asakiyume: (good time)






I'm just back from a truly wonderful visit to Nova Scotia. I have so much to catch up with from everyone here! I had absolutely no Internet whatsoever, so it'll take time, but in the meantime, I wanted to share--just as a start--photos of the good cheer evident in every town we visited. Today marks Canada's 150th birthday! There were flags and red-and-white balloons and streamers everywhere, as well as a special flag representing Canada's multicultural heritage. (And, although Canada, like the United States, has its share of shame for various cultural conflicts, what we saw everywhere were efforts to include and listen to everyone--so encouraging.)

We got so into it, we put flags on our dashboard for the drive back across the border.

Happy 150 Canada

Happy Birthday, Canada! Canadian friends, you have an excellent country.

Happy 150 Canada

Happy 150 Canada Happy 150 Canada Happy 150 Canada Happy 150 Canada


asakiyume: (feathers on the line)






[livejournal.com profile] wakanomori and I went to see Moana this past week. (I arrived at the theater first and bought the tickets. "Two for Moana," I said, and the ticket seller said, ". . . Two adult tickets?" "Yes," I said. Yes, two adults can go see a Disney film, unaccompanied by a child. IT CAN BE DONE.)

I enjoyed it very much, mainly all sorts of small things that had nothing to do with the overarching story or even the characters, really. One part that really swelled my heart was the song of Moana's wayfinding ancestors, which you can listen to below. (It won't spoil anything about the movie for you.)



The sense of huge adventure, of traveling to worlds unknown, guided by the stars--just, so moving. And the sails caught my attention, the care that the animators had taken to show the weave of them. And I thought about how I know someone who once worked making sails, and it got me wondering about how the wayfinders' sails were made. So I dug around, and I found two great sources. This PDF from the British museum describes repairing a Tahitian canoe sail and describes how it was made from a series of mats, made of woven pandanus leaves.

Figure 5, Construction features of the sail, from Sailing Through History: Conserving and Researching a Rare Tahitian Canoe Sail, by Tara Hiquily et al.


And then this great blog post from the blog "The Art of Wayfinding" talked about the different parts of a Marshall Islands outrigger canoe, including the sails. An organization called Waan Aelon in Majel (WAM), which means "Canoes of the Marshall Islands" in Marshallese, teaches kids how to make traditional canoes. (In a case of unrelated languages having similar-sounding names for the same thing, "aelon" means "island.")

Here are some girls with their model canoes (photo by John Huth from the blog post)



And here is a pandanus tree, with those handy leaves (Photo by Eric Guinther, courtesy of Wikipedia):



I also loved that the start of the song "We Know the Way" was in some Pacific-islands language, and I wondered which one. Turns out it's Tokelauan. Tokelauan is spoken in Tokelau, a territory of New Zealand that's north of New Zealand, and also on Swain's island in American Samoa. Wikipedia says there are only about 4,000 speakers--but one of those is Opetaia Foa'i, who, with Lin-Manuel Miranda, wrote and sings "We Know the Way."

I LEARNED SO MUCH.

PS--one other (galling) thing I learned: In the 1840s,the French forbade inter-island travel in their colonies. Isn't that just like a colonial power: denying people the right to travel from place to place freely. After that, people in the French colonies stopped making woven sails because they weren't needed for the level of travel that was still permitted.


asakiyume: (misty trees)
At this time in the morning, the shadows of the tiny bits of snow we have cast huge. It's like looking at the Guilin Mountains.

Guilin Mountains, photo by Hiroji Kubota, from this site


See?



Can't you imagine wandering there, with your sturdy pack horse carrying your porcelain tea set and some charcoal, so that when you tire, you can sit down, make a fire, brew some tea, and watch the sky and the mountains?


asakiyume: (shaft of light)
Well, removing the one shopping cart must have registered as a gauntlet thrown down, because a new one appeared, and this time in the rosa multiflora, which will KILL YOU if you try to go through it--which meant, no lifting from underneath.

But today, I had three of the four forest creatures to help me, and they are grown into their power! We got that cart out in no time.

pondering the shopping cart


hands and hooks


lifting


up over the rail


success!


I'm a little worried about the cart tossers upping the ante... what if they dump two shopping carts? But sufficient unto the day...


asakiyume: (feathers on the line)
I feel very proprietary about the boardwalk near our house because I helped it get built (in a roundabout way--I didn't actually help build it). So, when someone leaves a crumpled-up can of soda or a Dunkin Donuts coolatta cup on it, I pick those things up, and I try to keep the marsh it goes through clear of rubbish, too. I love the marsh even more than the boardwalk.

When I saw some mischief makers had managed to push a shopping cart over the boardwalk rails and into the long grass in the marsh, I was frustrated. It would be very hard to fetch the shopping cart back out: everything's overgrown right now, including the sharp-thorned rosa multiflora and the poison ivy.

This was the situation:



The sides of the boardwalk are chain-link, so it's extra hard to get the cart up (and it must have been hard to push it over into the marsh, too)--you can't just reach it onto the boardwalk; you have to get it up over the guardrails, which are about my chest height.

I thought that if we had metal hooks and ropes, maybe we could get it up. So I bought some at the hardware store, and the healing angel and I cut the cord and threaded it through the holes in the hooks.



Then we tried fishing for the cart, and we caught it! And we were able to turn it rightside up. But it was VERY heavy. Heavier than I was bargaining on. So I checked, and seeing that there wasn't any poison ivy or other pernicious plant in that part of the marsh, I went out to the road, climbed over the guard rail, and went under the boardwalk into the marsh. I was thinking maybe we'd have more luck just pushing it out from underneath the boardwalk, straight onto the road, rather than trying to lift it over the boardwalk's rails.

Here's us fishing for it. The healing angel is actually rail thin, not beefy the way I've drawn him, whereas I'm more middle-age rounded than the aspirational me I've drawn.



Fortunately it's been pretty dry this summer, and where I was walking was muddy but not actually flowing. I was wearing flip-flops. Once underneath, I trying pushing the cart in the direction I'd come, but it wouldn't move. Hell, carts can be hard to push on smooth supermarket floors if their wheels get jammed, and there was plenty of long grass and mud to jam its wheels there.

So we were back to our original plan. We realized we could inch the cart up bit by bit if I lifted and he pulled, and in between pulls he tied the ropes to the chain-link. We got it up pretty high, and at just the right moment a family came walking by, and the father was able to grab the handle, and between him and the healing angel, they got it back onto the board walk.

Here's us before the family came along


Then I pushed it back to the supermarket while the healing angel rolled up our cords into the neat bundles in the photo.

I felt so deliriously pleased with myself! I saw a problem, thought up a solution, got the bits and pieces needed for the solution, and tried it, and it worked. I don't know if that's ever happened before--not with some mechanical, technical thing, anyway. I know it's a stretch to count this as mechanical or technical, but I do. And the healing angel seemed pretty pleased too. And we did it together! And we enlisted help from passersby. It was good, very good.

And now the marsh is no longer hampered by a shopping cart. It's all just long grass and song sparrows again. Yay!


asakiyume: (glowing grass)







Behind this grand old mill building is the Mill River, which [livejournal.com profile] teenybuffalo took me to several years ago.



Little Springtime, the healing angel, and I went down to the very spot she had shown me (and, actually, the healing angel was along on that trip too), but really what we wanted to get to was a sandy island a bit upstream. The problem was that there was a waterfall between us and upriver at this point.

The healing angel hopped quite nimbly across the river and signaled to us, after a time, that we would find a place to scramble down on our side if we walked back along the highway a bit.

We walked back up the highway, and sure enough, did find a place to scramble down to the water.

Here is the healing angel, already on the island we want to get to.


a few more photos )
asakiyume: (feathers on the line)
Sesame oil, peanut oil, olive oil--they have really distinctive tastes. Sesame oil really tastes like sesame, and peanut oil has a peanut taste, and olive oil doesn't taste like pickled olives, or brined olives, but it tastes the rich and fragrant way it smells.

Palm oil has a really distinctive taste too. When I tasted Flo's Nigerian fried beans, cooked in plenty of palm oil, it was the first time in a long time that I tasted something so completely *new* and *different*.


Nigerian fried beans from All Nigerian Recipes


Palm oil has, to me, a green taste ( which is funny since it's bright red), green and deeply warm. It tastes the way leaves baking under the midday sun smell--and mix that smell with the smell of hot, warm earth--that dusty warm smell. That's how it tastes to me. And it has a lingering feel in the mouth, the way peanut butter does--but not quite that sticky.


Do I like it? At first it nonplussed me a little because the flavor was so unlike other oil flavors I've experienced, but I enjoyed it. And today, going back for leftovers, I felt less tentative, more enthusiastic. Tastes: BROADENED.

Here is an oil palm plantation (photo from Azran Jaffar's article on a prizewinning smallholder's plantation)



Apparently there are two types of oil to be had from the oil palm. Red palm oil, the kind I used, comes from the fruit. A golden oil comes from the kernel.
Photo source here




asakiyume: (cloud snow)
The Arkell Museum in Canajoharie, New York (a town celebrated by They Might Be Giants in a song--can your town say as much? Mine cannot--but more about Canajoharie later) has been assiduously advertising its exhibit of art from James Gurney's Dinotopia since October. Yesterday the ninja girl, the healing angel, and I went to see it.

Do you know Dinotopia? James Gurney imagined an island populated by sentient dinosaurs and humans, living together. Gurney's worldbuilding is fabulous, and his art is amazing--very much like N.C. Wyeth or Howard Pyle. Here are some examples from the Dinotopia website that we actually got to see:

flying on a skybax



Waterfall City in the Mist



Desert Crossing



One very intriguing artifact was an early sketch of the island that would become Dinotopia. In pencil, he has it labeled Panmundia, and then under that, a series of other possible titles, including Sauropolis, Saurotopia, and Dinotolia, and at the bottom, Dinotopia, with three underlines and a star beside it. Yep, that's the one!

Read more... )


A bus ride

Aug. 19th, 2013 12:02 am
asakiyume: created by the ninja girl (Timor-Leste nia bandiera)
The day after I arrived in Timor-Leste, I made the six-hour journey up to the mountain town of Ainaro. I rode on some vehicle which was not quite an anguna (term borrowed from Indonesian: an anguna is a pick-up truck with seats in the back, so people can ride in it) and not quite a bus--it was open-air, like an anguna, but with seats facing forward, like a bus, rather than parallel to the side of the vehicle, like an anguna. There were sacks of rice on the floor, for delivery along the way, and other goods loaded on the roof. We started out from the market in Dili, the capital of Timor-Leste, with people filling all the seats and sitting on the floor (on top of the rice) and hanging on the back, and we picked up more people as we went.

Some of the young people who hung on the back

rest stop on the way to Ainaro

There was music playing--here's a taste of it:



(If the embedding doesn't work for you, you can find the 14-second video here on Flickr)

Here's the sound system:
DSCN3883

Early on, we passed the Santa Cruz cemetery, where, in 1991, the Indonesian army killed some 250 people who were demonstrating for independence (more on that here, courtesy of Wikipedia).
Santa Cruz cemetery from the bus

Victor, the man I was sitting next to on the bus, asked me if I knew the story of the cemetery. We communicated with my very rudimentary Tetun and his equally limited English. I think with grave face more than with words I was able to convey that I did.

Victor

Victor from the bus

We bounced along, and eventually had a rest stop. This enterprising twelve-year-old (age is one of the questions people in Timor-Leste like to ask and share, at least with foreigners), engaged me in conversation in English and introduced me to her mother.

rest stop on the way to Ainaro

I shared round my big 1.5-liter bottle of drinking water (purchased in Dili for fifty cents). Meanwhile, some of the younger boys were eating what looked like puffed pork rinds, dyed green, probably purchased at the little shop where we'd stopped.

Along the way I saw lots of little roadside stands with 1.5-liter water bottles like mine recycled, filled with... tea? Something pale and golden, and sometimes also something dark dark brown. No, not tea. Can you guess? I realized what it was when I saw someone with a cloth-lined funnel, pouring some into his motor bike. Yes: gasoline (petrol), and also diesel. No gas stations along the road, but lots of these little roadside stands.

More tomorrow or the next day... I have tabs open on so many of your entries, and by now you've probably all posted new ones. With time I'll get back in the groove! And in time there'll be more (I hope, I intend) than just-the-facts-ma'am reportage. Maybe I'll alternate? Some posts that are reflective and some that are pictures? Or take things as they come... Anyway, do feel free to ask questions!


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