Travel Tips

After traveling three-quarters of the way around the globe, Portuguese navigator Fernão de Magalhães (Ferdinand Magellan) was killed during a tribal skirmish on Mactan Island in the Philippines.
Magellan, a Portuguese noble, fought for his country and participated in a number of key battles. In 1514 and 1516 he asked Portugal’s King Manuel for an increase in his pension which the king refused. So Magellan went to Spain in 1517 to offer his services to King Charles I, later Holy Roman Emperor Charles V.
In 1494, Portugal and Spain, at the prompting of Pope Alexander VI, settled disputes over newly discovered lands in America and elsewhere by dividing the world into two spheres of influence -the so called Treaty of Tordesillas. A line of demarcation was agreed to in the Atlantic Ocean; all new discoveries west of the line were to be Spanish, and all to the east Portuguese. Thus, South and Central America became dominated by the Spanish, with the exception of Brazil, which was discovered by the Portuguese explorer Pedro Álvares Cabral in April 22, 1500 and was somewhat east of the demarcation line. Other Portuguese discoveries in the early 16th century, such as the Moluccas Islands -the Spice Islands of Indonesia- made the Spanish jealous.
To King Charles, Magellan proposed sailing west, finding a strait through the Americas, and then continuing west to the Moluccas, which would prove that the Spice Islands lay west of the demarcation line and thus in the Spanish sphere. Magellan knew that the world was round but underestimated its size, thinking that the Moluccas must be situated just west of the American continent, not on the other side of a great uncharted ocean. The king accepted the plan, and on September 20, 1519, Magellan set sail from Spain in command of five ships and 270 men. Magellan sailed to West Africa and then to Brazil, where he searched the South American coast for a strait that would take him to the Pacific.
On October 21 and after several unexpected events, he finally discovered the Strait of Magellan - the only route between Atlantic and Pacific Oceans before Panama Canal. It took 38 days to navigate the treacherous strait, and when ocean was sighted at the other end Magellan wept with joy. He was the first European explorer to reach the Pacific Ocean from the Atlantic. His fleet accomplished the westward crossing of the ocean in 99 days, crossing waters so strangely calm that the ocean was named “Pacific”, from the Latin word pacificus (tranquil). By the end, the men were out of food and chewed the leather parts of their gear to keep themselves alive. On March 6, 1521, the expedition landed at the island of Guam and ten days later, they reached the Philippines (only about 400 miles from the Spice Islands).
After Magellan's death, the survivors, in two ships, sailed on to the Moluccas and loaded the hulls with spice. One ship attempted, unsuccessfully, to return across the Pacific. The other ship, the Victoria, continued west under the command of the Basque navigator Juan Sebastian de Elcano. The vessel sailed across the Indian Ocean, and arrived at Seville on September 9, 1522, becoming the first ship to circumnavigate the globe. This after round the Cape of Good Hope, which was first rounded by Portuguese navigator Bartolomeu Dias in 1488 and renowned in 1497-98 when Vasco da Gama was successful in establishing a sea route from Europe to India.

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May Day began as a Spring festival long ago. People gathered together on the first day of May to celebrate the coming of Summer. There are a lot of different customs that have been a part of May Day festivities.
Some people would gather flowers and put them by their doors and windows to keep out troublesome fairies. Some people would put out their old hearth fires and gather with the people in their village to start a new fire to take home. Cutting down a tree and putting up a Maypole in the middle of a village is another popular custom. Ribbons are attached to the tree and are woven together by dancers. One more popular custom is filling May Baskets with flowers and other goodies to give to friends and loved ones. Many of the old customs are part of this celebration.
The ancient Celts and Saxons celebrated May 1st as Beltane or the day of fire. Bel was the Celtic god of the sun. The Saxons began their May day celebrations on the eve of May, April 30. It was an evening of games and feasting celebrating the end of winter and the return of the sun and fertility of the soil.
This is still one of the big festivities in British Isles and Scandinavia, namely in Sweden where I lived for a couple of years. Tradition is still preserved -it all starts with picturesque bonfires in Walpurgis Eve, eating, drinking and singing...

Celebrate
À Saúde, Skål, Cheers, Salud, À votre santé, Cin cin, Pro, Kampai, Gan bei, Prost, Na zdrowie, Stin ijiasas, Zivio, Serefe, Noroc, Sanitas bona

Some events this day... some related to traveling, some not...

1527 - German troops began sacking Rome, destroying libraries, capturing the Pope, and killing thousands. The Renaissance ended with the Sack of Rome by the armies of the Holy Roman emperor Charles V, in May 1527. In eight days, his Spanish troops and German mercenaries killed around 4,000 Romans and looted works of art and literature. Even the Pope, Clement VII, was imprisoned. Though the Renaissance was effectively ended, Rome bounced back and by 1600, it was once again a prosperous city.
By that reason, this is a holiday in Vatican City: swearing-in of new recruits to Swiss Guards.

1937 - The hydrogen-filled German dirigible Hindenburg crashed in New Jersey, killing 36 of its passengers. It was the largest dirigible ever built and the pride of Nazi Germany. It was supposed to be a great development in traveling but the risk was under evaluated...

1994 - A rail tunnel under the English Channel officially opened, connecting Britain and the European mainland for the first time since the Ice Age. This was really a development in the connections and mobility of people across the channel.

Today’s Birthday (for every taste...)
1758 - Maximilian Robespierre, French revolutionary.
1856 - Sigmund Freud, Viennese founder of psychoanalysis.
1856 - Robert E. Peary, American explorer, discoverer of the North Pole, explorer of Greenland.
1895 - Rudolph Valentino, silent-film star.
1915 - Orson Welles, American actor, director, producer, writer.

Other
2006 - and we... on the way to Marbella VT Meeting... ;-)

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On May 17, 1970, Norwegian ethnologist Thor Heyerdahl and a multinational crew set out from Morocco across the Atlantic Ocean in Ra II, a papyrus sailing craft modeled after ancient Egyptian sailing vessels. Heyerdahl was attempting to prove his theory that Mediterranean civilizations sailed to America in ancient times and exchanged cultures with the people of Central and South America. The Ra II crossed the 4,000 miles of ocean to Barbados in 57 days.
Heyerdahl, born in Larvik, Norway, in 1914, originally studied zoology and geography at the University of Oslo. In 1936, he traveled with his wife to the Marquesas Islands to study the flora and fauna of the remote Pacific archipelago. He became fascinated with the question of how Polynesia was populated. The prevailing opinion then (and today) was that ancient seafaring people of Southeast Asia populated Polynesia. However, because winds and currents in the Pacific generally run from east to west, and because South American plants such as the sweet potato have been found in Polynesia, Heyerdahl conjectured that some Polynesians might have originated in South America.
To explore this theory, he built a copy of a prehistoric South American raft out of balsa logs from Ecuador. Christened Kon-Tiki, after the Inca god, Heyerdahl and a small crew left Callao, Peru, in April 1947, traversed some 5,000 miles of ocean, and arrived in Polynesia after 101 days. Heyerdahl related the story of the epic voyage in the book Kon-Tiki (1950) and in a documentary film of the same name, which won the 1952 Oscar for Best Documentary.
Heyerdahl later became interested in the possibility of cultural contact between early peoples of Africa and Central and South America. Certain cultural similarities, such as the shared importance of pyramid building in ancient Egyptian and Mexican civilizations, perhaps suggested a link. To test the feasibility of ancient transatlantic travel, Heyerdahl built a 45-foot-long copy of an ancient Egyptian papyrus vessel in 1969, with the aid of traditional boatbuilders from Lake Chad in Central Africa. Constructed at the foot of the Pyramids and named after the sun god Ra, it was later transported to Safi in Morocco, from where it set sail for the Caribbean on May 24, 1969. Defects in design and other problems caused it to founder in July, 600 miles short of its goal. It had sailed 3,000 miles.
Undaunted, Heyerdahl constructed a second papyrus craft, the Ra II, with the aid of Aymaro Indian boatbuilders from Lake Titicaca in Bolivia. With a multinational crew of seven, the Ra II set sale from Safi on May 17, 1970. After a voyage of 57 days and 4,000 miles, the ship arrived in Barbados. The story of this voyage is recorded in the book The Ra Expeditions (1971) and in a documentary film.
In 1977, Heyerdahl led the Tigris expedition, in which he navigated a craft made of reeds down the Tigris River in Iraq to the Persian Gulf, across the Arabian Sea to Pakistan, and finally to the Red Sea. The goal of the expedition was to establish the possibility that there was contact between the great cultures of Mesopotamia, the Indus Valley, and Egypt across the sea. Heyerdahl later led research expeditions to Easter Island and an archeological site of Týcume in northern Peru. For the most part, Heyerdahl's ideas have not been accepted by mainstream anthropologists.

Nevertheless, a great traveller

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May 19

1535 - French explorer Jacques Cartier set sail for North America
1588 - The Spanish Armada set sail from Lisbon on a mission to secure control of the English Channel and transport a Spanish invasion army to Britain from the Netherlands
1900 - The world's longest railroad tunnel, the Simplon Tunnel linking Switzerland to Italy through the Alps, opened
1935 - T.E. Lawrence, known to the world as Lawrence of Arabia, dies

May 20

1498 - Portuguese explorer Vasco de Gama became the first European to reach India via either the Atlantic Ocean or Mediterranean Sea when he arrived at Calicut, India
1506 - Christopher Columbus, the first European to explore the Americas since the Vikings in the 10th century dies in Valladolid, Spain
1874 - Levi Strauss began marketing blue jeans with copper rivets
1927 - Charles Lindbergh took off from Long Island, New York, aboard the Spirit of St. Louis, on his historic solo flight to Paris, France
1932 - Amelia Earhart took off from Newfoundland for Ireland to become the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean
1939 - Regular transatlantic air service began as a Pan American Airways plane, the Yankee Clipper, took off from Port Washington, New York, bound for Europe
2002 - East Timor became an independent nation

May 24

1543 - Nicolaus Copernicus published proof of a sun-centered planetary system
1830 - The first passenger railroad in the U.S. began service between Baltimore and Elliott's Mills, Maryland
1844 - Samuel F.B. Morse formally opened America's first telegraph line from Washington to Baltimore
1883 - The Brooklyn Bridge, linking Brooklyn and Manhattan, was opened
1976 - Britain and France started transatlantic Concorde service to Washington

May 25

1768 - James Cook sailed on his first voyage of discovery, on which he explored the Society Islands and charted the coasts of New Zealand and West Australia

May 27

1703 - After winning access to the Baltic Sea through his victories in the Great Northern War, Czar Peter I founded the city of St. Petersburg as the new Russian capital
1931 - In a balloon launched from Germany, Paul Kipfer and %L[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auguste_Piccard ]Auguste Piccard%L* became the first to reach the stratosphere, rising almost 10 miles during their flight
1937 - The Golden Gate Bridge, connecting San Francisco and Marin County, California, was opened

May 29

1953 - Edmund Hillary of New Zealand and Tensing Norgay of Nepal became the first to reach the summit of Mount Everest
1999 - Space shuttle Discovery completed the first-ever docking with the International Space Station

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All photos (and drawings) by a2lopes except otherwise stated.

The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen is one of the fundamental documents of the French Revolution, defining a set of individual rights and collective rights of all of the estates as one. Influenced by the doctrine of natural rights, these rights are universal: they are supposed to be valid in all times and places, pertaining to the human nature itself. The Declaration was adopted August 26, 1789, by the National Constituent Assembly, as the first step toward writing a constitution. It sets forth fundamental rights not only of French citizens but acknowledges these rights to all men without exception, making it a precursor to international human rights instruments
First Article
Men are born and remain free and equal in rights. Social distinctions can be founded only on the common utility.

The declaration has influenced and inspired rights-based liberal democracy throughout the world, namelly, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in December 10, 1948.
Give peace a chance ... according to UD of Human Rights
Preamble
Whereas it is essential to promote the development of friendly relations between nations
Article 1
All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood ...

let's put it in practice...

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
still on August 24th

79 - Mount Vesuvius erupted, burying the Roman cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum in volcanic ash and killing an estimated 20,000.
410 - The Visigoths (German "barbarians"), led by Alaric, sacked Rome.
1542 - In South America, Gonzalo Pizarro returned to the mouth of the Amazon River after having sailed as far as the Andes Mountains.
1891 - Thomas Edison filed a patent for the motion picture camera.
1932 - Amelia Earhart became the first woman to fly non-stop across the United States, traveling from Los Angeles to Newark, New Jersey, in just over 19 hours.
1949 - The North Atlantic Treaty went into effect.

Talking about vulcanic eruptions here is another famous one (almost the same day): in August 26th, 1883, on the Indonesian island of Rakata, the volcano Krakatoa (real name, Krakatau) erupted with one of the biggest volcanic explosions ever in human history -it was heard as far as 3540 km away, in Australia and in total over 7.5 per cent of the earth's surface. Tsunamis caused by the great blast killed 36000 people in Java and Sumatra.
"Modern" communications helped the world know about Krakatoa in a short time and helped changed the world view of the day. Whereas news of Abraham Lincoln's 1865 assassination did not reach London for 12 days, Europeans and Americans knew about the explosion of Krakatoa in four hours. The difference: in the years between 1865 and 1883 there had been three great developments: the invention of Morse Code; the global spread of the telegraph, and the establishment of Reuters news agency. No longer could the world be seen as vast and unknowable.
What we should say about today's "global village" and our online virtual world ?....

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... A SMILE IS UNIVERSAL

World Smile Day (first friday of October)

A round happy cartoon-like image, representation of a smiling human face, often a yellow button with two dots representing eyes and a half circle representing the mouth, a symbol of peace and joy. The smiley face is one of the few symbols which so fully represent this spirit of friendship, happiness and peace.

Harvey Ball, co-owner of an advertising and public relations firm in Worcester, Massachusetts designed the Smiley Face in 1964 to help ease the acrimonious aftermath following the merger of two insurance companies.

In the early 60s State Mutual Life Assurance of Worcester, MA initiated a merger that had bad effects on company morale. In 1964, State Mutual cooked up a "friendship campaign" to get employees to smile whenever they answered the phone, paid a claim, or typed a report. The company turned to Harvey Ball for graphic support. Ball reported that he spent about 10 minutes designing the smiley face, and he was paid $45 for it. This was the only profit that Ball ever made from his most famous creation. Neither Ball nor the insurance company trademarked or copyrighted the smiley face.
In the early 1970s, the smiley face image became a symbol for an entire generation, emerging as one of the most well-known images in the world (the graphic was popularized by a pair of brothers, Murray and Bernard Spain, who seized upon it in a campaign to sell novelty items).

Nowadays the smiley has become an essential of Internet culture, with animated GIF and other image representations, as well as the ubiquitous text-based emoticon, :-)
The two original text smileys, :-) to indicate a joke and :-( to mark things that are not a joke were invented on September 19, 1982 by Scott E. Fahlman, a research professor at Carnegie Mellon University's Department of Computer Science.

The first friday of October it is World Smile Day

Never in the history of mankind or art has any single piece of art gotten such widespread favor, pleasure, enjoyment, and nothing has ever been so simply done and so easily understood in art., Harvey Ball :-)

Do an act of kindness. Help one person smile.

smile, sorrir, sourire, lächeln, glimlachen, rideti, sorridere, uśmiechać się, le, gülücük, smaids, úsměv, osmijeh, naeratus, hymy, mosoly, šypsena , בת-צחוק , улыбаться, усмивка, χαμόγελο, .... :-)

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