According to Conde Nast Traveller’s, the “Next Seven Wonders” of the world feature two concert halls, a museum, two stores, a church and a hotel. They are:
- Tenerife Auditorium, a curving, soaring concert hall on Santa Cruz de Tenerife in the Canary Islands.
- The Kunsthaus contemporary art museum in Graz, Austria, a blue, other-worldly building with light flowing in from 16 nozzles, dubbed the “Friendly Alien” by locals.
- The six-storey Prada tower in Tokyo with a facade made from diamond-shaped grids of glass, some concave, others convex, illuminated from within at night.
- The Jubilee Church in Rome, comprising three concrete shells, soaring skylights and glass exterior walls that fill the church with light.
- The Selfridges store in Birmingham, England, a futuristic pod of a building with 15,000 glittering aluminium disks covering its wavy walls.
- Hotel Unique in Sao Paulo, a boat-shaped semicircle, complete with round nautical-style windows.
- Frank Gehry's Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, known for its acoustics and reflective stainless steel panels.
Is there anywhere you’d like to nominate as the next wonder of the world? The Beetle would like to nominate the Gherkin, also known as the erotic gherkin, or more properly known as the Swiss Re Tower in the City of London. Let the Beetle know and we will compile a list for next month’s e-news.
Friday – the shopping trip
to Mtwara took 5 hours whilst Esther searched all over town for
enough chickens to feed this crowd whilst the goat in question was
tethered outside the Boma bleating for a few hours. Saturday –
kitchen a hive of activity chopping, cutting, marinating and
counting bottles of water, soft drinks, plates, glasses, knives,
forks etc. Last minute panic appeared non-existent – my own
memories of the night before a major event of this importance were
very different!
The official party arrived in a flurry of dust as about 40 cars
swept into the school ground. In the background was the celebratory
sound of drums and chanting, and there were dancers that we could
hear but not see from our corner of the school ground. Because they
were so late we abandoned all attempts at ‘silver service’ and put
a couple of desks in the centre of the room as a buffet and allowed
them to help themselves. We were advised to do this so that we
could not be held responsible for delaying them and influencing how
long they took to eat!
After they had eaten the
District Commissioner invited the whole Boma team into the room,
introduced us and gave a short speech of thanks for providing such
a wonderful lunch. He acknowledged that the Boma is run by Trade
Aid and proceeded to thank Trade Aid for providing this opportunity
for employment and the development of tourism in the Mtwara Region.
The Prime Minister's photographer recorded the event and held a
photo shoot taking a number of pictures on the Trade Aid digital
camera.
After picking up
our rental car at the airport and after some looking on the map we
found Surahammar Manor. A fantastic place in the Mälar Valley with
romantic surroundings! And such a family atmosphere! The owners
themselves welcomed us and we got a high standard room facing the
parkland. All rooms are individually decorated with elegant
antique furniture. And we really enjoyed the welcome dinner with
Swedish schnapps. In the evening we went early to bed, talked about
our wedding and revelled in that pleasant tired feeling in your
body and serenity in your heart that only a great day can
bring!
but not. We
were fishing from the Manor’s park! After some hours we had got
four salmon trout and thought it was enough. In the evening we
prepared them together with the cook. Never has a dinner
tasted so good!
Sciacca is not really on the tourist trail
although it is extremely pleasant and some of the upper town is
really picturesque. There is no really cheap place to stay, though
the Paloma Bianca in Via Figuli was not really dear. The main
appeal of Sciacca for me is the fact that it is an ideal place for
an excellent bus trip to the hill village of Caltabellotta. Sicily
has so much to see [I missed the lovely west coast and most of the
interior, including a terrific Roman villa] that I suspect a lot of
people never make it to any of the smaller towns. Even though I
obviously saw them at the cost of some better known larger places,
Erice in particular, I feel that it is a pity not to sample some
and this is a beaut. From my knowledge of Sicilian hill villages I
would say that somehow they are less picturesque from a distance
but quite as good when inside them as those of the mainland. On the
ride to Caltabellotta it is going up high, rather than heading for
the village, which gives the pleasure and you need to be well up in
the village to see it at its best.
This was only my fifth night out of eleven but already lack of time
was forcing me to adjust my plans. I had meant to go right around
the island anti-clockwise and hopefully to do a trip into the Villa
Imperiale inland. I now realised this was far too much to take on
and I abandoned any notion of reaching the west coast or Segesta, a
spectacular site to the west of the island’s capital, Palermo. This
meant cutting from the south coast to the north at Palermo itself.
I decided on one further southern escapade first – a trip to the
ancient Greek settlement of Selinunte It was necessary to change at
Castelvetrano from the bus bound for Trápani to the local minibus
to Selinunte and the modern village of Marinellla which is little
more than the accommodation for those going to see Selinunte. It
turned out that the wait in this rather ordinary place
[Castelvetrano] was going to be over an hour and a half, and then
when the bus was quarter of an hour late.
The eastern temples were mainly erected in the sixth century BC and
one of them, Temple E as it rather prosaically named, was
reconstructed in the 1950s. Apparently this was and is
controversial but I feel no qualms about it as long as some are
left as they are found. Whatever, it is a magnificent building and
I am sure a full size re-construction must be the best way of
illustrating to children what these temples were like. The
Acropolis area contains another five temples and most of the
ancient living area as well as the remains of the great walls.
These walls, however, are older than the rest of the remains,
having been built after the city had been destroyed once by
Carthage in order to defend the high ground from further
destructions.
The name of St Moritz
has an interesting story attached to it: the story told to me was
that Maurice (later turned into Moritz) was a Christian and came
from Egypt. He served in the Roman army under Julius Caesar
and led a Theban legion for the Roman empire and fought in the
Alps. He refused to obey the order of the Emperor Maximian
and sacrifice some Christians to the Roman gods because he was
himself a Christian. On hearing this, Maximian ordered
Maurice's regiment to be decimated – i.e. every tenth person
killed, and this went on until no-one was left. And so
commanding officer Maurice became a saint. Legend has it that
the rock used by Maurice to lay his head on so that he could be
beheaded is at St Moritz. Like England's St George,
St. Maurice is a patron of knights and soldiers. From the
12th century, due the similarity between his name and Maurus, he
was depicted as a Moor, so he became the black saint.
There are lots
of bridges across the River Reuss, it reminded me a little of
Ljubljana, especially with some of the dragon symbols, some of my
friends said Stockholm. One of the most famous is the Chapel
bridge built in the 14th century as a part of the city's
fortifications and named after St. Peter's Chapel, which is
located nearby. It has paintings on it including some info on the
city's patron saints, St. Leodegar and our friend St.
Maurice. There's also a very splendid 17th century
baroque Jesuit church. I really liked the water spikes that
act like a lock to regulate water levels like in a canal. and
you can see the remains of water mills.
On my final day in
Lucerne, I went to the tourist information centre at the train
station and asked where I could go in the mountains. They
suggested a trip to Rigi Kulm, so, using my rail pass, instead of
paying 79 Swiss Francs, it cost me 29 Swiss Francs. It was a
great adventure! I took a boat across Lake Lucerne, and then
a funicular or cog wheel train up the mountain to the top of Rigi
Kulm, about 1,800m, so not too high, and then the cog wheel train
to the half way point and a cable car down to Weggis back down by
the lake, and the boat again back to Lucerne. It was a
wonderful half day trip, where we could see above the clouds, the
mountain tops poking through, then there was the lake and the green
of the alpine pastures leading up to the mountains. There are
a couple of other mountain type trips you can do like this whilst
based in Lucerne.