Stamp of the Day: Vasco da Gama, India, and the Cape of Good Hope
I am sitting at home on Martin Luther King Day, a holiday here in the US (but some, like PP, have to work anyway), and working on flowers from Colombia, putting firewood in the furnace, and helping the kids to study. Midterm exams are only 3 days away for them. AREA is learning about the great explorers, like Vasco da Gama, the first one that rounded the Cape of Good Hope in South Africa and reached India. Dias had already passed the Cape but turned back.
This is a map of how he sailed and this how it might have looked like. I would not want to sail on those ships. But seeing new land must have been exciting.
PS. EH - Spring is coming nearer, I saw the first starlings ('starar') of the year in our tree outside the kitchen. But now it snows again...
2 comments:
Spring is nowhere near me, I´m afraid. The snowstorm is coming tomorrow they say...hmm, but I have a bird feeding house in my Syringa-tree (syren). So i´m feeding the local birds to help them trough the winter, the other day a koltrast (blackbird?) came to my front door and asked for apples. ! :)
It went away a few meters when I got the apples and came back and sat there eating while I sweeped the front steps.
Syringa is lilac in English, for those of you that don't know Latin or Swedish. Part of our lilac fell down and broke in the ice storm. It is sad, it was such a nice plant. But I hope it will come back.
I love blackbirds, but we don't have that species here. We have other thrushes (trastar), like robins (which is not the European robin). At our birdfeeder now we have squirrels and tufted titmouse, mainly. I need to get more bird seed, the birds are tired of old bread and apples.
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