This is unrelated to piano and probably everyone already knows about this,
but I just discovered Google Street View a few months ago and wish to share, in case
others are curious about the places around the world in which our fellow
pianists live.

Tiny Google cars have been driving along the streets of cities and taking
pictures from all angles by using a multitude of cameras on the rooftops of each
of these cars. The images are being compiled for city after city.
For each city that has been completed, by using your computer arrows and mouse,
you can feel like the one driving the car and see fronts of buildings that,
unless you had the money for the airfare to actually travel to these places
and rent a car yourself, a person would not otherwise see. I am pasting an
example of a city which I think some of our pianists live in or near.
Doubleclick on the link below, then be sure to wait while NOT clicking anything
for a few seconds as just a plain map will initially show.
It will switch by itself from plain map to street view as you wait:

http://maps.google.ca/maps?f=q&source=s ... ,,0,-10.49

yes, that's very cool, Nicole! I've used that to look at my own neighborhood but have not yet gone 'exploring'.

Perhaps all of here could post our addresses so we could see each others homes? (but I'm not going first. )

Just went on a runaround on new york and berlin... though the street view hasn't been compiled for those cities, it was still fun to see through the available satellite images. Very cool stuff!

My city in Canada has not been done yet either. The car drove
around the city last year, but the images have not yet been compiled.

I couldn't help but take a peek at New York too -- first the
Steinway factory, then Carnegie Hall.

In Italy, some of those ornate balconies of the apartment buildings
are exactly how I had imagined them to be. And the street signs in Italian!!!

Last week, I found the exact apartment in Holland that my
grandma grew up in as a little girl way back
in (she'll kill me to read this) the 1920's, well before
moving to Canada after WWII. Was like I was standing right
there on the sidewalk and found myself wondering which window
would have been that of the bedroom she shared with her sister.
Up until that time, it had just been some abstract street that was
extremely difficult to pronounce in some foreign land I would
have no hope of seeing.

Thank-you, Google! What a neat feature.

That looks very familiar, Nicole!

This is Bodoni Square, the building at the end of it is the Turin Conservatory of Music:

http://tinyurl.com/yl6nf2o

who's the guy on the horse statue?

Alfonso La Marmora: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfonso_La_Marmora