Old post of the botanical gardens!

Hi, Marc again.  I have some photos that I wanted to add to Mandy's post of the St. Andrew's Botanical Gardens.

So, I recently got a new phone.  It has an amazing camera on it.  One of the nifty features of the phone is it takes 3D photos.  So, if you can find some red/cyan glasses and look at these photos:

Alternatively, it has the option of using stereoscopic flashing optical illusion seen below to produce the 3d image.  But note: it may make you dizy look at it!

Welsh Mountain Zoo!

Hi there all! Another post by Marc here.  I travelled to the Welsh Mountain Zoo for research.  It is an interesting small zoo.  They seem to focus on primates.  The zoo is a bit old... but they are making some amazing improvements.  The improvements are slow, but understandable because they are a small zoo.  The most interesting thing they had at the zoo was their lemur exhibit.  It was well designed.

See, very nice design.  Lots of climbing spaces.

 The nifty part of the exhibit is the lemurs had a yard they could come out into with people (they had zoo employees on hand to watch the guest).  

 The above photos are of their chimp outdoor enclosure.  It is okay.  Lots of climbing spaces and hiding spaces for the chimps.  In addition, the guest could view from either at the bottom of the hill (first photo) or overhead (second photo).  Their chimps are no longer breeding quality because they have been determined to be mixed species.  The enclosure could use with some updating and repair work (one of the glass windows was cracked).

 These photos are of their penguins.  This is a problem enclosure, but they know this.  It is old (70s) and slated for updating.  Major problem, how close people can get without supervision. 

One of the best qualities of the zoo was their horticulture.  It was amazing!

So that was the Welsh Mountain Zoo!

Tentsmuir

A few miles outside of St. Andrews is the Tentsmuir forest.  It is a large natural park with lots of hiking trials, and goes right along the beach.  It is also a great place to see seals hauled out from a distance (however you need a good pair of bins!)  When we went it was really windy, and the sand moved out in front of us like a fog.  Beautiful!

Introducing Laurel and Togo

I have been lucky enough to begin work with the St. Andrews aquarium, with four harbor seals to play with.  At the moment Laurel, a 24 year old female, and Togo, a 2 year old male, are residing at the aquarium.  However later in September two new arrivals will be coming in from a facility shutting down in Denmark.  And most exciting is that it is a mother and her 4 week old pup!  She is also Togo's mother, so it will be a family reunion.

St Andrews Botanical Gardens

I finally got around to visiting the botanical gardens in St Andrews.  It is massive, lots of hiking trials, very lovely.  And the sun does come out occasionally in Scotland!

Fringe shows

Marc and I are enjoying the fringe this year.  Marc has enjoyed the festival the past few years, but I have not been in Edinburgh during August yet to enjoy it.  City centre is absolutely insane; trying to walk down the royal mile is impossible there are just to many people.

Our first show was a gift from a man marc met on the train.  When Marc had travelled down to Cornwall for his school project with the seal sanctuary, he met the coordinator for a fringe show.   He brought the most talented art students (junior high to high school age) from Shanghai here to put on a show.   I was blown away by how much they did; before the show the students made arts and crafts (such as painting fans, making cards) and gave them away to the audience.  They provided food and drink.  During the show they did everything; lots of traditional dancing, song, played their own instruments, and even had visual arts of painting and cutting figures out of paper on stage.  And at the end of the night they gave away all their props (like Chinese knots) as it was a one night show.

They were very talented, and gave so much for the audience in the show.  Fantastic :)

We have also been hopping around all the 'free' (meaning donation based) comedy shows.  Really funny stuff.  And tons of it.  You can spend all day and night just going show to show.  There are hundreds of veneus, don't know how they find all these show spaces just for August.  They have been in cool places though; there were a few held in some of the vaults under the city.  

The paid shows are also nice.  Tickets are not to pricey, and at least they are not quite so crowded.  We went and saw the show 'bookworm' which was about the ultimate book club put together by the actress who played lavender brown on harry potter.  She is just as energetic in her show as she was in the movie.

The book festival starts next week, and there will be fringe shows all of august so we will be busy this month ^_^

Royal Edinburgh Military Tattoo

My (early) birthday present from Marc was to go and see the Royal Military Tattoo.  We had unbelievable seats...facing the castle, with disability seating below us so there was a completely unobscured view.  It was jammed packed even though it was a preview night, and the media were invited.  They were running around on the floor trying to get shots of the performers throughout, and almost got run over by the pipers a few times when they didn't move fast enough!

The United States was well represented by the Navy's group, they are very talented musicians.  However I wasn't as thrilled with the theme...superhereos.  The played the theme music for popeye, dennis the menace (a superhero?), batman, and spiderman.  Throughout the castle was used as a screen to display images of the heroes....for batman they turned the castle into gotham.  It seemed tacky, but the crowd loved it.