Shirley and Alan's Weblog

Blue Mountains Getaway

We spent the weekend up in the Blue Mountains. A little bit of walking... a lot of eating!

To see the evidence look here

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Seattle 2008

Photos from our 2 month stay in Seattle can be found here

Olympic Peninsula weekend

A selection of photo from our weekend on the Olympic Peninsula can be found here

Weekend in Vancouver

Our trip to Vancouver is documented in this Souvenir Book (22 MB). A selection of our favourite photos are here

Braga, Portugal

Shirley attended ETAPS 2007 which was held in Braga, Portugal. You can see a selection of the photos that she took in this beautiful city.

Trip to India and Israel

This summer Alan and Shirley again visited Alan's colleagues at IIT Bombay and then continued to Israel for a wonderful 16 day holiday. Okay, okay, Alan also gave 4 talks at 3 institutions - but we still had a lot of fun catching up with friends and family and it still felt like a holiday! You can see the pictures from India as well as some of the ones from Israel.

Cremorne Point, Sydney

Today we strolled along Cremorne Point and enjoyed the spring sunshine.

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Trip to India

From December 18th till January 15th Alan and Shirley travelled through India. After a stop-over in Mumbai, we attended a conference in Hyderabad, then holidayed in Delhi and Aurangabad and then spent two weeks visiting academic colleagues at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) in Mumbai. For pictures and details see the individual day's log entries starting here.

Downtown Mumbai

While staying at IITB we took a little timeout to explore downtown Mumbai.

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Visit to IITB

For the next two weeks we visited the IT department of the Indian Insitute of Technology in Mumbai.

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The IT department building is situated just minues walk away making life on campus very convenient and relaxed.

Ellora

Ellora caves feature temples of faiths from Buddhist through Hindu to Jain. They are not painted like the Ajanta caves, however they feature examples of both the "Cut-in" and "Cut-out" method of carving.

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Wedding Anniversay

We celebrated our second wedding anniversary with a quiet, relaxed day at our hotel in Aurangabad.

Ajanta Caves

On the 28th of December we flew to Aurangabad which was the jumping point for visisting Ajanta and Ellora cave temples.

]]> The Ajanta caves were carved out of a hillside from 200 to 700 C.E. and many were very beautifully painted. Some caves were designed as temples for Buddhist worship and others had cells for the monks to live in. These caves were abandoned for the later Ellora caves and rediscovered in about the 1850's.

Lodi Gardens

For today's adventure we didn't need to go far. The Lodi gardens are situated just a little up the road from the guest house in which we were staying and we could get there without crossing any major roads!

The gardens are beautiful and peaceful particularly in te early morning and late afternoons. We walked all around the gardens and saw the 15 and 16th centuary tombs which loom out from the grass and trees.

	Shish Gumbad late 15th century
	Inside the tomb of Sikandar Lodi built in 1517
	Alan in front of the tomb Muhammad Shah built in 1434

Day trip to Agra

Whilst we were staying in Delhi we took a day trip with our friend Sanjay to Agra to see the Taj Mahal and Fatehpur Sikri, two of the wonders of the world.

Fatepur Sikri was built as an imperial capital by the Moghul emperor Akbar between 1569 and 1585. Akbar was the grandfather of Shah Jahan who built the Taj Mahal as a tomb for his wife in 1632 to 1653. These two sites are located about 40km apart and make a wonderful contrast to each other.

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The Taj Mahal





	"The philosophers walk"

Fatehpur Sikri