Flower, Pool, & Tree

 Happy Valentine's Day! 

These are frangipani or plumeria. They are quite common here, but we had never seen them growing before.

 Frangipani grow in many of the yards here, including our own. They are a bit like rhododendron in New Haven - leggy or "architectural" (depending on your point of view). Then once in a while you see one and realize how stunning the entire plant can be. We saw the frangipani above on the way to Sylvia's swimming lesson yesterday.

Here she is with her swimming teacher. The pool is Olympic-sized. If you are swimming laps, you are supposed to sort yourself into the proper lane according to speed. We have discovered that people have widely variable interpretations of "slow" and "medium." 

The locker design is very functional and none of us had seen it before. It has shelves and room to hang up a shirt and jacket. To lock and unlock it, you key in whatever four numbers your want without using coins. Nifty.


Remember Aussies like abbreviations and diminutives? Well, even on their insignia above the pool, they abbreviate "university."

On the way home we stopped at a cemetery near our house where an enormous fig tree grows.
The tree was planted in 1848.

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Right now we're reading The Enchanted Forest by Enid Blyton. Looking at this fig tree makes magic trees seem very realistic. Off the top of my head, I can think of Yggdrasil (the tree that held together the world in Norse mythology), The Magic Treehouse books, and The Swiss Family Robinson which didn't have a magic tree, but did have a magical-seeming treehouse. If you think of any other stories about enchanted, powerful trees, please let us know.