Of visibility and vocab

[tabouli]

Visibility has been less than 5km all week. It's like someone covered the city with a giant white bowl. Or pasted cut-out pictures of trees and buildings on a greying sheet of paper. Everything's tinged with smoke. Eucalyptus trees burn like pine trees, and the forests around Melbourne are covered in them. My grandparents came within inches of

Comments

[hnpcc]

Interesting, I hadn't realised they weren't using the dialects in Singapore and Malaysia any more although I was aware they were teaching Mandarin. How many native speakers (um, roughly) of the smaller dialects are there in China itself?

The smoke haze is weird, the light makes it feel like it should be colder than it is. I've stopped smelling the smoke now, although when it clears I'll undoubtedly notice that the smell's in my clothes.

The past couple of weeks has been quite reminiscent of both Ash Wednesday and Black Saturday, for obvious reasons. Hopefully we're past the worst days now (although Ash Wednesday was the 16th February, so it's not impossible we'll get another run of hot, northerly wind fire-prone weather... and of course the fires at Hazelwood are likely to affect us for a while yet.)