Random musings on the United Kingdom

When one considers the United Kingdom is the country that gave the world the Magna Carta and the Beatles, the current achievements lead me to think there is something rotten in the state of Denmark. With Denmark, of course, being the great UK.

London is presently my favourite manifestation of the national misadventures of the UK. Truly one of the worlds great cities, pockmarked all over with structures that pervade both my conscious and sub conscious; Westminster, Tower Bridge, Piccadilly Circus, Buckingham Palace: places that you have been and seen before you have even been there. And it's not even the big tourist icons, it's things like the view from Primrose hill or the curves of the Thames. There's all this stuff that you know because, as an Australian at least, culturally, your culture demands that you recognise.

The really cool part of that cultural memory bobs up when you walk up Regent St and admire the grand Victorian buildings, or perhaps wandering among the bars and restaurants around Soho. Standing in the shadow if St Stephens tower while Big Ben drowns out the latent city noise it's hard to escape the achievements of British civilisation. And, for me, that compounds the, well not constant, but pretty frequent stream of dissapointments, inconveniences and generally being let down by the British service industry and the damned propensity of the people of this country to put up with second best.

The past civil achievements are magnificent. Londoners managed to construct the Circle Line Tube, right underneath some of the most expensive real estate on the planet. Underground, using futuristic mass public transport methods that had only just been invented they built an amazingly effective and useful system that worked so well they replicated it over and over until the city was riddled with underground train lines. All this in 1854 when Melbourne was a smaller city than Ballarrat. Then when they invented electric trains, they installed them and put the entire fleet into service in 11 days. A fairly impressive achievement and no doubt an indication as to why Victorian Britain was the greatest civillisation the world has ever seen.

Now lets zoom forward to 2009, where it is taking 18 months to replace 15 escalators at Bank station. Basically you can hardly move around the station if an escalator is involved. My engineer friends assure me that escalators are a tricky business and that they are much easier to build from scratch than replace etc etc etc.... They are replacing 0.8333333 escalators a month. This strikes me of a lack of will, or organisation, or who know what. Sloth perhaps?

But it's not just the tube, although living with it daily means it is always near the top of the complaints list. No, London has other problems. Fly tipping, for instance. Basically people put their rubbish on the street quite a bit. Why anyone in a modern soceity would think it is ok to just dump your rubbish on the kerb is quite beyond me, but Londoners love it. My guess is they know they can get away with it, which segues quite neatly to the general standards of service. On my scorecard it's a poor to very poor. Anyone who has opened a bank account, got a mobile phone contract, talked to any service provider about anything will know what I am talking about and this experience invalidates any argument that a larger market and more competition improves customer service. They are all as bad as each other. The list of gripes grows ever larger:

* sunday shopping hours

* the false outrage against Bankers' Bonuses from MP's committees

* The fact that 1 guy (the Duke of something or other) owns Mayfair

* Flood Plain insurance subsidising people whose house is guaranteed to get flooded every 5 years

They just aren't doing as well as they have in the past. In Melbourne when there is a total lack ability to do difficult things, such as fix the public transport system we make excuses - the city is too big, there is no real cost benefit, it's just for rich inner city residents yada yada yada there's a hint of truth to the excuses. Here they try to do all the great nation building things but just cock it up. It's good to be somewhere where the nation is willing to have a go at the hard stuff, but the results are just so disappointing.

But then the sun starts shining, U2 play a secret rooftop gig on Regents St, You go out in Covent Garden on a Saturday night, see a West End show (the Lion King - excellent!!) and all of a sudden it's not so bad. In fact London is really cool. Sure they can't make the tube work and the nation is not what it once was but you know they still do a brilliant city. For all its failings London is a place that people want to be. And if you get a bit sick of it, Paris is a 3 hour train ride away!

I love Paris (but not as much as I love London, which is less than I love Melbourne, which is marginally less than I love Richmond)

Shell turns the big 30 in style, Tignes, Espace Killy, France

After a festive period of over indulgence we headed to France to perfect our snowboarding. Potatoes cooked in goose fat were a highlight of the festive season for both of us so we thought that post New Years something needed to be done to rectify the fattening side effects of these.

It was luck that the lovely Ainslie (a colleague of mine at GOSH) had very drunkenly at our house warming party invited us to Tinges in France for a week of snow adventures. I really didn't want to be at work for my birthday and Brock really wanted to get to the snow this winter so we jumped at the chance to get away with a bunch of her friends (detecting a theme here). In the end a few of my friends jumped on the band wagon as well so then there were 10 of us which made for a pretty good contingent. Out of 10 of us we had 6 radiographers and one radiologist, a research scientist who is trying to get into medicine and a token computer nerd and an accountant just to even things up a bit.

We made the interesting and in hindsight questionable money saving decision to catch the bus all the way from London Victoria bus station to Tignes. We departed after work on Friday and arrived at lunch time on Saturday. It would have been better if our seats actually reclined, the DVD played worked and if Tweedledum and Tweedledee our drivers could have sorted out the air conditioning. I won't complain too much as it was no where near comparable in length or painfulness to our Laos to China bus ordeal of 2008. In the end I was just thankful that the toilet stops actually involved real toilets and that there were no leeches. However we did spend more money at a service station on two sandwiches than we did the entire week were in Laos on all our food (slight exaggeration but it was pretty outrageously expensive).

So we made it to Tignes in one piece but quite tired. Tignes is in the wonderful part of the Southern Alps that is Espace Killy. There is a glacier there that you can ski/board on all year round and more runs than you could actually ski in a week. We stayed at the UCPA which was simple hostel style accommodation with rooms of four and a shared bathroom, so Kylie and Sheida were lucky to get a glance of Brock in his underwear at least 2 times a day. The UCPA was pretty simple but proved to be excellent value as we had all our meals, lift tickets, a whole week of lessons and accommodation included. The food was a sensation considering they were catering for 250 people. I shudder to think what we would have been served up in the equivalent place in the UK. We all embraced the fresh baguettes, pommes frites, drinking our morning coffee out of a bowl and most of all the cheese. I think I might have actually been a chance of loosing my Christmas lard if it wasn't for all the cheese!

We took ourselves out boarding on the Sunday just to check and make sure that we hadn't over shot the mark by telling them that we could actually snowboard green runs and the odd blue run. We had plenty of tumbles but nothing too spectacular and managed to sort ourselves out so that we didn't look too foolish in our first lesson. We were pretty amazed at how fast Ainslie and Pete could get themselves down the mountain on their boards, we could only hope and dream that we would be that good by the end of the week!

Monday saw the start of our lessons and we were in the improver group, as we certainly needed some improvement. There were two improver groups so we all headed out together bright and early to sort out the boys from the men. I basically fell over a lot and couldn't keep up with half the people in the group. That wasn't really a problem as Brock's self taught technique was so bad that he got put in the boys group with me along with our travelling companion Rick, who embarrassingly for us has taught himself to snowboard the day before. We also had Helen a lovely young English girl in our group and Fred the French guy who got sick of our English speaking and didn't make the lessons after Wednesday!

Once we got put into the easy group Denis, our French hero of an instructor, took us up the mountain to "slide" and rectify all our bad habits. Our lessons weren't really very much like lessons at all, it was more like having a French mountain guide take us to where he thought the snow and conditions were the best and then we would "slide" and then "keep sliding" while he would give us pointers on how not to fall over so much, go faster and look cool as well.

Ainslie demoted herself from her advanced boarding group after getting a dose of "the fear" on the glacier and decided to join our crew. She was far better than any of us in our group but it was great to have four of us all in the same group and it was much easier for me to try to keep up with her than the boys!

So the week went on, our days consisted of "sliding" from 9am till 12pm, lunch from 12-1.45pm and then we were back on the piste for some more "sliding" until the lifts closed, we were too tired to move or we had concussion.

Thursday was my 30th birthday so I got to chose what we would do for the day. I chose for us to spend the day at Val d'Isere which was next door to Tignes and also part of Espace Killy. I had also requested for it to snow so that we would have fresh powder and my request was granted. We headed off in the morning up the lifts and down the piste until we made it across to the Val d'Isere area where the snow was brilliant. Denis found a fantastic area to hone our off piste skills and we did a few runs down the mountain in powder that was so light and deep that you couldn't see your board. We all boarded like heroes mainly due to the fact that when you fell in the fresh powder it didn't hurt nearly as much as on the groomed runs, and we had now been boarding for five days we were actually getting good at it!

We made it to Val d'Isere for lunch in a small restaurant, Denis produced birthday candles from the pocket of his ski jacket for my dessert (that Brock ate) and I had happy birthday sung to me, it was nice. We had a long lunch and Denis produced some of his homemade digestive (spirit concoction made of pure alcohol with flowers soaked in it) from another one of the pockets of his ski jacket and we had a bit of a tipple before hitting the slopes again to make our way all the way back across to Tignes. I have to say again that I was pretty chuffed to get birthday candles even if there were only three and not 30 of them!

By the time we made it back to the UCPA we were all extremely tired but we managed to down a few bottles of champagne (the real stuff of course) and head out for a quiet drink after dinner. I have to say it was one of the best birthdays that I have ever had. I got to spend it with my lovely husband, my friends, a very cool snowboarding instructor and the snow and scenery was phenomenal.

I have to admit (sadly) that by the end of the week I was pretty much broken (don't worry my dodgy knee was fine), snowboarding is pretty hard on the old body especially when its 30! I had a massive bruise on my derriere which would make for a very uncomfortable bus ride home, bruises all over my legs, an eggy on my forehead from headbutting the piste and a nice gash across both my shins from Helen and I stacking it up together. We did accomplish a lot though, we could both go really fast, ride switch (Brock was far better than me though) and Brock even managed to pull off a few freestyle moves until he fell and tore a muscle in his shoulder! Never fear though dear reader we both made it back to London in one piece and if the pound wasn't so pathetic compared to the Euro we would be back at the snow right now.

The Orphans Christmas Dinner

It is cold in England during the winter. It gets dark early. Everything freezes. The high street stores have their after Christmas sales before Christmas and Australians either get the hell out or else gather together for a proper orphans christmas in the country. It was thus that we found ourselves away with friends in Somerset for Christmas in a really big, old, cool (but well heated!) country house.

One of our friends, Deverey, had thought it fun to escape the traditional London shutdown over Christmas (no cabs, trains, buses, shops or fun) and had done some excellent googling and haggling to organise a large old house in South West England that could sleep about 30 people. As we knew we would have not a great deal on over Christmas, we jumped at the chance to get out of town and see some of the countryside. Knowing only Jo Jo, Magnus and Dev we said "yep" to her offer and on the 23rd of December hired a car and set off for our first big trip out of London.

Tonedale house was an old country house built by a some guy that built a mill during the industrial revolution and, in good industrialist fashion, built his trophy house attached to the mill. Located in a small town called Wellington in Somerset it had about 50 rooms with a really big lounge room, games room with a pool, table tennis and blackjack table, a totally excellent kitchen and a gigantic formal dining room. It was a good house. The kitchen was the focal point for the house with a BIG oven and a nice table making for a great spot for eating breakfast, reading the paper and generally hanging out with all of our new friends.

We arrived on the evening of the 23rd and set about meeting everyone, playing pool and drinking some beer. The next day we started on the bacon (2.5 Kg of streaky, 2.5 kg of back rashers) for breakfast and did a reconciliation of the food purchased for Christmas dinner. Mags and Dev had organised Christmas dinner and it was a feast, the likes of which would have enough mores for Oliver Twist and us telling stories about it to anyone who would listen.

But before we got to that, Magnus had organised some Clay Target shooting at a nearby farm for Christmas eve, so Michelle and I, Dev, Mags and one of Dev's friends Kate, Mag's boss Scott, his wife Fabi and Scott's two sons Liam and Seamus, a couple of small animals, the gameskeeper from the local African wildlife park, three 19th century boot blacks and a couple of others (those last few might not have actually come along, but it did seem like the car was awfully full) headed off to blow to the crap out of some clays.

It was fun. Shell didn't have a go because she was afraid of not hitting anything but I stepped up and didn't hit a thing with my first try. I later top scored during the competition round (although my team still lost) but got to have a crack at the fast clays and even managed to hit a few of them!

After lunch we went and got some supplies for Christmas day (another few cases of beer) and went to the pub for dinner, and spent the night playing blackjack. Fun but all just designed to kill time before the main event - Christmas dinner. Mags and Dev had procured some excellent produce for the big meal, the piece de resistance being an 11kg bronze turkey that was easily going to fill the industrial sized oven. Despite never having actually cooked a turkey, Magnus bravely had assumed responsibility for the bird and spent Christmas eve researching recipes and techniques for the perfect succulent turkey.

"Make sure there's butter under the skin!"

"Stick an orange up its butt!"

There was no shortage of ideas on how to prepare it, but few actual hands on deck at 6AM when Mags got up to put it on. We got up about 9 and made ourselves a nice cup of tea and some more bacon and eggs whilst we planned the cooking of the ancillaries. Cheese boards, pancakes with salmon and cream cheese, goose fat roasted potatoes, parsnips, carrots, pumpkin, brussel sprouts with bacon and salads were all planned, and mostly peeled where necessary thanks to Jade, Amy and Dev the night before.

But the food wasn't going to cook itself, so with apron on, a wooden spoon in her hand and a gleam in her eye that said "I was made for this moment" Michelle took command of the kitchen. With Magnus taking care of the bird, Shell organised the rest with a willing team of assistants. Orders were issued, Trays were greased, sprouts boiled, potatoes par boiled, vegies roasted, pancakes cooked, turkeys basted, hands, shoulders and fingers burnt, salads prepared, cheese boards set, drinks drunk, dishes washed and generally lots of activity around the place until the bird was taken out, rested and tested.

An intake of breath.

A deep cut in the thigh.

The juices ran clear. It was cooked! At least thats what we thought and Mags began carving. But then on the carve, the juices seemed a bit red. Not cooked through, even though it had spent 6 hours in the oven already. "Bugger it" we thought and wrapped it back up to go into the oven again for another hour and a bit. At this point everything was ready to go and we had to put all the vegies etc back in the various ovens around the place whilst we finalised the bird.

Eventually it was all cooked and we tested it again. Cooked! Despite a small downgrade, from absolutely perfect to almost perfect, the bird was pronounced ready. With that there was a flurry of activity whilst everything was served and in no time we all sat down with a glass of champagne and a plate of the best Christmas dinner one could ask for.

It was a great day and we managed to fill in the rest of the week with plenty of walks in the countryside, drives through the countryside, shopping at the Christmas sales, a proper Devonshire tea in Devon in the shadows of the cathedral at Exeter, plenty of Blackjack ("Monkey!!!!!") and, on the way home a visit to Stonehenge, which I was pretty excited about. Unfortunately I didn't get to back into the stones a la European vacation but it was still one of those great things about the UK where I got to see in the flesh things that have been a part of my consciousness since I can remember remembering. We also went to the Avebury stone circle which was also quite cool but it was so very cold that we retreated to the pub for lunch.

And with that we headed back to London after a great break with new friends and a christmas dinner that will be spoken about for years to come!

Home sweet home - London

And then it was over - admittedly over 6 weeks ago now, but just allow me to slide into a retrospective frame of mind for a bit and tie up the loose ends of our totally excellent adventure.

We flew into Heathrow on the 29th August to be greeted by sunshine, some warmth and the tube which, I thought was great, until we couldn't buy the tickets on our credit cards, find which District line train to change to for Paddington or find a seat that was not next to a smelly fat person. Geez louise. It got better soon, though as we met Steve at Paddington (he nicked off from work at about 1pm - nice one!) and then went onwards to his new flat in Maida Vale where we were staying until we could find our own place.

From there we headed off to the Waterway pub in Little Venice and drank heaps of beers while regaling the bar with stories of our daring and adventurous travel. At some point Kirsty joined us and I think we may have eaten some nice food too. The next day was a Saturday and we had some tickets to go and see the Chemical Brothers at Kensington Olympia so we had a nice sleep in and a walk around Maida Vale before heading out to see the band - wicked Audio Visual show - and have another great night out.

That more or less set the tone for the next couple of weeks as we sorted ourselves out administratively. We would go to the pub, whilst also finding a nice flat in a convenient if not fantastic part of town and Shell getting a job at Great Ormond Street Hospital. I was being a bit picky with the kinds of jobs I was putting myself forward for which was probably a bit dumb as the 2nd week we were here Lehman Brothers investment bank failed, setting off the stock market crash that engulfed the worlds finances and my prospects for getting a sweet contract.

Ahh well. I have actually managed to get a job with AOL Broadband and get to join Shell in the ranks of the employed, although she is now the breadwinner as she earns more than I do! I took a little longer than anticipated but it looks good for now.

So now we live, according to whom you ask, in either Maida Vale (the Real Estate Agent), Maida Hill (the closest post office), West Kilburn (the A-Z), Queens Park (the local council amenities) or even just good ol' London (the post code checking system on the Royal Mail website). We are sort of in a promontory of nice places in an ocean of crappy council housing. Allow my map to demonstrate the area. The green bits are nice houses with normal people walking along the streets, the yellow bits (which our house is in) are areas that are ok with the occasional dodgy off license or crappy pub but generally nice places. The orange areas are low rise council flat areas but still relatively normal streets but a higher incidence of dodgy off licenses and frequently large groups of people standing around not really doing anything except talking loudly.




The red areas are dyed in the wool council housing a la Atherton Gardens on Brunswick St in Fitzroy or the Lennox Street / Elizabeth Street complex in Richmond, putting even Melbourne's best attempt at horrible state housing to shame. I actually quite like our area excepting Harrow Road which is a crappy way to start the day. It's like Smith St in Collingwood without the charm.

Anyway our house is about a 10 minute walk from either Queens Park tube or Westbourne Park tube which is quite handy for getting around town. It is a 1 bedroom flat in a long row of terraces that has been recently renovated and furnished with a bit of style. We've got a nice kitchen, a big living room and a big enough bedroom AND there's also a rooftop terrace / decking thing on top of our bedroom so we also have an outside area which is really cool. You have to climb an extension ladder to get up there but it is a small sacrifice! We also have a very comfy sofa bed......

The only real problem we've had so far with the house was the small matter of the oven. As most readers would know, we love a good roast and Shell is a dead set genius in the kitchen so our oven generally gets a bit of a work out in normal day to day operations of the house. So we cooked a few roasts and cakes and stuff and we noticed that if we left the oven for over, say, an our or so, the house would gradually fill with smoke until the place smelt like a campsite. The first time we thought it may have been the baking paper that sort of caught on fire when it touched the grill element so we didn't think too much about it, until we had Matt and Eva over for dinner and managed to smoke out the house again.

Finally thinking something might be up I gave the oven a good clean out, in case it was some stray food causing the smoke and gave it another test but, nope, still more smoke. I began systematically dismantling the bit around the oven but not finding anything obvious and since it was neither my house nor my oven I decided to call the landlord. She organised a workman to come over and have a look, so Kevin came around and had a quick look as I explained the problem. He looked at the same things I looked at and couldn't see anything so he pulled the oven out, which actually turned out to be quite easy to do. We got the oven out and lo and behold pretty much the whole shelf was burnt to a crisp! There was a big hole burnt about 15 cm in diameter and it had started to burn through the next shelf down as well. This was not to do with the baking paper.

It turns out the oven was seriously faulty and hadn't been fused correctly when it was installed, so it was basically just waiting for the unsuspecting tenant to nick out to the shop for 15 minutes whilst cooking something for a couple of hours and burning the joint to the ground. Not the sort of excitement we need but the landlady was very good about it and had the oven replaced, by Kevin, on the same day.

Our days are now spent meeting up with friends, going shopping on the high street, drinking Pimms in the sun and generally enjoying life with practically no responsibilities! It's great, although we miss our families, our dogs, our friends and the Australian service industry (so far superior in every respect to the British standard that it is actually shocking) but I guess there is always a trade off to enjoying yourself.

Well until the next lazy Saturday morning when I feel like sharing my thought with the world, au revouir and Cole - can you throw the ball for Lily and give Burns a pat on the head and tell him he's a good boy!

Back to the real world - Helsinki, Finland

To mangle a quote from Tolstoy, all developed countries are pretty much the same, whereas all undeveloped countries are undeveloped (and a bit hopeless) in their own special way.

This was first and foremost in my mind as we cleared customs in our seats on the train from St Petersburg to Helsinki. Yet again it was a case of what a difference a border makes and for the first time in months we were now somewhere that looked somewhat similar to life as we know it.

Russia had been good to us. It was still a bit soviet at times and the wildly skewed costs of certain goods and services boggled the mind ($100 a night for a crappy hostel room with a shared bathroom, $10 for half a kilo of big caviar) but overall we'd had a great time and seen some truly spectacular things:

• Red Square - it was just like my imagination had decided it should be like
• The Hermitage - we actually got a bit bored looking at priceless painting after priceless painting, but there was some other really cool things like rooms where world changing events took place
• The Moscow Metro - these guys know how to build a train station. The subway stations are amazing, with many rivalling museums for their architectural skill and artistry. Being commies, the Moscow city fathers in the 30's decided that the workers should be able to enjoy the cultural highlights of modern Russia whilst on the way to work.

But it was still not quite right. Perhaps it was just the men going to work in business casual suits with socks and sandals, the falling apart look of St Petersburg's suburbs or the conviction of certain tour guides when they tell you that you'd be crazy to talk to a policeman in Russia, but you could just tell that while these guys are doing better than, say, your average Kyrgyz man in the street in Bishkek, Russia didn't have it all figured out yet.

The Finns, on the other hand, have. Whatever "it" is, they have worked it out, made it look good, surrounded it with a nice park and placed a statue next to it. Aside from the obvious stuff such as real prices (in euros! oh no), trams and shops for all the people selling goods (as opposed the junk, which we had seen quite a bit of) there was an obvious feel of prosperity to Helsinki, my impression of which that was no doubt fed by our stay at the 4 star Hotel Torni which was superb.

It's not like they had it easy either. Finland itself was only declared independent from Russia in 1917, which was followed promptly by a civil war (commies vs good guys and strangely for this area the good guys won!) and then a couple of wars against invading bad guys, namely the Nazi's and the Soviets. After the war the Finns, having very little aid from the West due to a couple of treaties signed with the Soviet Union, developed from a agrarian society to an industrialised economy. The US did provide aid on the sly to prevent communist overthrow of the democratic government, but most of their development was through trade, probably reindeer hides to begin with, but these days it's all about Formula 1 drivers and mobile phones.

Helsinki itself is great, located right on the Baltic sea with many lakes, rivers and islands. The architecture is really nice with most of the city built during the 1920's to 1950's in a nice and tasteful way. There's plenty of grand old buildings and statues and an excellent little tourist market they run each day down by the harbour where a lady sells baked potatoes out of one of those black kettle "Victorian Baked Potato" cookers that used to be at every holiday destination of my childhood. They were never as good as this one though, as the Helsinki version was piled high with smoked salmon and doused liberally in either a blue cheese or tartare sauce. Yummo.


There's a really cool old fortress on an island guarding the bay called Suomenlinna which was built by the Swedes in the late 18th century to ward off the pesky Russians, who periodically invaded. Unfortunately for the Swede's Helsinki fell to Russians for good only 6 months after they completed the fortress so now it sits up there with the 17" guns at East Point in Darwin as expensive, ultimately pointless military installations that now make excellent tourist attractions. We had a good time walking around the old walls and drinking "the best filtered coffee in the world", as proclaimed by a tourist magazine we got for free. We also ate some Reindeer burgers, went and saw the Batman movie and generally had a great time.

It was great to be back in the first world too, as we could drink the water out of the tap and eat ANYTHING! In fact it was the perfect way to finish off our holiday and move on the next bit of our adventure - getting jobs and going back to real life. How sad.

Mosques, Medrassas, Mausoleums and Minarets, Bukhara, Uzbekistan

I don't think that this blog would ever be complete without some photos of the majestic architectural sights of Uzbekistan.

My favorite city by far in Uzbekistan was Bukhara, I'm not sure if it was because we stayed in a nice hotel there or if it really was a stand out from Khiva and Samarkand!

A bit of history for you....Officially Bukhara was founded in 500BC, however the region around Bukhara has been inhabited for at least five millennium. The city has long been a center of trade, scholarship, culture, and religion and is located on the Silk Road, otherwise we wouldn't have gone there of course.

The most famous of all the architectural wonders of Bukhara is the Po-i-Kalyan complex, which means "The foot of the Great". This is a square with the Kalyan minaret towering over it at 45.6 meters high. Back when the Uzbeks were still enforcing capital punishment (which is frighteningly not that long ago) they would march their criminals/victims to the top of the minaret, put them inside a sack and throw them from the top of the minaret. Literature reports of sacks twisting and turning through the air as the victim inside struggled to free themselves in vein.

There is apparently a depression in the square below the minaret where thousands of bodies thrown from the top over the years had started to wear a hole in the stone. It was a chilling thought knowing all this and gazing up at the towering minaret, a very beautiful structure with a somewhat grisly past. We did look for this depression in the stone but were unable to find it, but I guess bodies are a lot softer than stone and a hessian bag would have made it a lot easier to clean up the mess.

On the two sides Po-i-Kalyan are the Kalyan Mosque and Mir-i Arab Medrassa , Kalyan Mosque is a massive and beautiful structure and in Soviet times was used to store tractors and other farming machinery. In the 14th century when Amir Temur (otherwise known as Tamerlane) was rampaging across central Asia he slaughtered basically the entire population of Bukhara within this mosque. I read somewhere that once Temur had finished the mass slaughter his men were wading through the mosque in blood that came halfway up to their knees. Disturbing when you know how large the mosque is, its large, so large you could fit a football pitch inside it, I'll let you do the math yourselves on how much blood that would be.

Opposite the mosque is the Mir-i Arab Medrassa which was built in the 16th century presumably by then the population of Bukhara that had pretty much been wiped out by Timur had time to repopulate itself and build this imposing structure. The Medrassa is still a functioning facility for the training of religious minds in Uzbekistan today. It has a beautiful mosaic exterior, the fact that its still a functioning Medrassa means that you are not allowed inside past the entrance hall.

Also of note around Bukhara are the trading domes, where trading still happens. Uzbekistan is famous for its carpets, embroidery and ceramics and there is plenty of that to be found within the domes of Bukhara. I bargained so hard for some ceramics in a store that the lady who sole them asked me "Where are you from?", I said "Australia" she then proceeded to say "Australian women are hard women!" whilst clenching her fists and banging them together. I think I might have got a good deal!

Into the bears den in Russia

Editors note: These blogs have been a long time coming as I have been at the pub for most of the last week. So the programme is Russia today, Finland by maybe Thursday and then a comprehensive London update after that, unless I continue to get waylaid at the Elgin.

We flew into Sheremetyevo UAC, didn't get much sleep last night.
On the way the paper bag was onmy knee, man I had a dreadful flight.
But now I'm back in the USSR, don't know how lucky you are boy
Back in the USS, Back in the USSR!!!!

Or at least that's what it seemed like we were arriving in what with all the invasions, diplomacy, border disputes, talk of sovereignty and insurrections we kept hearing about from the Caucasus on the BBC as we left Uzbekistan for Russia. We were half expecting to see the corpse of Lenin rise, smash its way out of Red Square and restart the Revolution; he would not, however, need to travel far to find the capitalists or even the tools of the bourgeois. He would probably get run over by one in a large black Mercedes or Porsche right out the front of the Kremlin where they scream around the corner flat out next to St Basil's Cathedral.

But, as so often seems to happen with these blogs, I digress. I actually didn't get much sleep that night, owing to a 4:50 AM flight from Tashkent that we arrived at the airport for at 2:35 AM. The previous night we'd planned on getting plenty of sleep but had ended up staying up late eating pizza and talking about pets with our new friends from Perth, Jasmin and Mark.

The lack of sleep affected Michelle somewhat more than me, which I could tell from the serve she gave a armed member of the notoriously corrupt Uzbek customs who dared tell her she was in a line for Uzbek nationals only. Allow me to relate the story, which we will now refer to as When Michelle Lost Her Mind.

When Michelle Lost Her Mind

A True Story

By Brock Mills

It was 2:35 AM when we arrived at the Tashkent Airport, tired and unkempt due to too many beers and not enough sleep the night before. Also weighing on our spirits were our very heavy packs that weighed on our backs. We were cheered by the existence of our flight number on the departures board (a welcome change from Vietnam) and by the nice Aeroflot employee who offered to upgrade us to Business Class for $100 each, an offer we would have taken had we actually had the money.

Having got our tickets and filled out the necessary forms, we headed over to customs where the procedure was mercifully straight forward compared to when we entered the country. From customs we went to passport control where there was a group of about 30 school girls from Russia in one line and about 3 people in the other line. We stood in the short line for about a minute when a young, armed Uzbek customs official came over and asked to see our hotel registration forms (Each hotel you stay in has to "register" you with the authorities and they all give you a little slip of paper, which you have to keep in case a customs official wants to look at them. Why? We have no idea. Blame the Soviets.)

We showed him our forms and he nodded. He then proceeded to tell us we were in the line for Uzbek nationals only and we had to get in the other line with the 30 Russian school girls. At this Michelle decided to give him a bit of what for, pointing out that the same "Uzbek nationals only" sign was above that queue as well, that the other queue was much longer and we didn't much feel like standing in this line any longer than is necessary. All said with the threat of violence in her voice that I sometimes fear. The official didn't know what to say as I'm sure he had never been spoken to in that manner by a woman in his whole life, and certainly not by one at the airport trying to pass through immigration without any problems.

Sensing danger, I tactfully defused a potential international incident, by grabbing my wife and dragging her over to the other line and hiding behind a large pole. I didn't say anything about it, until after we were safely in the departure lounge.

"Have you lost your mind?" I asked.

"Yes. I don't know what came over me.." she answered.

"Well luckily we didn't get shot. You should have a little sleep before we need to deal with any officials again". So she went to sleep and was much nicer to everyone after that.

And that was it. The Aeroflot flight was brilliant, almost the best food we had in Uzbekistan, with good service in a clean, comfortable and almost brand new A321. Some people were pretty surprised when told that we were flying Aeroflot owing to their poor safety record and Soviet standards of service but the flight was very good and there were no annoying holes in the hull, like what you get QANTAS at the moment. People did clap and cheer when we landed so I guess that the cultural memory of Aeroflot is still alive in people's minds, but they do that in Greece for Olympic Airways as well.

Now for all the trouble it took, which was considerable, to actually get permission to travel to Russia, what with all the visa support and quick processing fees and the like, actually entering Russia was so easy it was almost a bit of a let down. We lined up for 2 minutes at immigration (with Shell keeping her mouth shut) and then walked straight through customs and we'd arrived. A short 3 hour bus/metro/walk trip later we were in the heart of Moscow quickly coming to grips with the reality of being in the world's most expensive city.

Moscow is fantastic. We stood in the shadows of the Kremlin in Red Square, savoured the view of St Basil's Cathedral with the Onion Domes and the magnificent GUM department store in what is a place that far exceeded my expectations. It's pretty cool to stand in a place that you know so much about, mostly from movies and Cold War spy novels, and watch people simply going about their daily lives. I was hoping to catch some KGB guy following us from a distance, or perhaps see a dead letter drop in Gorky Park but we didn't get to see any of that. We did get to see the changing of the guard at the Kremlin and there were many large black Mercedes with tinted windows that may have contained Vladimir Putin or Dimitry Medvedev but that was about as far as it went. We did get to see these amazing office buildings they built in the 1950's that seriously look like they are out of Gotham city and there were quite a few gigantic churches.

Most if the stuff I'd read about Moscow said things like "it was a great city, but was ruined by the commies" and "90% of the old parts of Moscow were pulled down and replaced with horrible Stalinist towers". If that's the case then Moscow must have been one of the world's great marvels as it is still really good. It's a large modern city with some great Baroque architecture in the centre of town that has great weather in the summer, even into late August. A bit like Melbourne but not as hot and more daylight. And it has the Kremlin, Red Square, St Basil's Cathedral, Lenin's Mausoleum and all these icons of 20th century history.

We had a great time. We walked around town taking photos, we rode the subway to the souvenir market where we got some great Babushka Dolls, T-shirts and little badges. We managed to buy some train tickets to St Petersburg from a lady who didn't speak a word of English and we even went to the hands down best local supermarket in the whole world on Tversky Boulevard - it's in this amazing old classical building that sells caviar and all sorts of fancy foods we hadn't seen for months like bread and milk. We went through Cathedral Square in the Kremlin and even went and saw a rubbish movie out near the 1980 Olympic Stadium. And, apart from accommodation which is outrageously expensive, it doesn't actually cost that much to do things there. McDonalds is cheap and there's these Pancake places everywhere that will feed you for about $3 and even real food is comparatively inexpensive on a 1 for 1 basis with Australia. We got a really good pasta meal for maybe $8 AUD each, and they do good coffee.

My favourite part of Moscow though, was when we were having a beer at a sports bar before we headed off for our 2:35AM train to St Petersburg. We were watching the Olympics and more or less minding our own business when these Russian guys, who were obviously dying to talk to us, struck up a bit of a conversation with us. Before we knew it, everyone in the bar that could speak English was helping our new friend out with his questions as everyone became fascinated with our trip and the fact that we were actually real Australians in Russia. We talked about this and that - this guy used to be an officer in the Army, now was in sales of some sort and was going to buy a new car - and then we did some shots of Vodka. The manager of the bar told us he lived in Sydney for 3 years and wanted to go back and we all generally had a good time when he explained a concept of the Russian language I'd been missing. We were talking about Vladimir Putin shooting that tiger and our friend said "I've got a shotgun" and I said "Kruta" which is Russian for cool. He said "Nyet - Shotgun is not Kruta. AK-74; this is Kruta"

With that we left for St Petersburg, which I will probably write about in the near future!