Tuesday, August 26, 2008

La Tomatina, Buñol

Tomorrow, on 27th of August, a Spanish town Buñol will gather for the yearly Tomatina festival.
Like on any festival, guests from all around the world will enjoy live music, food, drinks, and fireworks. But at about 11 am several trucks will bring tons of tomatoes to Plaza del Pueblo, the center of the town. Everyone in the streets will run towards the trucks and tomatoes to fight in a tomato battle. During the fight, most of bars and cafes are closed, and people wear minimum of clothes.

In 2008, as La Tomatina official website says, 40,000 people will participate in the battle where 120,000 kilograms of tomatoes will be launched and destroyed. Six trucks will be carrying them from the town of Castellón Xilxes. The trucks will distribute the tomatoes over Paseo de San Luis, Calle del Cid, the Piazza del Popolo, and Avenida del País Valencià. You can find these streets in Google Maps.

There are only few rules of the battle. They are automatically translated from Spanish, so may not be too accurate :)

If you come to La Tomatina, respects the rules.
This year's Tomatina is celebrated on August 27, 2008.
La Tomatina begins at 11 am, there is a rocket that announces the start of the battle, an hour, another rocket indicating that the battle is over.
The tomato, which is mature, must be crushed by hand before launching it.
You should not enter bottles or any object that might cause accidents.
You should not either break or launching shirts.
You must be careful to the passage of trucks.
In the second shooting of housing should be left to launch tomatoes.
These small rules of civility and coexistence are necessary for the feast takes place as every year, ie without any kind of problems.




View in Google Maps

Sunday, August 10, 2008

Tskhinvali

There will never be this town of Tskhinvali, capital of self-declared South Ossetia.


View in Google Maps

Note that Google removed all roads and towns from Georgia in Google Maps - now it's just one big blank country.

Wednesday, August 6, 2008

New Google Imagery For Beijing Olympics 2008

New Google Earth imagery provides access to the latest shots of Beijing Olympics stadiums, sports centers and other buildings of the Olympics 2008.
New images cover Beijing, Tianjin, Hong-Kong, Shanghai, Quingdao, and Shenyang. Some of the images were made just on July 19th, like the image of the Olympic Sports Center Stadium below.



View in Google Maps

It is worth to mention that the 3D Building layer already contains some 3D models like the Beijing National Stadium below.

Friday, August 1, 2008

Total Solar Eclipse

No words can describe this

Wednesday, June 18, 2008

Biggest Optical Telescope

The biggest and most powerful optical telescope is located in Arizona on the top of Graham mountain near Safford, Arizona. The 600-ton $120 million Large Binocular Telescope has two 8.4 meter mirrors equivalent to single telescope with a main mirror of 11.8 meters.



Large Binocular Telescope in Wikipedia

Find in Google Maps

Biggest Swimming Pool

This swimming pool in Algarrobo, Chile is about 1 kilometer in length and contains 250 000 tons of sea water. Fernando Fischmann, owner of the San Alfonso del Mar resort where this pool was built, now offers anyone to beat his own record. His company Crystal Lagoons can build a similar lagoon anywhere on Earth for just about $350 000 per hectare.



View in Google Maps

Thursday, May 1, 2008

Yurtas in Mongolia-2. Gobi

Mongolian deserts and steppes are the most sparsely populated places on Earth. Wikipedia lists countries by population density and Mongolia yields only to Western Sahara, Falkland Islands and Greenland.

That's why meeting a human being in Mongolia can make you real happy. Even in Gobi desert, there's plenty of people living in yurtas and ranching cattle. I'm not sure what they all eat in the desert but hopefully there are some snacks.



This place in Google Maps

This family has a pretty large herd and you can see a cattle-pen. All such yurtas settlements (there are more than a dozen of them in this area and you can recognize them by dark spots in Google Earth that are actually sheep's dung as they say in Google Earth forum) are interconnected with roads - indeed, that's just gravel.

If you look at this region, you can see a town called Tugrug at South-West. Tugrug is Mongolian national currency and it also happens to be a town's name. There are several yurtas nearby the town and even in the town, next to stone buildings. This fact proves that many people are so adjusted to rural and nomadic lifestyle that they won't leave their yurtas even in cities.

Town of Tugrug, Mongolia (in Google Maps):