The end of summer

The US has gone on Daylight Savings Time, and we're about to go off of it. The upside down seasons are still one of the strangest aspects of living in the Southern Hemisphere. It's mid-March, and the signs of the end of summer are everywhere here. The nights are cooler, the days are shorter, and some trees are just beginning to get tinges of yellow. I keep thinking the roses will stop blooming so profusely, but they are still beautiful. The first photo shows the roses in front of the Catholic church a couple blocks from our house, and the second photo shows some roses in front of the train station.

I took the next photo in a downtown mall, and the flowers look like the kinds of flowers I see in flower shops in Seattle during the fall.

Dave's been trekking around town taking photos of things he might want to paint. He really likes First Presbyterian Church, a big, old downtown church with a pretty amazing spire. Three Presbyterian congregations meet in the building, an aging mostly white congregation, a Cook Island congregation, and a Samoan congregation. That gives you a bit of the flavor of the cultural diversity here.

Dave also spent a day at the harbor (or harbour) taking pictures. He's got a fixation with boats in dry dock, as you'll see in the third and fourth photos. He keeps taking pictures of them, thinking he's going to paint them, and I keep wondering why.

One of the main museums in town has a butterfly exhibit going on right now. The last butterfly exhibit I walked through was at the Woodland Park Zoo in Seattle a few years ago. Somehow it was poignant to have a butterfly exhibit here, too. Perhaps it was because there are so many things in New Zealand that are different than life in Seattle, and this was one thing that was similar.