Views from above ...

Continuing from a bird's perspective,  this is a collection of "plane window shots". 
Occupying a window seat on a plane with a camera in the lap, ideally in front of the wings meaning business class, waiting for the plane to make a turn before it goes through the cloud layer, makes one feel like an idiotic "All-of-Europe-in-a-Day" tourist next to the business guys hacking away on their notebooks. I guess, I feel stupid, but they are envious...  But it is the easiest way to get aerial pictures short of renting a high-resolution camera drone. 

Camera settings should be on a fast shutter-speed for obvious reasons and focus on manual - otherwise the camera will inevitably focus on some dirt or scratches on the window.  Then, sometimes, if you are lucky with the weather, and if you have good light, if the pilot flies a steep curve in your favour soon after take-off or just before landing, and if you are quick to spot the image - many if's - , pictures can turn out quite pleasing. 

So enjoy this Quick-and-Easy-Grand-Tour-Around-the-World from above! 

 Sicily from above

patches of olive groves in Sicily 

Africa, the Okavango Delta, Botswana:

in the Okavango Delta,  Botswana

 Boma in Kenya, Masai Mara

Tansania:

Australia:

 in the Outback, Northern Territories

Salt Lake, Lake Amadeus

Kata Tjuta mountains with Uluru in the back

Uluru

The Great Barrier Reef:

UAE, Abu Dhabi, Sheikh Zayed Mosque:

Dubai:

 dotty neighbours

The Palm, Dubai

fishing fleet, Dubai

The Himalaya and Mount Everest 

Singapore

Hongkong

Storm clouds over Java, Indonesia

Iguacu Waterfalls, Brazil 

London

Frankfurt, with the Taunus hills in the background

somewhere over Thuringia approaching Berlin

River Havel with the lakes of Brandenburg around Berlin and the TV tower in the back

Berlin

...and who is the photographer? 

Pearl Fishing in Abu Dhabi

It is hot in the Rhein-Main-area in Germany now. At night the thermometer stays above 20 °C, during the day it goes up to 34° C.  On the nightly weather reports this classifies for "tropical nights ". As they are very rare here, why not take a splash and put in a refreshing post about pearl diving in Abu Dhabi!

Two years ago, when on a conference in Abu Dhabi, I took part in a pearl fishing trip. Pearl fishing in the Arabian waters goes back a long time. The earliest settlements of people on the Arabian coast around the areas of Dubai and Abu Dhabi were pearl fishers. In fact, the very poor early Arab economies on the Persian Gulf  were mainly reliant on pearl fishing since before 2000 BC and up until the 1920s, when artificial pearls were invented, and long before the oil industry started. 

We went out on a reconstructed motorized dhow in the shallow waters of the harbour.

When we had cruised a while and were out of the harbour, we expected our guides to take of their dishdashs and keffiyes and jump into the water. But they laughed and went aft to fetch a couple of cooled boxes filled with sea water full of pearl oysters! 

Every one of us chose an oyster and the guides showed us, how to open them with a special knife.

Pearls are imbedded in the oyster's flesh. They can be compared to a cyst, that builds around an injury in the mantle tissue, when the lining of the oyster is pierced or hurt by parasites or some other intrusion. Layers upon layers of calcium carbonate and some organic substances are added from the mollusk's mantle to form the more or less round pearl. The pearl's luster comes from the numerous translucent coatings.

 Sometimes, pearls are small and not easy to detect. You have to poke around in the oyster's flesh to feel for the hard substance and extract the pearl. Pearl oysters are not related to the edible oysters; the latter do not produce pearls with luster. 

Abu Dhabi started these tours a couple of years ago as history tours, to show tourists not only the famous shopping malls in the area, but also a bit of the history of the people there and the beginnings of the settlements on the coast of the Arab peninsula. 

"Our" oysters were raised in banks for that purpose.  Some visitors had to try and open several oysters, but in the end all of us "found" a pearl and it felt like christmas ...