Lepidoptery 4

Time for a few more flutterbies. These are from a few weeks ago now. The cold weather beginning to kick in is causing the different species to disappear one by one.

This fine beastie is an Indian Fritillary, enjoying the flowers just outside our front door:



















As is this one (may even be the same one - there were a few fluttering about):

























And this is a Common Wall (bizarre name! My favourite name is the one called THE LEOPARD - sounds a bit ferocious for a mild-mannered insect - and one of the few that I didn't manage to photograph before it disappeared - maybe next spring...) - apparently a female one:



















And last but not least of today's selection, this is an Indian Tortoiseshell, seen on our walk up Mukshpuri the other week (as was Mrs Wall above).

First day in clinic

Disclaimer - This is about my first day in clinic and being a “lady daktar” the problems of the patients I saw reflect this. You have been warned....

Yesterday was my first day of full time work, and it went something like this...

6.20am: Alarm went off, wake up feeling slightly nauseous with nerves about the day ahead, feel better after breakfast.

7am: Ward round, reasonably straightforward as I accompany our resident paediatrician. It was very sad to see one baby who had been brought to clinic a bit yellow and needing some phototherapy, but whose family either couldn’t or wouldn’t allow him to be admitted. He subsequently came back 2 days later, even more yellow and having seizures and now seems to have some brain damage.

8am: Clinic starts. Unfortunately the very capable nurse-in-charge has “chuhtti” (leave) today so somehow no-one was really expecting me. After a bit of a guddle finding a room and a clinic helper my first patient arrives. I’d hoped for a nice straightforward case to start with but instead it it was a woman with an 8 years of infertility, polycystic ovaries and possible type 2 diabetes and I rapidly discover as my Urdu runs out that my clinic helper doesn’t actually speak English!

9am: Things improve when I get a new clinic helper who does speak some English and is very good at correcting my Urdu so that the patients can understand me. My next patient is also concerned that she is not getting pregnant but actually only got married 5 months ago, (you have to be trying to conceive for at least a year and possibly 2 before you meet the definition of infertility). There seems to be quite a lot of pressure here for women to have babies in the first year after they marry, even if their husband is working in another country and only home every couple of months or they’re living with their in-laws!

9:30am: Rufie (my clinic helper) and I are both stumped when the next patient launches into discussion in Pashto which neither of us speak. Fortunately she also speaks a little Hindko (which Rufie understands) and has a straightforward problem so we muddle our way through.

10am: A much needed chai break. I wondered why it didn’t taste sweet even after I added 2 teaspoons of sugar but discovered why when I got to the bottom of the cup and discovered the sludge there. The sugar granules are huge and it takes a lot of stirring to dissolve them.

10:30am: My next patient tells me her problem is abdominal pain and it’s only when I go to examine her and find she has a large mass in her abdomen that I realise that she is 5 months pregnant and she’s actually here for antenatal care - oops. (I don’t think she’d mentioned it before.)

The rest of the morning was more straightforward; urine infections, lower back pain, nothing too complicated. I’m informed that there are only 2 patients to see after lunch so go home for lunch quite happy.

1pm: Clinic restarts. I see a woman who’s is probably having a miscarriage but when I do an abdominal ultrasound I can’t see the baby. This means I can’t rule out an ectopic pregnancy (where the baby grows outside the womb, rare here, but a potentially life threatening condition that you don’t want to miss). She needs an internal scan (which I can’t do yet) and when I call our obs and gynae specialist, she’s been called away to the operating theatre to do an emergency c-section. I panic slightly but am reassured when she says she’ll come when she’s finished. Then all the cards for the patients she was going to see arrive on my desk, so I spend the rest of the afternoon struggling through various gynaecology problems, so much for only 2 more patients.

4pm: My day at the hospital finally ends after a short teaching session on internal scanning for the 2 bleeding ladies I saw during the afternoon and checking up on my babies in the nursery. I only managed to see 10 patients in my day in clinic and it felt like a lot more but I survived. Back tomorrow for round 2.

Bring on the Snow Leopards! (& Common Leopards!)

As mentioned previously, we stopped in at a wildlife park on the way down from Makshpuri, and in the process realised the ambition put to you in my inaugural blog post.



















Relaxed snow leopard. We also encountered a noisy school group of teenage boys, which meant we were just as much an exhibit as the leopards - a little uncomfortable, especially for the ladies. However, they decided they'd had enough after Mr Snow Leopard here did a fantastic charge/leap/claw-onto-the-chickenwire right behind one of their number. Then it sat there looking pleased with itself.



















While it's always something of a shame to see grand beasts shut in tiny cages, I wasn't unhappy about having 3 layers of chickenwire between him and me.

They also had a couple of common leopards, which were good entertainment value. Almost as grand, though without the mighty balancing tail of the snow leopard. I could have sat watching them for much longer.

Wagah Border Ceremony

I'm getting slightly out of chronological order here, but this is worth going back to. At the end of the orientation conference, we and a few friends went to the famous Wagah Border Ceremony. This involves lots of shouting, stomping around and generally facing off against your Indian counterparts.



















That's India through there.

























No idea who this chap was or what he was doing there. He wandered about a lot with his picture. People cheered.

























"You're looking awful cheery for a guard..."



Here's a taster of some shouting. And stomping. At times the whole thing felt like 3 shows happening simultaneously, with minimal co-ordination between the various parties. There were cheerleader chaps with big flags who shouted a lot and gee-ed up the crowd. There was a guard with incredible lung capacity who stood on top of the gatehouse and shouted - people cheered. There were rousing pop songs along the lines of "Go Pakistan!" - people cheered. People in the crowd started up their own chants in competition with the cheerleaders ones - and people cheered some more.



















They have been known to kick their own hats off on occasion.

























The flags descending. In order to keep international relations suitably happy, it's obviously imperative that the flags come down in unison, with one never being below the other.



















And finally, the flag being hot-footed back to safe-keeping. A job well done. Now for some Lemsip for the shouted throats, and a nice warm bath for the stomped legs.

Photo post: Mukshpuri

Last weekend we took a trip out into the Murree Hills and did a lovely walk up a 9000ft hill called Mukshpuri, passing through a wildlife park on the way down (separate post on that coming shortly).



















As you can see, the road up is fairly impressive on the way up there; from above it looks something like this.



















On the drive there we met a sizeable troupe of these fellows.

























Looking down from the side of the valley.



















Some of the local ladies collecting fuel. Etiquette reduces my National Geographic-wannabe shots to covert behind-a-tree-once-they-aren't-looking operations.

























There are a startling number of lightning-struck trees, but that's understandable given the standard of lightning storms in this part of the world...














(click on pics for larger versions...)

At the top we emerge from the trees onto this plateau or alpine meadow - it almost doesn't feel like the top of a mountain somehow. This is the quietest place we have been, night or day, since we arrived - no bustling bazaars, no truck horns, no shouty loudspeakers... aah.



















Some big mountains are just about visible to the north-west. We're told that on a clear day you can see all the way to Nanga Parbat - maybe that's it, who knows?



















We stop at an open air barbecue restaurant on the way home, where we have possibly the best curry so far (a ginger chicken dish with soft fresh naan - spicy without being too hot to taste the ingredients!). Here is one of the views from our table. It's amazing where people manage to build their houses. And it gives us some understanding of why so many of pregnant patients at the hospital don't make it to their antenatal appointments!



















Some alternative transport - I'm not sure I like the look of that commute, even though it would probably cut an hour off the journey from one side of the valley to the other.

The Salt Range

The aforementioned Salt Range: this may be of more interest to you engineers and other geeks, but it has some nice scenery too!

Once you get down to Islamabad from where we are, the journey is amazingly flat for several hundred kilometres. So after all that flatness, it's intriguing to encounter a succession of increasingly urgent-sounding signs...





























































...before heading onto a 10km-long, 50kph-limited, 7%-inclined series of double bends, cuttings and bridges that looks something like this...



















...complete with escape roads for those whose brakes aren't up to it (looks like it's been used a few times too!):
















In this one you can see where they've obviously had to swerve the road inwards a bit from the edge after it got too precarious:



















Some striking scenery - all of these were taken on the return journey - on the way there it was so hazy you couldn't see much beyond the road itself:



















While the speed limit for those double bends is mostly 50kph, the trucks have to settle for less than a 10th of that as they settle down into hill-climbing gear for the long haul upwards:



















In our area there are plenty of twisty little mountain roads that snake along the sides of valleys in improbable ways, but to do it with a 6-lane motorway is pretty darn impressive.

Orientation conference

We've been back for a few days now, but hadn't quite got round to updating you on our orientation conference in Lahore. When we tried to book our Daewoo (that's the coach company here - connected to the car company of the same name) tickets we weren't too disappointed to learn that one of the colleges had booked the entire 6.30am bus, meaning we'd have to get the 11.30am instead. What a shame.

The Daewoo bus is fairly special: the overall experience is closer to travelling on an airline than a bus (but with more legroom), with baggage checks, luggage tags, and a hostess who brings round newspapers and refreshments. And the equivalent of £8 gets you a 7.5 hour journey. Unfortunately ours picked up a puncture on one of its inner rear tyres, which added another 90 minutes.



















Especially for Laurence, I should point out that the full writing on the green rickshaw reads "MASTER PANTHER".

The journey includes one rather special stretch through the Salt Range, including what I think is the craziest piece of motorway engineering I've ever experienced, which I shall save for a post of its own in full geekish glory.

A friendly chap I met on the bus (and even bought us chicken at one of the stops) helped find us a taxi who wouldn't overcharge us. The journey to the college campus at which the conference was taking place was straightforward enough, but actually finding where to go once we were inside the vast maze of buildings, gardens and arches (in the dark) took so long that we decided to tip him a little extra. The campus was very nice indeed. Here are some of us watching the ubiquitous cricket match.



















The conference itself was great, mainly just for the chance to meet a few other folk in a similar boat. There were 25 or so of us from locations all over the country. We had some fascinating talks on culture, religion, politics and local church history, interviews with local church leaders, and even a cooking lesson ("make sure you don't waste any of the oil!" - we can see why so many of the more affluent people here struggle to keep their weight down!).

On the last day we had an outing to the Wagah Border ceremony (detailed post with pics to follow), before a lovely meal out with one of the other couples (at a buffet restaurant - endless variety of curries being made in front of you, live music, pretty swish - not the kind of thing we'd frequent, but great for a rare treat).

On the journey back we broke the journey at the house of a couple of our new friends, then got a couple of minibuses back up from Pindi. The last one waited until it was full, then set off. Then stopped to pick up just one more passenger to be squeezed in wherever possible. Then again for one more. And again. And one more time, this time for a family of three, prompting a complete re-shuffle so that no women were sitting next to unrelated men. Wouldn't like to do that for more than a short ride!

Oh, and when we got back, it was cold! Apparently there was a big hailstorm soon after we left, and it's been triple-layer temperature ever since - bit of a shock to the system!

Lepidoptery 3 - Striped Tiger

Squeegie merchant!

Today I went down to 'Pindi with the workshop boss to get the first batch of supplies for our prototype solar water heater. Here's the edited highlights of the day, complete with random hotchpotch of sights, observations and random impressions:

Mobile Goat Bouncers. For a while on the drive down we were stuck behind a small truck chock-a-block full of goats. There were also two guys in the back with the goats, whose job seemingly was to clamber about the place disciplining their charges if they misbehaved. All while barreling down a bumpy hill, swerving around the other traffic. Can't say I particularly envied them their job.

First stop - the metal merchant:




















After purchasing our copper pipe and aluminium sheet, we headed to a little shop where we were presented with an ever-growing pile of different pipe fittings and valves. Here the language barrier didn't help general communication - after about 20 minutes I drew the chap a quick diagram and he said "Ah, for this you need 3/4" to 1/2" reducing tees." Which I could have told him right at the start! Or rather I could, had I been able to follow any of the conversation, or known how to say any of that in Urdu.

The taxis in Pindi are almost as finely decorated as the trucks in the rest of the country. The very best ones, which unfortunately I wasn't fast enough to snap, had a large painting of an animal on the side in addition to all the other paraphernalia: tigers were popular, as were white horses, as (for some reason) were eagles fighting cobras. But the BJW award of geniusness has to go to the one proudly displaying an intricately painted 3-foot lobster.
















The drivers here also have their own equivalent of the UK's once-ubiquitous "My other car is a Porsche" stickers - writing on the back of a tiny Suzuki pick-up said, I'm reliably informed: "When I grow up, I'm going to be a truck".

Taxi race:
















Members of the Wilson clan will no doubt be thrilled to hear that we also went to a genuine Pakistani squeegie merchant. Need a plunger (or ten?), any kind of brush, or a random basket-y thing? He's got them too!

Some of the trucks have proper pictures on as well as random patterns. I'm a fan of the somewhat bewildered expression on the tiger.




















A final thought: watching a suzuki with 8 men clinging onto the back of it go over a speed-bump is, for some reason, really rather amusing.

New clothes

So, you may remember a little while ago that I was shopping for some cloth for some new clothes for my birthday. Well, today, a month later I finally have my new suits, (after 2 visits to the ribbon shop, 2 visits to the tailor and 1 visit to my language teacher's talented sewing sister!).

I'm very pleased with the results and you should know that the green suit is in the very latest style! I don't think my friends would describe me as an avid follower of fashion, but there are so many beautiful fabrics and colours and shiny things here I'm getting quite into it. It's a good job they're not too expensive...

Turns of phrase

While Urdu is mostly reasonably straight-forward to translate once you get your head around it, today's lessons produced some rather... well... unwieldy sentence constructions.

We were doing an activity on seeing and hearing things (actual physical things, not hallucinations), and I wanted to say we could hear a bird's footsteps on the corrugated iron roof. Which ended up being:

"We, above the room, on the roof, the voice of the walking of the bird can hear."

Similarly, 'I can hear the dog barking' became:

"I, outside, the loud barking voice of the dog can hear."

Phew.

The thought crossed my mind earlier today that doing live interpretation of Urdu to English must be made incredibly difficult by the differences in word order; if it was a long sentence, you'd have to memorise it all until you finally got to the verb at the end of the sentence before you could translate it, by which time the speaker would be well on the way through their next sentence...

Lepidoptery 2

It's high time Herbert was demoted from the top of the blog in favour of more beautiful creatures...

(click the images to see larger versions)

This one's an Indian Cabbage White - there are loads of these.

And this fine fellow is an Indian Fritillary.

EDIT: Actually, no he's not; she's a Painted Lady. (Mistook page 31 for fig. 31 in my book. Oops.)

I'm much better pleased with these pictures than my previous attempts; partly aided by the fact that these ones do occasionally pause (and actually land rather than hover), partly by better light, but mostly because I finally found the manual focus mode on my camera. Its macro mode has an unfortunate habit of focussing on entirely the wrong part of the picture, so while manual can be slightly more hit-or-miss, it's worth it when they come out right. I think I need a proper SLR.

I love the way you can see her tongue going right down into the depths of the flower. Which brings us to what I think is my favourite of all my photos from this trip so far:

Also, the other day we saw a large dark one, similar in shape and size to the Common Peacocks, but entirely black, and I think with slightly different shaped wings. I haven't managed to track down his identity anywhere. Maybe he's some kind of nefarious butterfly anti-hero.