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This is making my neck hurt.
These trolleys are part of the so-called LRT (Light Rail Transit) system, which we unfortunately never got around to taking a ride on.
Fuyuko is in happy SLR camera land, taking a photo framed by these arches. Basic SLRs are as manual as you can get, meaning that all settings (aperture, film speed, focus, shutter time) must be set for the picture. SLR stands for "single lens reflector", so that when you peer through the viewfinder you're looking out through the same lens that the camera uses to take the picture. There's your photography lesson for the day...
For each picture, she wrote down all of the camera's settings at the time the picture was taken. Quite tedious, if you ask me, but that's dedication to improvement. Meanwhile I snapped away indiscriminately with my digital camera, and fixed up all the poorly lit, badly framed, oversaturated, blurry pictures on my computer later. That is, the ones I was able to take before filling up the camera's 128 MB memory card... good for over 200 pictures, but that doesn't last long the way I take them.
We passed this firehouse on just about every sortie out of the
hotel and into town. Several times in the evening we could hear some sort of
party going on inside, and smell something good being barbecued. These firemen
sure know how to spend their time. Didn't Elvis write a song about that?
"Firehouse Rock" or something?? ...So who gets to put out the barbecue grill?
I think it's Jose's turn today, or maybe it's
Here's the infamous escalator link you may have heard of, the "world's longest escalator system". It runs downwards until 10 in the morning and then upwards for the rest of the day, and consists of just a bunch of ordinary escalators one after the other, going along a straight road up a hill. But if you start traveling along this thing, sooner or later you're going to start thinking "wow, this is pretty long".
As mentioned, the escalators change direction at 10 AM and start going upwards. What if you were almost at the bottom of one when the direction change took place? That would be a bit strange.
I'm assuming they call it Mosque Street because there are a lot of churches and synagogues there?
We're up at the very top, and Fuyuko is relaxing on the back of a duck.
The view overlooking the city from an upper floor in this clean and futuristic looking apartment complex, high up in the hills, must be breathtaking.
On the way down, we stumbled into a mini-zoo. The picture is a bit blurry, but this and the next show a mama orangutan playing with her baby. I'm glad my mama didn't play with me this way... did she?
The most amazing thing I saw though was in another of the monkey cages. Something called a "buff-cheeked gibbon", a skinny golden monkey (the females turn golden, the males remain black), was traveling in large circles by swinging from the ropes and chain-link fence at the roof of her cage, swinging from one point to the next, never pausing, traveling round and round with incredible agility. At two specific points in the circle, she always performed the same move: at one point, she did an upside-down cartwheel by grabbing the top of the cage with her feet instead of her hands, swinging through the arc, and then grabbing on with her hands again. At another point, she did a 360 with some fancy handwork. Apparently this was a lesson; a baby started falteringly trying to swing around the cage after the mommy. This went on for awhile; eventually the mommy settled down and held the baby. Nice swinging, baby. According to the sign, this kind of locomotion is called "branchiation" and is a hallmark of this kind of monkey. And there's your biology lesson for the day.
We're holding you responsible for making sure your dog cleans up after itself...