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English Vocabulary. Airports

Tokyo at night

The Dolomites, Italy The Italian village of Ranui sits nestled in the Val di Funes below the Geisler Mountains. It is home to several historic churches, inlcuding St. John's, which stands apart in the meadow. The small baroque church was built in the 1700s.

Machu Picchu Experts believe that Machu Picchu was one in a series of royal Inca estates built in the Urubamba Valley. To researchers, the site’s multiple observation points suggest that the Inca worshipped the sun, and its location, surrounded by rivers and mountains, indicates a reverence for nature.

Glacier Bay National Park, Alaska. Nothing can prepare you for the confrontation with six stories of sculptural ice calving into still waters.

Fjord Norway Western Norway, known as Fjord Norway, is home to the world’s largest concentration of the saltwater-filled, glaciated valleys. The region’s six National Tourist Routes offer easy driving access to bouldering, ice climbing, glacier walking, base jumping, caving, and year-round skiing. Fjords are best experienced from water level, so hop a ferry, book a cruise, or rent a kayak for unobstructed views of the surrounding snow-covered peaks, steep mountainsides, and abundant wildlife. The midnight sun in June and July brings near round-the-clock daylight and the most visitors. Days are shorter in May and September, but the lighter tourist traffic makes for easy meandering from Kristiansand to Trondheim along the Fjord Coast Route.

Dominica A lack of white sandy beaches and an overabundance of rainfall keep this mountainous island of tropical rain forests off typical Caribbean vacation itineraries—a plus for adventure seekers.

Namibia Southern Africa’s youngest nation is well known for its vast windswept deserts—the inland Kalahari and the coastal Namib—so it’s no wonder that the country’s first conservation area (established in 1907) is named for the “place of dry water.” Etosha National Park is a wildlife sanctuary in far northern Namibia centered on Etosha Pan. During the June to November dry season, large numbers of elephants, giraffes, black rhinos, lions, and other game are drawn to the park’s natural and manmade watering holes. During the rains, huge numbers of flamingos arrive to feed and breed.

Ancient Ruins, Portugal The ruins of an ancient village submerged by the construction of a hydroelectric dam resurface when lake levels are low. The park's man-made attractions range from medieval castles and pilgrimage sites to modern resorts.

London is looking forward to Olimpics. In Olympic-ready London, a new landmark (City Hall) meets old (Tower Bridge) along the Thames.The last time London hosted the Olympics, in 1948, locals subsisted on rations, there was no budget for new sports venues, and many competitors slept in military huts in Richmond Park. Britain may be entering another age of austerity, but nearly $15 billion has been spent on sprucing up the capital for the 2012 Olympics.

Cocooned Trees, Pakistan An unexpected side effect of the 2010 flooding in parts of Sindh, Pakistan, was that millions of spiders climbed up into the trees to escape the rising flood waters; because of the scale of the flooding and the fact that the water took so long to recede, many trees became cocooned in spiderwebs. People in the area had never seen this phenomenon before, but they also reported that there were fewer mosquitoes than they would have expected, given the amount of standing water that was left. Not being bitten by mosquitoes was one small blessing for people that had lost everything in the floods.

Syzran, Russia

St. Louis, Missouri, USA

Water Bridge, Magdeburg, Germany

Shanghai, China

Schloss Tatenhausen, Germany

Cyprus

The Obersee ("Upper Lake") the larger of the two parts of Lake Constance.