Corner View - Traditional Architecture

The photos show three examples of traditional Omani architecture. The first is the onion-domed tomb of Bin Ali, the second is of wooden-fronted merchants' houses on the harbourside at Muscat while the third is an adobe house at Mirbat, not far from Salalah.

Corner View - Miniature Worlds

The theme of this week's Corner View is Miniature Worlds., and it made me think of small animals and insects, like the coatis and butterflies, especially the 88 Butterfly, Diaethria eluina, which I saw by the majestic Iguazu Falls on the border of Argentina and Brazil. In so many ways, the insect world going on beneath our feet seems to mirror our own. As a boy, I was fascinated by the lives of ants, and used to spend hours in the back garden watching them. They cultivate miniature crops, keep greenflies as domestic animals, fight orgainized wars, carry their dead home and so much more, and numerically there are more of them in an acre than there are humans in the whole world.