Zwickau, Germany

Zwickau in Germany, former seat of the government of the southwestern region of the Free State of Saxony, belongs to an industrial and economical core region. Nowadays it is the capital city of the district of Zwickau. The city is situated in a valley at the foot of the Erzgebirge Mountains and is also part of the so-called Saxon triangle metropolitan area, an economic network that includes Leipzig-Halle, Dresden. The city has slightly fewer than 100,000 inhabitants but has a regional catchments area of over 480,000 people. The city can be easily reached by car via the nearby Autobahns A4 and A72. The city has a main railway station (Zwickau-Hbf) and is also reachable via a public airfield, which takes light aircraft.
Zwickau, known as the city of Automobiles and Robert Schumann (the famous composer), is the cradle of the Saxon automotive industry with an over one hundred year old tradition. The city has a long history of automotive development and automobile industry along with Auto Union. Well known beyond Germany's borders are trademarks such as Horch, Audi, Trabant and Volkswagen. The "Westsächsische Hochschule Zwickau" - University of Applied Sciences - has therefore always been an important centre for automotive development.
The valley of the 166 km long Zwickauer Mulde River stretches from the Vogtland to the famous Colditz Castle at the other extreme. The Silver Road, Saxony's longest scenic road, connects Dresden with Zwickau. The German ADAC City Guide recently wrote, "The town of Zwickau has transformed itself over the years from a traditional mining town into an elegant Art-Nouveau town, which is well worth discovering.“ Sven sent this pretty card to me

Jyväskylä

Jyväskylä is a city and municipality in Central Finland in the western part of the Finnish Lakeland. It is the largest city in central Finland and on the Finnish Lakeland. Jyväskylä is located on the northern coast of Lake Päijänne, 147 kilometres (91 mi) northeast of Tampere and 270 kilometres (170 mi) north of Helsinki. The hilly and forested terrain in Jyväskylä is surrounded by hundreds of lakes. The summers in Jyväskylä are warm and winters cold and snowy.
Elias Lönnrot, the compiler of the Finnish national epic Kalevala (details are available in earlier posts on this blog), gave the city a nickname "Athens of Finland". This nickname is used to describe the major role of Jyväskylä as an education centre and the first place in the world to provide education in Finnish. The works of the most famous Finnish architect Alvar Aalto can be seen throughout the city. The city hosts Neste Oil Rally Finland, which is part of the World Rally Championship. It is also home of the annual Jyväskylä Arts Festival.
As of 31 January 2012, Jyväskylä had a population of 131,997. The city has been one of the most rapidly growing cities in Finland since World War II. The Jyväskylä sub-region includes Jyväskylä, Hankasalmi, Laukaa, Muurame, Petäjävesi, Toivakka and Uurainen. My friend Auli sent me this card.

Oscar Kleineh

My friend Merja sent me this nice painting of a Finnish yawl made by Oskar Kleineh in 1890. Oskar Conrad Kleineh (18 September 1846, Helsinki, Finland – November 16, 1919) was a Finnish painter. He attended the school of the Finnish Art Association in 1863-1864 and studied drawing, then in Düsseldorf, Karlsruhe, and in St. Petersburg, Russia as well as between the years 1866 and 1878 in Paris 1881-1885. Kleineh painted, inter alia, of the marine and coastal scenery of the coast of the Gulf of Finland, and in the high season, France, Denmark, Norway and the Mediterranean countries, as well as sailing images and city views from across Europe, such as the 1870 's, in Northern France. Kleineh was unmarried. No wonder he had so much time to paint so well ;-))

The River Mersey is a river in North West England. It is around 70 miles (113 km) long, stretching from Stockport, Greater Manchester, and ending at Liverpool Bay, Merseyside. For centuries, it formed part of the ancient county divide between Lancashire and Cheshire.
The river is now internationally famous thanks to the music of the 1960s known as Mersey beat and its strong association with Liverpool, which produced songs such as "Ferry Across The Mersey".
Over 30 acres of land within the heart of the Liverpool dock area. The site is a paradise to bird watchers and is an important area for seabirds and waders. Consisting of freshwater and salt lagoons it also provides a valuable source of food for the ducks that over-winter in Liverpool. For those interested in viewing the wildlife, three viewing hides are available for use, in one of the freshwater lagoons. Ross sent me this nice card.

Shipwreck (1854) by Ivan Aivazovsky

Throughout his lifetime, Ivan Aivazovsky contributed over 6,000 paintings to the art world, ranging from his early landscapes of the Crimean countryside to the seascapes and coastal scenes for which he is most famous. Aivazovsky was especially effective at developing the play of light in his paintings, sometimes applying layers of color to create a transparent quality, a technique for which they are highly admired.

Although he produced many portraits and landscapes, over half of all of Aivazovsky’s paintings are realistic depictions of coastal scenes and seascapes. He is most remembered for his beautifully melodramatic renditions of the seascapes of which he painted the most. Many of his later works depict the painful heartbreak of soldiers at battle or lost at sea, with a soft celestial body taunting of hope from behind the clouds. His artistic technique centers on his ability to render the realistic shimmer of the water against the light of the subject in the painting, be it the full moon, the sunrise, or battleships in flames. Many of his paintings also illustrate his adeptness at filling the sky with light, be it the diffuse light of a full moon through fog, or the orange glow of the sun gleaming through the clouds.

This painting is a testament to the artist’s skill of portraying light and dark. With nothing more than a pencil and gouache on paper, this scene illustrates the strong winds and crash of the waves with violent intensity. This intensity makes you fear for the safety of the standing observers, as if the waves threaten to dash the ship against the cliff, upon which they are standing, and throw them into the sea. Three seagulls fly over the ship, creating the slight sense that all hope is not lost, and seeming as if is not impossible to hope that the ship may not yet be lost.
This lovely card was sent to me by Rita from Kaliningrad in Russia.

The Hallig

The North Frisian Hallig Islands are indeed unique in the world. The Halligen (singular Hallig) are ten small German islands without protective dikes in the North Frisian Islands on Schleswig-Holstein's Wadden Sea-North Sea coast in the district of Nordfriesland. The name comes from a Celtic word hal, meaning "salt", a reference to the low-lying land in the region which is often flooded over with saltwater by the tides. A greater number of Halligen existed in the Middle Ages than in the 21st century. The very existence of the Halligen is a result of frequent floods and poor coastal protection. The floods were much more common in the Middle Ages and coastal protection was much poorer. A look at the maps on this page will demonstrate that this part of the North Sea coast is very much at the sea's mercy.
The Halligen have areas ranging from 7 to 956 ha, and are often former parts of the mainland, separated therefrom by storm tide erosion. Some are also parts of once much bigger islands sundered by the same forces. Sometimes, owing to sediment deposition, islands have actually grown together to form larger ones. Langeneß (or Langeness) includes a former island by that same name, and two others that were called Nordmarsch and Butwehl. Dwellings and commercial buildings are built upon metre-high, man-made hills, called Warften in German, to guard against storm tides. Some Halligen also have overflow dikes. Not very many people live on the Halligen. Their livelihoods are mainly based on tourism, coastal protection, and agriculture. This last activity mainly involves raising cattle in the fertile, often flooded, salt meadows.
Sabine sent me this card which has a painting of a Hallig.

Swiss Quality Emblem

This "maximum card" of Switzerland, showing the commemorative stamp of 40 cents denomination commemorating 50 years of "Swiss Quality Emblem (showing traditional "Armbrust" (Crossbow), with  which William Tell had killed "Gestler", who according to legend put an apple on the head of the son of William Tell and ordered the father (William Tell) to shoot the

apple, you certainly know the legend! The Swiss people believe in the legend, but there is not a single person called "Tell" who lived in the past or is living in Switzerland today!). The emblem (Trademark) Armbrust was introduced for the first time in 1931.This Armbrust Signet ensures the buyers that the product which they have purchased is genuine, and is made in Switzerland. In 1981 this signet celebrated its 50^th anniversary. Thank you Maria for this interesting maxicard.