This is a stitched vertical panorama taken inside the Blue Mosque in Istanbul.

Click here for the larger version.

The pano sort of communicates the scale of the interior of the mosque, but… like most places we saw in Turkey and had known or read about before we went seeing them these places definitely left you with a loss for words. Ayasofya is the most obvious structure that will leave you feeling literally and figuratively much, much, much smaller. The Blue Mosque, overlooking the Sultanahmet neighborhood where we stayed and a huge visual presence from the rooftop patio of our hotel, was another.

Here’s another panorama made from pictures taken inside the Ayasofya.

This was done with a (relatively) cheap Canon OneShot digital camera, and the images were touched up in Photoshop and stitched using DoubleTake, which I bought over the Internet while in Cappadocia. (And while talking via Skype with my youngest brother while late afternoon call-to-prayers where being sung out in Goreme, in the valley below the inn we were staying.) (Not that I spent any time on the Internet.)

This is another photo from our 2003 trip. On this trip, my Minolta film camera died! Thank goodness I had my little digital point-and-shoot with me. It saved the trip!

Here is the Ha’penny Bridge over the River Liffey, running through the middle of Dublin. A pedestrian bridge, its official name is the Liffey Bridge.

Way, way back in 2003 we visited Dublin for a few days in January. This is the Graduates Memorial Building at Trinity College, which is also the home of the famous Book of Kells.

Found this sad-looking chair on Park, around the corner from the “shop.”

Located on Park Street. The carriage house in back is massive and beautiful. Nice brickwork. I’ll post a picture when I have a nice one to post.

This is an older picture from when we went to Montreal in the summer (of all things! we’ve normally visited in the winter or in the often wet fall), and we biked around the city.

The city’s infrastructure for bicycling and bicyclists is excellent! Bike lanes follow major commuting roads on the city grid, but for safety reasons, and for traffic (bikes are, um, slower than automobiles) the bike lanes are physically separated from that part of the road used by cars. Other urban areas, Portland included, should really follow Montreal’s example!

Velo Quebec has a lot of great information on bicycling in the area.

This picture was taken after we’d biked up from the Auberge de La Fontaine, where we were staying, to Jardin botanique de Montreal. It was hot that day, but not too humid, and the sky and the light were amazing.

Portland plans to fix this bridge in Deering Oaks Park in the Parkside neighborhood downtown. They should!

Deering Oaks Park is a significant city landmark: It was designed by Frederick Law Olmstead, better known for Central Park (NYC) and Franklin Park in Jamaica Plain in Boston.