As I said I've had a pretty busy fortnight, last Tuesday I had a day trip... to MACKAY!, in order to extract my data collectors that have been recording for the last two months, and thank goodness there is some interesting data in there!
Here is a photo of my field site, Mackay has a 6m tidal amplitude at a Spring tide so that beach extends out 1.8 kilometres or so from high tide mark. The tidal flats are covered in little solider crabs like these ones in Moreton Bay.
I flew back the same day, and was completely buggered. Bear in mind I had been up the day before at 0230 for the soccer final! Plus on the Sunday I was on North Stradbroke and Rogaining on the Saturday and bowling the night before that and returned on previous Tuesday from Adelaide.
This didn't stop me from going out the next night to take pictures of Brisbane with the new doobyschmacker! Gio kindly joined me for dinner at the amazing Chez Laila (home of the world's best Falafels, the food that unites the Middle East according to Wikipedia! Those Lebanese and Israelis should remember that!). She was unbelievably patient as I snapped lots of long exposures, I wish I had a remote for the camera so I could use the bulb setting instead of the maximum 30s metered exposure.
These tiny pictures don't do the resolution of the camera justice! At 100% crop, you feel like a voyeur looking in office windows!
Try as we might we somehow couldn't manage to hold still for the rear curtain synch flash
Looking back towards Kangaroo Point
The Nepalese Pagoda that the monks forgot to take down after the World Expo '88
Also went to a photo exhibition that was part of the Brisbane Festival on the weekend past, called "Democratic Republic of Congo: Forgotten War", which was as sad and haunting as centre piece photo taken by a photojournalist attached to Medecins Sans Frontieres of an AIDS sufferer in the Congo. See it if you are in Brisbane
The following Sunday, all the Uni crew turned out in Gyatt park, despite the intermittent weather, to farewell Gio. Little did we realise that rather than a quiet BBQ with engineers, we had a whole host of people enjoying the free Brisfest live Jazz in the Park. It was very enjoyable and thankfully the weather held off. The best part of the afternoon was lobbing heavy steel Bocce balls at maurading young children and watching the looks of horror on their parent's faces! Ahhh, it's the little pleasures in life.
So in all it was sad to get to know Gio as well as we did, knowing full well that she had to go home eventually, but hey at least we all have a place to stay if we ever decided to go to Viareggio, Italy! So I bid a fond farewell to Gio at the airport and promised that I'd call in on her when I'm next in Italy... which happens to be exactly two months to the day! Not many days to learn some openers in Italian really.
Ciao Bella! See you soon!
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