Qas Al Haj

I promised I'd post some photos of the most famous Berber fortified granary in Libya - the Qasr Al Haj.

Like the one at Nalut I posted photos of last year, this Qasr was used to store grain and oil for local tribes. It housed the stores of over 70 families, and was still in use until relatively recently. Nalut was a rabbit warren, whereas Qasr Al Haj is round and fort-like from the outside...

...and inside is a wide open space ringed with the little doors into the storage spaces.

There is also a little display of traditional tools and vessels.

In the Medina I once saw a fantasic 3d wall mural of this qasr taking up an entire wall of a shop. One of the interesting sights of Libya, within a few hours' drive of Tripoli.

Well, boys and girls...

We've come to the end of our two-year contract. I've still got photos and stories to tell, but my internet access has died again, so they will have wait to I'm set up again somewhere else (where, is the question, of course)...

In the meantime, here's a photo or two from my Africa tour last year.

Giraffe from a little national park near Victoria Falls (Zambia side). The national park is so small and the animal populations so limited that these giraffes have paler spots than other populations due to inbreeding. Did a great walking safari through here and learned more than you ever need to know about dung (I can now tell the age and sex of a giraffe from looking at its dung, my friends, that is quite the in-demand talent).

Watch out for dangerous hippos! Camping has never been so fun (not as bad as the Serengeti where one girl's tent was attacked by a giant wild pig). The expanse of water beyond is not the sea but the parasite-filled lake of Malawi.

One of my favourite stops on the tour was Zanzibar. We had a fantastic tour guide take us around some of spice farms - who knew pepper grew on a vine? Not me. He also showed us how one berry could be used as lipstick, and another berry could be used as soap. Yep, the suds in his hands are from a berry, not actually soap. Smelt beautiful, the whole island did. The main town there is a lot like the medina of Tripoli except errant breezes brought you whiffs of cinnamon and vanilla rather than garbage and sewerage...

Expect a long absence. In the meantime, you could check out my writing blog at wendypalmer.com.au

The butchers...

I have a hard time with the butchers, I admit, because I generally don’t really like dealing with meat (ex-vegetarian who makes the Ambassador do all the meat-cutting and cooking bits of the evening meal), and there it is, in your face. This, of course, is why I'm not posting pictures. Just imagine large dead animals hanging in windows (sometimes with neck and head still attached to prove its freshness...).

According to our Arabic teacher, there are no words for cuts of meat – you have to ask for meat without bone if you want a steak-type thing, or you can ask for mince. Or of course you can point at the fresh carcass hanging from the ceiling to show which bit of the animal you want. Generally, expats have found that the English words ‘fillet’ and ‘chicken breast’ are understood. I tend to cheat and visit the butcher attached the big expat-favoured supermarket once a month or so, where everything is just a little bit further away and already cut up and laid out under glass and plastic.

There’s an Australian lamb butcher locally in Janzour. You can tell it’s Australian lamb because its logo is a map of Australia with a lamb in it. It’s all frozen stuff, not great, but one of the few places that does hamburger patties that don’t shrink to nothing.

Beef is cheaper than camel here – which I found out when I was earnestly warned that the camel was expensive, but with no warning about the price of beef – because beef is seen as an inferior meat, I was told. Which is a nice environmentally-friendly way of treating local vs imported meat, really.

Thailand: what we did on our holiday

We went to a temple and saw a really big Buddha.

We cradled a sleeping tiger in our laps.

We rode an elephant.

We snorkelled and canoed with lots of fish.

I went to a Thai cooking class, and we both ate plenty of Thai food.

And we went to a wedding which involved a procession of dancing drummers.

Slightly bigger plug for self

My young adult fantasy fiction novel, After the Dragon, has just been published as an e-book and can be checked out here...

ETA: I forgot to mention it'll also shortly be available in hard copy for those who aren't yet on board with electronic formats.

Calling international

Here's an interesting phenomena that seems be becoming more and more common in the last few months. We try to dial home on our mobiles (the landline being of poor quality) and end up connected to random people around the world rather than the number we actually dialled. The Ambassador tried to call my roaming mobile while I was outside and got a family in the US - who happened to have someone there of my name, which you can imagine was quite confusing. Interestingly, it happened again, and he got the same family.

Another expat got a US family and asked for 'Mum', who was duly put on the phone...then there's the expat who is harressing some poor Chinese guy by dialling the mis-directed number 7 or 8 times in a row just to see what happens.

Since it usually appears to be going to the US, it appears that the network is sometimes randomly dropping our +61 code to +1, routing us to the US instead of Australia.

No posts for a few weeks.

Small plug for self

My short story Excision is out now in Zombies, edited by Robert N Stephenson.

Unfortunately the editor was much better at suggesting structural changes than at copyediting, and has introduced quite a few errors into the story with random deletions of conjunction words like 'and' and 'but'.

He also tacked on his own, misspelled, ending without running it by me first. If you do read this story, remember that my much more subtle version ends at 'discount' and ignore the last few lines.