Category Archives: Travel

New National Monument in the USA

On December 28, 2016 President Obama declared the Bears Ears National Monument in Utah. There’s no website for it yet on NPS.gov, but some info is available at Wikipedia.

Boston Globe Big Picture: Bear Ears Buttes in Utah.

“Known as Bear Ears for the pair of purple buttes at the region’s center, the newly proclaimed 1.9 million-acre National Mounument will preserve a photographer’s checklist of high-desert drama: spires, bridges, canyons. Yet the region’s true distinction is not its topography, but its cultural significance; perhaps no place in America is as rich with ancient Native American sites as Bear Ears. In October 2015, a coalition of five Indian nations, including the Hopi, Ute, and Navajo, formally proposed the monument, attempting to preserve the parcel’s 100,000 archeological sites from ongoing looting and grave robbing. Last June, in a letter to President Obama, more than 700 archeologists endorsed the proposal, saying that looting of the area’s many ancient kivas and dwellings was continuing “at an alarming pace“ and calling Bear Ears “America’s most significant unprotected cultural landscape.“ “

(No typos added by me; the Boston Globe calls it Bear Ears instead of Bears Ears.)

Weißer Schwarzwald

We had a friend from the UK staying with us this week and went on a day trip to the Black Forest with her on Thursday. We had a little bit of snow at home (very low, very near to the Rhine river), but there was more than enough in the Black Forest! We stopped at the Mummelsee (elevation 1028m) and climbed the highest mountain in the Northern Black Forest, the Hornisgrinde (elevation 1163m). We experienced a few short snow showers, but mostly the weather looked like this:

(Click photos to enlarge.)

Bayerische Auswanderer in den USA

Auf Bayern 3 lief über die Weihnachtstage eine dreiteilige Serie von “Gernstl unterwegs”, in der er in drei Metropolen der USA bayerische Auswanderer besucht hat. Man kann sie in der Mediathek anschauen:

Gernstl unterwegs in Los Angeles. 25.12.2016, 18:45 Uhr, BR Fernsehen, 43 Min.

Gernstl unterwegs in San Francisco. 26.12.2016, 18:45 Uhr, BR Fernsehen, 44 Min.

Gernstl unterwegs in New York. 27.12.2016, 18:45 Uhr, BR Fernsehen, 43 Min.

You’ve probably never heard of the language they deemed the hardest of them all

The Economist (on Medium): We went in search of the world’s hardest language. “English is pretty simple. Learning to speak Ubykh or !Xóõ presents more of a challenge.”

“With all that in mind, which is the hardest language? On balance The Economist would go for Tuyuca, of the eastern Amazon. It has a sound system with simple consonants and a few nasal vowels, so is not as hard to speak as Ubykh or !Xóõ. […]

Most fascinating is a feature that would make any journalist tremble. Tuyuca requires verb-endings on statements to show how the speaker knows something. Diga ape-wi means that “the boy played soccer (I know because I saw him)“ , while diga ape-hiyi means “the boy played soccer (I assume)“ . English can provide such information, but for Tuyuca that is an obligatory ending on the verb. Evidential languages force speakers to think hard about how they learned what they say they know.”

Link via MetaFilter.