Day and night

One of the small cafes with a view at the ocean, a good spot to spend the late and still hot afternoons at Lanzarote.Well, real Italians don't drink cappucino late in the day, that's what I heard......but who cares :-)
It is important to drink regularly in such hot environment :-)
Amazing night sky over the island, there's almost no dust cloud. Sort of hypnotic to look at these millions of stars...
The island racer had to sleep outside, between fields of cacti and in a cooling breeze from the Atlantic ocean, bringing the low sounds of the waves hitting the coast rocks in the distance.

Flying through the air

Somewhere in Spain, on the way to Madrid, in an altitude where it's always sunny.
Did someone look up? I'll never know...

Jardin de cactus

In the rather calm Northern part of Lanzarote people used to earn a living with the production of carmin red dye by farming cochineal from cacti. Nowadays this dye is made articially, the large cati plantations are still there, though.

As one of his latest artworks the famous local artist Cesar Manrique designed and constructed a cactus garden in a volcanic cave.
The garden itself is rather small but lovely, with somy tiny lakes.
For whoever is into cacti, this not very cuddly kind of plants, here are a couple of close-ups of the inhabitants of this garden..

Airport series: Madrid

Second or third post about this large airport, I lost track :-)
Despite the horror stories about lost luggage or people missing their flight on Madrid airport, including myself, I like it. Particularly the new Terminal 4 is so colorful, airy and simply nice. Don't know who was the architect, but this is my favorite airport design so far.



Entertainment for the bored stopover passenger is provided: for aircraft enthusiasts there is a good view of the apron...

...for the technically interested there are strange machines :-) .....and for the ladies lots of fashion shops...but one has to watch the clock!!!

Airport series: Arrecife, Lanzarote

Besides the usual and generic airport building the airport of Arrecife featers a runway along the coast. Along the beach, actually, maybe 100 metres from the holiday people on their beach towels..
Inside the same interior as everywhere else, with the main purpose to make people uncomfortable and wanting to leave...

Tour Eiffel...from the outside

Naturally, there is something in Paris you can't miss: the Eiffel tower. Well, and nobody else is going to leave without visiting it, probably the most crowded place in a city which is crowded anyway.However, if you're not directly below the tower the crowd relaxes a bit, lots of people just enjoy the good weather and the fountains...

L'Opera

More pics from the Paris trip: Galeries Lafayette was the most beautiful department store I've been to so far. So this is the big brother of the store right next to my home in Berlin...in Paris everything is far more luxurious and old while the Berlin branch is more modern architecture, with strong references to the one in Paris, though.
Not far away and even more magnificent is the Opera de Paris, the Palais Garnier. Unfortunately the pictures are quite dark and noisy, the wide angle lens is not exactly powerful at low light. However, I hope the pictures deliver the impressions at least.
Everything was so perfect and atmospheric as if Louis XIV. himself with his royal suite is just about the come around the corner to see a performance...





Last but not least a view from a balcony at the front of the building over the Place de l'Opera..

Tuileries gardens

Right next to the Louvre is a parc area, the Tuileries gardens. Actually it wasn't as nice as expected, a bit too formal and too crowded.
Starting with the rather small Arc de Triomphe du Carrousel there are a couple of basins, a couple of fountains, a couple of statues and a couple of trees and bushes..hope my description isn't too disrespectful :-)


The most impressive view is away from the Louvre, where the Place de la Concorde with its Obelisk, the Champs Elysee, the Arc de Triomphe and the Grande Arch are in line...

Louvre

My personal highlight of Paris was the Louvre, the worlds largest museum. The palace itself is beautiful and surprisingly large, even the glass entry is famous and happens to be the roof of a shopping mall in the basement. Well, it has to serve 30.000 visitors each day(if I remember right).



In fact it's impossible to see everything within one visit, even one month would probably be too short. So I limited my visits to the painters, especially the French.
The floor with the Mona Lisa was the hardest, since many travel parties tried to finish the Louvre within just one hour, so all they did was to find Mona Lisa and take a picture of it, then back to the bus.
I even saw a guy with a videocamera walking along the Gallery filming the paintings for later study at home...
It's hard to describe the paintings, I liked many of them because they somehow touched me. Delacroix and Ingres were pretty impressive, like La grande Odalisque or this one.