Word: palau
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Fifty feet below the surface of Ulong Channel off the coast of Palau, Noah Idechong points excitedly at a large fish lurking under a fan coral. It is a brown marbled grouper, quite rare, but a favorite of Chinese restaurants around Asia. It looks back at him warily, not knowing that Idechong is a main reason the fish and many other marine creatures are still alive on Palau's reefs instead of stir-fried on restaurant plates in Hong Kong...
...Palau is renowned for its marine life. Divers and scientists from around the world fly to this Pacific archipelago 500 miles (800 km) east of the Philippines to view its parrot fish, gobies, damselfish, sharks, turtles, butterfly fish and stately Napoleon wrasses. The Blue Corner on the western reef is rated one of the world's top dive sites for its abundance of big fish. With 1,387 species at last count, Palau has more fish varieties than any other area of Micronesia. But a decade ago, all this was threatened by fishermen. A short boat ride from Ulong takes...
...they create vaults in the tunnel roofs--beautiful, arched Romanesque spaces cut in the creamy pink-veined stone. It is troglodyte architecture: dense, theatrical and intensely moving, infinitely better than anything built above ground. It has the same kind of weird beauty as the basement of Antoni Gaudi's Palau Guell. Here and there the lights pick up sparkles of quartz and waste opal crumbs embedded in the stone. You could imagine it as a set for a Wagner opera; you half expect to see Alberich and his dwarfs...
...that, in a nutshell, may explain the curious lack of joy last Thursday evening in the Palau Sant Jordi. The women's all-around should have been an energizing high for rapt spectators. The field of competitors was so deep with talent that on any given day, the gold medal could have hung deservedly on any one of eight necks from four countries. There was enough grace to satisfy balletomanes and enough difficulty to suggest that the laws of gravity ought to be rewritten. Yet there was little of the heartwarming drama that in Olympics past enabled audiences to lose...
...fell to Domenech, a man obsessed with the history of Catalunya, to % design what may be the most extreme Art Nouveau building in Europe. This is the Palau de la Musica Catalana (1905-08). It was built for the Orfeo Catala, a choral-music society. Pablo Casals and Montserrat Caballe, both Catalans, began their careers here. From the mosaic-sheathed ticket office to the stupendous inverted bell of a stained-glass skylight in the auditorium, from the sculpted Valkyries riding across the proscenium arch to the encrustations of ceramic roses (each the size of a cabbage) on the ceiling...