Almost back to work

We are (almost) looking forward to going back to work. We will fly through Toronto and then back to Pakistan in about 10 days. Our summer pictures will be posted after we get back to Karachi. Jim didn't pack the cable to download photos from the cameras!
Did you notice the weather we are missing? Karachi is unbelievably hot during the summer!

Birds of Karachi

Enjoy the birds of Karachi! We have seen more than these, but we don't have pictures of all of them (yet!).

This is a Black Kite. They are very common and can be seen circling the garbage pits of Karachi. Don't lay down and go to sleep!

Black Kites are raptors.

This is a Hoopoe. It is one of the coolest birds we have ever seen. This one was right outside our window.

House Crow or Corn Crow. Very common, noisy and aggressive.

The Swifts swoosh around in huge flocks eating bugs at sunset.

The birds all flock into the trees at night. You can tell where they spend the night by looking at the guano patterns on the ground.

This is a female Asian Koel (Cuckoo). It took us eight months to spot it. We just kept hearing them.

This is the male. It looks like a bad-tempered crow!

This is the Mynah. You may have heard of them as being good at learning to talk like a parrot. It is a member of the Starling family.

This is the Rose-Necked Parakeet. The same bird in Saudi Arabia is called the Ring-Necked Parakeet. They are not native to the area, but so many have been brought as pets and then escaped, they are now part of the ecosystem.

This is a Red-Vented Bulbo. There is a Yellow-Vented, but we don't have a picture of it.

These two herons were posing when we visited the WWF facility at Hawks Bay (French Beach). You can find it on Google Earth by searching "hawks bay karachi pakistan".

This series of three shows one set of nesting Purple Sunbirds.

Good old Sparrow!

This last bird is the Tailor Bird. The male likes to wag its tail!

We hope you enjoyed seeing some of our birds here in Karachi!

Around Karachi

Alonda and the rest of the Middle School teachers took all the students out to the beach in February. The weather here is NOT like February in Seattle. This is a bridge going out towards the port.

This is how you can tell you are near a beach. It has all the normal "beach" stuff: beach balls, sand buckets, ice cream, etc. Everything is from China, of course.

As usual, you have to share the road with the donkey carts. We think they are the only vehicle in Pakistan that knows and follows the rules of the road!

Here's the beach! As we said, the weather is NOT like Seattle. Everyone wears shorts and T-shirts; no one wears a bathing suit.

Another fact of life is the guards. They took three carloads of guards. They had people on the perimeter the whole time. This does NOT mean it is unsafe. It is more to prevent kidnapping and beggars. The houses in the background are beach houses for the rich people. The house the school used belongs to relatives of one of the local teachers.

No beggars, but the camel-ride guy came around! The kids loved it.

A couple of weeks after the beach trip, Alonda & Jim and another couple went out to visit the World Wildlife Fund's Center in Karachi. Very close to Hawks Bay Beach where the students went. (wwf Karachi Pakistan as search terms on Google Earth will find it!)

Alonda and Johanne got muddy planting mangroves! You have to walk barefoot or lose your shoes in the mud. They are adding a second species to the one that is already there.

The local people harvest mangrove for building materials and fuel. They seem perfectly willing to help with re-planting since they can see they are taking out more than is growing. They have no alternative fuel for heat and cooking. They can't afford to shift over to bottle gas and they have no electricity.

These two reef herons posed for us we were getting ready to leave.

On the way back, we stopped and took pictures at the salt pans. They let in the ocean (salt water) and evaporate it until they get salt. It takes a lot of time and a lot of water.

This is a view of Karachi from one of the "flyovers" (overpass). The pile of yellow stuff is sulphur. This IS a port city. We don't know why the sulphur is piled in the open! It is dry enough that they routinely stack cement in the open, too. The area is actually a desert.

We don't just share with donkeys; camels get out on the road, too! Look closely and you will see busses, a camel, motorbikes, pedestrians, trucks, bicycles and (closest to the camera) our guard car! The billboard is part of the constant politicking.

Here is the camel close-up. The guys on the billboard behind him are all politicians.

This video was shot 14 March while we were out shopping. Adam, a teacher from school, was sitting in the front seat and borrowed our camera so he could take some pictures. Try to imagine driving here!

The Hague International Model United Nations

In January we took 12 students to The Hague in The Netherlands for a Model UN. Sound familiar? We did it in Boston in December! We don't show pictures of the kids since they are always concerned about security. No faces!

Even though we were there in the dead of winter, the transportation of choice is very often the bicycle. Holland is flat and very bike friendly.

This is just outside the main train station at The Hague. This is the local commuter parking lot for people who come down from or commute up to Amsterdam or come in from smaller communities to work at The Hague.

This is one of the utility vehicles. Imagine your pickup truck getting this kind of gas mileage! This bike was parked along a canal in Delft.

The convention organizers had a tour set up for the advisors. This is where great cheese starts. Cows. The farm we visited was VERY clean and these yearling calves were separated from the production cows. Pregnant cows were in another area.

This is the next step on the way to cheese. The lady on the right is wife of the farmer. She, the three daughters and the farmer are the entire work force. They make all the cheese right here on the farm. They sell some of it direct to customers who will drive out weekly for their "fix" of farm fresh cheese..

This is where they age the cheeses. A specialty of the farm is the heart shaped cheese. It doesn't taste any different, they just have some antique wooden cheese molds. The large rounds in the background are very popular with cheese stores. Most cheese makers won't handle the large sizes. They get too heavy to move around and you HAVE to use wooden molds. The lighter, plastic ones are too flimsy.

The second stop on the tour was to this windmill. It is a complete reconstruction of a sawmill. They still actually saw wood here. Since Holland doesn't have the flowing water for a waterwheel, their grain grinding and sawing were set up at windmills.

Our convention ID's were good for the streetcars over about 1/3 of the country. We didn't go that far, but we went out to Delft. This is the home of the fine Dutch china. It is also the home of van Leeuwenhoek (inventor of the microscope). This is one of the churches in the town. Yes, it IS leaning over. They didn't even try to build it straight. Apparently, when they were building, the foundation sank and they just kept going. It hasn't fallen over, yet.

One of the things we were looking for in Holland was chime and handbell music. There is a small chimes choir here in Karachi which Alonda is working with. Holland has no music for chimes or handbells even though they have actual church carrillons in several of the towers. We heard this one in Delft and there is one close to the hotel we stayed in at The Hague.

This is a demonstration board showing the stages of manufacture of Delft pottery. We did the factory tour (we were the only people there) and Alonda bought a candy dish and a wall tile.

This is one of the last places we went. The Hague, like everything in Holland, is very close to the beach. Even in the winter, the beach is pretty. We would like to visit it when the weather is warmer, but it would probably be pretty crowded.

Here is our final "find" in Holland: Stroopwafels! We called them "stroopy waffels" since we weren't sure of the pronunciation. They are small waffels with vanilla syrup in them. Delicious!

We will be going back to Boston in about a year for the Model UN at Harvard University. They moved their calendar and Boston and The Hague are now both at the end of January. We decided to go to Boston!

December 2008

In December, we took 12 students to Harvard University in Boston, MA for the Harvard Model United Nations conference. We flew through Dubai in the UAE. Totally Muslim nation with lots of Christmas decorations in the airport! After Jim took this picture, a Muslim family asked us to take their picture in front of it, too.
Kind of fun to take Flight 007! James Bond was not on board, though.
This is the view from our hotel in Boston. We didn’t pay for the hotel; the students paid all the fees. The convention was actually downtown and we went out to Harvard only once, even though Harvard University runs the convention.

We put up our Christmas stuff in Karachi. We didn’t take everything from home, but we took some things. We bought the little artificial tree at the local grocery store. Simon the cat was hard to pose with the tree. This was the best we managed to do with him.

For Christmas/New Year break, we went to Vienna. Alonda got to wander through several Kristkindlmärkte. This one was at the town hall in Vienna. There was another one out at Schönbrunn Castle. We also saw them in Budapest and Bratislawa.

There were actually a lot of people at the market in Vienna. It is a real family event. Tourists get there, too.

We visited two museums in Vienna. This picture is from the clock museum. Astonishingly fun! This is an example from about 150 years ago when they would take a picture and install a clock in it. The frame would be thick to give the clockworks enough room behind the picture. Looks like something you could do with those battery powered clock kits!
This is the interior of the Maltese Church. We went there to listen to a trumpet and organ concert. The church is quite small and is in the middle of town. The trumpet player was amazingly good.

Jim wanted to visit the Esperanto Museum run by the Austrian National Library. The guy behind him is L. L. Zamenhof, the inventor of the language.

The first part of our Christmas/New Year was visiting Vienna. We then took a 5-day river cruise. The cruise was on the Danube River from Vienna to Budapest and back. The “Beethoven” is a fairly new boat, built in 2004, and run by a French company.

Along the Danube, there are a lot of bridges. This one is in Vienna and reminded us of the single tower suspension bridge in Tacoma. The Austrians also have a lot of windfarms. You can see one of the turbines in the background. We cruised past a lot of these.

The weather along the trip was cold, but very sunny and nice. This is one of the things along the river. It is Eszergom Cathedral.

When we first saw these, we thought they were bird’s nests revealed by the lack of leaves in the trees. Actually, this is clumps of mistletoe! Good Christmas decoration along the river.

When we arrived in Budapest, it wasn’t that long until sundown. This is the boat moored on the edge of the river on the Pest side. Buda is actually on the other side of the river. Ship is about 110 yards long, holds 144 passengers and 35 crew members.

This is the newest bridge uniting the two cities.

This is the oldest bridge. It is called the “chain” bridge. If you zoom on the picture, you can see that the pieces look like a bicycle chain. They had to bring engineers from England to build it. When the bridge was finished, people started talking about the city of “Budapest”. It is “Buda Pest” instead of “Pest Buda” because Buda is the side with the Austrian imperial palace!

This is the palace on the Buda side. There are a lot fewer people on that side, but the property values are much higher.

On our city tour, we saw this natural hot spring full of ducks. The entire area is actually famous for its hot springs. This is not fog, it is steaming. Air temperature at the time was about 31 ° F.

This is the view from an overlook down into the city along the river. Very pretty place.

This is a completely different country! This is Bratislawa in Slovakia. There is a restaurant in the round tower, but it doesn’t revolve! In the background you can see the Communist era apartment blocks they built to bring workers in for the oil refinery. Slovakia has no oil deposits.

The city has some very nice pedestrian zones. The city tour was very nice

Off to Muscat, Oman for New Years! We met friends, Graham and Lee Haywood, from Jeddah. We toured some castles and forts. This is the mosque next to Fort Nizwa near Muscat.

The countryside is definitely greener than Saudi Arabia but not as green as Europe

This is the beach near our hotel in Muscat. It was nice to be able to just go out and walk around. The Omani people were very gracious and friendly. Cars actually stop when pedestrians cross the street!

Like in Jeddah, the Omanis decorate the roundabout intersections.

The souk (market) in Muscat looked a lot more like what we think a market should look like!

We enjoyed the New Years Eve bash at the Rock Bottom bar in the hotel.

We are back working in Karachi and are going to The Hague in the Netherlands for the next Model United Nations conference with 12 students. More when we get back!

We hope you all enjoyed the holidays and wish you a happy and prosperous New Year!