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.