Author: Ms. R.

Castel Meur, a small stone cottage in Plougrescant, France, was built in 1861 in a precarious position at the tip of the peninsula. At the time, construction was much less regulated and more riskily undertaken. To protect it from the  frequently violent coastal weather, the house was positioned with its back to the sea and flanked on either side by two giant boulders. The unusually located cottage became known as the House Between Two Rocks. It has been passed down……

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Erected in 1985 to commemorate the Soviet Army’s victory over Nazi Germany in World War II, the Victory Memorial to Soviet Army is one of Riga’s most controversial monuments. The memorial complex dominates the park with its towering 249 foot (76 meters tall) obelisk. It is adorned with five golden stars that symbolize the five years of WWII. On either side of the obelisk are bronze statues of Mother Motherland and a band of three soldiers. The monument can……

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These pegasus sculptures first appeared in Warsaw in August of 2008. Originally, they were set to be a temporary exhibit designed to celebrate the works of the Polish writer Zbigniew Herbert, however, their popularity led to them becoming a permanent fixture of the city’s landscape.  The installation was part of the Norwid-Herbert Mediterranean inspirations exhibition, and the designs were chosen to pay tribute to Herbert’s piece titled “Pegasus.” Each one of the five colorful sculptures stands over 11 feet……

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The city of Motya was a rich Phoenician colony located on a small island off the western coast of Sicily. It was one of the most important towns in the Mediterranean when it was controlled by Carthage during the 5th-century BCE. Motya was famously destroyed by troops from the Greek city-state of Syracuse during the Second Sicilian War in 398 BCE. Not much remained of the city and it was lost to history for centuries, that is until the……

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Coastal Peru, rich in gold, silver and culture, was central to a number of pre-Columbian civilizations. Most of us are familiar with the Incas, but only because they were the dominant empire in the area when the Spanish invaded. The Inca empire itself lasted a little less than a hundred years and was predated, in part, by the more durable Moche (from the years 100 to 700) and Lambayeque (700 to 1375) cultures, which you can experience during this……

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In 1975, an injured broad-winged hawk found its way to Dr. Richard Brown, an ornithologist at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. Along with several biology students, Brown helped the bird back to health and released it into the wild—it would be the first of many rehabilitations. Over the years that followed, more and more birds were brought into the makeshift clinic in the basement of the university’s biology building. In 1980, Brown and Deb Sue Griffin, one……

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In 1609, the flagship of the Virginia Company, Sea Venture, was blown miserably off course by a brutal summer hurricane that wrecked the ship near a tiny island, some 700 miles off the Virginia coast. Fortunately, no lives were lost. Unfortunately, the island offered not a drop of fresh water. Today, that island is among the most densely populated countries on Earth, and it is still without a permanent body of fresh water. Oddly enough, visitors to Bermuda can……

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