Homelessness

We don't have a house either but we are unlikely to have to live like this. We have seen quite a few homeless people in Japan and have been amazed at how orderly their temporary places are e.g. the cardboard laid out like tatami (sleeping mats), the proliferation of umbrellas (essential in Japan for both the heat and the showers) and even their washing hung out on coat hangers in the trees in a neat manner! Today we saw homeless people in Osaka sleeping on park benches but they had taken off their shoes which is the custom in Japanese homes - so unlike the untidy and scruffy stereotype of homeless people!

Japanese couture

Lovely kimono and note the wooden shoes!

Shrine in Tokyo

The first of what will be many shrines we visit! Lovely though!

Japanese ice in plastic of course!

The boys discovered these lemon ices in plastic bottles when they went to the park and were offered one by BMX stunt riders. They cost about 100 Yen (70p) and are amazingly refreshing when the temperature is approaching 40 degrees!

Climbing wall on the corner of our street!

You can imagine how happy the boys were to find this on the corner of our street just a few metres from the hotel - note the ever present bicycle in the foreground! We didn't see anyone else using the wall! The bikes meanwhile were liable to get parking tickets if they weren't neatly lined up in the appropriate place from an appointed bicycle warden who fixed the penalty notice on their handle bars!

Alternative grave markers

I passed this cemetery every time I went to Hombu dojo. Luckily I could walk from the hotel to the dojo and the route consisted of narrow back streets and along one alley there was this cemetery where these giant lolly pop sticks poked up above the wall and if there was a breeze you could hear them rattling against each other - so maybe the dead were talking to each other? This route also took me past a lovely little pastry shop with wooden sliding doors (like most traditional shops) where I regularly bought blueberry and custard type tarts for myself and Alfie (great post training breakfast)! Oscar usually opted for a chocolate coated bun or a pain au chocolat but as all the products had milk in them Patrick had to find an alternative breakfast and he even chose McDonalds one morning much to the amazement of the kids!!!

Hombu Dojo Tokyo

Hannah outside Hombu dojo in Tokyo. I trained here for 6 days with a variety of sensei (teachers). Hombu is the international headquarters of aikido so training here is awesome. The dojo (training room) was on the second floor. In 36 degree heat it is pretty exhausting to do an hour of aikido! It was edifying to find that what they were teaching was very similar to that taught by the Leicester crew (thanks Terry and Pete) and by Rik in Devon!

Me and Margaret

Just had to put up this piccy of me and Margaret Purdey outside her house in Coburg, Melbourne. We've known each other for 28 years thanks to being best friends with her daughter Kate! Thanks to Margaret and Chris for putting us up...we owe a lot of people hospitality when we get ourselves a home...I'm hoping that all the friends and family that we have met with/stayed with on this trip will want to visit us so that we can repay some of their immense kindness.

Sunset in Noosa

The boys and I rented kayaks along with Jana our German room-mate and paddled up the Noosa river just before sunset. We saw mullet leaping and twisting out the water and a bird that would have passed for a fish eagle in South Africa as well as flocks of black cormorants and white herons. We paddled down a small inlet surrounded by mangroves and then beached our kayaks so on a sand island so that we could empty out the water that was seeping up through drainage holes in the kayaks and soaking our shorts!

Tokyo is hot hot hot! It hits 37 degrees centigrade here during the day and only drops to about 28 degrees at night! You could probably fry and egg on the pavement if you wanted to! Our hotel is in the Shinkuyu part of the city, with wide boulevards but lots of little lanes and smaller houses in behind. There are some great parks nearby where children have baseball practice on Saturday mornings and old people do aerobics at 6am on weekdays. There are restaurants everywhere and we've been having fun trying out new things. The sushi bar was amazing, sitting in a ring around the cooks while they loaded new dishes onto a tiny conveyor belt that sped past you at eye level ....!

Surfing!

Check out these surf dudes!!!
Eat your heart out Steve Black - he's got the look - surf champ of the future?!!!!

Oscar taught our room-mate Jana to surf - this is the first time that she stood up on the board!
Alfie looked so at ease - can't wait to do more surfing in Devon...

Check out Oscar on the surfboard...

Pure joy!

This is probably my favourite photo and moment from the entire trip so far. We were staying at the youth hostel in Hall's Gap, a town in the Grampian mountains a few hours out of Melbourne. The 'roos grazed on grass just outside of our backdoor and we were all fascinated by them - not last Alfie who slowly slowly crept closer to them and held out some grass for them to take. And amazingly one grazed right from his hand - this photo is taken just as the roo hops away to the right. Look at Alfie's face - pure joy!

Not just a holiday .....!

You might think that this trip's been just one long holiday! And you'd be nearly right but not quite ....!

I have been doing a little bit of work along way, writing some journal articles and giving some seminars. This week I attended the International Congress of Applied Psychology in Melbourne, which was attended by about 3000 people from all over the world, and gave 3 presentations of different projects I am involved in. Next week, I'm spending a few days at the University of Melbourne to collaborate with Ray Green - a landscape architect. I'm giving a research seminar on Wednesday and we're working on a proposal to the Australian Research Council to carry out some research on adaptation to climate change - specifically coastal erosion.

I have to say I've grown to like Melbourne a lot - it's arty and multicultural and massively sporty. I took Margaret to a great gig by the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra on Friday night, and was lucky to hear one of my all time favourite pieces of music - Rachmaninov's symphony number 2 - brilliant. They also played an incredibly poignant encore in memory of the late Charles MacKerras, Australia's most famous conductor, who died this week in London aged 84.

The Pies agains the Saints!

As you can see, I've been having fun here in Melbourne while Hannah and the boys have headed up to the sunshine coast for some surfing! Here's me with two Dutch pals Judith and Wouter at an Aussie rules football game.

Ok - the world cup final was a great occasion. But the score was 1-0 after nearly 2 hours of football! I saw Collingwood (the magpies) crush St. Kilda by - wait for it - a score of 100 - 52. Yes, that's right, the total points scored in the game was 152! Now that's not dull for sure! And there were 81,000 people in the crowd at the magnificent Melbourne Cricket Ground, with supporters from each club mingling together and a great atmosphere. I particularly liked the 'runners' who, dressed in bright yellow, spend the entire game dashing from the coaches' dugouts onto the field to pass messages to individual players - an alternative career for me I think when this academic lark pales ......

Coburg half marathon champion!!!!

Yesterday, a local running club, Coburg Harriers held a half-marathon race. I'd no idea the club had such a great history - set up way back in 1896 and with no less than the great Herb Elliott as a past member. Herb won the Commonwealth Games 1500m in 1958 and the Olympic Games 1500m in 1960 in Rome, in a then world record of 3:35 - not a bad time nowadays 50 years later!

So I was totally chuffed to be a little footnote in such a great club's history, winning the half-marathon race in a time of 80:36 in cold, windy conditions. Big smiles all round. Margaret and I celebrated with a brandy at home afterwards!

There's a giant spider in my bedroom .....eeeek!

This monster spider was in my bedroom last night and I didn't like it at all! It was skulking near the lightswitch, so every time I came into the room and had to feel for the switch in the dark, I was afraid I'd get nobbled by the monster! It's a Hunstman apparently, and often gets much bigger than this, and isn't really very dangerous at all according to Chris who's house we are staying in .... but I'm not so sure!

Rainforest!

The best thing about my conference trip to Gold coast was that I managed to hitch a ride inland to the Lamington National Park, a world heritage site of rainforest that stretches along the border of Queensland and New South Wales. There were miles of trails you could walk on, very well signposted, and I stayed at the Binna Burra mountain lodge, at about 800m altitude, which was a fantastic place - a bit like youth hostels of old with an ethic of mingling and helping out, and great food!

So whilst taking in the magnificent trees and waterfalls, I got down to some fun trail running. I ran about 100km over the 4 days I spent at the lodge, with the highlight being a 50km run along the 'border track' from Binna Burra to O'Reilly's Lodge, and back again, which took me about 6 hours. I took a route that passed along the Coomeera gorge, running through creeks and past stunning waterfalls with steep drops on one side of the narrow track. It was absolutely brilliant!

I left the lodge to fly back to Melbourne from Brisbane airport, and managed to visit my Dad's sister Stella, who's been living there for the past 10 years. We don't get a chance to meet often, so it was great to catch up with life for her in Australia ....

The Gold Coast .....

Surfer's Paradise, Gold Coast south of Brisbane - I've never been to Las Vegas but it had the feeling of a Vegas 'by the sea' about it! Ironically, I was there to attend a conference about adaptation to climate change, but there didn't seem to be too much of this happening locally as the spires of new 40 storey hotels and apartment blocks ribboned the coastline. But this is to take nothing away from the beach - I did a gorgeous 80min run in the dark along the sand with the southern cross glistening overhead, and then dived into the waves at the finish .....

Cultural encounters in Coburg

Not only did we go swimming in the local pool this day and do a drumming workshop (see below) but I took the boys to a Turkish barber shop for a haircut. Last time they had their haircut it was by Liz in the poodle palour! This time when asked 'what do you want?' they could only say 'a cut like yours' to the young man cutting their hair as our Turkish is non-existant so they both got a short cut. Alfie loves his hair cut because he can make it all spiky - Oscar is not so sure about his cut because he has lost some of his curls!

Same day, we stopped in a Lebanese deli for lunch and shared a table with a man making a documentary about Australian businesses moving off-shore to save bucks (and take advantage of less stringent labour laws etc) - I love these kind of encounters - I'll always be the person seeking out the slightly odd looking person on the train etc so that I can sit next to them and find out how they see the world!
Local libraries are usually great places to get free (or very cheap) access to the internet. During the school holidays (winter here and the kids had the last 2 weeks off school) there are various activities for kids e.g. this African drumming workshop which Alfie and Oscar enjoyed one morning.

Healsville Australian Wildlife Sanctuary

Got to laugh at some of these Aussie creatures like the wombat!
Never saw a dingo in the wild so made-do with this encounter with a sleepy fella!
I loved the pelicans - reminded me of the Roald Dahl story 'The giraffe, the pelly and me' - couldn't believe how big their beaks were and loved watching them diving for food - they looked like they would capsize every time they dived.
This bird was great cos it would lift its left/right leg, open its wings and even 'roar like a tiger' when asked to do so by the keeper. At the same time we saw a fly-past by an eagle with a 2m wingspan - very impressive!