Asakiyume mita

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

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?

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!

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

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



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:


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).


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



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.



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!