Here are a few pictures from this evening’s expedition to Xi’an’s old (walled) city.

The full set is here in my MobileMe Gallery.
It was bitterly cold, and I used the opportunity to educate overseas colleagues on the old English(?) expression “monkey weather” (as in, “It’s cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey”). We took two taxis to the highly-decorated South Gate(?), then braved the traffic to cross into the old city, and went looking for a bar. The first one had cute kittens, but no cocktails. The second had decent drinks (the strongest Long Island Iced Tea I’ve ever had) and great music. From the “Bar Street” we headed up to the Muslim Street, which was a crowded riot of colour, smells (food, incense, spices) and music. Resisting the tourist trinkets, we found a restaurant that offered more and varied ways to serve lamb, beef and goat than I had imagined. (And the fish, mushrooms, and dumplings were good too.) It was halal, of course, and when pressed for an alternative to tea they came up with a couple of bottles of warm, sweet Sprite. (Sweet, because of course it was made from sugar rather than corn syrup.) And finally we flagged down a “cargo taxi” who agreed to take us all back to the hotel for 40 yuan, which was a great deal even if it did mean treating Roman as self-loading freight!
Tomorrow, hopefully, we’ll get to see the Terracotta Army. (I say “hopefully” because there’s a non-zero chance that we’ll have to head back in to the office.)

In nearly three years of living in Seattle, I’d never been to a baseball game. My son used to praise Safeco Field as a great venue, and it’s only 10 minutes walk from my apartment, but I’d never been tempted. I don’t watch much baseball anyway: I think the last game I saw was in San Francisco with Chris and Celeste. But yesterday I suggested to Kate – almost idly – that there was a game starting in just over an hour, and 35 minutes later we were sitting in wonderful seats overlooking first base.
At first, I simply enjoyed the sun, the cityscape, and the buzz of the crowd, and I simply… well, tolerated the baseball. Seattle was hosting the Oakland Athletics, and neither team was playing very well. Oakland got 3 runs in the first innings and Seattle never looked like catching up. The worst team in the AL West was beating the best, and both looked like minor league teams. None of the pitchers looked comfortable: Oakland used five, while Seattle ran through an incredible eight pitchers. So I amused myself by experimenting with the burst mode in my Panasonic DMC-TZ4. It’s a great way of uncovering the anatomy of, say, a swing and miss; you can see the exact point at which the batsman realizes that he’s not connecting.
So things bumbled along in a pleasant, sunny, spring Sunday afternoon kind of way. Around the bottom of the eighth, the crowd began to disperse, including the guy in front of me (in a $70 seat!) who’d spent the entire game playing Sudoku on his iPhone. And then, unexpectedly, Seattle scored a home run in the bottom of the ninth to tie things up at 4-4. And suddenly the entire character of the game changed, along with the attitude of the crowd. Everybody was engaged. The pitchers were still struggling, and the batsmen all seemed to be committed to distributing foul balls to as many kids as possible, but we were all concentrating.
In the 13th, it looked as if it was all over. Oakland scored three runs, and almost swaggered onto the field intent on closing things out. But Seattle came back, scored three runs, almost got a winner, and we were tied up again at 7-7.
The game had started just after 1pm, and it was now after 5. The floodlights came on, whereupon the clouds broke and bathed the field in a glorious sunset. In the middle of the 14th, the crowd was encouraged to stand up and have a second seventh-inning stretch, to mark the passage of seven more innings since the first! We went into the bottom of the 15th inning, and Oakland decided to relieve their long-suffering pitcher, Gonzalez, by bringing back one of their starters, Eveland. It was a fatal mistake. Eveland had no control, gave up a hit, committed a throwing error after fielding a bunt, and loaded the bases. It only remained for the center fielder to misjudge an easy pop-up for Seattle to score an improbable win.

A bunch of Seattle Amazonians, including my boss Colin Bodell and yours truly, found ourselves in the Asiana Hotel in Chennai this weekend, and decided to play tourist.

We got a driver to take us down the coast to Mamallapuram, a town 60km south of Chennai. It’s famous for its stone carvings and temples, and for a large impossibly-balanced rock known as Krishna’s Butterball. Wikitravel has a good article on the place.
After several hours at “M’puram”, we headed back up the coast, but stopped for a quick visit to Crocodile Bank, a zoo and research centre devoted to all things crocodilian. From their website:

Starting with 30 mugger adults, the Bank has bred over 5000 and now holds over 2400 crocodilians of 14 different species. By 1987 the CrocBank developed a much broader focus, and became the Center for Herpetology, Indias premier institution for herpetofaunal conservation, research and education. Currently besides crocodilians, the Bank maintains 12 endangered species of turtles and tortoises, five species of snakes, including the King Cobra, Ophiophagus hannah, water monitor lizards, Varanus salvator salvator, two species of pythons and albino cobras. Housed in enclosures very similar to their natural habitat visitors can get a close view of how these reptiles live in the wild.

It’s awesome. Highly recommended.
The photos that I took are presently uploading (slowly – we’re up to number 28 out of 134 but they’re all up on grommit now) to my gallery. Enjoy.