Lightning does strike twice!

Remember my post about being run over by a car? It happened again!

Except this time it happened to my flatmate, and by ‘it happened again’, I mean literally. Mary was mowed down by an evil man at exactly the same corner, on exactly the same side of the street and going in exactly the same direction! Conveniently she also wasn’t too badly injured either, just some aches, pains and bruises.

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Palestine

I’m not going to go into the details here, but we almost got kidnapped on entering Palestine. After that, I wasn’t particularly interested in taking out my camera to take photos. Thankfully Vicki Argyle took some photos of our visit. Since things were a little stressed during our trip, we didn’t do anything beyond taking a taxi to Bethlehem, visiting the Church of Nativity and getting taken to an overpriced souvenir shop where we had to buy some crappy products (taxi drivers must take tourists to a souvenir shop apparently).

Inside of the Church of Nativity in Bethlehem.

 The Church of Nativity is quite run down, but spectacular none the less. It is supposedly the birth place of Jesus Christ, although it is highly doubtful that this is the correct spot as there are no records of exactly where he was born.

If you look carefully at the bottom of the doorway, you can also see where the slab of stone has been worn away during the past 1400+ years of foot traffic.

I wasn’t allowed into the church with shorts on (apparently that is impolite), so our taxi driver arranged for me to wear a strange skirt thing around my waist.

You need to step up to go through the doorway I am standing in front of, but despite that I was still taller than the height of the door. This is because the church was built in 565 AD when humans tended to be a lot shorter than they are now.

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People in Israel

Someone complained that I don’t post enough photos of people! The reason I don’t normally post photos of people is because I’m not very good at taking them and I often never get around to asking permission. To keep my readers happy, here are some photos from Israel containing real live human beings 🙂

This is one of the few photos I took of people while in Israel. Vicki Argyle is on the left and Gemma Christian is on the right.

Vicki Argyle and I on top of Davids Castle in the Old City of Jerusalem.

One of numerous ugly photos of me taken by Vicki.

Penguins on a mission

Continuing my trend of writing blog posts totally out of sync, here are some photos from a recent trip to the Otago Peninsula. I acted as tour guide for visiting student Meghan Dunn during her visit here. My previous attempts to find penguins for tourists has always failed. I usually the find the pesky little birds when I least expect it, but never when I’m trying to! So to avoid that frustration we headed to Penguin Place, a little sanctuary about 30 mins drive from my place.

Penguin Place is on a small piece of land on the coast. If you zoom in, you can see the constructions in the sand hills designed for tourists to watch the birds.

The birds aren’t caged, they’re allowed to come and go as they please, but are provided with warm, man made shelters which they seem to quite like living in. Before heading down to the main Yellow Eyed penguin area, we stopped to see some Baby Blue penguins which also lived there, you can see one sitting in it’s little hut in the photo below.

We watched the birds surfing in on the waves after a hard days work catching fish. This little dude took his time and sat out in the waves enjoying the scenery for a while.


But he eventually waddled his way out of the surf … 


and then met up with his little buddy who waddled back over the sandhill with him … 

 

but his friend treated it as a race … 

 

So he decided to lean back and have a stretch instead. All that fishing must have taken it’s toll!

He even posed for me 🙂