Beach – Page 2 – a cooking pot and twisted tales

Today’s echoes experienced an unexpected delay because I’ve been on a road trip and for some reason, my photos couldn’t load up on my pad. My apologies.

On Thursday’s, I share pictures about ‘Echos of my Neighbourhood.

I would like to invite you to participate. The challenge is quite simple.

Every Thursday, share a photo of bits and pieces of wherever you are at any point in time. It could be a house, backgrounds of your neighbourhood, activities and so forth and you can tag it Echos of my Neighbourhood, add my link to your post so that I will get the ping from your post.

Every other Thursday, I will publish a post with the links of all those who participated the previous week.

This is just a fun way of getting to see more of the World around us through your eyes since we cannot all be at those places, we could, at least, see them through you.

Watching them off-load made me think of smugglers and pirates 😉

Last weekend found us visiting Ajman which is one of the Emirates (the smallest member State) that makes up UAE which comprises of 7 Emirates.

It’s a leisurely one-hour straight drive from Dubai if there’s no traffic, so it’s easily a day trip of 2-3 hours to and fro, but to enjoy the benefits of the pristine Gulf as well as getting a feel of the Emirate, an overnight stay wouldn’t be a bad idea.

A direct opposite of Dubai’s energetic pulse, it’s calm and much slower. Good for a quiet family weekend away.

There are several beautiful hotels to choose from, though we got a deal at Kempinski by making an early booking.

Last Week Echoes took us to different neighbourhoods, hop on let’s go see and we will be glad to see some of yours.

Giggles and Tales You’ve got to love Europe’s architecture and it’s passion for cycling. I remember my awe years ago, the first time I visited Amsterdam and saw all the bikes at a bike station.

Spring is in the air The only words to describe this is ‘gorgeous and fabulous’ 🙂

Boys come out to play Boy’s will be boys no matter how small they are 😉

Mercury Colliding Kat has a nice fairy that works very hard. I wouldn’t mind one myself.

Earnestly Debra joins us with a sea ferry, whale watching adventure that I wouldn’t mind experiencing.

Munich Lady Lee shows us spots of Munich through her lens and a sumptuous meal to go with it.

Do show us just a peek of your neighbourhood, please 🙂

Until Thursday, next week, have a good weekend.

For ease during our road trips, we use:Garmin nüvi 2597LMT 5-Inch Portable Bluetooth Vehicle GPS with Lifetime Maps and Traffic

Below is my first Poetry Book “Out of the silent breath” which is available on Amazon and Smashwords.

When you buy my book, you support me in an invaluable manner.

Out of the silent breath

Jacqueline Oby-Ikocha’s poems portray images that stare us right in the face. Images of love, joy, death, pain, challenges, violation, and freedom. She writes in a language that’s rich in imagery, earthy, honest, vulnerable, yet full of the promise of hope, of loving and of Grace. A collection of light and dark soulful prose.

Water. What an apt theme for today’s Photo 101 course. It’s raining quite sensibly over here, with the rumbles of thunder growling in the background and there’s something about the elements that makes me feel so alive.

My mind is lost in a maze of thoughts and feelings as I tap to the drip-drop of the rainfall and the rumbles. It simply makes me want to chatter over a nice cup of coffee.

It reminds me of naked and carefree days as a child dancing with glee in the rain and singing ‘rain, rain, go away,’ with my siblings and the neighbours kids, to our mothers dismay when they eventually caught us.

Rainy days reminds me of early days of learning to give myself a bath as a kid and my concentration point was to scrub my tummy over and over until my mother took over the sponge and gave such a thorough scrubbing that left me squeaky clean with tingling skin.

It takes me back to years gone by, of putting plastic pails under the corrugated zinc roof, to collect pools of water from the rain due to the epileptic service of the water taps.

The days of going up and down the slippery, clay slope that led to the village stream with swinging kegs to fetch water for my grandma’s big pitchers pass through my mind. We would wade in and splash around in the stream before finding our way home, but my dalliance with water of deep depths was rudely brought to a stop one day, when a water snake came gliding by as we frolicked.

It scared the blinking daylights out of me. Hurtling out of the stream, my wading days in untamed water was over. I DESPISE snakes!!

I do love to wallow in the pool or the jacuzzi, when I get the chance, but I keep away from the deep end.

I know my paranoia comes from an incident back in the days, of witnessing a young man disappear into the waters of Tarkwa Bay in Lagos and was never found again.

This paranoia got further cemented with the loss of my brother-in-law to the cold, watery fingers of a lake in Ontario, Canada four years ago.

Nonetheless, I made sure to teach my children to swim and we dally with water with a lot of respect. At the beach, we only pluck our butts on the sand, play and maybe allow our toes to get wet. No more, no less.

It’s needless to say that human life cannot exist without this liquid essence.

My photos come from different places, and most times I take a landscape/horizontal shots for a wider perspective.