back log = blog

On Friday night, coming home from dinner I saw what I thought was a giant bat fly in front of a street light, then I realised it was more like an owl. But then, eerily, a few meters later we found a tiny bat crawling on the road - an absolute coincidence, I'd never seen a bat nor an owl here before. It was though I had imagined it intp existence, or rather, mistakeningly identified it into existence. It seemed to be injured and I tried to get a photo, but it was too dark and then suddenly its boney body crawled along and it flew away into the night. 

On saturday a girl offered to babysit abacus for a couple of hours. The only problem was she lived a lot further away than we'd thought. We walked for almost half an hour under an exaustingly hot sun, which evaporated any energy we might have had to use for our time alone. By the time we got home again we fell asleep and woke up with just enough time to get back to pick her up. We hoped to find a tuk tuk but they were all full, so in desperation we managed to thumb a ride on the back of a pick up. Luckily we got a tuktuk back, there was no way we would have walked. Danielle was too exhausted to teach the little boy english, so - i guess ironically - we played badminton with him. He loves badminton and is really competitive.

We were awoken at about 4 or 5 this morning by fireworks, for chinese new year apparently. We heard it'll be even earlier tomorrow, at least it'll be the end of the drumming practice in the evenings - unless they start the next day for next years cellebration, which judging by their dedication and discipline, wouldn't surprise me. We had brunch this morning with a doctor who we've seen around a lot. She's probably the coolest person we've met here and we had lots to talk about. She works at the mallaria clinics and works around the poorer communities. We talked about the competitive nature of medicine and of how it ends up leaving you flat and unfullfilled, that the payoff from working to years training is not an equal exchange rate (she's happy though, now, doing this kind of work). She also solved a mystery from the night before, when we were walking hom we came across a burmese mother and her infant son, danielle held the son and noticed he had no nappy under his pants. But the doctor told us they don't use nappies and often in the clinics, the mothers will use their sarongs to catch the urine from the babies, or just hold them over the floor to pee. They don't see urine as dirty because it is ubiquitous.

The fireworks have continued all day, but they're not at all spectacular, just loud crackers, like tomthumbs, loud noises are used to ward of evil spirits for the new years.