Thomas Locke Hobbs
| Currently: Buenos Aires |
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| A stall in Marrakech's spice market. If you buy any, they don't take it from the cones, they have a separate bag. |
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| Perhaps my favorite thing in Marrakech were the stands that sold fresh, squeezed orange juice for only 30 cents a glass. Totally unrelated to Morocco, I found out some more information on Brazilian Graffiti. I put links to more photos in two posts from July 05 and Sept 05. |
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| Food stalls in the Djemma-el-fna in Marrakech. I had a bowl of lentil soup for 60 cents. The stands serving tajine & cous-cous only had tourists. The locals went for cheaper fare; lentil & trip soup, goat heads, saussages and snail soup (mmmm). Aftewards I had the most amazing, spicy, ginger & cinnamon tea. |
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| A seller of sweets in the souk of Marrakech. I paid for 400g which seemed too much (I couldn't see the scale). I decided if I was going to get ripped off I should get a photo out of the experience. The sweets were delicious, at least. |
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| Above Granada, in the Sierra Nevada mountains are these small, whitewashed villages called the Alpujarras. They were the last redoubt of the Moors after 1492 and the villages resemble those in Northern Morocco. |
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| The Alhambra, the Patio de los Leones in the Palacio Nasarid, to be exact. I got there first thing and, being low season, managed to take this utterly postcard-ish picture with only a few tourists in the background. The Alhambra is one of those places that absolutely lives up to its reputation. Macchu Picchu was another. |
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| Ceiling in the Mudejar style from the Alcazar in Sevilla. The palace was built by a Christian king in the 14th century using artisan labor from Islamic Granada. The landscape of Andalucia reminded of California--they're both Mediterreanean, in Andalucia's case literally. Even some of the weeds were the same as my Mom's garden. |
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| 10 hours by train from Barcelona to Cordoba. This photo is from the mosque/cathedral and shows the dome covering the maqsura, the very ornate part where the ruler would pray. |
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| Leaving Luc and his grandma behind in Toulouse I hopped on a Eurolines bus for six hours to Barcelona where I partied for three days. On Sunday, feeling guilty about my lack of sightseeing, I took the metro up to Antonio Gaudi's Parc Guell where I snapped this photo of a friendly lizard. |
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| A delapidated country house in the Armangac region of France. I'm always amazed when places turn out to be as charming as they're reputed to be. |
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| Dead ducks at a poultry market in Samatan, a small village west of Toulouse. I spent five days in the region with my friend Luc, who's from Toulouse. He took many more gory duck pictures for his blog. |
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| Roman mosaic in Nimes. Nimes was obviously a big place in Roman times if they built the Pont du Gard (below) to supply its water. The arquealogical museum is dim, underfunded, and absolutely cluttered with an abundance of Roman statues, mosaics, objects and inscribed blocks (gravestones?). My sense is that you can dig down anywhere in central Nimes and find something, probably another mosaic. |
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| A very postcard-y shot of the Pont du Gard, this massive Roman Aqueduct outside of Nimes. Traveling around the south of France without a car is not convienient. There were two buses the whole day from Avignon. Luckily I was heading on to Nimes and only had to wait an hour for the bus onwards instead of six for the return. It was chilly but sunny. The place, probably the most spectacular piece of Roman engineering anywhere, was deserted. I was literally the only tourist there for the first hour. |
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| Happy New Year everybody. I guess it's back to boring architecture shots. This is from the Papal Palace in Avignon. |
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 | For more about me, please go visit my old geocities page. |