Only slightly bent

The Melbourne Zoo has a very good butterfly house that especially our daughter loves visiting. The last time we were there, I took my real camera along and – despite the occasional butterfly landing on the camera – managed to capture a few nice ones:

Since the arrival of the kids, we have been spending a fair amount of time at various parks – conveniently they often come with good playgrounds. Below are some photos of these urban oasis near our home; click to enlarge.

Basterfield park has a pond and is especially nice at this time of the year (at least this year, since we’ve had good rainfall over the summer):

Braeside park is a huge (312 hectares) park a short drive away; it has a variety of areas as the following three photos indicate:

Dendy park, especially popular with people with dogs:

This little critter – Green Mantid – I actually caught roaming our back yard – and discovered that if you don’t shut the blinds / curtain in the evening, you will discover them walking on the window, lured by the light.

Sunsets are often excellent here – and happen at a decent hour year round so you’re actually awake to take photos of them The first example is from our back yard..

.. and another one from Basterfield Park.

I have a terrible backlog of posts to do, but this thing called life nowadays seems to be interfering with blogging. Anyhow, a few weeks back we took a small road trip along the Great Ocean Road for a few days. A few selected photos follows.

Of course, the one thing that cannot be overlooked when driving the Great Ocean Road are the beaches. Many awesome beaches dot the coastline, along with many world-class surf spots. Spots like Jan Juc, which could be classified as not very crowded:

One fascinating place was the Otway National Park and a feature called the Otway Fly – a long steel canopy walk built up to 45m high among the forest. Very impressive, almost had an Avatar-like feeling of a different world being among the massive trees and ferns the size of eight meters across.

The scale of the cliffs (this one near the 12 Apostles) can best be understood by looking at the dozens of people standing on top of this cliff below. Yes there are people there.

Another great place was the Loch Ard Gorge:

And we return to the Otway National Park; what would be a bushwalk without seeing some koalas?

.. or Kookaburras for that matter:

Finally on the way back, we took a walk to the beautiful Stevenson’s Falls waterfall before returning home:

Overall a great trip with some breathtaking and diverse views.

As sort of hinted in the previous post, here are some night photos of the city. For any viewpoints higher up, there are two observation decks in the city’s skyscrapers; one at the tallest residential building in the world, Eureka Tower, and another at the Rialto Towers. Though at a lower level, the Rialto Tower is better for photographic purposes – not only does it have two outside observation decks instead of one, the outside decks also have wide enough fencing for a DSLR lens to fit through. The Eureka tower has a boring tight mesh that always intrudes into photos.

Anyhow, without further ado, some night photos (click on the photos to get a bigger version):

.. as opposed to Melbourne by night, which is coming up a bit later. Anyhow, I finally managed to gather a few shots of the city, so here goes the first rough batch. (click on the photos to view a bigger version)

The CBD – or the “city” – is a nice and compact area that is quite walkable; photography-wise, however, the skyscrapers are a bit dispersed and distributed on both sides of the river in three or four clusters. Therefore, getting comprehensive skyline photos is more challenging than it is in many other cities.

One thing that there are plenty of in Melbourne are cafes. And the cafe culture is starting to grow on me, too – to the great surprise of everyone, including myself. I have drank approximately 10 times more coffee over the past month than in my entire life before that. I kid you not.

There’s also lots of interesting architecture in Melbourne. Federation square, one of the happening places downtown, is one example:

Flinders Street station and the old city circle tram in the foreground represent a somewhat older style of the city; none less compelling, the sporadically preserved older architecture make a nice touch to the feeling of the city.

The Southern Cross railway station, on the other hand, is yet another example of cool modern architecture. It’s kind of like the Pasile station in Helsinki, only much nicer

There really isn’t a subway system in Melbourne as such, but there is a “city loop” with stations mostly underground via which some local area trains travel. The local trains are quite nice and the tram network is pretty extensive (even though we live outside of it), plus there are buses – overall the public transportation is quite good.

As far as shopping goes, it unfortunately seem Melbourne is a very good city to do some serious shopping. We’re (un)lucky enough to live within a 15-minute drive of the biggest shopping center in Australia, Chadstone. The place is positively huge with over 400 shops and it looks pretty nice, too:

While these don’t even scratch the surface of what’s worthy of taking a photo, I expect to get some pretty nice shots of all kinds of things as time goes by. There is no shortage of subjects for sure.

Last month, I was at Brussels doing some work for the European Commission. I had never been there before, so it was a bit of a shame that there was very little time to take a look at the city. Here are a couple of snapshots from my quick explorations anyway. Apologies for the picture quality, I only had my old compact digital camera and cellphone with me.

Ironically, the EC building where I worked was one of the nicest things. Not a bad lobby, eh?

I usually like parks, so one of the first chances I got, I headed to Park de Bruxelles Warandepark – the biggest park in the downtown area. On the the edges it felt alive, with people running around the park:

Unfortunately, when you ventured further in, it was quite close to dead in the center. Even though it was beautiful weather, the park felt like it was abandoned last fall (or some earlier fall for that matter) and left to die. Rather sad.

On the other side of the park the sight was beyond sad and downright filthy. It might’ve been an aftermath of a big event, but I did not expect to find quite this:

That, however, was foreshadowing what I witnessed right in the downtown shopping district also. Look ahead and you see a vibrant shopping street. Look left and there’s a desolate strip of road with everything closed and not a soul in sight. Strange.

You can find photos from this example and more photos from Brussels at the Brussels-album.