Food and Drink

{.asset-media-link} The floating restaurants off the eastern part of Phuket Island serve excellent seafood in an incomparable environment. When the sun is out, and the wind is blowing, the ambience is inimitable.

This isn’t very coherent, but my activities at the start of this month haven’t been coherent either. Let’s pick a few of the highlights. How about ice cream at 7 a.

{.asset-media-link} I refer, of course, to a week of farewell parties – soubetsukai (送別会). It is rather late in the year for a shinnenkai, and much too early for a bonnenkai, but it was a fine time for soubetsukai in Ishigaki, Fukuoka, and Tokyo.

{.asset-media-link} Recently, I have been botanizing. Rather than perorating on the details, no matter how fascinating, of Thuarea involuta and Sporobolus virginicus, for example, I will write on a more general subject.

In the midst of a trip to Japan, I took a trip to Tokyo. It was a windy day, and it was a bit of a construction site, and I was happy to have the hard hat until I discovered that so many of the other people at this meeting were not wearing one.

I would normally make a golf report at this time, but with just three rounds in the past two months, in three different countries, without any birdies, let’s just say that my game is in a research phase.

Recently, I’ve been enjoying the delights of air travel. In addition to the scores of flights I’ve taken in economy class, I’ve had the chance to check out the C class service of Thai Airways on their A380, the onboard lounge on the Emirates A380, and the 787 (before the grounding) on a trans-India flight.

http://www.flickr.com/apps/video/stewart.swf?v=109786 I've been on a bit of a sabbatical this month, working on writing projects and making tremendous progress with my research. Today I took a sabbatical from my sabbatical and studied marine biology for a few hours, before the high irradiance forced me to seek the shade of a palm tree, from whence I am writing this.

{.asset-media-link} I’ve found Thailand rather salubrious this week. To begin with, I went botanizing in the Gulf of Thailand. {.asset-media-link} I botanized by the seashore, and on the hillsides, and on the roadsides, exploring the cracks and crevices of the rocks for the particular species of grass that can survive in such an hostile environment.

You will be aware of my staunch adherence to a vicinal diet, and thus it will be no surprise to find that I have recently enjoyed the new (I think it says new?