Anniversary, voting, Chinese medicine and dumplings

I've just been to see a Chinese doctor. He was about 200 years old and checked my pulse and my tongue. Apparently I'm okay. However, he is an expert on excema and so took a good look at my hands and prescribed a remedy. Walking around the dispensary afterward and noting the "deer penis" and the "Tibetan Rhubarb Tea for Hemmorrhoids", I was a tad nervous about what was in the prescription, but Sha has just translated the ingredients as: nosed pit viper grass, cyathula, plantain, manyflower glorybower, salvia, escallonia 'red dream', virgin: radix rehmanniae, phellodendron amurense, Kam tree, Health Gardenia, Dictamni and Rhizoma Imeratae. So that's all right then!

I've just discovered from a 17th Century astrologer a whole heap of interesting facts about plantain: ""The clarified juice drank for a few days helps excoriations or pains in the bowels, and distillations, of rheum from the head. It stays all manner of fluxes, even women's courses, when too abundant, and staunches the too free bleeding of wounds.
The seed is profitable against dropsey, falling-sickness, yellow jaundice and stoppings of the liver and reins."

Unfortunately searching for "nosed pit viper grass" just gives me photos of snakes.

Anyway, I haven't drunk this stuff yet. We had to walk around the City for a few hours while they prepared it. Apparently I have a weeks worth of medicine and have to drink it twice a day starting after dinner tonight.

I also voted today. Very exciting. Australian voting is, unlike places like Britain and Canada, actually fair. First, voting is compulsory so I had to wait in a long queue before I could cast my vote and second, it is based on a preferential system where you rank all the candidates. I discovered that ranking the Australian Sex Party, Communist Alliance, The Climate Sceptics and the Christian democratic party was actually really hard. Worryingly, the Australian Sex Party ended up reasonably high up on the list. A magnificent summary of the election from the Taiwanese News Service is on youtube here!!

Sha and I had an anniversary last weekend!! We've been together for one year. It seems as if a lot has happened since I met Sha in Beijing!! :) Sha was incredibly generous and bought me a posh pulsar watch. Apparently it is traditional to "give the time" to someone on their anniversary. We then went and had dinner in the revolving restaurant at the top of the huge Sydney tower. The views were spectacular. After dinner we "accidentally" got lost and found ourselves in the movie theatre where we had an immersive experience in which our chairs bounced around as we virtually flew across the Australian landscapes. Very impressive, but probably would have been better before all the food!

I also went to Perth for a few days. PULSE@Parkes went really well and Rob and I managed to get some work done between discovering the various pubs and restaurants.

Time to eat some dumplings!