Dutch Fairytales

Efteling is the largest theme park in the Netherlands and one of the oldest theme parks in the world. It's located in the town of Kaatsheuvel, in the municipality of Loon op Zand. Over the years, the park has received over 100 million visitors.

Since its opening in 1952, Efteling has evolved from a nature park with a playground and a Fairy Tale Forest into a full-sized theme park. It now caters to both children and adults with its cultural, romantic and nostalgic themes, in addition to its wide array of amusement rides. It is twice as large as the original Disneyland park in California and predates it by three years.

The park is fantasy-themed and its attractions are based on elements from ancient myths and legends, fairy tales, fables and folklore.

 

Roman Baths

Roman houses had water supplied via lead pipes. However, these pipes were taxed according to their size, so many houses had just a basic supply and could not hope to rival a bath complex. Therefore for personal hygiene, people went to the local baths. However, the local bath complex was also a gathering point and served a very useful community and social function. Here people could relax, keep clean and keep up with the latest news.

Taking a bath was not a simple chore. There was not one bath to use in a large complex such as the one at Bath. A visitor could use a cold bath (the frigidarium), a warm bath (the tepidarium) and a hot bath (the caldarium). A visitor would spend some of his time in each one before leaving. A large complex would also contain an exercise area (the palaestra), a swimming pool and a gymnasium. One of the public baths at Pompeii contains two tepidariums and caldariums along with a plunge pool and a large exercise area.

The building of a bath complex required excellent engineering skills. Baths required a way of heating up water. This was done by using a furnace and the hypocaust system carried the heat around the complex.

In the wood

A home movie is a short amateur film or video typically made just to preserve a visual record of family activities, a vacation or a special event and intended for viewing at home by family and friends. Originally, home movies were made on photographic film in formats that usually limited the movie-maker to about three minutes per roll of costly camera film. The advent of camcorders that could record an hour or two of video on one inexpensive videocassette, followed by digital video cameras that recorded to flash memory, made the creation of home movies easier and much more affordable to the average person.

The technological boundaries between home-movie-making and professional movie-making are becoming increasingly blurred as prosumer equipment often offers features previously only available on professional equipment.

In recent years, clips from home movies have been available to wider audiences through television series such as America's Funniest Home Videos, in Great Britain You've Been Framed! and Internet online video-sharing sites such as YouTube. The popularity of the Internet, and wider availability of high-speed connections has provided new ways of sharing home movies, such as video weblogs (vlogs), and video podcasts.

 

Dutch Capital Amsterdam

According to the Dutch constitution Amsterdam is the capital of the Netherlands, although the parliament and the Dutch government have been situated in The Hague since 1588, along with the Supreme Court and the Council of State.

Only once during its history was Amsterdam both "capital" and seat of government. Between 1808 and 1810, during the Kingdom of Holland, King Louis Napoleon resided in Amsterdam and declared the city capital of his kingdom and seat of government. To accommodate the king, the grand seventeenth-century Town Hall of Amsterdam, prime example of the republican values that were prevalent for so long in the Netherlands, was converted into a Royal Palace.

In 1810 the Netherlands were annexed by the French Empire and King Louis Napoleon was replaced by a French governor, who took up residence in the Royal Palace in Amsterdam. From 1810 to 1813 Amsterdam kept its position of capital city somewhat, as Emperor Napoleon declared the city to be the third city of the Empire (after Paris and Rome) and an imperial residence. In December 1813, after the fall of Napoleon and the accession of Prince William VI of Orange as Sovereign of the Netherlands, The Hague was restored as the seat of government.

Baune in Bourgogne

Speed ramping, or simply "ramping", is a process whereby the capture frame rate of the camera changes over time. For example, if in the course of 10 seconds of capture, the capture frame rate is adjusted from 60 frames per second to 24 frames per second, when played back at the standard movie rate of 24 frames per second, a unique time-manipulation effect is achieved. For example, someone pushing a door open and walking out into the street would appear to start off in slow-motion, but in a few seconds later within the same shot the person would appear to walk in "realtime" (normal speed). The opposite speed-ramping is done in The Matrix when Neo re-enters the Matrix for the first time to see the Oracle. As he comes out of the warehouse "load-point", the camera zooms in to Neo at normal speed but as it gets closer to Neo's face, time seems to slow down, foreshadowing the manipulation of time itself within the Matrix later in the movie.

Madeira music

Folklore music in Madeira is wide spread and mainly uses local musical instraments such as the Machete, rajao, Brinquinho and Cavaquinho, which are used in traditional Folklore dances like the Bailinho da Madeira.

Locals from Madeira emigranting also influenced the creation of new instraments such as in the 1880s, the ukulele is based on two small guitar-like instruments of Madeiran origin, the cavaquinho and the rajao, introduced to the Hawaiian Islands by Portuguese immigrants from Madeira and Cape Verde.

Peter the Great captain

A movie star (also known as a film star and cinema star) is an actor who is famous for their starring, or leading, roles in motion pictures. The term is used for actors who are marketable stars and whose names are used to promote movies, for example in trailers and posters.

Eternal Spring on Madeira

Madeira was re-discovered by Portuguese sailors in the service of Henry the Navigator in 1419, and settled after 1420. The archipelago is considered to be the first territorial discovery of the exploratory period of the Portuguese Age of Discovery.

Today, it is a popular year-round resort, being visited every year by about one million tourists, noted for its Madeira wine, flowers, landscapes and embroidery artisans, as well as for its annual New Year celebrations that feature the largest fireworks show in the world, as officially recognized by the Guinness World Records The main harbour in Funchal is the leading Portuguese port in cruise liner dockings, being an important stopover for commercial and trans-Atlantic passenger cruises between Europe, the Caribbean and North America.

 

Loretta of Prague

The Prague Loreto is a remarkable Baroque historic monument, a place of pilgrimage with captivating history. The expansive decorative frontal façade with a clock tower, from which the Loreto carillon tunes may be heard every hour, shall certainly not go unnoticed by any local or
foreign visitor passing here on his or her way to the Prague Castle. It would, however, be a great pity to enjoy only this picturesque view opening before us from the terrace of the Czernin Palace. Those who descend as far as the Loreto Square and pass through the Loreto gate will be pleasantly surprised by the place of pilgrimage disposition.

Castle district Prague

Panning refers to the horizontal movement or rotation of a film or video camera, or the scanning of a subject horizontally on video.Movie and television cameras pan by turning horizontally on a vertical axis, but the effect may be enhanced by adding other techniques, such as rails to move the whole camera platform. Slow panning is also combined with zooming in or out on a single subject, leaving the subject in the same portion of the frame, to emphasize or de-emphasize the subject respectively.In photography, the panning technique is used to suggest fast motion, and bring out foreground from background. In photographic pictures it is usually noted by a foreground subject in action appearing still (i.e. a runner frozen in mid-stride) while the background is streaked and/or skewed in the apparently opposite direction of the subject's