Bus Window

Man I got a lot of hours on buses coming up this weekend. It's not so bad I guess. These were taken late Autumn, to the west. Tomorrow I'm going south and it's early Spring.

Devil Eyes

The First Sign of Spring

I got back from Brussels at the beginning of March, and on the way to school I could see that within the space of a week, the season had begun to turn. Before I left there was practically no life to be seen, but now, the almond trees that had been nothing but bare and twiggy since I arrived, were covered in blossoms. The colours were amazing. The ever blue sky with the dusty pink blossoms and tawny sandy earth was not a colour palette I had ever seen, and it was beautiful. I knew this would only last a matter of weeks so after our big staff lunch one Monday, I took my disposable camera down the road from school to this ancient almond grove and took these. In the second photo down you can see the Peñas which is the big rock, at the foot of which my school is nestled. Now, 5 or 6 weeks later, these colours have been replaced with green, which seems like a miracle.

Brussels (I was Having a Good Time)

Photo by Nora Gerrard

School on Disposable

This is one of the villages I work in, Peñas de San Pedro. This big rock is the Peñas. There's ruins of an old castle up the top where I like to go walking. The village is on a big plain and from the top of the Peñas you can see for ages. Hundreds of almond and olive trees, and windmills.

School Yard.

Street Realming (still Lisbon)

Botanical Gardens, Belem

Walking through these gardens was strange for a few reasons. Firstly, the weather and the plants felt so much like Brisbane or Sydney, our home towns. They even had a bunya nut pine there, with a sign saying it was from Queensland. A hotchpotch of birds and animals were digging about everywhere; a kitten with some baby chicks and a peacock, roosters kicking around with ducklings. It felt like it was a forgotten place. Things were lush and overgrown, and the glass of the greenhouses was sometimes clouded and sometimes smashed. We hardly saw another person in there either. I think it was my favourite day of the trip.

More Lisbon

So we started out walking, and kept on walking, and found ourselves in Belem eating Portuguese tarts. Then we saw a sign for the Botanical Gardens which were tropical. That's going to be the next lot I put up.

Lisbon with Elianor and Bruno