I'm back...

Hi all... blog entry coming soon, I hope. I'm back in England now, with 37.7kg of checked luggage. So much to do now that I am back... and that doesn't even include work stuff. Shopping for food seems quite important. :P More later...

A taste...

Waterfall-let
Originally uploaded by enlightened0ne

Blogs are still to come, but I've been sorting through my photos and thought that I should post one. I wish that photos could do justice to the beauty of Jiuzhaigou; the colours here are what the camera sees, and can never quite reproduce what the eye sees. I'll post photos that include still water later... you won't believe that I haven't used photoshop to add the colours!

deadly household appliances

overheard on the tram (a while back now):

"... and the washing machine fell off the wall, smashing the chair that she had been standing in 2 seconds earlier!... none of the neighbours came to check - I would have come home to find her DEAD!!"

I love eavesdropping.

An interesting way to find the site...

Just briefly, I thought that this was very amusing. We have had one visitor to this blog via google, apparently from Auckland. The search term he/she used? "rat faeces photo"... This took her/him to Joanne's blog entry from a while ago. I checked, and if you search for the term on google we're about the 12th link. Since I've written this, we'll probably shoot up closer to number 1. So if you forget our address... just search for rat faeces!

Quick notification: Hong and James are still alive

James: A proper entry or three will be coming soon, but at the moment we are travelling around Sichuan, and not really able to use the computer. We're currently at 3000m above sea level in Jiuzhaiguo, with a tenuous link to the internet via a 3G modem. For the first time in a while, we are properly warm, with a hotel room that has 24 hour airconditioning (that works!) and hot water during the times that matter. It's funny that it seems expensive and luxurious, when it's only about $12 each per night. One place we stayed at was about $4 each per night... but had a pillow and doona that smelled of sweat and cigarettes, and hot water that required significant negotiation with the owner to ask them to change the battery in the water heater. Oh, and to get there we had to cross the channel that had been dug to provide a new subway... a 30m deep pit with operational earth-moving machinery and construction workers giving advice about where to climb. At least the climbing skills were useful, as they were put to the test in JZG today, when we used them to access closed walkways in the park.

 

Hong: Sorry to disappoint all of you who are expecting something more "exotic" to have happened to us. But we have survived a city of dust, a bum-splitting 10hr bus trip through earthquake rubble, landslides and rock falls, a freezing old town without any functioning heating device, except our fevers, which stemmed from URTI of dubious origin... (James' assertion: probably the expectorated bacteria of someone in Sichuan; they spit everywhere, including on buses and on carpet!) Jiuzhai is very beautiful, as an understatement, and please be prepared to be inundated in James' photographs, as well as an album of the photo maniac James taking photos during this trip. Hmmm... what else.... Oh, and bought a Tibetan maroon lacquered coconut, being sold as a special Tibetan fruit that grows in the mountains and taste like sour milk. Ours tasted like normal coconut milk...

As you can probably tell by now, I have very little desire to do well at this AMS gig. I have low interest in the subject, my supervisor is a tool/n00b/incompetent (as a supervisor... as a clinician he does well), and I'm tired. Very very tired.

I'm taking a weekend off from 20-22nd November. Can't wait.

I just got water on my notebook. Damn.

I'm going to buy a camera, so I can post photos of really uninteresting crap (unlike James, of course).

I want to go home and bake. and then throw the cake at something.

The Head

The Head
Originally uploaded by enlightened0ne

A photo from before the battle in Leominster. You can see how serious the people were... this would be a heavy helmet, and it's dented too...

Gourd flowerpots

Gourd flowerpots
Originally uploaded by enlightened0ne

Aren't these cool? I want to grow some gourds at home and use them for this... These gourds were found on the side of a covered road in a little village on a hillside. It was a funny village; no vehicle would be able to traverse the majority of the streets because they were so steep and so uneven, and little old grandmothers lined the ways, selling apples and oregano and (mmmmm) figs, as well as some hand-made things. There was a tiny area with some tourist-oriented shops, and the village was famous for its wine (which was, apparently, very unusual; quince wine?), so quite a number of wine stores were offering tasting. We ate in a restaurant which sold delicious stuffed zucchini flowers. The owner of the restaurant challenged me to a chilli-eating competition, which was fun. :) Small green chillis are hot, though not unbearably so...

The things one learns...

Yesterday, I found out that a cell line with which we have been working in the lab actually has prostate cancer because of a virus (Xenotropic Murine Leukaemia virus-related virus), and we have not been working with it in a containment level appropriate to this. It's been in the literature for 2 years, but we were only told yesterday... and my supervisor wanted us to keep working with it. I'm not too keen on getting chronic fatigue/prostate cancer, so there's a definite NO from me. It's pretty terrible that he asked us to keep working with it! I just hope that I didn't catch it while the cells were growing.

Ah well... at least it was found out before I started doing heaps of work with that cell line...

On a happier note, my site is now fully up and running; it has 20 prints for sale, at last. It's shocking how expensive it is to actually have something printed at high quality, though; I really want to find a cheaper source! (Other than the really good one in the US that won't ship outside America)

Turkish meat

Slabs of raw meat
Originally uploaded by enlightened0ne

I don't know what this stuff is called, but it is raw meat, semi-dried. Not dry like jerky, but not that bloody. It's coated in something like flour, which has become soaked in blood. It appears to be kept for months at a time, and is eaten as is... no cooking, no washing, no disinfection. It seems the Turkish are quite used to eating meat that has sat around unrefrigerated for a considerable amount of time; most of the doner kebabs sit around all day, free to any flies, dripping meat juice and fat, until evening comes and the cooker is turned on. Still... the stuff in this photo is worse, eaten raw, as it is. It has a strange smell, too...