Sunrise, sunset

We have been watching the rising and setting sun here - how does it compare to what we get in PG? We seem to get much longer sunrises and sunsets. The sun doesn't rise until quite late and sets early, but there is a longer time when the sun is not up when it is light. For example, in the pictures here:

Sunrise on the way to Karlstad Dec 19 at 8:25 am.



This picture shows the sun setting behind our little creek at 1:42 pm on Dec 21/06. It was still light for another hour and a half.

The last picture shows the sun still on the mountain just to the east of us at 2:45 on Dec. 23/06.

By the way, I HATE working with pictures in this program - my published post doesn't look like my draft and I can't move the pictures around or the text for that matter. Does any one have any suggestions short of finding a new blog site?

Dec 13 is Lucia day in Sverige

Here are some pictures from the Lucia day celebrations at Duncan's school last night. It was a beautiful ceremony and the children did an amazing job with all the songs. The older girls hold real candles and there are real candles on the head of the girl chosen to wear the special head piece. The boys dress as you can see in this picture of Duncan. He wasn't that impressed with "wearing a dress", but that is how it is done. Mitch's school in town went to the big church across the street to see the ceremony done there. I only recognized one song and the rest were new to me. There was a dance after this, but we couldn't stay as Mitch was playing hockey in Sunne and needed to be picked up.

We did stay long enough to have a cup of coffee and sample the traditional Saffron buns mad for this occasion. I bought some "saffron" in Tunisia to try and make my own, but unfortunately what I bought was not the real thing, so it was nice to try the real thing.
 

More of Tunisa - North of Sousse

Here we are back at Sousse for a day on the
beach. We wandered all the way up to the point
you see in the distance and part way back before settling down on the sand. H, M, and D swam and then the boys built sand forts and had a rousing sand fight. Nice to just sit in the sun.
We found an ice cream place on the way back with Italian gelato style ice cream - the fig ice cream was to die for and real pistacio was pretty amazing too. By this time we had started to figure out how to deal with the constant barage of people trying to sell you something and had found a corner store and a few places to eat with reasonable prices, so things were looking up.
The next day we took a bus trip north to Tunis and Carthage. Sidi Bou Said was a beautiful area on a hillside where we stopped for some traditional mint tea and perused the many shops along the steep and narrow cobble streets. Here we are sitting on the steps of a home above the market in this area.

The ruins of a roman bath at Carthage were amazing. The pillar behind us has been erected recently to show the height of the original structure, which was twice the height of the standing pillar. We were walking around in the lowest level. There are broken pillars everywhere of various types of stone from different sorts of granite to marble. We could have spent much longer here, but we had other stops to make on our tour. There was a model of the original bouildings as well as an artists interpretation and these ruins would have been truely impressive even in their time. It is amazing to think that places such as this were constructed thousands of years ago. We also stopped in downtown Tunis to see the medina there and to check out the French architecture in the capital. We were also whisked through the Bardo museum full of old mosaics housed in the old palace - again, we could have spent much more time here.

More Tunisia pictures - from the South

K is in the central courtyard of this Berber
"cave" home in Matmata. The woman on the right lives here. The entrance was in the side of a hill. You walk through past a few rooms and into this central courtyard open to the sky above. There are 6 entrances to this courtyard at the ground level, and one you climb to with a rope and notches in the wall. There was a kitchen with a propane camp stove, 3 bedrooms, a work room where the women weave and then the entrance passageway with room to store tools and food for their camel. It must be strange to have a bus looad of tourists stop and tromp through your home taking pictures, but the 3 who lived here were and were available put up with us. It must be a welcome source of income for them.


Here we are riding camels into the sunset at Douz at the edge of the Sahara. This was an amazing experience, marred only by the camel peeing on his tail and then flicking it up may back. Camel pee smeels a lot like cat urine, by the way. Also, we were not impressed by the efforts to extort money from us when we got off the camels out in the desert for a break. There was alot of putting something in your hand or showing your child something and then demanding money.


At sunrise the next day we found ourselves on a road in the middle of the great salt lake in the Sahara called Chott El Jerid. Mostly it looks like endless sand, but there had been some rain and there was some water at this end - it was a stunning site with the mountains in the distance and the pastel colours at sunrise. From here we drove on to an oasis near Tozeur where we saw dates, figs, lemons, oranges, jasmine, roses, zucchini, fava beans, bananas, hot peppers, and pomegranites growing. This was an amazing place to see for a gardener.

From there we took jeeps to Chebika at the base of the mountains and walked up the creek to this pool in the palm trees. The mountains are barren and this little bit of water feeds an oasis below and the town with it. People here were prospecting for what we would call dinosaur eggs - pretty crystals filling cavities in the rock. These they were trying to sell to tourists. On the way back we saw some wild camels, an army hummer and fences woven from palm fronds to hold back the shifting sands from the roads. Apparently some Starwars scenes were filmed in this area.

Tunisia pictures - Sousse area

Tunisia - a land of contrast. As you can see in
first picture people travel by all methods here. It's not uncommon to see donkey carts or mopeds, but you will also see mercedes. This family was on a road by the harbour in Sousse.












The entrance to Sousses's medina or old, walled city was about 200m from here. Our first excursion in Tunisia was to the medina. We went on a quick walking tour through a few of the narrow street just to get an idea what it would be like. This place is another world: narrow, cobbled streets jammed with shops, merchandise and people. As you walk by the merchants try to entice you into their shop. First they try to guess where you are from and what language you speak. Appartently English speaking Canadians are a rare commodity here. Just off the main shopping roads you can peak down narrow residntial passages like this picture shows.
This is the sun setting around 5 pm over one of Sousses hotels along the beach (not ours). We were staying about 500m from the beach near downtown. I took this picture as the boys frolicked in the sea as we walked back from the medina along the beach.
This is a picture of the romean colisseum in El Jem. It is amazing - better preserved than the one in Rome apparently. Tourists have amazing access to these ruins - you can climb all over them and go down into the holding cells below on your own. Apparently the movie Gladiator was shot here.

Nous sommes à Tunisie....

Well, we found a cheap 1 week vacation to Tunisia, so here we are. I am typing this in the hotel lobby and this will not be long since the keyboard has some differences making this quite slow. We have been on a 2 day tour of the south of the country and are heading on a day trip to the north tomorrow. The we have riden camels in the Sahara, been to oases, seen the mosque at Kairouan and the coliseum qt El Jem. H, M, and D have swum in the Mediterranean Sea. Tomorrow we are off to Carthage and Tunis. There is much to tell, but this keyboard is painfully slow so more when we get home.

Top row on keyboard: ²&é"'(-è_çà)=*
Top row with shift: '1234567890°+µ
Top row with other shift key: ~#{[|`\^@]}
There is another set of symbols on the top row, but I cant figure out how to get them

Anyway, the a q w z and m are all in different places and you need to shift to get most numbers qnd some punctuation.