC, visiting museums, going to concerts, and doing tons of other cool stuff (some of which I got to participate in! :-)). I did library things during the daytime, obviously, but we did manage to meet up quite a bit on weekday evenings and on the weekend, and our adventures included good food, cycling down the Mall, a great Mouths of Babes house concert, a cool dinner in Alexandria with S & P (who I got to meet there for the first time!), and a visit to Mount Vernon.

Mouths of Babes
the view from George Washington’s back porch

Universitas Tartuensis II

And here is the daytime view that goes with the last picture. Last day of the EASLCE conference coming up!

Universitas Tartuensis

In the gloaming, gleaming, dreaming…

In Bamberg

The Conference I went to last weekend included an excursion to Bamberg (where it did not rain for a whole hour). I took very few photos there, as we were doing the city tour at quite a brisk walk. But I took some, mostly while we stopped and were informed about historical events, and here is one of them. :-) (And, yes, it’s HDR.)