Barcelona: The Aquarium 1

One of the many tourist attractions and one the kids insist on visiting every time is the Aquarium. It has a lot of thematic basins, but of course the main attraction is big shark tank with the glass tunnel. Seriously, how anybody can think of sharks as monsters after seeing them will be eternally lost on me.

Pictures are a bit on the poor side, because the light is always low and a good camera needs good light.

Shark swimming through water.

©Giliell, all rights reserved

Shark in water

©Giliell, all rights reserved

Shark in water

©Giliell, all rights reserved

The Daily Bird #780

We’ve been neglecting the Daily Bird, which is a thing that cannot be.

So here’s a gorgeous Sardinian Warbler for you.

The funny thing about shooting with the 600mm lense is that I sometimes don’t even know what I’m shooting and only find out at home when I look at the pics on the computer screen.

Small bird sitting on a fence

Sardinian Warbler
©Giliell, all rights reserved

Fleckchen

As you may remember, our lovely bunny Pünktchen died some weeks ago, and of course, the first thing my dad did when he returned from their holiday was to take the little one to the breeder to get a new one. The guy breeds bunnies for shows, so those who don’t fit his breeding needs are sold as pets, which shows again that those things are stupid as the new bunny is the cutest.

So here’s the first pics of the new family member. Let’s start with Molli, being very hot and not suspecting that life would change again.

 

Brown rabbit dozing in the shade

Effin’ heat wave when you’re wearing a fur coat.
©Giliell, all rights reserved

And here he is, Fleckchen.

Brown and white bunny

©Giliell, all rights reserved

Face of brown and white bunny

©Giliell, all rights reserved

Face of brown and white bunny

Isn’t he pretty?
©Giliell, all rights reserved

Translating his name got me thinking again. Now, first of all, in German we make things small by adding -chen, which doesn’t always work in English. While you get a baby and a kitty, you don’t have a “cary”, meaning a little toy car. Now, the former bunny was “Pünktchen”. A “Punkt” can be a dot, but also a spot, which would be the more usual term for describing an animal’s coat. A “Fleck” is something like a larger dot. It can be a spill on your clothing, but also the colouring of an animal, so now I have two rabbits named for their coat and they could both be translated as the same word in English. So I went with “Patches” because his coat looks more like a patchwork blanket.

Brown and brown and white rabbit, separated through a fence

Molli and Fleckchen
©Giliell, all rights reserved

Here you can see the first contact between the two, with Fleckchen being in his temporary enclosure, from which he escaped the next day. Thankfully he#s still too young for making baby rabbits.

Jack’s Walk

Red Admiral butterfly, ©voyager, all rights reserved

Red Admiral, underside, ©voyager, all rights reserved

The weather here was a bit strange last week. We had very high humidity and bouts of rain, but it was cool making it feel more like late spring than the middle of July. I’m not really complaining, cool is definitely better than sweltering, but it was weird. Today, though, things seem to have reset. The humidity is mostly gone, there isn’t a cloud in the sky and the temp has climbed into the mid-twenties and seems to be staying there. This is what I call a perfect day. So does Jack, who had a welcome spring in his step this morning.

Barcelona: The City 2: La Plaza Catalunya

The centre of Barcelona is the Plaza Catalunya. Lined on one side by the traditional Corte Inglés shopping centre and start of the Rambla, the main boulevard, there’s a snowball’s chance in hell you’ll miss it. Most tourist buses start and stop there (our shuttle bus from the camp site dropped us off there and picked us up, and so did most others), the hop on- hop off buses stop there, the metro lines do, the regional train station is under it.

Above it are the pigeons.

Water fountain by night, brightly lit.

The fountain by night.
©Giliell, all rights reserved

 

Water fountain in daylight.

The fountain by day.
©Giliell, all rights reserved

Pigeon bathing in a water fountain.

Did I say fountain? What I meant was “pigeon bath”.
©Giliell, all rights reserved

Pigeons in a tree.

How many pigeons can you count?
©Giliell, all rights reserved