Manly -- September 23, 2007

Another exciting day in the library today. This time, it was poring over the conference reports of the Australian Teachers' Federation from 1964-1978. Yes, it was exactly as exciting as it sounds. Summary: Give us more money, give us more money, give us more money. Don't give the Catholics money! Give us more money. Weeellll....OK, you can give the Catholics money, as long as you...Give us more money. The worst of it was that the reports were all bound up in an enormous hardcover volume that weighed about ten pounds and was extremely unwieldy, especially toward the ends of the volume. And naturally, I somehow managed to strain my left forearm manipulating it during photocopying. Who knew libraries were such dangerous places?!?

Anyway, it's not so bad that I can't type. But this is just much more pleasant:
That's the view from the ferry to Manly on the way out. On the way back, just before docking up at Circular Quay, I shot this composite of bridge and Opera House:
Manly, by the way, is gorgeous. I hopped right off the ferry and went to the Manly Fish Market, where within fifteen minutes I had a packet of fish and chips and plopped myself down on the beach. It was a beautiful sunny spring day. These last two pics are from Manly; the first is of the main (oceanside) beach, and the second is on the harborside strand near the ferry docks.

'Roos on the Loose!

I've got a bunch of stories and pictures from my (amazing!) trip to Sydney last weekend which I promise I'll post soon. But now, for something completely different...

Yesterday, I went with K. and A. and some of their friends down to Tidbinbilla Nature Reserve just south of Canberra for a barbeque and some hiking. And I finally saw some Australian wildlife! To wit, kangaroos and emus:
It was about time, too. Inevitably, in conversation with Australians (and others, like the philosophy graduate students who've been here for a while even if they're transplanted from Europe or New Zealand), people always ask me whether I've seen a kangaroo yet. And they'd always be shocked when I told them that, no, I hadn't. Apparently, because of the drought, the kangaroos have been creeping in closer and closer and have started dining at night on the cricket ovals in various parts of Canberra. So I was feeling really embarrassed not to have seen one yet. Now, I can say that I have in fact seen a kangaroo.

Tidbinbilla has one of the highest concentrations of kangaroos in all of southeastern Australia, and as we were heading back to our car later in the afternoon, we were treated to a spectacle of an entire mob of kangaroos out grazing on a field:
Wildlife aside, the landscape in Tidbinbilla is generally beautiful: a sort of austere pastoral wonderland. Tidbinbilla was basically burned over during the bush fires 4-5 years ago, which left it with some great old gum-tree skeletons:
The wide-open horizons aren't too shabby, either:

San Millan de la Cogolla -- June 2, 2007

Here are a few pictures from around San Millan de la Cogolla, in the Rioja region. San Millan is famous as the "birthplace of the Spanish language," if memory serves because one of the first monks in Spain to write in the vernacular lived in one of the area's two monasteries, in around the eleventh century or so.

The first pictures were taken at Yuso, one of the two monasteries (the other, Suso, was closed). The latter were taken on the way back to our hotel in Haro, when we stopped off at a berm of wild poppies, which are everywhere in Spain in early June.

Santillana del Mar -- June 3, 2007

Santillana del Mar is a small town in the north of Spain which is, its name to the contrary, not located on the ocean. It's an extremely well preserved medeival town, near the famous (and closed to the public) Altamira Caves, which means it gets quite a bit of tourist traffic during the day. It empties out at night, however, which is when we experimented with night photography:

For some reason, the black and white ones always turn out the best at night. I think it's because they capture the two-headed nightwalkers that the color shots just can't...

Gaastra, Michigan -- May 28, 2007

This is the first of a series of posts I hope to do featuring pictures from various travels I've done. I enjoy photography, though I'm not particularly good at it. So any tips on improving the photographs (in the comments) would be greatly appreciated!

This post contains four pictures from the town of Gaastra and its surroundings, in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, which I visited back at the end of May on a swing through the Midwest. The area has a generally depressed farming economy and a few remnant mining and timber operations. Like Vilas County, just over the border in Wisconsin, it has begun to transition into a service-vacation economy; the area is dotted with small glacial lakes and kettle moraines, which make it prime location for summer cottages and recreation for Midwestern city-slickers.

This picture was taken in the town of Gaastra in the local playground. This swingset was the best-maintained piece of equipment in the place. Tire swings were pretty common when I was a kid, though today they're considered dangerous because water collects in them and breeds mosquitoes and other nasty things. (Here in San Francisco, all of the playgrounds are nice and safe and made out of colored plastic.) But not in Gaastra, where the tire swing still reigns supreme:


This next picture was taken just outside of town. The soil in this part of the country is littered with rocks, courtesy of the retreating glaciers of the last Ice Age. Farmers had to clear them all by hand. Sometimes they used them to make neat stone walls like this one:


However, typically there were so many of them that they would also just create enormous piles of rocks in the middle of the field and just farm around them:


(Incidentally, the above setting is one of my favorites in the area. The light wasn't ideal when I got there, but I plan to go back and take a few more next time I'm in the area.)

Finally, there's this shot. For some reason, barns with smiley-faces are a fairly common sight in the Great Lakes region (also watertowers with smiley-faces). So are barbed wire fences. So this shot brings the Midwest's two great tastes together, in one "good fences make good neighbors" taste sensation...