The yellow follower stole my monastery

If you don't understand what that means, you need to start playing Carcassonne ... ! :-)

Anne Ida played yellow and she stole my perfect monastery spot. Augh ... !

But I recouped it later though, twice over. (I played green.)

Check out the Pig of Fortune ;-) in the background. How cute is that. :-)

Carcassonne 2009: London Zoo, part 2

More pictures from my visit to London Zoo, on my way to Carcassonne, France. August 6th.

A couple of butterflies, Lepidoptera, in the rather ... inflatable-looking butterfly house.

Look at this one, its wings are hardly even there. Weirdness. :-)

The otters, Lutra lutra, were of course adorable. Squee. :-)

A couple of green iguanas, Iguana iguana, in the rainforest house where I sought shelter from the rain.

Aww. I so agree, we can't imagine what it must have been like. But I almost wish we could. :-)

A sloth, Folivora, still in the rainforest house. In Norwegian these animals are called dovendyr, which means lazy animal. V. appropriate. :-)

After the rain let up, I left the rainforest house and made my way towards the African section. Where so many fascinating animals were on display!! Warthogs, giraffes! Zebras and hunting dogs! Okapis and toilets! Wheee!!!

An African warthog, Phacochoerus africanus. A face only a mother could love.

One of the giraffes, Giraffa camelopardalis, really wanted to go outside, but for some reason they weren't allowed to. Maybe it was too cold ... but on the other hand the door was partly open, letting the temperature in, so I'm not sure that makes sense. o_O

Oh, for the great outdoors ... !!

Carcassonne 2009: London Zoo, part 1

I mentioned that I travelled to France via England, and met up with Anne Ida in London. I spent a day in the city on my own before meeting up with her and our friends that she was staying with, and I decided to spend that day at the zoo. :-) I'm not a big fan of London and I wanted to find just one place where I could spend the whole day and just more or less relax ... so I picked the zoo. Where of course I took lots and lots of pictures. :-)

From the Aquarium ... which is the oldest of its kind in the entire world, in fact. Many pretty waterscapes. :-)

And some very pretty fish, like this one. I love the colors ... and it also had a gorgeous iridescence that doesn't really show up in the photo ... but it was quite beautiful.

Some really wonderful setups to be seen ...

Raja, the zoo's Komodo dragon, Varanus komodoensis. Paz, he seems a bit lazy, doesn't he? ;-)

The zoo has added three Gálapagos tortoises, Geochelone nigra, to their collection this year as part of their celebration of the Darwin bicentennial.

Zaïre, the matriarch of the zoo's troop of western lowland gorillas, Gorilla gorilla gorilla. She was eating something and quite busy with that, so seeing her up close was out of the question.

But Effie, the other adult female in the troop, was sitting by the glass watching us watching her. Oh, look at her face, it breaks my heart. :-( I do enjoy zoos if they're well constructed and maintained, but deep down I always know that it just isn't right. :-( Except at the Nordic Ark ... :-)

A lazy tiger, Panthera tigris sumatrae. In fact they have two. :-)

Some ... pigs ... of some kind ... Wild boar from somewhere. I honestly don't remember exactly what these were. :-) But this is a pretty good shot. And it's interesting to think that our domesticated pigs probably were something like this once ... :-)

An eastern white pelican, Pelecanus onocrotalus, grooming itself.

Adult large flamingos, Phoenicopterus roseus ...

... and a flamingo baby. Aww. :-)

Feeding time in the penguin pond. The one getting all the attention is Ricky the Rockhopper ... I already posted a picture of him. He was just too cute. :-)

I mean, just look at him. :-D

This twolegs seems to be in possession of MAH BUKKIT!!!

Carcassonne 2009: Leaving Norway

So, we travelled to France via England ... and, boringly, we did not travel together. Anne Ida went to England a week ahead of me, because her best friend lives in London and it was her 30th birthday that week. So she went there to celebrate with her, and we met up in London on Thursday, August 6th, after I'd travelled from Oslo to Torp Airport in Sandefjord and from there to Stansted all on my lonesome. I was bored. But at least I got a window seat. So I made this video. Pointless or what. Don't worry, there's better stuff coming up ... !! ;-)

Oh, all the things I've seen ... !!

I'm back home, although not for long. I'll get to that. Just let me say that I've had a wonderful trip and I'm so happy that we didn't just talk about this, but actually made it happen. :-) Anne Ida, thanks for sharing this great experience with me. :-)

It's only been a week, but I've seen so much ... !!!

I've seen my first ever pancake tortoise in real life. It looked fascinating, even more so - unsurprisingly, of course - than in the pictures that I've seen.

I've seen an animal I never knew existed, the Himalayan newt. These little critters were just too adorable. I wanted to break the glass down and take them with me. This picture doesn't even do them justice. I have a video coming up that will show what I mean much better. Just too cute for words. :-)

We've seen the Canal du Midi, a marvel of engineering which nine days ago neither one of us (ie, Anne Ida and me ;-) even knew existed.

We've seen strange and wonderful flowers and plants. :-)

We've seen kangaroos!! :-D

We've seen not one, not two, but three amazing cemeteries, whole little cities of the dead. As un-Norwegian as it can possibly get.

And of course, we've seen the gorgeous, beautiful, amazing, astonishing old town of Carcassonne - la Cité.

This was our first glimpse of it. I had the great good luck to be able to take this shot through the window of our plane, even though I wasn't sure when I would see it or even if I would, and I only had a moment in which to take a picture. What a sight from so far away.

And even more impressive up close. We've seen it!! :-D

And of course, we have played Carcassonne in Carcassonne ... !

The trip home was kind of exhausting ... it took so long, even though the distance isn't that great. We had to change planes at Stansted, that awful, awful place, and our stopover was about four hours. (Actually more like five, but we got delayed in France, big surprise.) So, not long enough to leave the airport and actually do anything, but long enough to get soundly bored. And since they constantly changed the gates on us we didn't really get to settle down to wait anywhere either. Plus of course we had to wait in long lines lots of times. What fun. We left our hotel at 11:45am, yet by the time we touched down in Sandefjord the time was nearing 10:30pm. Whew. Fortunately Anne Ida's parents were waiting for us with their car ready to whisk us off to their cabin just outside of town. It was great to get to stay the night with them and not have to go all the way to Oslo ... we wouldn't have gotten there till past midnight. So it was good to put that off till today. We took the train back to the city and I got home at about 4pm. Whew, again. The turtles were fine, the little guys were happy to see me and Raphael quite skeptical (although he did come out into the living room to look for his dinner eventually ;-). I'm kind of sad to have to leave them again so soon. They may not miss me, but I miss them. :-)

My vacation isn't over, though - I'm leaving tomorrow for another week, or thereabouts. I will be spending it at our cabin in the mountains ... so I've got my fingers crossed for nice weather. I'm sure it won't be anything like what we had in the south of France, of course, but I'm hoping for a few sunny days at least. :-)

A few blog posts will probably pop up, but apart from that I really will be incommunicado this time. Kind of a relief. And as picturesque as that landscape is, I don't think I will be taking more than 2,500 pictures and videos in a week ... o_O

When I get back I will finally have time to check out everybody's blogs and whatnot. Thanks for stopping by here. I hope you're all enjoying your summer. :-)

We're here!!

Alive and well but having trouble with this damn French keyboard. :-D

Big thanks to KAS and trilltrall for feeding the turtles!!

Anne Ida says hi to whoever. :-)

I've taken SO MANY PICTURES... !! o_O

By the time you read this ...

... I'll be here:

OK, so, obviously, not here, but here. :-) Anne Ida and I will be there - here - for a week, till Friday the 14th. We'll be playing Carcassonne in Carcassonne. That's pretty much all the plans we have. But I'm sure we'll think of something. :-)

There will be a few updates while I'm gone, not sure how interesting they'll be, but, well, everything slows down when it's vacation time. :-) I can't promise I'll manage to post anything while I'm in France, but we'll see. I certainly have plans for a very silly post when I get back. ;-)