Simserhof is the site of a well-preserved bunker, one of many built along the border as part of the Maginot Line, to protect France from a German invasion after World War I. Everything was considered: defensibility, survivability and livability. It was a feat of engineering that almost broke the bank of France in the interwar period.
In World War II, of course, the German invasion detoured through Belgium, rendering the Maginot Line ineffective. Setting that aside, Simserhof is an engineering marvel to behold.
Start the tour by taking an electric tram through the bowels of the complex, where museum curators have created quite the spectacle with films, lights, and effects to show what it was like to live in the bunker during its short fight at the beginning of World War II. After this, a tour guide will take you to the upper part of the bunker, built at the top of a hill, where you will be shown all the measures built to keep invaders out: moats, drawbridges, and hidden gun ports. Spend the next few hours touring the long hallways, galleries, functional rooms, and all the systems to keep the facility livable.
The preservation of history is on full display at Simserhof with the work and funds put into the facility over the years clearly evident. The staff is knowledgeable and friendly and is more than happy to oblige any questions about the facility and its history.
Tucked along the sun-bleached road that slices through the dunes of Corralejo, Villa Tabaiba bursts from the landscape like a mirage dreamt up by Salvador Dalí. From the outside, it’s already a spectacle: a whitewashed wall animated by colorful mosaics and half-submerged sculptures — a mermaid here, a mannequin there — beckoning the curious to look closer.
This kaleidoscopic home is the life’s canvas of Carlos Calderón Yruegas, a Sevillian-born architect turned multi-hyphenate artist. After decades of minimalist design work, Yruegas gave himself permission to break all his own rules. What began as “a joke,” he says, became an intricate, decades-long art project where every corner, window, and statue carries a hidden message — or at least a splash of whimsy. He calls it his personal playground; visitors might call it an open-air museum wrapped in a tropical daydream.
The villa’s garden teems with living greenery and fixed figures — many fashioned from mannequins Yruegas rescued and reimagined. A hand emerges from the earth to ring a bell, towers sprout with glass circles, and tiled creatures whisper from behind fronds. It's both a sanctuary and a surrealist stage set. And though it’s often quiet, the air hums with stories, metaphors, and perhaps a bit of mischief.
As of 2025, Yruegas — well into his seventies — still tends to his living, breathing artwork. Villa Tabaiba isn’t just a home. It’s an island within an island, where logic takes a holiday and art runs gloriously wild.
Brick Lane is a street that lies in the Tower Hamlets neighborhood of east London. It is situated between Bethnal Green, to the east and Spitalfields Market to the west. It is a lively district due to its active and prosperous Bangladeshi community. This is reflected in the numerous curry houses and fabric outlets that dot the area. Earlier generations have left their own mark on the area, including French Huguenots and Ashkenazi Jews.
In the mid-1990s, a community organization named Bethnal Green City Challenge decided to fund a project that would illustrate the rich and vibrant history of the area. They contacted a local sculptor, Keith Bowler, to come up with various designs that reflected specific sites throughout the neighborhood. Over the course of several months, 25 were made.
These include a pattern of matchsticks to commemorate the matchgirls’ strike of 1888, an early labor action. Another depicts a ring of apple and pears that symbolize the fruit and vegetable market that once resided in the area. Some have been removed in the decades since they were installed, but over a dozen of the roundels are still in place as of 2025.
Billy Wynt is an unusually named cylindrical stone structure standing on a hilltop outside the village of Llantrisant in south Wales. The relatively austere single-story building has only a door on the outside and a staircase on the inside. However, Billy Wynt’s name is not the most unusual aspect of this stubby building. The history of the building is so unclear that no one really knows when exactly it was constructed or what its original purpose was.
Traditional histories of the area assert that Billy Wynt was the base of a windmill that was partly demolished during a Welsh uprising in 1280, but no clear records indicate that a windmill stood at the site. Other historians have inferred that, because of the building’s views over the surrounding area, it could have been an auxiliary tower for the nearby castle in Llantrisant. Alternativeely, it may have been a simple storage building. The structure first appears in a map of the area in 1729, but at that point in time, it was labelled as “an old tower,” providing no clear indications as to what the building was originally used for.
In 1889, Billy Wynt was acquired by the newly formed Llantrisant Town Trust, and it was rebuilt as a folly in 1890. The trust still owns and maintains the building today, and the people of Llantrisant recognize Billy Wynt as a quirky part of their local heritage.
Far from Mallorca’s bustling beaches and resort towns, nestled among quiet agricultural fields near Ses Salines, lies an unexpected and striking sight: Cactus Toni Moreno. This expansive cactus nursery stretches across open land, its neatly arranged rows of towering succulents and desert plants visible even from the roadside.
The landscape appears almost surreal — like a sculptural desert garden unfolding in the middle of the Mediterranean countryside. With thousands of cacti in countless shapes and sizes, the site blurs the line between agricultural function and botanical artistry.
It’s a place where nature, design, and climate come together — offering a quiet yet unforgettable contrast to the island’s typical scenery.
A gem of Romanesque architecture, Worms Cathedral — the Dom St. Peter — lords over one of the most important cities in Christian history.
In December 1048, Bishop Bruno von Egisheim-Dagsburg received his papal nomination in Worms, and traveled to Rome to become Pope Leo IX. He became a major player in the Great Schism of 1054, which divided the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Churches.
In 1122, the Concordat of Worms was signed by Pope Callixtus II and Holy Roman Emperor Henry V, establishing that bishops would receive their spiritual authority from the church while remaining loyal to local monarchs.
The Diet of Worms of 1521 — where Emperor Charles V called on Martin Luther to recant his teachings — took place in the Bishops’ Court Palace, which stood next to the cathedral until its destruction in 1689. When Luther refused to recant, Charles declared him a heretic and forbade his writings.
The cathedral, which measures 110 meters by 27 meters (about 360 feet by 90 feet) was mostly finished in 1181, though additional parts have been added or renovated since. It was damaged in the Thirty Years’ War and the French Revolution, and has undergone several restorations. The cathedral was set on fire, though not destroyed, by the Allied bombing raids that leveled much of Worms on February 21 and March 18, 1945.
Visitors can step into “Luther’s Big Shoes,” a bronze monument in the Cathedral courtyard, which was placed by the local Rotary Club in 2017. A more substantial Luther Memorial — featuring the man, fellow reformers, and personified cities that accepted the Reformation — stands one block to the northeast.
Inside, the Baroque high altar was designed by the renowned 18th-century architect Balthasar Neumann. Medieval stone carvings of famous Biblical scenes line the walls along the nave. In the cathedral crypt, visitors will find the resting places of five generations of Salian dukes.
A new high-speed line (NBS) between Hamburg and Hanover has received the approval of the government, and will go up for a Bundestag vote shortly. The line has been proposed and planned in various forms since the 1990s, the older Y-Trasse plan including a branch to Bremen in a Y formation, but the current project omits Bremen. The idea of building this line is good and long overdue, but unfortunately everything about it, including the cost, the desired speed, and the main public concerns, betray incompetence, of the kind that gave up on building any infrastructure and is entirely reactive, much like in the United States.
The route, in some of the flattest land in Germany, is a largely straight new high-speed rail line. Going north from Hanover to Hamburg, it departs somewhat south of Celle, and rejoins the line just outside Hamburg’s city limits in Meckelfeld. The route appears to be 107 km of new mainline route, not including other connections adding a few kilometers, chiefly from Celle to the north. An interactive map can be found here; the map below is static, from Wikipedia, and the selected route is the pink one.
And despite the very high cost, the standards are rather low. The top speed is intended to be 250 km/h, not 300 km/h. The travel time savings is only 20 minutes: trip times are to be reduced from 79 minutes today to 59 minutes. Using a top speed of 250 km/h, the current capabilities of ICE 3/Velaro trains, and the existing top speeds of the approaches to Hamburg and Hanover, I’ve found that the nonstop trip time should be 46 minutes, which means the planned timetable padding is 28%. Timetable padding in Germany is so extensive that trains today could do Hamburg-Hanover in 63 minutes.
As a result, the project isn’t really sold as a Hamburg-Hanover high-speed line. Instead, the presentation above speaks of great trip time benefits to the intermediate towns with local stops, Soltau (population: 22,000) and Bergen (population: 17,000). More importantly, it talks about capacity, as the Hamburg-Hanover line is one of the busiest in Germany.
As a capacity reliever, a high-speed line is a sound decision, but then why is it scheduled with such lax timetabling? It’s not about fitting into a Takt with hourly trip times, first of all because if the top speed were 300 km/h and the padding were the 7% of Switzerland, the Netherlands, and Sweden then the trip time would be 45 minutes, and second of all because Hamburg is at the extremity of the country and therefore it’s not meaningfully an intercity knot that must be reached on the hour.
Worse, the line is built with the possibility of freight service. Normal service is designed to be passenger-only, but in case of disruptions on the classical line, the line is designed to be freight-ready. This is stupid: it’s much cheaper to invest in reliability than to build a dual-use high-speed passenger and freight line, and the one country in the world with both a solid high-speed rail network and high freight rail usage, China, doesn’t do this. (Italy builds its high-speed lines with freight-friendly standards and has high construction costs, even though its construction costs in general, e.g. for metro lines or electrification, are rather low.)
Chattanooga, Tennessee, circa 1908. "Hotel Patten, Market and 11th Streets." Completed in 1908 and still standing. 8x10 inch glass negative, Detroit Publishing Company. View full size.
Up by four o’clock, and at my multiplicacion-table hard, which is all the trouble I meet withal in my arithmetique. So made me ready and to the office, where all the morning busy, and Sir W. Pen came to my office to take his leave of me, and desiring a turn in the garden, did commit the care of his building to me, and offered all his services to me in all matters of mine. I did, God forgive me! promise him all my service and love, though the rogue knows he deserves none from me, nor do I intend to show him any; but as he dissembles with me, so must I with him. Dined at home, and so to the office again, my wife with me, and while I was for an hour making a hole behind my seat in my closet to look into the office, she was talking to me about her going to Brampton, which I would willingly have her to do but for the cost of it, and to stay here will be very inconvenient because of the dirt that I must have when my house is pulled down.
Then to my business till night, then Mr. Cooper and I to our business, and then came Mr. Mills, the minister, to see me, which he hath but rarely done to me, though every day almost to others of us; but he is a cunning fellow, and knows where the good victuals is, and the good drink, at Sir W. Batten’s. However, I used him civilly, though I love him as I do the rest of his coat. So to supper and to bed.
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