Day 2 of the conference in Antwerp. The morning started with a delightfully filling breakfast buffet - today they had pancakes that were to die for - light, and laced with maple-syrup-like flavouring but without the stickiness, all topped off with a pile of cream! The day then proceeded with an 'exciting' morning at the conference - lots of work, not much play. For lunch, a few colleagues decided to head out to the waterfront to eat at a well known seafood establishment. Between the various colleagues, we managed to get a smattering of lobster, crab, fish and mussels - poor [View Full Entry]

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Belgium - country of cheese, fries, chocolate, and all those other artery clogging treats that help you meet an early death. I didn't think my trip to Belgium would be so food-filled, but thankfully I was happily mistaken. I'm in Belgium as part of the Interspeech 2007 conference, an annual event that brings together speech scientists from around the world. Its a 5 day series of non-stop talks and paper sessions where speech geeks get together and get excited about the latest ways to model our vocal tracts. Belgium is a bi-lingual country, split into a french speaking east and a [View Full Entry]

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We started the day at a ridiculous 5am. Next on the itinerary was Xiangshawan, "the singing sands gorge", a tourist spot in the Gobi Desert. The place is known for its incredibly huge sand dunes, with the largest being over 90m. Alas, getting to Xiangshawan was a 4.5 hour drive from Huitengxile, which is why we had to get up at a ridiculous 5am. Despite the early start, and the rather tiring day before, the majority of the gang didn't sleep in the van. Instead, we whiled away the time playing childish hand games, including a fun little local game called [View Full Entry]

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Many people don't realize that there are two Mongolias. Good old standard Mongolia is a standalone country north of China, and is best known for its famous conqueror, Genghis. Then there is Inner Mongolia, a province in the far north of China, that was claimed a long long time ago for the Chinese empire. Both places are known primarily for grasslands and horses. Not sure why people find grasslands so fascinating, since I'm sure we've all seen big fields of grass before. But somehow, those tourism brochures make walking through big fields of tall itchy grass seem like an exciting heart- [View Full Entry]

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Enough with the turquoise turrets. We felt like spoilt kids with parents that owned a fudge shop - wonderful merchandise, beautiful in fact, but please, not one more piece. Sadly, looking at beautiful stuff can get a bit tiring (of course, looking at my wife will never get tiring - need to include this to ensure I get dinner tonight). Today was our last day in Bukhara, before we would head off to our final city in Uzbekistan, Khiva. We'd saved the best sites for last, which at the time had seemed like a good idea. Alas, 2 days in Bukhara [View Full Entry]

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I said it in my previous entry, but it deserves to be said again. This city has a lot of mosques. A lot. And if its not a mosque, then its a madressah (Islamic school). And if its neither, then its a tourist hotel. Thus, if you're a touring Islamic student, you'd have something to do in just about every building. In the past, Bukhara was known as a center of wisdom - during the middle ages, a lot of famous Arab scholars originated from Bukhara. For example, apparently the anatomy textbook used as late as the early 1900s in Europe [View Full Entry]

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"More mosques than days of the year". And that's the truth. Bukhara has more mosques than days in the year, and walking around, you'd kind of start to believe that its more than a tall tale they tell the tourists. Bukhara is known as the holy and wise city of Uzbekistan, although given that Bukhara is that much closer to the scorching desert, you'd wonder just how wise the people living here were. We traveled to Bukhara from Samarkand in a shared taxi. This time we had two guys with us - older and more quite Salim in the front, and [View Full Entry]

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Day 1 in Samarkand had been so rewarding that we decided to get up bright and early today ... actually the truth is that the bed was kind of a bit dusty and the room a tad too musty to encourage a nice leisurely sleep. Breakfast at Hotel Zarina was supposedly 'a typical uzbek' breakfast, complete with French cheese, criossants, and Nescafe coffee. Hmmm.... I think not. Add to the fact that the hotel was full of French tour groups, and that the cook was an old French lady - we suspect the claim to typical uzbek was a bit farfetch. [View Full Entry]

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We woke up bright and early to catch a shared taxi to Samarkand - our next stop on the trip. Uzbekistan has this super-convenient means of traveling between cities - shared taxis. All you do is turn up and the shared taxi stand, fight through the rabble of taxi drivers that swarm you because you're a tourist, and then negotiate a price per seat in a taxi going to your city of choice. The nice thing about this is you get to travel with other people in a confined car - which guarantees some level of interaction. We only had [View Full Entry]

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Tashkent - capital of Uzbekistan ... yet everybody speaks Russian. Okay, so it makes sense, since Uzbekistan was a Russian state until the break up of the USSR - but that was 15 years ago. Yet today, people still continue to speak Russian in Tashkent, and most people (to our untrained eyes) definitely don't look or dress like what we thought an Uzbek would dress like - which goes to show just how silly we are. Because, you see, today, to be an Uzbek, means that you have some kind of Russianness in you. The interesting thing about Uzbekistan is [View Full Entry]

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