This is us, on the second floor. The shutter has jammed on our Canon, so the pictures of the beautiful Xinjiang spring are not taken: there are cuckoos and warblers and flowers on the fruit trees.

... and the big question: can I post inline photos with mutt?

It's a modern town, with petrochemical factories down the slope, and it's also wealthy. The supermarket in the mall is almost a deli with Italian wines and very expensive things in tins from France. And seafish on ice. I think about 60,000 live here: it's quiet at night and the air is mountain-fresh.

It's been a bit of a change moving from Hainan all the way up to the NW. We spent four days on the train - and three nights, one with Gareth in Xi'an - but really it wasn't too much of an ordeal, just one long doze, watching the countryside get drier and drier and seeing spring kind of folding up and disappearing. But the flowers are coming out now and the blackbirds sing in the tops of the popular trees in the evening. We're still eating a little too much of the local nan breads.

A sweet cake and a glass of green tea at the side of the road.

riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, ...
 
As well as flowing and arrival(these in McHugh), there is return (Fr. revenir). The church is Adam and Eve's, but we are going backwards into sleep and into history: into sleep, into night, "past eve'n"; and "past even Adam".
 
Hmm. "History ... is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake."
Wot's dat den?

I've been running without shoes for about a year and a half and I like to think I've made a lot of progress: I'm up to 58km a week and in January I managed a 5000m in 19:54 ... in bare feet of course. The last few weeks I've been wearing my sandals a lot of the time, mainly because of building sites and viscous little angular stones all over the place. Anyway, I was reading an old article over at the The Science of Sport on Running Technique just the other day, and they were discussing heel strike versus mid-foot strike running techniques ... just try running with a heel strike in bare feet: ouch! And I think the human body has spent most of it's evolutionary time running barefoot.