My goldfish pond

[tbendl]

Lots of great friendly people on here.

No we're not! RUN AWAY RUN AWAY... Hehe

 

[CometKeith]

CE, you are too funny. Well I remember the first time Colleen posted on GPF. She posted on my little thread too with all her pictures and eventually she made her own thread. Tbendl. Good luck with all your baby fish. I hope they turn into nice colors. Well how to you spell sad? Cubbies..... Down 6-1 in the 5th and facing elimination

 

[CometKeith]

We have had a few visitors lately to the pond. A little over a week ago there was a coyote sunbathing next to the pond. The other day a possum jumped in it and ran out when he saw me,but thankfully it looks like he didn't eat any fish, and the other night there was a furry black animal with a white spot sitting on the lounge chair next to the pond. I am guessing it was either a cat or skunk. It seems like besides me there are a lot of animals that like the ambiance of our pond.

 

[CountryEscape]

Wow, this would be really cool in a country setting, Keith, but in your urban setting, it's amazing!!!! That's really neat. I never have animals like that at my pond, guess my dogs keep them away. ;-)

 

[CometKeith]

This year I didn't pull out my biofilter Nov 1st like I usually do because it has been so warm. Well one thing led to another and I kept putting it off and naturally I caught a bad cold the last week and couldn't do it and now snow is expected for this weekend. I hope it doesn't freeze before I can bring it in

 

[CountryEscape]

It may have frozen, but it will have thawed out again, hopefully. Hope you have some nice warm weather for the next couple of days, Keith, and I hope you are feeling better, too!

 

[CometKeith]

Thanks CE. I finally kicked my cold. I was sick almost 2 weeks. I pulled out my pumps and bio-filter the other day, but still need to clean up a bunch of leaves. I should have done it Thursday when it was 24 degrees warmer!

 

[CometKeith]

A nice winter scene from about a month ago when we last had snow!

 

[CometKeith]

Hi all. I haven't posted in a while. I took a trip to India this winter with my family. It's a very interesting country and very different from any place else I've been. Lots and lots of people everywhere and lots of vehicles on the roads all honking their horns at each other.The people there go out of their way to make sure tourists are welcome. Here are a few pictures.

 

[Meyer Jordan]

Great photos! Must have also been a great trip. Photo #10 looks like a photo of one of the famous stepwells of India. Is this the stepwell of Dhabhai? Were you brave enough to descend all of those steps and then climb back out?

 

[CometKeith]

Thanks Meyer. It sounds like you are familiar with India. Have you been there? It is a step well. I am attaching a picture of a plaque there. The steps were fenced so we were unable to go down into it. We stopped there on the way from Jaipur to Agra right after we saw the " Monkey" temple.
It was a pretty amazing trip. We stopped in 8 cities in 3 weeks including Zurich going there and Munich on the way back. Our 22 year old daughter loves to travel and pretty much planned the whole trip for us We started out in Mumbai on New Years Eve and stayed there three days and then flew to Udaipur and from that point on had a driver and car for then next 8 days. The cost for that was about 24,000 Rupees which is about $360. We stopped in Pushkar which has over 400 temples there and everything there is in 6 languages including Hebrew. Rock music of the 1960's is very prevalent there and it was a very unique place. We also went to Jaipur, Agra, Deli, Rishikash, and Haridware. In Jaipur we rode elephants to the top of Agra fort and had a wonderful tour guide explain how the fort was used by Mogul emperors 6 centuries ago. We stayed in the basin of the Himalayas by the Ganges River one night and they had to turn on the electricity for us because it had been turned off. Some of the workers were living in nearby tents and donkeys were the main way of transporting things. We learned a lot about religions there including Hinduism and saw carvings of Shiva that were 1000 years old in Elephanta caves.We also went to several key places where Mehatma Gandhi lived and learned a lot about his life. Overall it was very interesting and educational trip but I probably needed a vacation to recuperate when we came back!
.

 

[Meyer Jordan]

No, Never been to India (or anyplace else of importance). I learned about the stepwells in the course of my research. I would imagine that you and your family suffered a bit of culture shock during this, what had to be, amazing trip. India is an interesting contradiction. It is a democratic nuclear power with a functioning space program, but where the majority of the population does not have access to clean drinking water.

 

[CometKeith]

Yes, there was definitely some culture shock. I never saw 4 people ride on a motorcycle before and amazingly the law makes the driver wear a helmet! re: clean water. I think it is clean to them but our definition of it is a little different. I tried to be careful but my stomach was bothering me for a while after I came home. However my wife and daughter were fine. There were some really nice things too. Typically the Hindus we met in Mumbai all go as a family every day early morning to pray at the temple. Generally the people we met were very nice to tourists. In one busy market some people on the street helped us cross a street that had very busy traffic.I can't say we are all so nice to tourists here!

 

[callingcolleen1]

Wow! Sounds like a very interesting trip to the world's oldest society. We have lots of Indian people living in Medicine Hat now. My new boss is a young newly married Hindi Indian man and his wife makes me some real Indian cooking. Love their spices! They are really nice people with so much interesting culture.

 

[CometKeith]

Colleen the food there was amazing. Every morning the hotels we stayed at would have a large buffet breakfast that was very good and extremely reasonable. They had Asian, American-English, and Indian dishes so there was a lot to choose from. I think the best Chinese food I ever had was in a restaurant in India at a Holiday Inn we stayed at in Jaipur....a really nice Holiday Inn! Another interesting thing we saw was mountains being cut for marble in Rajasthan. There were hundreds of dealers selling slabs of marble on the road we were on and lots of large trucks carrying large chunks of marble to factories.