Sunday, November 12, 2006

Some words and some pictures

After a terrifying few moments yesterday afternoon when a quirk of Eric's PC* made it appear to have eaten three days' worth of my photos! (It had us both fooled for about two hours so it wasn't just me being a dizzy Mac user) before we eventually discovered that all by itself and without being asked it had uploaded the contents of my camera to Eric's account and deleted them from the card. Photos were all safe though which is all that matters. I'm going to leave doing the big photo album thing until I get home, but I thought I'd shrink a few to blog posting size and put them up now.

Note: If you're reading via LiveJournal's syndication the images probably won't show but you can get to the actual post on splateagle.com by clicking the link at the top of this entry

... right here we go:



This is a shot of Perth's skyline at night taken from King's Park on the night I arrived. It does not do it justice. Happily Eric (who wasn't jet lagged at the time and has a digital SLR) has some better shots that I'll get copies of and post when I do the full albums of my adventures in January. For now you'll have to put up with my dodgy camerawork here.




Perth is chock-full of green spaces, some are vast and some are not. Until I moved to Eric's spare room I walked past/through this little park in a region called Northbridge (just on the edge of the city centre) on my way into the city each day - it's full of gigantic antipodean fig trees, some bigger than my old house, which have facinating enormous networks of buttressed roots. I've got photos of them too but they don't show up well when you shrink them like this so here's the pretty little bandstand instead.




Perthers seem to like their bronze statues - they're everywhere, and they're usually lit at night which makes walking through the city a bit like being in a big open air sculpture gallery at times. These are probably my favourites, they're a family of life-sized bronze kangaroos who live next to Stirling Gardens in the heart of the Central Business district.




Freemantle's kind of a city within a city - it has very much its own distinct identity and atmosphere, and it's also the first place I've been in Australia where anything other than the landscape has felt old (even Perth's "historic" buildings feel like they were built yesterday and only just had the wrappers taken off) this is a shot out to sea from beside the old round house jail on the shore at Freemantle.




One of the many things I'm really enjoying about Perth is the exceptionally high standard of modern architecture here, I'm constantly being wowwed by stunning original buildings, and this is one of them. It's the Maritime museum in Freemantle and was essentially built to house Australia II so that she could be brought back from Sydney. I took a lot of photos of the light playing on and in the structure from various angles but I think this one probably stands by itself the best. Next time I go to Freemantle I might even go inside!

So there we are, a few little snaps of my adventures so far - sorry they're only small, but I neglected to make a note of my ftp password before I left and it isn't one I set myself, so I can't upload bigger versions of the files just yet. Fear not though these are just a few of the shots I've taken so far and I fully intend to bore you all rigid with 100s of full sized snaps when I get home.

* The whole Operating System thing is very much a matter of personal choice, I'm very grateful to have the use of a decent computer which I'm not being billed by the minute to use and to which I can readily transfer files. I'm not talking Eric's machine down here and I'm certainly not getting into any of that adolescent nonsense about which platform is "better" ...but I really really miss my Mac.

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

"A quirk of Eric's PC"
Poor Patrick... he had the longest face when it looked all was lost. You can not imagnine my relief nor the expletive that I muttered when the darn things popped up in my account.

Oh yeah, he got really really annoyed with me, when i suggested that he hop on the back of the bronze Kanagroo so i could take a photo (just jokes)

LOTS more pitures to come ;)
Eric

Hamish MacDonald said...

I know we've had a hundred conversations about architecture, the vast majority of which would suggest that I hate anything new. But that's not true, and here's proof: I think that maritime museum building is really cool!

Patrick said...

Eric's right - I have been pulling faces at him for some of his cheesy photo op suggestions, but everyone back home will be pleased to know we're building up a few good shots of me here.

Hamish you're OK there - I was actually thinking looking at the Maritime museum that it's exactly the sort of building you'd like: right at home in its surroundings, much like the Royal Museum back home which I know you like in spite of it not being ancient ;)

Anonymous said...

There are wonderful pictures and I am very glad you found them again. I love the park one. The building though are amazing. I will have to check what the best time for a none heat loving person to visit is the more you talk about the place the more I want to visit.

Chris said...

Anyone else feel like Patrick's living up to the 'weasel' moniker with his whine (sorry, did I say whine? - I meant reasoned statement) on operating systems...

*grins*

Patrick said...

Anita I gather Autumn here (April, May-ish) is much cooler, but I think you'd adjust to the spring/summer heat I'm getting as it's dry and there's usually plenty of sea air moving (though I gather high summer, Jan/Feb is terrible). Singapore was cooler than here but humid and I hated it, today was 35C and perfectly comfortable. As the old addage goes, it's not the heat, it's the humidity.

Chris :p 1: we Weasels are not nown for whining, and 2: that was not even remotely a whine. Stop stirring. ;)

Chris said...

Ok, 1: I know, but how often does one get the chance to use 'moniker' in a sentence and 2:, Very well, if you insist.

I'm just jealous of the picture taking - ordered a spanky-new Digital SLR last week and it's Still Not Here!