Excellent animation

As I've mentioned before, we have recently been watching the afternoon kids' shows, mostly animations. One that's for somewhat older kids is called ממלכת אוקיאנה Mamlechet Okiana ("The Kingdom of Oceana"). It's a continued story, much of it set under water, with a number of interesting characters. Yesterday was clearly the final episode, where the main evil character is defeated, and the kingdom returns to peace. Although, in a way, this whole series (or at least all the episodes that we saw) is about an epic battle, but it is almost totally non-violent! The worst that even the most evil character, גלייל Galeil, can do is to zap people, leaving them stunned for a bit but obviously not even seriously injured. At the end, Galeil is defeated by הנסיכה נרי HaNsichah Neri, ("The Princess Neri"), who is clearly the heroine of the whole show. She does this by thinking, together with all the other "good" characters (which is everyone except for Galeil and his main sidekick, Elgar), about the message רק ביחד ננציח rak b'yachad n'natze'ach ("only together will we win"). And, in fact, the previous failures were all clearly due to selfishness on the part of the various characters. This time, they all have the same goal and the same attitude, and Galeil is finally defeated by their cooperation.

The story is engaging and varied enough to keep one interested (even, as in my case, when you don't understand a fair amount of the dialog!), the music is brooding and beautiful, and the settings are imaginative and fanciful. We're hoping that, although yesterday was obviously the final episode, the show will repeat. In fact, with a few more times through the various episodes, I'll probably pick up most of the dialog. There ARE subtitles (in Hebrew), and they help a little, but mostly I can't read fast enough.

One more pleasing aspect of the show: as I mentioned, the heroine is a beautiful princess. Her sidekicks are her little dog, מיקרו Mikro, who has some magic powers and sometimes is really helpful, and her consort, צ'ובה Chuba, who occasionally does something but is actually mostly useless! It's such a refreshing switch from the usually story lines, where the handsome prince does nearly everything, and his female consort is mostly there to look beautiful!

Migrating birds

We went for a walk this afternoon since it was a nice day, albeit a bit cool and breezy. As we were walking down a road not far from here, we heard squawking sounds, causing us to look up. There was a huge flock of cranes, flying north in formation, honking as they went. There were probably about a hundred of them. Before they were even completely out of sight, along came yet another flock, of similar size. What a beautiful sight to see!

Flowers in the Jordan Valley

Yesterday, we traveled to Jerusalem for the bar mitzvah of a friend of ours. We went through the Jordan River Valley, along highway 90. In the narrower part of the valley, we began to see fields of flowers everywhere. Finally, I just HAD to pull over and take a few pictures. Here are a couple of them.

First, a view over one of these fields. All that white that you see is little flowers, thousands of them!
Here's one flower up really close!

Trip to Park Adamit

Yesterday was a beautiful, warm day, so we decided to take a drive to Park Adamit. Here are some pictures that I took.

This first picture was actually taken from our driveway. It's a picture of snow-covered Har Khermon (Mt. Hermon), at the north end of the Golan, in the extreme northeast corner of Israel.

The rest of the pictures were all taken in Park Adamit, not far from the extreme northwest corner of Israel.

Here's a lovely white flower with a yellow center.

The next picture shows one of the main attractions of Park Adamit, the Rainbow Bridge, which is a natural arch along the edge of a cliff.

The next picture is a view of Har Karmel (Mt. Carmel) from Park Adamit. If you look very, very closely, you MAY be able to see that there is a tall building on Har Karmel, a little right from the center of the picture. This is Migdal Eshkol (Eshkol Tower), the main building of the University of Haifa. Incidentally, on a clear day, this building is also visible from Tsfat, from a point (actually MANY points) only a short walk from our house!

Here's a bird who stayed perched in one place long enough for me to get his pictures. Thanks again to the zoom on my camera (and some cropping, of course).

We saw quite a few of these lovely flowers. Perhaps they are irises, or some kind of orchid?

A short walk near our house

Today is a nice day and considerably warmer than it has been recently. So, I grabbed my camera, and we took a very short walk near our house. Here are some pictures that I took along the way.

First, a beautiful orange flower. This one seems to be more common this year than in previous years. It is a very small flower, not even as big as this picture!

Here are some nice little blue flowers that we see occasionally but not too frequently.

Here's a different kind of blue flower.

We see plenty of these lovely yellow flowers.

Here's a nice ladybug that I spotted on a leaf. We see these from time to time here.

Here's a כלנית kalanit (anemone). These are VERY common all over this whole part of the country. With their intense red color, they are also very beautiful!

Here are a horse and a donkey in the newly fenced pasture quite close to our house. Isn't this a nice pose?

Rain and fog and cold!

Yesterday, it started raining, just as predicted. And it has been either raining or foggy or (most of the time) both ever since. Much of the time, the fog has been so heavy that we can barely see across the street! We did make it to Nahariya and back yesterday without any problems, though. I just had to drive more slowly than usual, especially in the areas where the fog was pretty thick.

Today (Shabbat), we're just staying home. This morning I fed the snakes, and this afternoon, I'm relaxing. This weather is now predicted to last at least through tomorrow, and there's even a possibility of rain on Monday and Tuesday. Much as I dislike rain, I have to admit that we REALLY need this, so I won't complain, especially since it's also bringing snow to הר חרמון Har Khermon (Mt. Hermon, the highest point in the country).

The temperatures are staying from just above freezing to about 6˚C (about 43˚F), at least according to the weather forecasts (I don't actually have a thermometer to measure them).

4th post of today's trip -- individual animals

In this post, you'll see pictures of individual animals. All of them are birds except for the last one.

We saw quite a few birds like the one in this picture. They were NOT too shy and let us get fairly close before flying or running away. Still, the zoom was very helpful. :-) I got several nice pictures of them, but this one seemed to me to be the best.

I think that this is the only bird of this species that we saw. I saw it fly over and perch in a tree, and, luckily, my camera was all ready to go, on maximum zoom! I snapped 2 great pictures of it, but I think this one is just slightly better than the other. Isn't this a beautiful bird!

This isn't the most common duck that we saw, but we still did see many of them. I thought that this picture came out exceptionally well.

This bird was standing quite a long way from us, on the other side of the water. Nevertheless, I managed to get this nice shot of both the bird and its reflection, again thanks to the great zoom!

I actually don't know if this bird was about to land or had just taken off. It was just a lucky shot!

Isn't this little guy cute! He's actually about the size of a small cat, but he's really a rodent, called a "coypu". They are originally from South America, where they are valued for their fur. For this reason, they were brought here many years ago. However, because of the warm climate, they don't actually grow that great fur here, so the hopes of the importers were dashed.