Church bells at Novgorod

Thanks for sticking around while I was on a blogging recession recently. Since its been over 14 months since I returned from Russia, these pictures are quite dated but I still intend to complete the Russia series and post interesting stories from my travels.

Stored outside the Cathedral of St. Sophia, built in 1052 AD in the little town of Veliky Novgorod (वेलीकी नोव्गोरोद), were a number of old Church bells. The massiveness of these bells struck with me and on touching them I felt a strange kind of buzzing, empty feeling.

All these bells have been decommissioned now, small and efficient electronic bells often taking over their jobs (I don’t know about this particular place), but perhaps one could imagine the glorious old days of Church’s rule when these bells occupied immense importance.

In my previous post, I wrote about the orchestra of bells at Orthodox Churches. Here in Novgorod, we were lucky to catch a little musical show at the bell tower. It seems an important part of tourist infrastructure, as you can buy tickets in advance and climb up the tower to see the orchestra in action.

I thought that these bells were huge, but they are dwarfs compared to the Tsar Bell in Moscow’s Kremlin, which is arguably world’s biggest bell.

Bell ringing in Eastern Orthodox Church (including Russian Orthodox) is complex, with particular bells being rung in particular ways to signify different parts of the services. Russian bells are usually fixed, and are tolled by pulling on a rope that is attached to the clapper so that it will strike the side of the bell. Very interesting to observe that.

I was in the automotive capital Detroit, Michigan, USA last weekend. There was Valentine’s day too, and one might wonder what I was doing in Detroit, a city infamous for intolerance, crime, racial segregation and an overall decay since the inevitable collapse of the automobile sector. I don’t know the extent to which any of that is true.

Well I had a lovely time, spending the gloomy snowy weekend eating, drinking, sleeping and getting pampered. Here are some not-so-glamorous pictures of the city.

There are rows of broken, unkept, dilapidated houses, just outside downtown

Cathedral of the Most Blessed Sacrament. (Note the emphasis on ‘Most’, since there are “Cathedral of the Blessed Sacrament” in other cities of USA)

Downtown Detroit

Taking down a building right in the heart of the city. There are several abandoned buildings around

Streets in the business district were empty although it was the lunch time

Fist of a champion

The municipal building

I haven’t been posting for a long time for a number of reasons but I assure you that I’m well and back in action. I received several emails and comments asking me if everything was okay – yes it is! Thanks for checking in! I’ll be checking out my reader soon.

I spent few days of the 2009 Christmas holidays at Chad’s dad’s place, in his charming house near Timmins, a town about 800km north of Toronto. He keeps reindeer and rabbits (among other animals) and it was fun to spend time watching them.

That’s what the house is called

Bunnies of all colours… always on the look for food

Reindeer

The herd.. Just chillin’ (literally!)

The rabbits love stealing reindeer feed and are skilled at escaping their horns. The reindeer are fed twice a day and they will quickly gather around the dinner table as soon as a bell is rung.

Reindeer pen

More wild rabbits basking in the sun at -15ºC. They run around outside the house all day long unless a predator is lurking in the bushes.

The deer seem to love sleeping out in the open

Yo

Everytime I see animals I feel weird. Animals just exist – grazing and mating. Why don’t they want to read books or eat Thai food?

Compared to 2008, this year was slow on travel. Since I was in school and pretty much broke from all the trips last year, there was very little I did.

India

I started the new year in India and flew back to Canada shortly after that.

Canada

Camping in a farm outside a little town in southern Ontario

I went on several biking and trekking day trips with Chad to places around Toronto, but our biggest one was a 4-day biking trip to Southern Ontario. Equipped with camping gear, we bicycled across small towns and through the woods for a total of 170km.

Fall colors at Frontenac Provincial park

There were few camping trips too, the biggest one being to Frontenac park amidst beautiful fall colors and an unexpected cold wave (-5ºC) on the Thanksgiving weekend .

Humber bridge, Toronto

Toronto Tuesday, with sights an flavors of Toronto will continue in the next year.

Abandoned mineshaft on a snowy Christmas day in Timmins

Right now I am in Timmins, a little city in north-eastern Ontario where I am spending the holidays with Chad’s family. I did several things for the first time in my life, such as seeing reindeer, eating reindeer meat and bear meat, drinking home brewed wine, getting my first Christmas present, going skidooing and snowshoeing and many other things… etc.

USA

Rainbow Bridge at Niagara Falls

I made three trips across the border, two of them were to nearby places: Niagara Falls and Buffalo.

NYC – near the courthouse and department of Justice

Before my Fall semester began, I went on a 8 day trip to New York city and Chicago. I walked till my feet fell and did many touristy things like walking with a I ‘heart’ NY shirt and taking cheezy pictures at the cloud gate in millennium park.

Plans for 2010

Simply stated, it all depends on how much money I have…hehehee. I’d like to see more of Canada and if possible make one trip overseas. Lets see where it goes!

This travel blog is one year old and I am excited about the next year.

I personally rely upon blogs for my source of information, and I often find them more useful than newspapers because blog posts are richly connected with links to other relevant information. With so much quality content freely available, its no wonder that the print media is increasingly sourcing, or stealing, stories, pictures and research from blogs.

In 2008, I was twice a victim of plagiarism, a different Indian newspaper on both occasions. I don’t know how many other incidents occurred after that because I no longer read Indian newspapers avidly. Mridula, one of my blogger friends from India who writes Travel Tales from India was a victim recently. India’s leading national newspaper, The Hindustan Times, stole her picture, cropped the copyright out and published it. Now that they have been caught, they are pleading innocence.

Where do these journalists get their images from? Google images and Flickr are the favorite sites of internet picture pirates. Google Images is an excellent example of how a wonderful tool can be abused. Google images indexes all images it comes across, and makes them publically searchable. Unfortunately this makes people lazy and temps them to steal images.

Here are some tricks I use to reduce the chances of my pictures getting stolen.

1. Removing an image from Google’s index

[From Google Webmaster Help]
I simply ask Google robots NOT to index any image from my website. To do that, you need to edit your robots.txt file.
To remove all the images on your site from Google Images index, add the following directive to your robots.txt file:

User-agent: Googlebot-Image
Disallow: / 

While this is a guaranteed method, it can be used only by bloggers who control their own servers. For the rest, here’s a workaround that might work.

2. Discouraging Image Alternative Text (ALT tag)

When you add an image to your post through blogger or wordpress, you will be asked to input “Alternate Text” for your image. That’s what I am talking about. First, lets understand why the ALT text is used.

In HTML, the ALT attribute (called Alternative Text) of your IMG (image) tag is used to record alternate text for your picture. This feature is very useful for accessibility based browsing (e.g. for vision-impaired users) or in case your image becomes unavailable. ALT tag was historically used for search engine optimization (SEO) but now thankfully Google ranks it quite low. So the significance of ALT tag has drastically reduced.

So I say, get rid of the habit of filling the ALT tag with useful keywords. For example, in the picture above, I’d have ALT tagged it “Machu Picchu, Inca ruins, Peru”, but now I simply say “image” or “[machu]123(pic chu)” or something like that. That way, you still follow XHTML 1.1 strict compliance, display a somewhat meaningful text in case your image is missing, AND prevent the search engines from indexing your picture in a useful way.

3. Change image file name

Simply call your pictures “4334.jpg” instead of “machu-picchu.jpg”. Remember, the lesser the keywords the search engine sees, the less likely it is going to index your picture prominently.

4. Use a big copyright symbol

Very effective, but aesthetically unpleasant. I refrain from doing that.

None of the above methods have any real impact on the overall page ranking of your website. So go ahead, try them.

Being the last week of school, I am swamped with work to do. I didn’t get out much this week…

Viewed from my apartment


Oh no!

Can you see the illuminated CN Tower? Find the sign that says “Village of Parkdale”

We are expecting a blizzard tonight, there are warnings all over the place. However, I don’t think it will be significant at all.

Torontonians
What are people busy doing?

Celebrating… at Dundas Square

Working… in the China town

Walking… on a busy road

Rowing… in the peaceful lake

Things to do in Moscow’s artist’s block

Arbat Street is a 1.25km pedestrian mall and is one of Moscow’s most famous streets. It’s an art market, with instant portrait painters, craftsmen, jugglers, buskers and little cafés offering nice treats.

Arbat Street, with poet Pushkin’s house

Arbat St and little picture exhibits

There were a number of performers who were handing out discount coupons for circuses and music shows and other gigs.

Wall of peace

This wall at the east end of the street consists of individually painted tiles on the theme of international friendship. A section of it is covered in spent chewing gum, forming an interesting but sticky mosaic.

Café. I can’t quite read cursive Cyrillic alphabet

шоколадный торт и кофе с молоком

Sports Bar (near Arbatskaya)

At night, I went to a sports bar to have some local beer and watch a football (called soccer in USA) game between Moscow and St. Petersburg (I think). I was meeting someone I found on couchsurfing, and she told me it was important to get out of the place before the match ended. The place was getting louder as the match was drawing to an end. I did encounter drunk football fans in the subway later on.

So as you can see, I had fun on Arbat street and it definitely deserves more attention that I gave it!

Lets go Raptors

Toronto Raptors is a professional basketball team based in the city and part of the NBA (National Basketball Association) based in USA. The team was established quite recently, in 1995.

I am not someone who follows basketball so I don’t know their current standings and status. However, a friend had extra tickets for this game and I gladly joined him.

Air Canada Centre is a huge stadium and was quite full. I loved watching the entertainment segments during breaks – so much better than watching commercials on TV!

Seven most prominent buildings of Moscow

The “Seven Sisters” is the English name given to a group of Moscow skyscrapers designed in the Stalinist style. Moskvich (Muscovites) call them Stalinskie Vysotki (Сталинские высотки / स्तालीन्स्कीए वीसोक्ती), meaning “Stalin’s tall buildings”. They were built from 1947 to 1953, in an elaborate combination of Russian Baroque and Gothic styles, and the technology used in building American skyscrapers.

The buildings had more symbolic than utilitarian value and gave a taste of Soviet architectural and technological progress.

Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Russia

The building is on the first ring highway of Moscow and close to the Old Arbat artist street.

The building was obviously bigger than what my camera could take!

The seven sisters are as follows:
Moscow State University (MGU), Sparrow Hills
Hotel Ukraina
Ministry of Foreign Affairs
Hilton Moscow Leningradskaya Hotel
Kotelnicheskaya Embankment Building
Kudrinskaya Square Building
Red Gates Administrative Building

Lomonosov Moscow State University seen from my flight. (Also seen is the circular Olympic stadium)