Clock tour

We spent a lovely day in July walking around Seattle doing the Clock Tour. The web site is: http://www.zombiezodiac.com/rob/ped/clock/map.htm. Alonda's sisters found this tour last October when they visited the condo (we weren't home!). They liked it so much, they recommended that we go, too. These are from the pictures we took. We have not posted all of the clocks. You will have to go to the web site if you want to find out about all of them. You will also find out a lot more information about the clocks.

This is the first clock on the tour. It stands over King Street Station, the AMTRAK station in Seattle.

This clock isn't on the tour, but should be! We happened to know about it since we had been inside this building before. This clock is in the large waiting room across the street from King Street Station. We had looked over the building years ago when we were looking for places to have a Junior/Senior Prom.

This clock is down in the Pioneer Square area of Seattle. This is the part of the city where all of the Klondike Gold Rush business was taking place over a hundred years ago. Very picturesque!

This clock is inside the bus tunnel. The city has just added underground streetcars to the tunnels they built for the buses. The clock is made from tools and parts used in the construction of the tunnels!

This is the Pendulum Clock. The clock doesn't actually have a pendulum, but it looks like it should.

Alonda's sisters never found this clock! The web site instructions missed the actual location and direct you to the wrong garage. Yes, this clock is inside a parking garage.

Here is a shop that is not afraid to advertise. They also have a very nice clock outside their store ...

This is the Question Mark clock. What do you think the question is?

Tiffany's has, of course, a large clock decorated with gold and marble. We don't know what Tiffany's has to do with Atlas holding up the world ...

Bergman's has been a fixture for dedicated suitcase seekers for decades.

This is the shot of Seattle that everyone remembers. The Pike Place Market, but not the clock, is world famous for flying fish. This is the place they mean when you read the book Fish!.

This clock is at Colman Dock. This is where the ferry boats come into Seattle. The clock has been here, in various forms and locations, for over a hundred years.

These clocks are not on the tour. They hang outside the REI store in Seattle. They are too far away from the other clocks to make a convenient walk, but if you patronize REI, you don't want to miss them.

This is the last clock. Notice that Mt Everest has its own time zone?

Almost back to work

We are (almost) looking forward to going back to work. We will fly through Toronto and then back to Pakistan in about 10 days. Our summer pictures will be posted after we get back to Karachi. Jim didn't pack the cable to download photos from the cameras!
Did you notice the weather we are missing? Karachi is unbelievably hot during the summer!

Birds of Karachi

Enjoy the birds of Karachi! We have seen more than these, but we don't have pictures of all of them (yet!).

This is a Black Kite. They are very common and can be seen circling the garbage pits of Karachi. Don't lay down and go to sleep!

Black Kites are raptors.

This is a Hoopoe. It is one of the coolest birds we have ever seen. This one was right outside our window.

House Crow or Corn Crow. Very common, noisy and aggressive.

The Swifts swoosh around in huge flocks eating bugs at sunset.

The birds all flock into the trees at night. You can tell where they spend the night by looking at the guano patterns on the ground.

This is a female Asian Koel (Cuckoo). It took us eight months to spot it. We just kept hearing them.

This is the male. It looks like a bad-tempered crow!

This is the Mynah. You may have heard of them as being good at learning to talk like a parrot. It is a member of the Starling family.

This is the Rose-Necked Parakeet. The same bird in Saudi Arabia is called the Ring-Necked Parakeet. They are not native to the area, but so many have been brought as pets and then escaped, they are now part of the ecosystem.

This is a Red-Vented Bulbo. There is a Yellow-Vented, but we don't have a picture of it.

These two herons were posing when we visited the WWF facility at Hawks Bay (French Beach). You can find it on Google Earth by searching "hawks bay karachi pakistan".

This series of three shows one set of nesting Purple Sunbirds.

Good old Sparrow!

This last bird is the Tailor Bird. The male likes to wag its tail!

We hope you enjoyed seeing some of our birds here in Karachi!

Around Karachi

Alonda and the rest of the Middle School teachers took all the students out to the beach in February. The weather here is NOT like February in Seattle. This is a bridge going out towards the port.

This is how you can tell you are near a beach. It has all the normal "beach" stuff: beach balls, sand buckets, ice cream, etc. Everything is from China, of course.

As usual, you have to share the road with the donkey carts. We think they are the only vehicle in Pakistan that knows and follows the rules of the road!

Here's the beach! As we said, the weather is NOT like Seattle. Everyone wears shorts and T-shirts; no one wears a bathing suit.

Another fact of life is the guards. They took three carloads of guards. They had people on the perimeter the whole time. This does NOT mean it is unsafe. It is more to prevent kidnapping and beggars. The houses in the background are beach houses for the rich people. The house the school used belongs to relatives of one of the local teachers.

No beggars, but the camel-ride guy came around! The kids loved it.

A couple of weeks after the beach trip, Alonda & Jim and another couple went out to visit the World Wildlife Fund's Center in Karachi. Very close to Hawks Bay Beach where the students went. (wwf Karachi Pakistan as search terms on Google Earth will find it!)

Alonda and Johanne got muddy planting mangroves! You have to walk barefoot or lose your shoes in the mud. They are adding a second species to the one that is already there.

The local people harvest mangrove for building materials and fuel. They seem perfectly willing to help with re-planting since they can see they are taking out more than is growing. They have no alternative fuel for heat and cooking. They can't afford to shift over to bottle gas and they have no electricity.

These two reef herons posed for us we were getting ready to leave.

On the way back, we stopped and took pictures at the salt pans. They let in the ocean (salt water) and evaporate it until they get salt. It takes a lot of time and a lot of water.

This is a view of Karachi from one of the "flyovers" (overpass). The pile of yellow stuff is sulphur. This IS a port city. We don't know why the sulphur is piled in the open! It is dry enough that they routinely stack cement in the open, too. The area is actually a desert.

We don't just share with donkeys; camels get out on the road, too! Look closely and you will see busses, a camel, motorbikes, pedestrians, trucks, bicycles and (closest to the camera) our guard car! The billboard is part of the constant politicking.

Here is the camel close-up. The guys on the billboard behind him are all politicians.

This video was shot 14 March while we were out shopping. Adam, a teacher from school, was sitting in the front seat and borrowed our camera so he could take some pictures. Try to imagine driving here!

The Hague International Model United Nations

In January we took 12 students to The Hague in The Netherlands for a Model UN. Sound familiar? We did it in Boston in December! We don't show pictures of the kids since they are always concerned about security. No faces!

Even though we were there in the dead of winter, the transportation of choice is very often the bicycle. Holland is flat and very bike friendly.

This is just outside the main train station at The Hague. This is the local commuter parking lot for people who come down from or commute up to Amsterdam or come in from smaller communities to work at The Hague.

This is one of the utility vehicles. Imagine your pickup truck getting this kind of gas mileage! This bike was parked along a canal in Delft.

The convention organizers had a tour set up for the advisors. This is where great cheese starts. Cows. The farm we visited was VERY clean and these yearling calves were separated from the production cows. Pregnant cows were in another area.

This is the next step on the way to cheese. The lady on the right is wife of the farmer. She, the three daughters and the farmer are the entire work force. They make all the cheese right here on the farm. They sell some of it direct to customers who will drive out weekly for their "fix" of farm fresh cheese..

This is where they age the cheeses. A specialty of the farm is the heart shaped cheese. It doesn't taste any different, they just have some antique wooden cheese molds. The large rounds in the background are very popular with cheese stores. Most cheese makers won't handle the large sizes. They get too heavy to move around and you HAVE to use wooden molds. The lighter, plastic ones are too flimsy.

The second stop on the tour was to this windmill. It is a complete reconstruction of a sawmill. They still actually saw wood here. Since Holland doesn't have the flowing water for a waterwheel, their grain grinding and sawing were set up at windmills.

Our convention ID's were good for the streetcars over about 1/3 of the country. We didn't go that far, but we went out to Delft. This is the home of the fine Dutch china. It is also the home of van Leeuwenhoek (inventor of the microscope). This is one of the churches in the town. Yes, it IS leaning over. They didn't even try to build it straight. Apparently, when they were building, the foundation sank and they just kept going. It hasn't fallen over, yet.

One of the things we were looking for in Holland was chime and handbell music. There is a small chimes choir here in Karachi which Alonda is working with. Holland has no music for chimes or handbells even though they have actual church carrillons in several of the towers. We heard this one in Delft and there is one close to the hotel we stayed in at The Hague.

This is a demonstration board showing the stages of manufacture of Delft pottery. We did the factory tour (we were the only people there) and Alonda bought a candy dish and a wall tile.

This is one of the last places we went. The Hague, like everything in Holland, is very close to the beach. Even in the winter, the beach is pretty. We would like to visit it when the weather is warmer, but it would probably be pretty crowded.

Here is our final "find" in Holland: Stroopwafels! We called them "stroopy waffels" since we weren't sure of the pronunciation. They are small waffels with vanilla syrup in them. Delicious!

We will be going back to Boston in about a year for the Model UN at Harvard University. They moved their calendar and Boston and The Hague are now both at the end of January. We decided to go to Boston!