These bike racks situate themselves throughout Brisbane, and I have been waiting to catch one completely full, like this. Although having said that, I never seem to see anyone actually riding one. NB: this photo is not an endorsement of Lipton Ice Tea, in any way, shape or form.
Hey… it’s day 600 of the blog! Crikey. To mark this milestone I have done one of my regular updates of the ‘best of the rest’ page – and the Stats page has also been refreshed.
At home it should be getting warmer and lighter right now (and may well be – I can’t say I really care), but here, in accordance with the earth’s axial tilt, the evenings are darkening and there is a cooler feel to the air. Not that it has ever been exactly dry and summery since I arrived here, not in Brisbane anyway. Of more salience is the question of just what I was doing at work on campus until 5.50pm on a Saturday….
A bit cliched to take this view of one of the world’s great cityscapes as one flies into it for the weekend: but I like the way the sun has caught the CBD, particularly those few buildings just past Darling Harbor.
Sometimes you see a shot coming just in time to get it lined up, focused and taken. Played for and got. I’m very happy with this one.
Does a photo have to be sharp? This is the most blantantly out-of-focus shot I’ve put up here, but I dunno, I think it works. I don’t mean to cast Brisbane as the rainy city – in fact it was a very warm and sunny day today for all but this hour between 6 and 7pm, in which it hurled it down with intense lightning and thunder. I was sat in a bar at the time and just did my best to get a shot that gave a hint of the atrocious conditions outside.
By the way this is the 11th consecutive day on which the shot has been taken in the same town/city – so Brisbane takes the record on that front, as even Hebden Bridge, my home town, has not yet got beyond featuring on ten daily pics in a row. There’ll be a couple more yet from Brisbane, as well: I’m not planning to visit anywhere else until at least Thursday. I think it’s still got things to offer the camera.
Irony warning…. I don’t mean to suggest it was like this all day, just this one heavy shower, but this is the only place I have seen rain in the whole 8 weeks I’ve been here, including in New Zealand.
Lunch here today – and if you can’t find some variety of ethnic food to satisfy you on this street, well, you just ain’t trying.
The city of Dunedin is dominated by this institution, the oldest university in New Zealand I believe (and pronounced o-TAH-go, not o-TAY-go). I spend a lot of my life on university campuses and can authoritatively state that this is a particularly fine example of the genre.
Incidentally I just about tolerate the car that has sneaked into this shot. I bet you can count on the fingers of one hand the number of cars that have appeared on this blog. I think virtually nothing ruins an otherwise pleasing shot more than there being a car in it. With the exception of vintage ones, they’re all identical, ugly, boring and vastly over-rated machines. OK, rant over.
Hard to resist the temptation to stick another ‘Flora/Fauna’ post up today but I have done so, purely for a change of theme. Mind you, to classify this as an ‘Urban Scene’ is pushing it. Penneshaw reminds me of the West Coast of Scotland, beautiful and remote; surprisingly so, in fact. This pump, powered by the wind, served as the town’s mains water supply until as late as 1965, and mains electricity did not come to Kangaroo Island until 1975. It’s a great spot and at several points over the last four days I have been quite seriously planning my move here: but now it’s time to go back to what is often termed ‘civilisation’, though I have my doubts. I leave on tomorrow morning’s ferry.
As you can see, it was a much nicer day today, but there is quite a lot of debris around the city from yesterday’s storm, particularly in the Botanical Gardens. And the Brisbane river is very full – but not yet flooding, indeed, there is evidence that it has gone down, namely the thin layer of mud over this boardwalk below the museums on the south bank. You can see here that it is scant inches – millimetres in fact – below the pedestrian and cycle track. Here’s hoping…
