Lizard Man's Travels

This site is a journal of my travels and other adventures while I shift from doing postdoctoral research on tree frog ecology in Darwin, Australia, to research on digestive physiology of lizards and bats in Sede Boqer, Israel. Enough friends have been asking me for regular updates on this journey, that I thought this would be the best forum to keeep everyone up to date (including me).

Monday, January 03, 2005

New Year's weather

Welcome to 2005 - a whole new year for the taking. The last one has certainly been eventful. For me, I started 2004 in Fort Collins with a party of old friends. Then off to a meeting, back to Australia, a bit of research, then back to the US for a grand tour, then to Sweden, and finally to Israel. It also saw some amazing elections - Afganistan, Australia, US, Ukraine - some incredible natural disasters - 3 hurricanes in a month in Florida, the recent tsunami in southern Asia. Quite a year.

This year started with a good Israeli-style party. We had a DJ, baloons, lots of sparklers, and several hours of pop music from at least 4 continents. The ebb and flow of different dance styles was interesting. There is a sizeable eastern European contingent here, and there was a fair bit of their dance style for a while. That was followed by a round of Indian pop, which got the Indian contingent dancing (of course the eastern Europeans didn't stop, they just moved to the side a bit). Then the S. American music started, and merengue-like dancing ruled the floor (surrounded by Indian and eastern European dancing). At the end, it was a mix of western European and US pop, and general pop bouncing-dancing mayhem.

At midnight, the room - the Blaustein Center's seminar room - exploded. Not quite literally, but there were a lot of sparklers, and some sort of sparkler-torch-flame thrower-things. Anyway, the room filled with smoke and suddenly there was a lot of liquid on the floor. I'm not entirely sure whether it was champagne or that we set off the sprinklers - could have been either. There was the usual New Year's countdown (in several languages at once), big cheers, good-luck kissing, back-slapping, and some genuine tears (probably from the smoke). Turns out it was also the birthday of one woman from Turkey, so we followed the New Years mayhem with a rousing rendition of Happy Birthday (in somewhat garbled english, with a few other languages sprinkled in for texture). All in all a good time.

New Year's day was gloriously sunny (much to the chagrin of some of the revellers, I'm sure) and unusually warm. I decided to take the day off, so sat on my porch in the sun and read a book (thanks, Jane - Mrs. Pollifax is a good read!). That's about all I accomplished on Saturday. Oh, and I waxed my hat. In the evening, we had a showing of "Los diarios motorcycletas", the story about Che Guevara and his motorcycle tour of South America in the early 1950's. Interesting movie. I quickly learned that the spanish that I've been picking up is totally useless for an Argentinian accent (and slang). Oh well. I could understand the Chileanos and the Peruvians, though, so that's a start.

Today we had another change in the weather. It was windy and cloudy today, and late in the afternoon, we got a lot of rain. It was enough to make a much-anticipated flood in the wadi below town. The flash floods here are pretty amazing. Lots of water rushes through the streambeds, and then is gone. I almost missed it. Unfortunately, it happened after dark, so it was hard to see. I walked down the hill and at the bottom, there was a lot of very muddy water, moving very quickly. And a crowd of people watching it. The water was pretty amazing - because of the soils around here (mostly loess), the water had the consistency of a good cup of tea, with milk. it was uniformly brown, but the particles are so fine that you don't really notice them in the water. Very interesting. I walked around a bit in the mud, and then headed back. In the 30 minutes or so that I was there, the water had dropped significantly, and I'd guess that it would have dropped to a tiny trickle in another 30-40 minutes.

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