Sports Day is a funny day – funny and fun. The trouble is that because we don’t have any sports facilities at the school we have to rent the running track at the Sports University nearby and often, the first time a student has run such a long distance or done any jumping or throwing… Read More »
It was a bad idea to go across the river to Pudong on National Holiday but I had thought it would be nice to walk along the river on such a sunny day. That was my error – thinking that it would be a pleasant stroll instead of trying to move through a scrum of… Read More »
The Art District had alluded me for years but I had a spare day and it was sunny so I got the metro up there and with the help of my trusty iPhone maps and the hindrance of my inbuilt sense of direction I ended up in a semi-industrial. The empty buildings, construction workers huts… Read More »
There was a large gathering on the junction of Fuxing Lu and Jiashan Lu and strong police presence. Some men were shouting and a woman was screaming as the police were loading large wooden structures on the back of a truck. I went closer and saw passers-by with their phones out videoing the scene. As… Read More »
I wrote recently that I was suspicious about the frequency of my electricity bills. They seemed to come more than once a month. Well, today I finally got to the bottom of the mystery. I got home yesterday to find that there were two envelopes pushed into my door frame. (This is how I receive… Read More »
There is such a lot which is good about China but sometimes I just despair. I have been here long enough to have got used to seeing grown men urinating on the street and in the parks although I still think it’s uncivilised. I have never seen so many genitals on public display as on… Read More »
A few years ago I was picking up a coffee for myself and one for a friend. I was having a cappuccino and a ‘brewed coffee’ for him. I noticed that not only was his coffee a lot cheaper than mine but it took no time to make whereas I had to wait in a… Read More »
Do you know what the speed of a marching Indonesian child is? I do, it’s torturous. It was only a 20 minute journey the taxi driver told me. Great, so I easily will make the connection and get to Ubud in time to collect my credit card I had left there a few days earlier… Read More »
We were setting camera traps for tigers but we ended up buying a Leopard Cat. Who would have thought I’d ever buy a wild cat. It was hanging in a tree in a beautiful village in the Rimbang Baling national park. The four of us were horrified that a nocturnal animal was being kept in… Read More »
The Sumatran tiger is critically endangered and this summer I spent a couple of weeks setting camera traps to see how many of these magnificent creatures are still alive. Pekanbaru is one entry to Sumatra and from KL it’s only a 40 minute flight. But you cannot imagine a place so different to KL with… Read More »