*** This Week Through Your Eyes 2025.08.16***

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Vikings

Vikings arriving. This boat is copy of Gokstad ship, in 2/3 scale. Built in Poland...

Viking, presumably capitan in this ship.

Long house site. It was one of biggest viking buildings, 83 meters long. Copy can be seen on right edge.

Better view of copy. It has different sections for every need: living rooms, workshops, meeting rooms, storage, space for animals.

Entrance decoration.

Chainmail making. I overheard that it takes about year to make it by hand...

Various weapons. One could try them so I used opportunity to swing sword little bit.

Soup is prepared. This long house had no windows, just openings on roof to let some light in and smoke out. So it was quite bad to live in such conditions, in constant smoke and life expectancy was not long.

Jarl's throne, I guess.

This setup imitates last travel to Valhalla, I guess.

It's bad day for someone.

Dragon in meeting room.

Door ornaments for meeting room.

Morning surprise? I somewhat doubt that it's copy of viking era, most likely modern norwegian humor.

Our guide. Not norwegian but from France, living long time in Norway.

Superb. I love minimalism! Normally, shooting from behind yields worse results, but here I believe it is better.
Where is this escalator?

An Abbey on Lake Como

The "Abbazia Santa Maria di Piona" in opposite the church I showed last week. It sits in a secluded spot at the head of a peninsula. I wanted to photograph the cloisters, which is its most interesting construction. The church and cloisters date from about 1250. The builders of the church played a nice visual trick. The church narrows towards the Apse, to give an exaggerated impression of length. The Cloisters are not rectangular either.

Whilst I was photographing the Cloisters, one of the monks came up to me and explained some of the capitals, and showed me where the builder had inscribed his initials on the last column. Using a tripod was no problem either. I wish I had had more time to explore the gardens and lake view, as like many of these religious buildings, the Monks chose a beautiful place to build their abbey.

The builders initials

From my garden

The garden has lots of interesting plants put in by my predecessor, including these colchicums which popped up this week. Not to be confused with autumn crocus (including saffron), these are deadly poisonous.

The rooks continue their evening exodus from the meadows to the woods behind the house.

Excellent shot. Puts me in mind of some 1970s thriller. There seems to be some kind of ghostly shadows on the lower (right ) part of the walkway?

Interesting set. My daughter and son-in-law are involved in Viking re-enactment here in UK, so these scenes are quite familiar to me! My daughter is quite an expert in Viking food, growing and cooking, and is often the one in charge of the pot when they're doing public events. Meanwhile SIL wields the weapons and oils his chain mail!
That's a HUGE longhouse! I remember some of the modern public buildings in Reykjavik have ornaments on the gables similar to these.

Another beautiful building. I notice the mis-matched columns in the cloister - another example of (post-Roman) recycling perhaps?