Bucket list birthday breakfast

Hitting the big five-oh, and Cathy had a great idea of how I could celebrate it in style, with rhinos!

Card made by Cathy

And so it was that early on my birthday we were at West Midlands Safari Park meeting the Asian rhinos and feeding them breakfast. I wasn't sure how close we would be allowed to get to the rhinos. (Petting a rhino has been on my bucket list for ages.) Turns out, we got close enough to get slobbered on as we fed them cabbage and celery starters. 

We met three adult rhinos and a baby' (less than a year old). The baby was adorable although his mum would push him out of the way to get to the cabbage. Rhino mums don't indulge their kids! Got to be tough to be a rhino. 

Asian rhinos have prehensile lips, which means they can grip things like door bolts, so extra security is needed on their pens. The lips are very flexible and they caress your hands while you feed them. They are very rubbery and warm, and I felt perfectly safe letting them engulf my hand to take the cabbage. 

However, while it's perfectly fine to put your hand into the mouth of a female rhino, the males have knife-like incisors in their mouths so it's advisable to just chuck the cabbage in from a safe distance. In the wild, male rhinos use their incisors for scrapping with each other over who gets to make it with the lady rhinos, and given they can do some damage to armoured rhino hide, they would make short work of a human hand if they accidentally bit you. 

For the main course of their breakfast the rhinos have a mix of different kinds of yummy pellets, mixed in with powder that simulates the dust that rhinos naturally consume while feeding in the wild. The dust helps them poop properly. Given how much rhinos can poop in an average day, it helps to make sure the poop is as solid and dry as possible. 

After breakfast was over, we bade goodbye to the rhinos. We then went on the Safari Drive, where we saw some more rhinos, and then looked at some of the other animals in the park. I enjoyed the sealion show and the nocturnal house with free-flying bats. But it's hard for any other animals to compete with the experience of being snuffled by friendly rhinos.

Anniversary hockey night

After our trip to see the Cardiff Devils on August bank holiday, I noticed there was a game on the night of our wedding anniversary. I bought the last pair of tickets left in the 'home' end and so, for our 27th wedding anniversary, we watched some hockey!

The ice hockey season starts with the Challenge Cup games. The opponents were Manchester Storm. The arena was almost completely full. A fun night beckoned. 

I'd joked with friends that 27 years is the "ice and violence" anniversary. There was a surprising amount of violence in this game. Lots of punch ups resulted in 38 minutes of accumulated penalties in the first period alone. A Storm player got done for "checking to the head". Later a Devils players incurred a 2 minute, 5 minute and 10 minute penalty all for the same incident. The 10 minute was for "instigating" because he started the fight.

The actual hockey in between the scraps wasn't great. Cardiff were the better side but only scored their first two goals when they had an advantage of a power play. Their third goal came after Storm had a late goal disallowed - I think because there was interference with the Devils goalie. With just a couple of minutes to go Storm took their netminder off to give them an advantage in attack but the Devils broke and a player scored from the halfway line into the unguarded goal. 

There was a reminder among the honours banners of how thing were different in ye days of olde. Remember cigarette sponsorship?

So the final score was 3-0. A reasonable win and a happy result for our anniversary.

Turning 40: My friends filled my virtual farmyard

I like virtual gifts. For a small sum of money a person who needs a sheep or a chicken or blankets gets what they need and I get a nice card saying what's been given.

As I have just turned 40 and I wanted to throw a party I wanted to avoid ending up with a ton of presents that I don't really need. I have more than enough stuff.

So I decided to ask people coming to the party that if they really, really wanted to, they could help me fill a wall with home-produced art or fill a farmyard with virtual animals and things.

Some people combined both - my niece Joy drew me a sign for my farmyard.

Every farm needs a sign

And people were incredibly generous. Most people turned up with some little envelope, or my inbox pinged with an email the day before, to say that donations had been made and virtual chickens, sheep, goats, bees (lots of bees!) and even donkeys had been 'bought' on my behalf for people who really needed them.

I was able to display all these by clipping up the cards and by the end of the party my virtual farmyard looked like this:

A full farmyard

For people who like knowing this sort of detail, here's the run down of what ended up on the farm.

• A queen bee and four other lots of bees
• At least 4 chickens (2 single chickens and a further gift of chickens plural)
• 2 donkeys
• Ducks (at least 2)
• 4 goats - one of them a nanny goat
• 3 sets of piglets (so a minimum of 6 little piggies)
• 5 sheep
• 3 vegetable gardens
• One lot of drought resistant crops
• 2 clumps of useful worms (good for the soil)
• A pile of poo (useful fertiliser)
• An adopted manatee (to go in the pond with the ducks)

I was also given a $25 microfinance loan to be loaned out to the person of my choice in the developing world. I'm going to sort that out and blog about it later but it sounds like a brilliant idea.

In a future post I'm going to blog about the art wall that got filled. But I wanted to show off my farmyard first. I'm very grateful to all the people who came to the party and who have helped so many people who are living in challenging situations around the world.

The good, the bad and the Uzbek

Today is National Day in Uzbekistan.












I know very little about Uzbekistan, except that it used to be part of the Soviet Union until independence on August 31, 1991. So, I thought I might try and find some stuff out about it, which I’ve handily categorized for readers as The Good, The Bad, and the Uzbek.

The Good
• Uzbekistan is Central Asia's most populous country with a population of 26.9 million people. So, it is a real country, unlike say Leichtenstien.
• The most popular beverage in Uzbekistan is tea and teahouses are impirtant social meeting places. Liking it!
• Tashkent, the nation's capital and largest city, has a 3 line subway built in 1977, and expanded 2001. (OK, perhaps not so good if you aren’t interested in underground railways, but I kind of am, so it’s going in as good)
• Uzbekistan is now the world's second-largest exporter of cotton and the seventh world major producer of gold. Good for them.
• The life expectancy in Uzbekistan is 63 years for men and 70 years for women.

The Bad
• Uzbekistan is doubly-landlocked, meaning to reach a proper sea you have to cross at least two borders because all it’s neighbours are landlocked. The only other country like that is, coincidentally, Leichtenstein, but that’s not a proper country anyway (see above). Uzbekistan does have access to the Aral Sea, which is really just a big lake… so no beach parties in Uzbekistan.
• Uzbekistan possesses the largest military force in the Central Asian region, having around 650,000 people in uniform. And it’s a repressive police state that’s pretty much a dictatorship in all but name.
• In 2005, Uzbekistan was included in Freedom House's "The Worst of the Worst: The World's Most Repressive Societies". In May 2005 security forces in the Andijan province carried out what Time magazine called “one of the bloodiest assaults any nation has inflicted on its own population since Tiananmen Square.”
• Although it’s a secular country that allows freedom of religion, president Islam Karimov is worried about the growth of militant Islam and has been cracking down on it. Which, as we all know, tends to make the nutters even more dangerous…

...and the Uzbek
• The name Uzbek, both for the people and for the nation itself, is said to be self-referential from the period the Russians first encountered the people, parsing as ozum bek, or "I am the lord (or ruler)". You’ve got to like that!
• Another Uzbek phrase I learned during this research is: ‘qovoq kalla’, which means ‘pumpkin head’.
• Football terms include: ‘Qanot yarim himoyachisi’ (chap, o'ng) = Winger (left, right); ‘Yarim himoyachi’ = Midfielder; ‘Himoyachi’ = Defender; ‘Hujumchi’ = Forward/striker. The national team play in the Pakhtakor Markaziy Stadium in Tashkent.
• The word for ‘sneeze’ is the wonderfully onomatopoiec ‘aksirish’.
• The currency is 1 Uzbek som = 100 tiyins.
• Uzbek websites have the suffix .uz; the international dialing code is +998.
• The 12 stars on the Uzbek flag (above) represent the 12 months of the Islamic calendar, while the new moon is both an Islamic symbol and represents the rebirth of the nation following independence.