unlike me, did not have the benefit of having learnt a smattering of Danish
through having had a nice Danish girlfriend during your pubescent stage.
I didn't tell you, did I, that yesterday I also brought home this $1-DVD which I had found at the Salvos shortly after I had a long talk in their furniture section with another op-shop aficionado who, with his wife, was relaxing on an impressive-looking $100-sofa which was still in such almost-new conditions that it could easily have cost ten times that much not all that long ago.
I joined them on the sofa - which was a three-seater - and we jointly regretted already having furnished our houses long before we had discovered the joys of op-shopping, and now had no more room for anything bigger than perhaps an occasional $2-book or this $1-DVD.
Of course, if it be left to Padma she'd be calling this DVD another dust-collector but I watched its whole 187 minutes today while she was in the Bay, and so can you because its full-length copy is also on YouTube.
Inspired by the Mongols of the thirteenth century who, under the leadership of Genghis Khan, created the largest contiguous land empire in history, a young Australian adventurer, Tim Cope, embarked on a journey that hadn’t been successfully completed since those times: to travel on horseback across the entire length of the Eurasian steppe, from Karakorum, the ancient capital of Mongolia, through Kazakhstan, Russia, Crimea and the Ukraine to the Danube River in Hungary.
From horse-riding novice to travelling three years and 10,000 kilometres on horseback, accompanied by his dog Tigon, Tim learnt to fend off wolves and would-be horse-thieves, and grapple with the extremes of the steppe as he crossed sub-zero plateaux, the scorching deserts of Kazakhstan and the high-mountain passes of the Carpathians.
Along the way, he was taken in by people who taught him the traditional ways and told him their recent history: Stalin's push for industrialisation brought calamity to the steepe and forced collectivism that in Kazakhstan alone led to the loss of several million livestock and the starvation of more than a million nomads. Today Cope bears witness to how the traditional ways hang precariously in the balance in the post-Soviet world.
