Drunk on a Kazak Horse

The view from my hotel room!

Strong spirits, fermented horse milk, a dead sheep and liver kebabs make for an interesting meal.  This combination seems to make you think that heading off through the Kazak scenery with a random chap that you've just met (who has a horse) is a good idea.

Arrival in Nanshan

We had a great day today. A bus picked us up in the morning to take us to the Nanshan observatory.  I saw the largest ground-hog in the World.  And lots of eagles.  We clambered around on the telescope for a while and then continued up into the mountains for lunch with a local family that has known Dick Manchester for 15+ years.  They killed a sheep specially for us and we ate it in their yurt.  Then I got drunk.

Preparing to climb on the telescope

The view from the telescope

Dick walking to lunch

Lunch time!

The freshly killed sheep

The owners of the yurt

Inside our yurt

The "ceiling"

My beautiful horse

Back in Changji

A hole for the largest ground hogs that I've ever seen

Dinner in a hui restaurant in Changji

A journey to where-ever I am

I'm somewhere near Urumqi in the YuanLin Hotel.  Apparently I am a Dear Distinguished Guest.  I even got to stand on a red carpet at Urumqi airport waiting to pick up my bag.  We arrived into Beijing last night after a spectacular flight (I thought it was spectacular, but Sha felt ill for most of it).  I have never seen such colours.  The water over the Gulf of Carpentaria was turquoise.  The sunset as we flew around the thunder clouds into Shanghai was bright red.  It was raining heavily in Beijing.

Sha met her mother and then Jingbo, Dick, Barbera and I headed off to the "airport hotel".  hmmm .... apparently it was 7km away, but it took us over an hour.  We first had to argue with about four taxi drivers.  Then we were charged Y300 for the journey.  Then we had to wait for ages before checking in.  Oh well ... the hotel was great.  The toilet didn't work.  The smoke-detector was on the floor and the pillow was filled with sand.  Unfortunately the hotel had a rule that "guests are forbidden to engage in feudalistic superstition" which was a bit disappointing.

Anyway, didn't have to wait long as we fell asleep around 2am and had to get up at 6am.  The flight to Urumqi was smooth and, even though I didn't have a window seat, could catch glimpses of the Great Wall as we flew out of Beijing and the snow-covered mountains in Xingjiang.  Very spectacular.

My current hotel has an orchard and is "a haven of peace and happiness".   I can go to the front hall for:

"Preservation: Your preservation is kept at any moment"

and I must "keep the floor clean, smuggling, whoring and the like".  I'm not sure if there is a word missing or not there.

Anyway, if I get it wrong (either by smuggling or by not smuggling) then "If serious violations happen, guests could be deprived out."

Off to the conference now.  Urumqi is on Beijing time and so the conference starts at 4pm!

I like China.

The Ocean and the Mountains

Near Palm Beach

I took yesterday off work.  Sha and I drove up to Palm Beach and then (after a large fish 'n' chips lunch) returned slowly down the coastline stopping off at various beaches.  Sha prefers the beach with lots of pebbles -- perhaps we should go back to England!

Here come the pelicans!

Today Sha found a lobster in the mountains and bought a gargoyle which is now in our back garden.   I spotted a honey-eater.  The walk was a wonderful as always.  It was wet, the waterfalls were full and one path was closed as you'd have to walk through swamps.

Going a bit crazy walking across to Palm Beach

Huge waves!

Avalon Beach

Wentworth Falls

Sha, Jingbo and Xinping

Back from Kiama

Feeling quite relaxed at the moment.  Sha is playing with the guinea pigs and Vikram is cooking dinner for us.  The student workshop at USyd followed by the conference in Kiama went extremely well.  Next year the conference will be in Thailand.   I now have a few days at home before going to Parkes and then next month to Urumqi and Beijing.  Rob and I have just heard that our application to run a PULSE@Parkes session in Japan has been accepted and so I'll need to fit in a trip to Japan sometime soon!

Sha's friends came around today to see the house.  We went for a great walk in the Lane Cove park.

The four wise monkeys of China!

Lots of mushrooms to take photos of!

Lots of parrots

Our photo wall

I think that lots of my new blog posts are going to be about parrots.  We drove back home today to find all the cockatoos patiently waiting for us.  We'd been at the shops printing out a selection of photos that we had taken in the last year to make a "photo wall".  Tomorrow we're off to some garden centres to buy a lemon tree.

Sha is now an expert at making durian pasties.

We're both off to Parkes on Tuesday leaving Xinping in our house to feed the guinea pigs.

First impressions

We have a house!

Strange creature inside the house

You can keep drinking until the lines start to wobble

We found a use for the cutlery holder that didn't fit in our
kitchen

The view that I get each morning when leaving for work

We have a house!!  It's tall.   If you drive back from work (which is a bit pointless as it's quicker to walk) you first have to get yourself into the car port.  That's interesting as nothing seems to follow a straight line and is on an impressive slope.  You then walk up some stairs into the back garden.  From there you could, if necessary, walk onto the roof of the car port and perch yourself on the top along with the cockatoos.  In fact, as I was just getting the burnt croissants out of the oven a minute ago I saw a random guy smoking a cigarette on the roof.  Our garden is now full of cardboard boxes, two empty plant holders and a BBQ.    The plants that we put down have been eaten by the cockatoos.

Then you walk up some more steps into the dining area.  We don't have a curtain yet as Sha and I cannot agree on the colour or pattern.  Anyway, the curtain rail has been attached by a "real man" with a big drill.

You then have lots of options ...

If you turn left you enter our kitchen which must have been the height of fashion on 1971.  We have a new oven that burns the croissants.

Going straight a little and then turning left takes you to the laundry.  We have a drier that was stuck upside down on the wall by another "real man" and his son.  The real man scratched our wooden floors.  I managed to put up the plastic bag holder, but that has now fallen off.

If you go straight (past the IKEA dining table, that I put together all on my own and hasn't fallen down yet) then you reach the storage space.  It is not very exciting.

You can then continue upstairs to our level 4 (car port = 1, garden = 2, dining area = 3).  You have then reached the ground floor and can leave through the front door and our front garden.  Our front garden has some unidentifiable trees growing in it and possum droppings on the wall.  The living room has stripy wallpaper, lots of IKEA furniture and two guinea pigs.  The room has lots of lights (some of which actually work).

Continuing upstairs to level 5 you get to the spare room which currently contains a bed and my cello.  It has a view over the cockatoo landing areas.  I'm sure that our visitors will not require an alarm clock.  That level also contains the bathroom.

As you continue up to level 6 you pass some lights that are stuck high up on the ceiling and will be completely impossible to change.  Level 6 contains our bedroom and my new little study area.  The shelves in my study were put up by the "real man" with his big drill.

There also is an attic to give us 7 levels in our house, but I haven't brought the ladder upstairs yet and so I haven't looked in it.

Still alive

Hello!! This is just to check whether my blog still works :)