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 🙂

Tower of David

We visited the Tower of David in the Old City of Jerusalem. The tower is named after David, the former King of Israel (from David and Goliath fame). It was built around 200 BCE, but has been successively replaced/built on over the years.

The following are more parallel 3D images.

To view the 3D photos, look through the page and merge the two images into one.

Dinner in Jerusalem

When I found out I was going to Jerusalem I emailed my online friend Miriam Schwab for advice about what to do and see in the area (Miriam lives in Jerusalem). She gave us heaps of advice and invited us to join her family for a traditional Jewish dinner during the Shabatt (Jewish sabbath).


Miriam and her children. Thanks to Victoria Argyle for the photo.

After arriving in Jerusalem, we made our way on foot (in 35°C heat!) to Miriams place. It hadn’t dawned on me that we wouldn’t be able to contact Miriam due to Jews not being allowed to use electrical devices on the Shabatt and I hadn’t bothered getting particularly accurate directions on how to find her place. All we had we her address, but only a teeny tourist map to find her on. We asked the locals for directions, but only a few seemed to know the housing area she lived in. A few suggested we walked up a hill, in the opposite direction to where we should have been going, to a Mosque on the top of the Mount of Olives. We found out later that the locals simply didn’t want us finding her housing complex as they are unhappy that there is a single Jewish housing complex in an otherwise entirely arab area of Jerusalem.

Two hours after we left the hotel, we were eventually met by an abrupt confrontation with guards armed with machine guns outside Miriams place. Once we convinced them that we were indeed supposed to be there, we were served a scrumptious meal of middle eastern style food 🙂 It was great to see an inside view of a typical Israeli family. The concept of having armed guards outside my house is certainly a very foreign concept though!


A panoramic image from Miriam’s place. On the right is Miriam and slightly to her left is Vicki. In the background you can see the wall seperating Palestine from the rest of Israel and you can faintly see the mountains of Jordan in the distance.


Photo of the wall seperating Palestine from the rest of the Israel as seen from Miriam’s place.


View of the mountains of Jordan as seen from Miriam’s place

Vicki and Ryan’s great adventure

For those of you who aren’t aware, Vicki Agyle and I have recently returned from a whirlwind tour of Hong Kong, Israel, England, Germany, Belgium, Netherlands and Japan.

Despite everyone’s insistence that we would be blown up the moment we reached Tel Aviv, we ‘braved’ it anyway to make our way to the ICCC38 (International Coordination Chemistry Conference 38) in Jerusalem.

Hong Kong

The heat walking off the plane was extreme. We quickly noticed that there was no air conditioning in the airport, so we headed outside to enjoy the sunny weather … except it turned out that there was air conditioning in the airport afterall! The heat and humidity outside was incredible. Our attempts to take photos of the scenery failed, as the lenses fogged up immediately due to the extreme humidity.

The only reasonable photos I managed to take were from inside the terminal. Below is my first real attempt at creating a 3D parallel view image. If you look through the page and merge the two images into one, you will see the view in 3D. Don’t go straining your eyes too hard though :p

Amsterdam

Our trip to Hong Kong was short and sharp, just a brief stopover before heading to Amsterdam for what was supposed to be another short visit in transit. Except it turns out we got confused and in fact had a day and a half there, so had to quickly arrange accomodation! The photo below is another 3D image, this time of a random Amsterdam canal (they have lots of them). More photos of the Netherlands will be coming later as we went back there for a proper visit later on.