Juxtapositions

More Japanese

2012-01-25T12:41:00.003-05:00

Now this is interesting. Once again, I've been researching the vocabulary we'll need when dining out in Tokyo and what do I find?

fork = fooku
knife = naifu
spoon= supuun
napkin = napukin
cup = kappu
glass = gurasu, koppu
a bottle of wine = wain
koohii to miruku = coffee with milk
soup = suupu
butter = bataa
cheese = chiizu
pork = pooku
beef = biifu
steak = suteeki
juice = jyuusu
pie = pai
ice cream = aisu kuriimu
tip = chippu

Since you don't pronounce, or hardly pronounce the single "u"s, those words sound (in romaji spellings) remarkably familiar. I assume, then, that all the concepts listed above must have seemed outlandish to the Japanese until they felt obliged to accommodate English-speakers in their country. Vegetarian is listed as "begitarian." In any case, as in other parts of the world, it may be considered trendy to have anglicised one's vocabulary.

However, I mustn't let this lull me into a false sense of security. The phrases I'll need day to day are still very different from what I'm used to.

please = onegai shimasu
thank you = arigatoo gozaimasu
excuse me = sumimasen
Chikatetsu no rosenzu o kudasai.= May I have a map of the subway, please?
Nihongo wa amari joozu ja arimasen. = I don't speak Japanese very well.
Wakari masen. = I don't understand.
Eigo o hanashimasu ka? = Do you speak English?
Doozo yoroshiku onegai shimasu.= Nice to meet you.

I studied my map of Tokyo yesterday and got some ideas from it, and a sense of where our hotel is located. I love maps.

In the cold, keep moving

2012-01-23T10:28:00.001-05:00

Along the Quarry Trail on the edge of Kanata people feed the wild deer with carrots and apples which encourages them not to be shy. The chickadees aren't shy either, a constant coming and going of them on our outstretched hands yesterday afternoon, as we stopped to feed them seeds.

We've kept up a series of Sunday walks since Christmas, last week in bitterly cold conditions through the streets of Rockcliffe Park to the rockeries (buried in snow) and then back to our starting point past MacKay Lake (a "Conservation Area"), the previous Sunday at Mud Lake, the week before that on the Larriault trail in the Gatineau Park, on New Year's Day in Montreal and on Christmas Day itself following dog walkers' home made trails through the woods above Ojai Road on a steep hillside in Chelsea.

Medica and Oruj

2012-01-21T16:08:00.002-05:00

I could have entitled this "Diba and Sadiqa"––these are the names of the two young Afghan women I listened to on Thursday afternoon at a meeting of the Ottawa CFUW's "University Women Helping Afghan Women" group. They are currently both students at the University of Ottawa.

Diba told us about Medica Afghanistan, a new organisation (for whom she works in her spare time) that provides counselling, mediation and legal aid for women and girls who are sheltering from "war and other forms of violence" in the city of Kabul. Canadian donors are helping to pay for the literacy classes at these shelters. Sad to say, the children there (in the same room as their mothers for most of the day; each shelter can accommodate up to 50 people) are disturbed by the stories that circulate. Illiteracy deters their mothers from seeking work and in any case these women are often too traumatised to concentrate on formal training or learning to read.* None is healthy enough to leave the shelter for the sake of work, said Diba. They do weaving, leatherwork, knitting, etc. for various enterprises but do not get the satisfaction of seeing what becomes of their handiwork, so have no real pride in their achievements. Diba claims that (in a population of 30 million) 95% of Afghans are in need of psychiatric help. But there is no qualified psychiatrist in Afghanistan.

* I have mentioned this to two people since, both of whom were reminded of the Maslov pyramid.

Sadiqa, who spoke for an hour without notes in English (her mother tongue is Pashto), told us about the NGO she had founded herself which runs "Learning Centres" for female students in Afghanistan. It is called Oruj, meaning Ascent. Sadiqa (who must be about 31 years old now) told us she had been working for girls' education in Afghanistan since she was in Grade 11. She had left her homeland as a five year old to live in Pakistan with her refugee parents and she attended a refugee school there. On a visit to Afghanistan to visit her cousins she found those girls very eager to hear about the education she was having, of which they themselves had been deprived. She swore to herself there and then that she'd do something about this and returned to Afghanistan in 2002 having raised enough money to start up a school on her father's property. When it opened in 2003, 63 girl pupils came along in great excitement, wearing glittery clothes and lipstick, because they had no idea how to dress for school. It was hard, she said, to get them to sit down in rows and face the board at the front (they all laugh about this now).

However, before long, the class shrank to half its size. No woman could be found literate enough to teach Grade 1 lessons so they'd had to employ a man teacher; kind though he was, the girls "covered up" and were wary of him. "All the parents we spoke to wanted to have their daughters educated," Sadiqa said, but what was education going to do to their daughters? There were concerns about that. The local community suspected that the instigators of these new opportunities might have hidden, ulterior motives. Sadiqa had to prove that she was an altruist, not a spy.

In 2008 Sadiqa's province was taken over by the Taliban which meant that the participants in her project ran the risk of violent attacks. Classes had to be held secretly, in private homes. As director, she asked the teachers whether they wanted to run the risk of continuing to do such work, but not one dropped out. One of the male teachers replied (I quote the words she used, her voice cracking with emotion): "Even if we're shedding our blood to the last moment ... we will work for our scholars!"

Here is an article about Sadiqa, published around that time, in 2009.

At the present time, Oruj is a success, serving about 6400 girls (and some boys!) in six schools. Some of the students now have high school diplomas and the older ones help to teach the children in Grades 1 and 2. Their mothers are also being offered literacy and "awareness building" courses at "family welfare clinics." Sadiqa said that the suburbs of Kabul might as well be remote mountain villages as far as the ideologies are concerned. People in these outlying communities are reluctant to have their children at school. Traditionally, children (6 per family on average) are needed at home to look after the livestock. Sadiqa and her colleagues counsel these parents and speak to the elders and to the religious leaders, trying to convince them that, according to the Koran, education is an obligation in Islam. (Because most of the people cannot read, they cannot check the scriptures for themselves.)

Another problem arose when the young women graduating from high school wanted to go on to higher education. Until last year their only choice would have been to attend a co-ed institution because there were no girls colleges in Afghanistan. Stories circulate about sexual harassment both from their fellow students and unfortunately from some of the male tutors as well. Therefore Sadiqa saw the need for a women's college such as exist in the western world (she had attended one herself in Massachusetts and was inspired by its principles). So she promptly set about raising funds. She managed to raise nearly $50,000 and this year, the first community college for women in her country, offering courses in Law and Economics, can boast of 52 graduates.

Currently only 1% of women in Afghanistan can get jobs. The rest of them cannot compete with the men because they simply don't have the qualifications or the requisite experience; they can't afford computers, they lack leadership skills.

Sadiqa studies at Ottawa University during the day and (because of the distant time zone) liaises with Oruj administrators until 2 o'clock in the morning. This work is more important to her than sleep.

Konnichiwa!

2012-01-20T14:23:00.005-05:00

Canadian snowshoes under Japanese feet

The Japanese Embassy graciously said hello (こんにちは) to our snowshoeing group today, at their Residence in Rockcliffe Park, and served us not only tea and coffee but also a hot and delicious chicken soup with mushrooms to counteract the effects of this very cold day. Another successful Diplomatic Hospitality morning with a hundred people present. We looked at pictures of winter in Japan and learned that the Japanese use snowshoes for winter in their country too, although they're rounder than ours.

Bathing in the hot springs at the feet of Mt. Fuji appeals to me, but I'll be surprised if I get the chance to do that next month.

Japanese is like German!

2012-01-16T10:34:00.000-05:00

I have been looking up useful phrases in Japanese for my week in Tokyo next month. Some of the vocabulary is not as difficult as I anticipated (after my struggles with Mandarin Chinese). Here are some easy-to-remember words in a romanized transcription. It appears they don't always pronounce the "u" in their words:

resutoran

bia gaaden

biiru

menyuu

hoteru (= hotel)

toiretto peepaa (= toilet paper!)

rentakaa (= car hire)

takushii

basu (= bus)

chiketto (= ticket. However, a ticket for the train is "kippu")

kanada

amerika

hotto kouhii (= hot coffee)

baagen (= bargain)

kaado (= card), e.g. kurejitto kaado

faasuto fuudo (= fast food!)

chikin

Horses in the snow

2012-01-15T09:12:00.001-05:00

Our outing to Smithvale Stables was a real success; about 80 people turned up despite the winter storm that was causing difficult driving conditions on highways and byways. Our diplomatic friends loved the snowshoeing between sleigh rides, the horses didn't seem to mind the snow and the campfire at the pick-up spot burned brightly, with Carol handing out marshmallows to stick on skewers and toast in the glowing cinders. If you tried to remove the burnt crust from your melting marshmallow, your fingers got very sticky. Everyone was smiling and, indoors, feet were tapping to the Irish and Scottish tunes that the band was playing.

Some of the diplomats' families were experiencing their first winter here. Outside, under the trees a little way beyond the stables, nine horses were on the loose, kicking up the snow with their playful hooves and snorting at us. Among them were young ones, experiencing their first winter, too.

Raymond's exhibition

2012-01-11T22:06:00.003-05:00

Raymond Aubin explore les lieux de passage au moyen du panorama photographique de 360°. Par l’entremise de la photographie, du photomontage, de la vidéo et de l’installation, il cherche la vérité dans le banal, le quotidien, le commun. Ainsi, l’artiste s’est intéressé aux aérogares, aux gares routières, aux stations de métro, aux corridors, aux esplanades, aux squares et aux parcs urbains. Trois caractéristiques de ces lieux l’ont particulièrement interpelé : la paradoxale solitude dans la foule, la fugacité des évènements et la normalisation des déplacements et des échanges...

(levadrouilleururbain.wordpress.com)

I'll have to go to see this collection of images, Tracanage, if I can, because I like what Raymond does and his latest theme means a lot to me; I can identify with la solitude dans la foule and habitually imagine myself in transit, especially at the moment (as my previous blogpost testifies). We're all in perpetual transit, actually, but some more obviously than others. The exhibition is about to be presented at the Maison de la Culture in Gatineau (from January to March).

In our house we have three "early" photos by this versatile artist who is a former colleague of my husband's. One of these is the "landscape" of a woman's bare hip, one is of an ancient stone doorway in Yemen and the other captures a happy moment for four children in the highlands of Madagascar.

Travel plans

2012-01-11T15:57:00.004-05:00

I'm compiling an itinerary again; Chris has another business trip coming up soon. We'll be visiting Britain next month and then flying on to Japan! We haven't set foot in Japan before; this will be exciting. Chris has to give a presentation on Bayesian Belief Networks to Assurance Case Preparation to the SSS (i.e. the Safety Critical Systems Symposium) in Bristol during the first week of our travels and then give a three day training course to some engineers in Tokyo during the second week.

We still have no bookings made—I have to be patient and leave that job to the company's travel agent—but it looks as though some of our accommodation could be quite grandiose: the Marriott Royal hotel in the centre of Bristol and the Royal Park Hotel in the Chuo City district of Tokyo. What I like about this is that both places should be accessible, the Bristol Hotel not far from Temple Meads Railway station and next to the Cathedral, and the Tokyo hotel being beside the Air Terminal (TCAT), a three minute walk from the closest subway station, from which I could reach any of the main attractions in the vast city.

I also intend to see several members of my family again.

The snags are that our flights are going to be uncomfortably long ones and that I haven't had time to learn any of the Japanese language yet.

Diplomatic Hospitality plans

2012-01-09T15:55:00.003-05:00

Our Diplomatic Hospitality group is off to the Smithvale Stables this coming Friday where we have the choice between taking a horse-drawn sleigh ride, skating on the pond, cross-country skiing or snow shoeing around the grounds. There'll be marshmallows to roast on an open fire outside and at the end of the morning we'll find warm refreshments indoors, in the "banquet hall." Musicians––the Lyon Street Celtic Band––will liven up the proceedings and might persuade us to do some dancing.

I was at a lengthy meeting this morning making plans for this and other outings. I came home in the car of a Canadian friend who is a diplomat's wife herself and appreciates the need for distraction and good company when posted abroad. She spent two years in North Africa once, unable to go out to work and feeling lonely and bored, she told me, quite a typical experience in the diplomatic missions. So the service we offer to diplomat families in Ottawa is worthwhile.

It's good fun for the organisers, too. The following week we're invited to the residence of the Japanese Ambassador near Rockcliffe Park, which is another good location for snowshoeing, and at the end of the month we'll be going curling at the RA Centre.

Round the pond on a Sunday morning

2012-01-08T15:44:00.003-05:00

Downy Woodpecker (Wikipedia image)

Seven of us did a circuit of Mud Lake this morning, stopping to feed the chickadees and nuthatches with the bird seed we'd brought with us. We had gloves on but discovered that the little birds––so light weight!––preferred to land on our bare hands. We couldn't leave our hands bare for long because the windchill was a biting -18ºC.

As we came to the section of the path near the Deschênes Rapids on the Ottawa River, we spotted some other kinds of birds: American robins (weren't they supposed to migrate south?) and a pair of woodpeckers. To my delight the male one flew onto my hand. Further on we saw a cardinal too.

The rapids

On Mud Lake itself, entirely frozen over, families were having fun on skates, one part of the pond having been swept for practising, another part for impromptu games of hockey. The trail we followed was shared with cross country skiers and children being pulled along on sledges. Robert and I had a chat about travelling to Siberia!

Elva, Francine, Carol and Robert at Britannia Point

A most satisfactory walk. When we sat down to brunch at the ever popular Newport Restaurant on Richmond Road, the men at one table, their wives at another, the waitress commented that we smelled like washing fresh from a clothes line. "Where have you girls been?" she wanted to know.

Clambering up to heaven

2012-01-07T10:41:00.007-05:00

The poet Baudelaire knew about comparative religion:

Plusieurs religions semblables à la nôtre,
Toutes escaladant le ciel ...

(Le Voyage *)

Four faces on the museum wall
advertise the current exhibition

On impulse, I called in at the Musée des Civilisations across the Ottawa River to see God(s): A User's Guide, which is very well put together.

The exhibition is not about theology or the history of religions; it concentrates on contemporary religious practices.

Whoever is responsible for this has had to tread very carefully, because if there's one thing that inflames people it's the subject of religion; I think the curators have succeeded in being both objective and respectful in what they chose to display. The presentation isn't completely bland either. It juxtaposes "primitive" religions with the more sophisticated ones so that visitors can be duly startled by how much they have in common, and it asks mischievous questions, such as showing a display of Elvis and Che Guevara memorabilia and asking "Is this a religion?" (... because it looks suspiciously like one).

The first exhibit is a map showing the distribution of various religions around the world. Christianity is by far the most popular with 2,264,500,000 adherents, apparently, Islam coming second with 1,523,200,000. The next two religions on the list are Hinduism––935,500,000 and Buddhism––463,800,000; how those figures are obtained, I'm not sure.

Otherwise the displays and exhibits are grouped according to themes, relating to things that the various religions tend to share. "Light" is one such element; then there are exhibits relating to"Life Cycles," "Rites of Passage" (videos of baptisms, weddings, confirmations and the like) "Music" (where you can sit under a canopy to listen) and the "Beyond" (described in the exhibition notes as an invisible world). The comparison of acts of worship displays the receptacles of ritual meals served by priests or their counterparts, pictures of these ceremonies and the props used by people who pray (nearly every religion encourages the use of beads, for example) and shows the various ways in which people of different cultures supplicate or praise their god(s) or atone for their sins. All religions proselytise as well.

As you come to the end of the show there's a chance to pause and think about "Conflicts and Co-existence" in the world; a wall of quotations leads you to consider the ways in which one's religion can be both a justification for atrocities and a means of making peace. Élie Barravi wrote that the separation of church and state is the only feasible way of keeping religious violence under control. On the other hand, it's clear that our secular "divinities"––the notion of Class, Nation or Race, not to mention the despots of this world who become quasi gods to their followers––can also instigate violence and division, so setting religion aside and turning to politics doesn't solve every problem.

Willard Oxtoby (in World Religions: Western Traditions, OUP) wrote about our differing opinions of religion:

We tend to notice what we were looking for in the first place.

be it "contentiousness" or "generosity of spirit." This is true, I think. The atheists among us don't seem to look for the latter very willingly, being too eager to score points on the other side.

The website associated with this exhibition encourages its visitors to leave comments in response to questions like "Do you wear a visible religious symbol? or "Would you like to go on a pilgrimage?" What I find interesting here is that by far the most comments have been made in answer to the question "What do you believe will happen to you after you die?" Is this the essential question, then? Is this the concern that generates the world's beliefs?

*****

* fleursdumal.org, by the way, is a marvellous website, i.e. a terrible time-consumer for people like me! Scroll down to read a series of translations of Baudelaire's poems. Le Voyage is the longest.

Don't do it again

2012-01-04T14:30:00.019-05:00

I don't suppose I can match last year's account of our trip to Montreal to see the New Year in; best not try too hard. In any case it's always a mistake to repeat an experience a year later and expect the same degree of satisfaction.

Having said that, I personally relished the trip from start to finish, especially the journeys to and fro in the business class coach of the train (we'd bought "supersaver" tickets) with full meals and wine on board. After feeling unwell after Christmas I had my appetite back by the other end of the week.

Our New Year's Eve supper at the Plein Sud restaurant on Ave. Mont-Royal didn't seem to reach quite the same height of perfection as it had on December 31st, 2010, probably because we were expecting that it would. From the chef's point of view the menu wasn't quite so ambitious. The restaurant was more crowded this year; maybe he feels he has established his reputation and doesn't need to make so much of an impression these days. We sat at exactly the same table for eight as before. I gather the magret de canard au foi gras didn't taste as good as last year's beef, although my choice, dos de morue grillée à l’unilatérale, crème de langoustines, turned out to be a superb dish.

New Year's Day skaters, Montreal

Chris wants me to mention that the ancient philosopher Heraclitus (according to Plato) claimed that you cannot step twice into the same river. You certainly wouldn't want to step into the St. Lawrence in Montreal as it was flowing very rapidly past the Île Ste. Hélène and freezing rapidly over in the backwaters. Ocean going ships with ice-breaking hulls were moored in the docks near the Science Centre (closed on January 1st). The old port was lively despite the winter with families skating to music on the Quays Skating Rink (note the webcam on that page).

At midnight when the New Year began we were all at the Old Port with our feet in the snow (slippery ice not far below it), watching the fireworks go off to cheers from the thousands of Montrealers celebrating. We had hiked 3km from the Avenue Mont-Royal, down St.-Laurent Blvd (aka The Main, Mordecai Richler's hangout) with all its nightclubs, the queues outside spilling off the sidewalks into the street, the girls in their mini skirts oblivious to the cold, or pretending to be, their high heels slipping in the slush. That style of dress didn't suit many of them. Walking through the fumes of marijuana and noticing the rows of ambulances lying in wait we speculated as to what it must be like inside the clubs. None of us had any desire to find out. Chris and I felt more at home once we reached the edge of China town where the people looked more demure.

Wall of cuddly toys, Big Bang exhibition

On New Year's Eve we repeated last year's behaviour all day, starting with breakfast in a group at Nickels on Ste. Catherine, then going our separate ways, Chris and I to the bookshop near McGill University, then to the Musée des Beaux Arts, then to the shops where we both bought new winter boots in the sales.

This year's special art exhibitions weren't as grim as last year's Otto Dix show. Chris was taken by the ironic painting by the American artist Mark Tansey that shows a cluster of artists with outdoor easels trying to capture the impossible, a shuttle lift-off from Cape Canaveral. We found the modern art––the Big Bang collection of carte blanche ideas from twenty different Quebec artists, plus the permanent exhibits––both provocative and entertaining, and while we were looking round the museum, John, Jill and Laurie turned up to join us there. We were all impressed by the En Masse black and white graffiti room and by the colourful wall of stuffed animals juxtaposed with (facing) a medieval stone Head of Christ,

"Cet incroyable Tête de Christ du XIIe siècle nous désarme par l’intensité pénétrante de son regard. En face, des centaines de peluches nous dévisagent."

Detail

John made the observation that we might be meant to think that the fluffy toys were modern society's substitute for Jesus, giving people the same warm and cuddly feeling that religion has traditionally supplied.

After that we went to look at the French impressionists and expressionists.

Red ribbons over the Gatineau

2011-12-29T18:20:00.001-05:00

Maybe this post should have appeared in my river blog instead; never mind. I wanted to record an outing to Wakefield on the River Gatineau which has cheered me up a great deal after a bout of gastroenteritis about which the less said the better. Today, with my appetite coming back, I managed to enjoy a lunch with Chris, Elva and Laurie at Chamberlin's Lookout above the General Store. The service was rather slow with just one waitress there, but the clientele was in a relaxed mood so it didn't seem to matter. We like the fact that this place has many dishes on its menu that incorporate the freshly baked multigrain bread of excellent repute from the Wakefield Bakery across the road. In the summer you can sit out on the balcony of the bistro, overlooking the river, but with a temperature well into the minus figures today, despite the Christmas decorations, the sunshine and deep blue sky, that was not an option. I took this photo from inside, looking across the river through the window. Wisps of advection fog were rising from the faster moving channel of river water that still hasn't quite frozen over, but my camera isn't good enough to have captured that effect.

Sing in exultation!

2011-12-24T12:21:00.003-05:00

I've just been listening online to the Christmas Eve Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols on BBC Radio 4, broadcast live from King's College, Cambridge. I appreciated every nuance of it, singing along to the descants as I used to do as a child. The words and music, especially the contemporary music on the programme, thrill me every year to the extent of shivers down the spine, and this year's service was a particularly good one. I knew that my 92 year old mother in Wales would be listening in as well and 'phoned her at the end to tell her that I hadn't missed it.

The Programme:

Once in royal David's city (descant Cleobury)
Bidding Prayer read by the Dean
I wonder as I wander (Rütti)

First lesson: Genesis 3, vv 8-19 read by a Chorister
Remember, O thou man (Ravenscroft)
Adam lay ybounden (Ord)

Second lesson: Genesis 22 vv 15-18 read by a Choral Scholar
Angels from the realms of glory (arr Jacques)
Riu, riu, chiu (Flecha)

Third lesson: Isaiah 9 vv 2, 6-7 read by a Member of College Staff
Nowell sing we now all and some (medieval)
Sussex Carol (arr Willcocks)
It came upon the midnight clear (descant Cleobury)

Fourth lesson: Isaiah 11 vv 1-3a, 4a, 6-9 read by a Representative of the City of Cambridge
A spotless rose (arr Ledger)
The Lamb (Tavener)

Fifth lesson: Luke 1 vv 26-35, 38 read by a Representative of Eton College
Blessed be that maid Mary (arr Cleobury)
Bogoróditse Dyévo (Pärt)

Sixth lesson: Luke 2 vv 1, 3-7 read by the Chaplain
Christmas Eve (Tansy Davies – first performance, commissioned by King’s College)
Sans Day Carol (arr Rutter)

Seventh lesson: Luke 2 vv 8-16 read by the Director of Music
The Shepherd’s Carol (Chilcott)
While shepherds watched (descant Cleobury)

Eighth lesson: Matthew 2 vv 1-12 read by the Vice-Provost *
The Three Kings (Cornelius arr Atkins)
Illuminare, Jerusalem (Weir)

Ninth lesson: John 1 vv 1-14 read by the Provost
O come, all ye faithful (arr Willcocks) Collect and Blessing
Hark! the herald angels sing (descant Willcocks)

Organ voluntary: In dulci jubilo BWV 729 (Bach)

* The Vice-Provost is an expert in Islamic Studies, from Iran, a very good choice of reader for those verses!

Christmas Markets everywhere!

2011-12-23T13:22:00.004-05:00

Stuttgart's Weihnachtsmarkt in the rain

There's even one in Cardiff these days. They had them in Paris, with stalls selling Christmas decorations from Alsace, roasted chestnuts, friandises, but the home of the Christmas Market concept is Germany and Austria. With centuries of previous experience to draw from, Stuttgart's Weihnachtsmarkt is very well put together, as is the equivalent one in and around the Marienplatz in Munich. They brighten up the short, dark, dull, damp days of Advent in those city centres (as do the umbrellas carried by the thousands of Christmas shoppers––a large number of whom seemed to be speaking Italian) and on December 7th and 9th gave me a target for my solo excursions. Deliberately travelling light I couldn't fit many extra purchases into my luggage, but if I'd wanted to, I could have spent a fortune at these colourful little stalls, with their displays of carved Christmas tree ornaments, beeswax candles, cuckoo clocks, Tyrolean Krippenfiguren, nutcrackers, glass balls and all kinds of winter clothing.

Candles for sale from a stall in Stuttgart

There's no shortage of things to eat when you need sustenance while wandering through these markets, with stalls or wooden Stuben offering

Baked apples (Bratäpfel)
Dates (frische Datteln) and "sweet" cherries
Roast almonds and chestnuts: gebrannte Mandeln und Maroni
Frische Waffeln
Game (Wildspezialitäten)
Currywurst mit Pommes Frites
and Steckerlfisch, big ones, sold and displayed on skewers

In Stuttgart I treated myself to some chocolate covered slices of mandarin and apple, also on a skewer. And of course there's the ubiquitous Glühwein, served in mugs so that you can warm your hands on it. I had some of that too, but in a posh place where I could sit down to make the most of it: a Hauspunsch at the chocolatier's, Maelu, on the Theatinerstrasse in Munich.

Wooden Christmas decorations on sale in Munich

Time to spare in Sindelfingen

2011-12-22T17:38:00.004-05:00

Kaffeehaus in Sindelfingen, near the market square

After breakfast at the Hotel am Klostersee on December 8th, while Chris was giving his presentation at the Stadthalle round the corner, I took the opportunity to wander through the streets of Sindelfingen, which by 10 o'clock in the morning had hardly woken up.

Sindelfingen ist traditionell Automobilstandort ...

Around the edges it's a residential district for employees at the Mercedes-Benz plant and associated establishments, as is the neighbouring town of Böblingen. The previous day I'd taken a train into Stuttgart from Goldberg station––a 3km walk in the rain from our hotel up one side of the Goldberg (hill) and down the other, during which I had to consult the street map several times under my umbrella, but with a better sense of direction on the way back I found a short cut, a path through the houses.

Hansel and Gretel's witch

The older part of town, around St. Martin's church on the hill behind our hotel, has less of a modern feel to it, with eye-catching corners. Martin's best remembered saintly act was to give his cloak to a beggar who was feeling the cold, as a modern sculpture outside the Sindelfingen church portrays. There were several other sculptures around the streets and squares, and in a shopping mall, temporary displays of scenes from Christmassy fairy stories. Another thing worth mentioning is that we found a great place for supper on the market square, the Fässle. This was such a good pub that we patronised it three nights in a row.

Streets of old Sindelfingen

Facing St. Martin's church

Gossips at the fountain, old Sindelfingen

This sculpture gave my husband a fright

In the market square, Sindelfingen

Ordnung muss sein ... and chocolate squares

2011-12-21T16:01:00.005-05:00

On my way to Tübingen with Annegret and Klaus I was driven through the northern Black Forest countryside southwest of Stuttgart via a place called Waldenbuch, known above all for the Ritter Sport Fabrik which lies in a pretty little forested valley on the edge of the town. The factory's Schokoshop sells the famous chocolate squares in every available flavour, size and quantity (we bought some), and an art museum, the Museum Ritter, where they specialise in Kunst im Quadrat, modern art that features squares, paintings by Mondrian, as you can imagine, as well as a series of exhibitions entitlled Hommage an das Quadrat, Black Box, Bewegung im Quadrat and so on. On the outer wall of the museum a large square is affixed at an angle and their is a lawn behind it featuring square flower beds and outdoor sculptures.

My friends outside the Museum Ritter with its square on the wall

A square patch of garden behind the chocolate factory

We spent some time browsing in the art shop and I wish now that I'd bought a book they had there showing photos of the entertaining creations of the Swiss comedian-artist, Ursus Wehrli, especially his series called The Art of Clean Up that makes fun of the obsession with tidiness (Ordnung) that seems to be endemic to the German speaking world.

Old Tübingen

2011-12-21T14:19:00.003-05:00

The famous view of Tübingen by the River Neckar

On December 6th, the morning after we arrived in the Stuttgart area, staying at the Hotel am Klostersee in the dormitory town of Sindelfingen, Klaus and Annegret picked me up in the lobby and drove me to their home town, Tübingen. We went via the Ritter-Sport chocolate factory which I'll mention in another blogpost.

The old part of Tübingen, built on a hill by the Neckar is all half-timbered old houses with plane trees, steep roofs and cobbled streets, squares and alleyways, very attractive as you can see from my pictures. It's been a university town since the 15th century and is still obviously prosperous. Klaus was a student there himself, at the school of Theology. Goethe spent a week there in 1792, perhaps on his way home from witnessing the French Revolution. In last week's blogpost I mentioned Hölderlin's and Hesse's connections with the town as well.

I saw the 16th century Rathaus with the murals on its façade, the Jacobuskirche and the beautiful Stiftskirche where the stone tombs of the Hoffürsten (the princes of Baden-Württemberg) were and where a series of J.S. Bach concerts was taking place. In the footsteps of all the people we were imagining, we walked down the Nonnengasse and the other Gassen and followed the steep steps down to the banks of the Neckar, in the middle of which was an island park featuring the Avenue of Sighs (Seufzerallee) where students throughout the centuries have paced up and down, worrying about their exams. The city's patron saint was St. George and there's a statue of him brandishing a sword against the dragon at the stone well (Brunnen) in the market square. This is the spot where, according to Klaus, a chosen Theology student always used to have to give a "Final Dissertation" to his fellows at the end of the school year.

Figure decorating the Rathaus

At the old mill, the Neckarmühle, now a brewery, I sampled the local ale at a window seat overlooking the river and ate Maultaschen mit Kartoffelsalat, Schwäbischer Art, i.e. a local speciality, filling but very tasty.

As well as the Neckar, a smaller canalised river, the Ammer, runs through Tübingen. In the summer my friends, who live further up the valley, cycle 6km along the bike path beside the Ammer to do their shopping in town. This is typical of the region; the locals are very eco-friendly and have elected a young, "Green" mayor (Oberbürgermeister). The shops sell stylish Naturkleidung and organic fruit and vegetables. The greenery being sold for Christmas decorations was lovely; Annegret bought a bunch of Christmas roses (helleborus) in a flower shop there. She had recently been working at a Pflegeheim (nursing home for the elderly) in this part of town, with a peaceful, secluded courtyard.

At the end of my tour I was driven on to Unterjesingen for coffee and a cake at the flat which had a lovely view of the Wurmlinger Kapelle, a place of pilgrimage on a hill across the valley. It reminded me of St. Martha's on the Pilgrim's Way in Surrey, England, on the ridge of the North Downs.

In Paris, December 3rd

2011-12-20T16:44:00.004-05:00

In the mirror of a French café near the Seine,
photo by Chris

On all three evenings of our weekend in Paris we took a walk (near our hotel) around what the Chinese would call the CBD of Paris, La Défense, with its architecture de qualité supérieure and quirky sculptures. We liked it and appreciated the vision behind the erection of La Grande Arche lining up with the Arc de Triomphe in the distance across the river.

It rained for most of the weekend, with a real downpour at the end after supper on the Sunday evening, but this didn't interfere with our enjoyment of the city. On Saturday morning, having taken a metro train to the Place de la Concorde, we strolled through the deserted Tuileries (I like deserted city gardens!) under our umbrellas then crossed the Seine to the Rive Gauche and St. Germain-des-Près district (where the writers Paul Guimard and Benoîte Groult used to live ... not to mention Pablo Picasso, Arthur Rimbaud, Paul Verlaine, Henri Matisse, Jean-Paul Sartre, Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald) where we found the requisite artsy cafés, little high-end galleries and a well stocked, Canadian second hand bookshop, to which Chris had found a signpost. We also went into a photocopying shop where we got talking to a young British landscape architect (working on his portfolio) who'd been living in Paris for a while and could speak excellent French.

A view from the Batobus

From there we explored as far as the Monde Arabe on the river bank (we'll have to go back––a new museum is due to open there next February) before returning to the quais to board a batobus. I was flagging and needed the hour's sit down on its round tour as far as the Tour Eiffel and back. Back on land, we crossed the island bridges and wandered west of the Seine through the Marais, veering off down side streets to the Centre Pompidou, eventually. By this time it was dark; Christmas shoppers were swarming. It reminded me of Barcelona. Chris was determined to find Les Halles, the sleazy setting of some Maigret novels, and we did so, but it has been radically updated and cleaned up, the forum being reconstructed and landscaped, in the process of being transformed like Berlin's Potsdamer Platz or the People's Park in Shanghai. It's going to be huge and very impressive.

In Paris, December 4th

2011-12-19T19:55:00.002-05:00

Zooming in on Montmartre, from the Arc de Triomphe

Luckily for us, the 280 steps to the top of the Arc de Triomphe were free of charge on Sunday, December 4th. Having walked the length of the long, straight avenues (Charles de Gaulle / de la Grande Armée) from the Pont Neuilly at La Défense to the Arc, we climbed up to see the views of the city from that splendid vantage point. Montmartre looked so higgledy-piggledy, with the dome of Sacré Coeur above, that it could have been Istanbul. Then we stepped back down and set off down the Champs Élysées, that now terminates at the ferris wheel (La Grande Roue, dramatically lit up after dark).

Champs Élysées from the Arc de Triomphe

Ave. Foch and Ave. de la Grande Armée. La Défense in the distance.
We'd walked from there!

Avoiding lunch on the Champs Élysées, too touristy for my liking (where shopaholics were queuing to be allowed into Louis Vuitton or the new branch of Marks & Spencer), we found a cosy Brasserie on the rue de la Boétie where we could sit at a window to enjoy our steak-frites and beer. Good service, good food!

Back on the main drag we walked past another Marché de Noël, French-German style, thousands of people milling around:

... pas moins de 160 chalets authentiques (fabrication dans les Vosges) ...

Molière as César, 1657

We decided on impulse to take refuge the Petit Palais (opposite the Grand Palais, between the Pont Alexandre III and the Champs Élysées metro station), an imposing edifice built for the Universal Exhibition of 1900 and recently renovated (in 2005). Its permanent exhibition contained a substantial collection of paintings, including a lovely one I'd never seen before by Monet, Sunset on the Seine at Lavacourt. At the moment the Palais features an exhibition about the Comédie Française, which interested me a lot, having (once upon a time) studied the 17th century French playwrights. There was the original portrait of Molière as a young man, acting in a play by Corneille; there was Molière's leather armchair, rather the worse for wear all these years later. What interested me most was the painted depiction of productions through the centuries of the great plays by Racine and Molière, several of Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme and L'Avare, for example, none, to my surprise, of Tartuffe. If this exhibition is anything to go by, the Comédie Française seems to have preferred to stick to French drama, with few deviations into Shakespeare, say, except for an occasional performance of Hamlet in translation. A picture of the riot caused by the première of Victor Hugo's Hernani was shown. Another thing that surprised me was that I didn't recognise a single face on the wall of faces that were the present day troupe of the Comédie Française, France's top-ranking actors. Had contemporary film stars been among them I'm sure I'd have been able to identify some of those.

Candlelit Bach

2011-12-19T12:44:00.003-05:00

I sat on the front row for an excellent performance of Bach's Wachet auf cantata yesterday evening, in St. Andrew's Church, by candlelight. The church choir there is directed by a well respected Ottawa musician, Thomas Annand, and includes professional or semi-professional soloists, so was bound to be worth hearing. The cantata includes two duets for bass and soprano soloists that are supposed to be dialogues between Christ and one of the "wise virgins" representing the receptive Christian soul, but are composed as love duets, the two voice parts answering and winding seductively around one another. Click here to hear what I mean.

The choir sang Cantata No. 65 as well, written for an Epiphany service in Leipzig: the accompanying orchestra included two French horns and a cor anglais used here as a substitute for the oboe da caccia Bach composed for, which soon afterwards became obsolete.

The female soloists also each sang an aria—one from Bach's Christmas Oratorio and one from the Magnificat (I knew them both)—the choir added three modern, unaccompanied Christmas anthems beautifully and softly sung, and at the end the congregation was allowed to join in with four carols. From where I stood, adjacent to the orchestra and close to the choir, I could watch the conductor and pretend to be one of the performers. I liked that.

Chris and I also spent a couple of hours or more singing carols in harmony at a friends' house on Saturday night. I had no voice left even for conversation after that, but it did put us in a Christmassy frame of mind.

Hölderlin, Heine and Hesse

2011-12-17T11:13:00.001-05:00

Friedrich Hölderlin

During my trip to Germany, I saw places where, at the beginning, middle and end of the 19th century, all three of these German romantic poets spent their time.

Friedrich Hölderlin lived for a long time in Tübingen. Here's a poem by him that I know and love:

Hälfte des Lebens (1805)

Mit gelben Birnen hänget
Und voll mit wilden Rosen
Das Land in den See,
Ihr holden Schwäne,
Und trunken von Küssen
Tunkt ihr das Haupt
Ins heilignüchterne Wasser.

Weh mir, wo nehm’ ich, wenn
Es Winter ist, die Blumen, und wo
Den Sonnenschein,
Und Schatten der Erde?
Die Mauern stehn
Hölderlin's house by the Neckar
Sprachlos und kalt, im Winde
Klirren die Fahnen.

A reasonable translation by Michael Hamburger goes like this:

The Middle of Life

With yellow pears the land
And full of wild roses
Hangs down into the lake,
You lovely swans,
And drunk with kisses
You dip your heads
Into the hallowed, the sober water.

But oh, where shall I find
When winter comes, the flowers, and where
The sunshine
And shade of the earth?
The walls loom
Speechless and cold, in the wind
Weathercocks clatter.

Hesse's bookshop in Tübingen

I believe I saw the descendants of those same swans he described, on the River Neckar, dipping their heads into the water around the Stocherkahne by the bank (that's the German word for punts, as found in Oxford and Cambridge), and then I quoted from the second verse to Klaus, the gentleman who was showing me old Tübingen; he knew the poem too.

Hermann Hesse worked at the Heckenhauer bookshop in that same town (from 1895-1899), publishing his first book of poems there.

On the wall of Heine's lodgings

Heinrich Heine

Heinrich Heine spent a year in Munich in the 1820s, co-editing a political magazine, but wasn't very happy, finding that city kleingeistig (small-minded) and longing all the while for Berlin. His Buch der Lieder was published while he lived there in the Radspielerhaus. Chris sings several of the songs by Schubert and Schumann that were settings of those famous poems: Der Doppelgänger, Ich grolle nicht, etc. Heine ended up living in Paris, by the way.

Hermann Hesse

Alexander's nativity play

2011-12-08T14:50:00.005-05:00

Last Friday, which feels like months ago, I was sitting on a bench by the water feature at the Hampton Hill end of Bushy Park in London, near a stately home on its perimeter that used to belong to the Admiralty. The water feature is an artificial waterfall or weir falling into a pond in formal gardens. The rest of Bushy Park is more natural in appearance, the water running along dykes through the bumpy field where, that morning, antlered deer lay chewing the cud. Frost on the grass had turned to dew.

Applying the Crown Jewels

Trying on the costume

This was precious therapy for my daughter, worrying about the imminent end of her maternity leave from a demanding job and the even more imminent birthday party—15 children invited with their parents—for Alexander (five years old on Monday). Alexander's other excitement this week has been the school nativity play for which he'd been cast as both Narrator (someone who "says words") and one of the Wise Men ("I'm in the Wise-man's Team"). We had to make him a suitable costume, so I bought a length of curtain material, sewed a hem along one side, using my travel sewing kit, and threaded a purple ribbon through to gather it into a cloak. That would do. Dark clothes under the cloak and a home-made head-dress complete with the felt crown that Alexander decorated unaided with stick-on "crown jewels." He had seen the real Crown Jewels at the Tower of London so knew what he was about. A most convincing Wise Man. His Narrator's lines went like this:

The landlord had hoped he would get a good rest.
He hadn't expected this number of guests!

I warned Alex that the audience might laugh when they heard that, seeing the 120 children on stage, but that if they did, they'd be laughing at the story, not at him. He knew to recite the lines clearly and slowly, "not fastly."

Alexander's parents were amused when they heard that several children would be playing the part of the Star of Bethlehem. My son-in-law supposed that with 15 wise men in the Team, some would be disorientated by the extra stars and might go off searching for Baby Jesus in the wrong direction. The reason why there are only three Wise Men in the traditional version is that all the others had got lost, he said.

Alexander's primary school has just published the results of its Offsted school inspection to the parents of its pupils. Result, "good" in almost every respect. This is a large school with about 1000 students between the ages of 4 and 11.

I wasn't allowed inside the classroom when we went to fetch my grandson home and furthermore each child was checked at the school gate to make sure (s)he was going home with the correct adult; to me, from a far-away generation, these security procedures seem astonishingly strict.

Almost another week later

2011-12-08T12:19:00.003-05:00

View of the Autobahn near Ulm

So much for the intention of keeping my blog updated during our Europe trip. It's hopelessly impossible, now Thursday evening; we have reached the outskirts of Munich after coming down the Autobahn from Stuttgart, driven at 180 kph by Peter who said he knew the road, having crossed the watershed (Wasserscheide) between the North Sea and the Black Sea and seen the Alps in the distance. Peter is a serious mountaineer who has led expeditions up Himalayan as well as Alpine peaks. When we got out of the car, he showed us photos of these climbs. Selling software systems must seem very tame in comparison.

In between journeys I am reading Breath by Tim Winton, having found it in a bookshop near the Sorbonne, in Paris; this novel's about the addictive, death-defying lifestyle of surfers on the western coast of Australia.

Old Rathaus, Sindelfingen

Sindelfingen

This morning Chris was giving his presentation at the ESE congress in the Sindelfingen Stadthalle, a few minutes' walk along the path by the stream from our hotel (Am Klostersee), and I was exploring the narrow, winding, cobbled alleyways below the Martinskirche at the top of the hill at the heart of Sindelfingen, the Kurze Gasse and the Hintere Gasse. On either side were beautifully maintained 16th and 17th century half-timbered houses; I passed the old town hall as well, its beams painted yellow, which at one time was a "salt house" and more recently a school. It is a museum, these days.

It's time for supper in Ismaning, now.

Written on the Eurostar from London to Paris

2011-12-05T15:23:00.004-05:00

December 2nd

How civilised! I have a “solo” window seat and am travelling backwards as London recedes at high speed, or at least what I can see of it above the rail-side barrier. We may be rushing through Kent now; there are fields. Traffic on the motorways is at a standstill which makes me feel superior. The French speaking steward has just served me the petite collation to which I'm entitled on this standard premier coach, and un vin blanc avec ca:

Timbale de riz aux épices orientales (and a sesame seed bread roll)
Grosses crevettes marinées et salsa verde (with two kinds of beans)
Gâteau aux pistaches et au chocolat au lait, crème anglaise

In Flemish, to my eyes is indistinguishable from Dutch, it reads like a different meal:

Rijst timbaaltjje met tikkekruiden
Gemarineerde gambas met salsa verde
Gebak met pistache en melkchocolade, crème anglaise

The French steward approaches again, speaking to me in English this time, such a seductive accent. “Would you lack a kerp of tea, Madame?”

I gaze into his eyes and say yes.

At Dover, with a brief glimpse of the South Downs under the darkening sky, then we plunge without pause into the Chunnel, 28 minutes after leaving St. Pancras Station. At St. Pancras the way to the train was well signposted and plenty of comfortable seats in the departure lounge, some with plug in points, and coffee bars, newspaper stalls, but no opportunity beyond the security checks to acquire Euros. No matter. The info desk sold metro tickets, as day passes or by the carnet (un carnet de dix billets) for £15, cheaper than London transport, it seems. I'd been using my Oyster card all over London, on the buses, overland and underground trains, by far the easiest way of paying.

Time in the Chunnel was 22 minutes today, then we emerge in France. Respecter la mer en passant sous la terre! -- says the slogan on a large board by the railway.

The rest of the journey was travelled in the dark, nothing of France to be seen other than parallel motorways, until we got to Paris, Gare du Nord. Like my fellow passengers, nearly all businessmen, I read my complimentary copy of The Economist and once on the platform hurried to the Metro, Chris having advised me which stop to aim for (Esplanade de la Défense on Line 1, after changing trains at Châtelet). The train on Line 1 was dreadfully full; with commuters still on their way home at 7:30 p.m. I had to fight my way to the door. Even so, I like Paris, could feel at home here.

Chris met me at the station exit, arriving only 3 minutes later than he'd anticipated, and we followed the walkways to the Ibis Hotel by the Pont Neuilly. From our bedroom window we can see the Seine flowing by and can even catch a glimpse of the Eiffel Tower.

Mannerheim followed by Tamm

2011-11-22T21:52:00.001-05:00

[This blogpost to be expanded when I have time!]

Another discovery this week, courtesy of the Canada-China Friendship Society; I went to hear the journalist Eric Enno Tamm talk about the book he has written––The Horse That Leaps Through Clouds––which is an account of the adventure he organised for himself in 2006, following the ancient, northern Silk Road (approximately) from St. Petersburg to Beijing in order to retrace a journey to China made by a Russian spy in 1906.

Gustaf Mannerheim, who eventually became President of Finnland, was the spy.

[...]

Confucius once advised: "Study the past in order to divine the future."

"By studying China's past," says Mr. Tamm, "I raised troubling questions about its future."

I queued up to speak to Mr. Tamm after his presentation (asking him how he'd managed the language problems––he said he had relied upon interpreters a lot of the time) and told him that when I got home I'd go straight to his website on the computer, which I did. I recommend it (a proper time-consumer, though) ––excellently well put together. Click here to take a look.

Guesswork

2011-11-15T10:43:00.001-05:00

Reading Pélagie-la-Charette (by Antonine Maillet), the novel mentioned in my blogpost about the Acadians, I'm struggling to follow the dialogue written in historic Arcadian dialect. Not having a French-Acadian dictionary to hand, I just have to guess at the meaning. Here, for example, is a passage I can more or less decipher ...

Je nous accoutumerons, j'avons connu pire dans le passé, et j'en sons sortis [...] Charlécoco, partez chacun de votre bord, l'un au nordet, l'autre au suroît, et me rapportez une paumée d'eau claire. [...] Après le règne des vaches maigres vient cestuy-là des grasses. Ça sera pas dit que je nous quitterons corver entre les deux. Allez, ouste!

... except for the verb "corver" (no idea what that means).

The book sweeps me along all the same, and could be the basis of an epic film if anyone took the trouble to adapt it. But then, what would become of the language?

Another thing I'm spending time on at present is helping Chris prepare for his presentation in German at the ESE conference in Sindelfingen next month. As we read through the documentation I can't help wondering what the Germans themselves make of their language these days, that leans so heavily on English, English technical jargon at that, in this context. Here's part of an introduction to one of the other talks that will be given at the conference (my italics):

Der Teilnehmer erfährt, wie neue Regularien im Energiebereich, Smart Grid, heruntergebrochen und durch technische Features realisiert werden können. Beispiele sind hier auch Smart Meters. Anhand von anschaulichen Use-Cases wird dem Teilnehmer vor Augen geführt, was es bedeutet, Sicherheit in der Fertigung in der Industrie einzuführen und was das Keymanagement in der Realität für Anforderungen an IT und betrieblicher Sicherheit stellt. Der Teilnehmer erhält dadurch Informationen, die ihm die Entscheidung erleichtern, ob und wenn ja welche Teile von Embedded Security als Entwicklungsdienstleistungen besser eingekauft und welche besser in-house aufgebaut werden.

It's hardly German any longer. Do students of German engineering rely on guesswork too?

The famous railway

2011-11-12T18:04:00.002-05:00

Ontario Science Centre photo of a Canadian Pacific steam train

The other day I got to see the documentary Imax film that's been showing at the Museum of Civilisation since the beginning of last month: Rocky Mountain Express.

At the end of the nineteenth century, against the odds, William Cornelius Van Horne of Illinois built the most challenging stretch of the trans-Canada railway, through the mountains of British Columbia and Alberta. He was aided and abetted by crazily obsessive surveyor-engineers like Major A.B. Rogers of Rogers Pass fame and assisted by heroic Chinese workers in the construction crews. They were paid $1 a day for their work in horrendously dangerous conditions. Tragically, hundreds of them died before the railway was finished.

Stephen Low of Ottawa directed the film, which I thought outstanding. A report in the National Post described the cinematography:

Cameras mounted on the engine’s cowcatcher, above the drive wheels and atop the boiler provide a train’s eye view hearkening back to some of the first frames of motion-picture film ever made. Helicopter footage captures the romantic pairing of engine and landscape ...

and if you've ever read Pierre Burton's book The Last Spike you'll know what a gripping story is told in the voice-over.

All over the place

2011-11-12T11:58:00.007-05:00

I read another article this week about how Internet addiction was linked to Attention Deficit Disorder in teens, and although I'm not a teen I've begun to wonder whether leaping from my bed to the computer screen on my way to the bathroom first thing in the morning might not be a habit I ought to break. In defence of the Internet, it's always interesting, and looking things up and writing about them is a good way of fixing them in my mind. But what I'm learning does seem very random and fragmentary at times.

Maybe it's nothing to do with the Internet; my whole lifestyle is like that. During the past couple of weeks, as usual, my thoughts have been all over the place. Not only in Afghanistan, Montreal, China and "Acadia" (as mentioned in my last few blogposts), but twice in Guatemala too, with one of our German conversation group giving us a lively account of her recent trip there as a wedding guest at a ruined, 18th century convent in Antigua. She climbed a volcano besides and encountered the Mayan Guatemalans, small, clean, tidy people, she said, who are proud of their heritage and refuse to speak Spanish. A few days after listening to that, I heard another lady, this one in the Spanish conversation group, telling us about her experience of Guatemala as a volunteer on a couple of Construction Expeditions, building a community centre with Mujeres in Acción, a partner of World Accord. She showed us marvellously colourful pictures of the Mayans and their woven cloths.

Meanwhile, at home, I've been writing out a complicated itinerary for what Chris calls our Grand Tour of Europe starting soon; we'll be travelling to London, Paris, Stuttgart and Munich, and Chris will be in Hannover and Oslo as well, giving presentations of his work. A lot of Internet research is required beforehand, and if we're not careful, imagining ourselves in five different countries within seventeen days causes a twitchy mind.

The Afghan Canadian Community Centre

2011-11-09T08:09:00.002-05:00

From the Toronto Star:

Ehsan Ullah Ehsan
It was the spring of 2006, and the school [Ehsan Ullah] Ehsan had opened to teach girls and women English, basic health, computer skills and other courses in the Taliban stronghold of Kandahar was fast running out of money. He was on the brink of shutting it down when the Toronto Star's Mitch Potter happened by, wrote about the looming disaster, and touched the hearts of two readers in Ottawa: Ryan Aldred and Andrea Caverly.

Ryan Aldred

I met Ryan Aldred last Thursday at a meeting of the CFUW's University Women Helping Afghan Women; he had come to tell us about what had happened next. He and his wife Andrea wrote to the reporter, asking, "What can we do to help?" and eventually received a grateful and detailed response from Mr Ehsan himself. He had no school buses, the computers were wearing out ... The young Ottawa couple decided to fund the Afghan school for 6 months, raising money from their friends and acquaintances in order to send donations. Meanwhile, in Kandahar, Ehsan chose a new location for his school, paying the teachers $100 a month and hiding the project from prying eyes because it was (and still is) very dangerous for Afghan girls to go to school. Families informed one another about the place by word of mouth, however, and with its lifeline of income from Canada the 100-strong student population quickly quadrupled. Then it transpired that men and boys wanted to be taught there too. "Almost overnight," said Mr Aldred, "we had 800 students." And eventually CIDA chipped in with a $310K grant to spend on buses and school equipment.

Afghan girl (photo by Paul Watson)

The girls are "fierce and fearless," according to Mr. Aldred, but the new buses protect them (from acid-throwers and other such extremists) on their way to school.

The CIDA money will not last forever. "You don't pull up stakes and leave everything flapping on the ground," when it runs out. What's to be done next? The request for three more years of funding was rejected, but people kept lobbying the Canadian government anyway, and then on International Women's Day a year's extension of funds was granted. "This is a big boost," says Mr. Aldred, "It helps us to keep going." During the several years since the project began, only half a million dollars have been spent, not a huge sum. The administrators of the NGO insist upon low cost developments, using members of the local community as staff. One of President Karzai's brothers has recently donated land for a new building, which some of the students themselves are excitedly designing.

In 2009 Ehsanullah Ehsan and Ryan Aldred founded the Canadian International Learning Foundation which supports not only this project in Afghanistan but similar projects in Nepal and in four African countries. Their initiative was reported in the National Post last month in an article by Jane Armstrong.

On its premises, the Afghan Canadian Community Centre now teaches over 1,500 students ...

...Business Management, Information Technology, English and Communications [...] with access to the Internet and online classes from Canadian and international institutions. The school’s programs provide students with the skills needed to obtain employment to support themselves and their families, improve their communities and participate in the reconstruction of Afghanistan. The skills taught at the ACCC are in high demand by international development agencies, local businesses and the Afghan government ...

Each former student now employed supports seven family members, on average. When a young daughter of a family man becomes the primary breadwinner, it makes people think, and attitudes begin to change.

Accreditation of such an institution is very bounded by rules and requirements. Mr. Aldred's NGO still needs to acquire 501(c)(3) status, but the developments continue, regardless.

... 32 students at the Afghan-Canadian Community Centre are enrolled in the Business Management certificate program offered online by the Southern Alberta Institute of Technology (SAIT), a Calgary-based Polytechnic Institute that offers internationally-recognized post-secondary education. The Business Management program often allows students in Kandahar to secure high-paying employment after as little as one course. A group of 5 ACCC students have also been given scholarships to study online classes with the Canada eSchool, where they will study a range of subjects including Science, Math, English and Civics.

A network of volunteer tutors in Canada tutors the Afghans at the Centre using Skype (mostly) for classwork and in one-on-one sessions. Other volunteers engage in online text chats with them, helping them with their projects and with career guidance. The young Afghans (the age of a student at the ACCC might be anything from 10 to 40 years old!) ask their Canadian mentors for help with online research, use of English, study skills. The only drawback to the system is the time zone. If you join in with the volunteering you may have to do your transcontinental chatting from Canada at 3 o'clock in the morning.

Thin spread

2011-11-08T15:11:00.000-05:00

The other day a wise, elderly friend of mine asked me how I was doing, and when I started to tell her about the many and various things that take up my time, she interrupted me.

"Alison," she said, "be careful. Don't spread yourself too thin."

I've been thinking about that, since. It is good advice.

In Montreal, a little extra

2011-11-07T17:10:00.004-05:00

We drove all the way to Montreal and back yesterday for the sake of supper with friends (Ottawa friends!) on the rue Ontario. The restaurant where we had a booking is Au Petit Extra beside the Lion d'Or cabaret hall.

The journey there, with Chris driving and Dan along as passenger telling us stories of youth and his family (who were miners in Sydney, Cape Breton), took us along a pretty route by the deep blue Ottawa River and through the late autumn countryside, the horizons clear and the sky and water all pink at sunset as we crossed the bridge onto the Île de Montréal. Highways 40 and 15 through the city suburbs were less attractive but we easily found our way downtown and arrived with an hour to spare, parking on the rue Papineau. After that, the excursion began to acquire added interest. Dan is married to Gianluca Ragazzini (a colleague and friend of my own husband at work) and Gianluca, meeting us in Montreal after a choir rehearsal, was waiting at the bar opposite our parking spot, Le Stud. I have never knowingly entered a gay bar before (only by accident in London once, when my mother wanted somewhere immediate to sit down with a pot of tea) and was immediately struck by the fact that all the people there were large men in black leather, talking loudly. Wearing a fluffy white jacket, I probably stood out in that crowd. We later learned that this place is popular with the "bear" community (unfamiliar with the vocabulary, we had to have it explained) and that a few years ago there had been quite a scandal when a young woman called Audrey Vachon had been bounced from there for intruding on the men's exclusive domain.

They didn't treat me like that; actually we weren't on the premises for more than a few minutes (Chris, to my amusement, nervously trying to make himself inconspicuous at the doorway) before the four of us walked on towards the restaurant, taking in the sights of Le Village Gai along the rue Ste. Catherine, with all its rainbow flags. Many same sex couples were strolling by and the magazines on sale in the shops were definitely customer specific.

Au Petit Extra is up the hill from there and round the corner, past old, Montreal style tenement buildings with their curving outdoor staircases. We discovered the restaurant to be a subdued, elegant place where Gianluca and Dan, who have eaten there many times before, knew the staff. We met the other couple in our party, Steve and Mary, who'd also driven in from Ottawa, and sat down to our meal. The service was excellent, as was the food, prepared in a seriously professional kitchen. My choice was

aiguillettes de canard fumé et mâche à l'orange
mahi-mahi à la caponate
gâteau framboise-pistache

Above the menu chalked on the wall, I noticed a letter written in the same hand-writing (by our waitress):

Ami Jean,

Voici trois ans que tu nous quittais. Après bien des larmes, on s'est retroussé les manches et le navire vogue toujours. Tu le reconnaîtrais sans peine. Le Lion d'Or surgit de plus belle et le Petit Extra pourfend* le temps. Nous pensons souvent à toi et, à bien des égards, tu es toujours là.

Tu sera bientôt grand-père. Le savais-tu?

On t'embrasse tous.

* = fights against, a fencing term

I told her it was a lovely letter and asked her about it. Apparently the restaurant's former co-proprietor had died three years ago last night; it was written to him.

On leaving we walked back to the car down the avenue Papineau past a 19th century brick church emblazoned with garish, coloured lights, spelling out the message: Le salaire de ton péché c'est l'enfer (presumably a paraphrase of Le salaire de ton péché c'est la mort.)

"My favourite church in Montreal," said Gianluca, with heavy sarcasm.

*****

The day after I published this post came an announcement in the Ottawa Citizen that Ottawa now officially has a Gay Village too.

"China changed us"

2011-11-02T09:04:00.002-04:00

I joined the Ottawa Chapter of the Canada-China Friendship Society last week and at their October meeting heard an engrossing lecture by a former Ambassador to Japan, China and Mongolia, Robert Wright. In the Liberal Government of the 1990s, as Deputy Minister for Trade he had organised Team Canada trade missions to China, so was already well prepared, and the opportunity to have front row seats for the Olympic Games in Beijing was another ("fabulous!") incentive to accept this job offer.

Mr. Wright and his wife represented Canada in China from 2005 to 2009. "To quote an old adage," he said, "China changed us."

He confessed that living in China was more difficult than he'd expected. He found the polluted air and the crowds in the big cities "physically demanding," the language-barrier frustrating and the bilateral relationship between China and Canada not as strong as it was when the Liberal Party had been in power, the political atmosphere "cooler ... more hostile."

One day, the Ambassador was arrested for walking his pet dog in the city! Dogs that size (dà gǒu––it was a labrador) were not allowed in Beijing. However, when the authorities realised who the culprit was, a diplomatic embarrassment was avoided.

In Mr. Wright's favour was the fact that his staff belonged to the biggest Canadian embassy in the world––320 strong––and that the Chinese government made no objections to his visiting every part of the country while he was in office, including the politically sensitive Autonomous Regions. "It was good to get out of Beijing for a change." Although he suffered badly from altitude sickness in Tibet, he was able to enjoy some "frank exchanges" with students at a Tibetan university before fleeing from the thin air.

Stressing that these were his personal views, he said he had learned ten lessons while living and working in China:

It is a self-confident and optimistic country. Unlike the conservative Japanese, the Chinese do not fear outsiders taking an interest in them. Japanese families would tend to resist the idea of their adult children marrying foreigners; attitudes in China seem just the opposite.
On the other hand, the Chinese government seems surprisingly insecure, afraid of instability. The government feels it should be autocratic in order to keep such a huge country safe and sound, therefore it cracks down on subversive elements and covers up its weaknesses. Mr. Wright felt that the next generation of leaders would be different in their governance, more flexible, because younger people in the Party have a better understanding of different cultures.
Since China wants a fair share of the world's wealth for its people, the government hopes China's status will return to what it was at the beginning of the 19th century, not wanting to be seen as a global superpower so much as a major power within Asia, with a high-ranking GDP (it seems the Chinese have achieved that already).
Canada is respected for being the only developed nation that has not invaded China! The Chinese like Canada's fairness towards immigrants, and our civilised way of doing business. We should nurture the trust between our respective leaders because, in Chinese culture, this is very important.
Canadians in general don't understand the Chinese very well. We still tend to see them as they used to be in the 1970s. (Only British Columbia, where Mandarin is now being taught in the schools, is an exception.) We're therefore missing our chances; if we're not careful, Canada will become irrelevant.
We mustn't assume that the Chinese or would want to share our values priorities (he corrected himself there). To them, debates about democracy or human rights are lower on the agenda than how to tackle economic growth, education, environmental concerns and corruption in high places. They believe that, in order to keep their enormous country stable and secure, (in Mr. Wright's words) they want "autocratic control.") If we find fault with China, we should voice our criticisms politely and in private, advised Mr. Wright, then we might be listened to. Strident condemnation splashed all over the media can only have a negative effect. They detect a certain amount of hypocrisy and self-interest in criticism from the west; i.e. they are suspicious of our motives.
The Chinese are not easily classifiable. They don't think of themselves as communists any more. They are in fact "ferocious capitalists." Clearly they no longer want Soviet style labels. On the other hand, how can the door to a more liberal régime be opened? Slowly, cautiously, is the answer. If change is to come, whatever should be done about the giant portrait of Chairman Mao in Tiananmen Square, for example? How can they eliminate the huge gap between their rich and their poor and the consequent threat of instability? Political evolution has to happen gradually or "uncontrollable forces" could be unleashed. The future of the Communist Party is being debated within its ranks, and that's a healthy sign, but it may take half a century, perhaps a whole century (say some) before China completely changes.
Never underestimate the capacity of the Chinese to solve enormous problems, fast. Mr. Wright predicts that in 10 years time, China will lead the world in environmentally friendly technologies. Re. Lesson 6, above, the mess that the U.S.A. made of dealing with the devastation after Hurricane Katrina (2005) raised Chinese eyebrows. They were not impressed, especially in comparison with the "tremendous" way they themselves responded to the victims of the Sichuan earthquake (in 2008).
Nor should we underestimate the risks inherent in Chinese nationalism. The instantaneous reaction of the Chinese to attacks on their Olympic torch bearers before the start of the 2008 Games obviously rather scared Mr. Wright. They are a fiercely patriotic people.
Despite the gaps between our cultures, there's an enormous reservoir of goodwill and commonality between our two countries.

Robert Wright remains optimistic for the future of the relationship between China and Canada. China being our second largest trading partner, he feels that trade will take care of itself. They buy potash, coal, wheat, transportation products and engineering expertise from us. He hopes that our influence in the world of engineering and science will bring about an increase in trust. We should continue to invite Chinese people to visit Canada as tourists, students, colleagues and friends. Likewise young Canadians should go to China as students, and we should "put more Canadians on the ground in the provinces of China," not just in Beijing and Shanghai. We should make efforts to learn the language.

The Acadians

2011-10-27T16:52:00.005-04:00

From another talk in French (on Tuesday) I learned about "les acadiens," also eventually known in the USA as Cajuns.

They were brave people; they had to be.

In the 16th century explorers from France claimed parts of northeastern America, naming the new found land "Acadie" after an ancient Greek word meaning peaceful refuge, idyllic place. Champlain (see my previous blogpost) encouraged settlement around the Bay of Fundy and around the Annapolis River where to counteract the extraordinarily high tides the new immigrants began digging canals and dykes (aboiteaux) through the salt marshes to dry out the land and harvest the salt. (You can find a model of this system in the Musée des Civilisations at Gatineau.) Little communities sprang up, Port-Royal, Grand-Pré, Pointe-de-l'Église. To start with, there were no women around, but friendly Mi'kmaq natives were trading their beaverskins with the new settlers, so inevitably some children of mixed race came along. As recorded in his journal, Champlain created a social club in Port-Royal called L'Ordre du Bon Temps to give the men some distractions. By the mid-17th century, French women were well established there too.

Then came interference from the British and a tragedy known to the Acadian people as Le Grand Dérangement, a moment in history of which Britain should be thoroughly ashamed. The expulsion was meant as punishment for rebellious behaviour, a refusal to swear unconditional allegiance to Britain. The governor of Nova Scotia in 1755, Charles Lawrence, ordered all the Acadians to be deported, about 10 thousand of them, with no redress. Grand-Pré, their departure point, is now a place of pilgrimage with commemorative gardens, monuments and a statue of the fictional Evangéline, heroine of the long, romantic poem about the exiled Acadians by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. There's another statue of Evangéline in Louisiana where some of them ended up.

Nowadays you can buy little Evangéline dolls wrapped in a box with Gabriel dolls (Gabriel was her long lost boyfriend) from the souvenir shop at Church Point.

I've not read the Longfellow poem, but Simone, the lady who gave the talk, lent me a novel in French telling a similar story. It's by Antonine Maillet and is entitled Pélagie-La-Charette. I have been warned that the dialogue is full of vocabulary I'll find difficult, the language of the Acadians being a unique corruption of old French dialects, "une langue déformée," the ladies called it. Simone had brought an Acadian-French dictionary along, and one of the others borrowed that to show to her linguist husband.

The Acadians, although they are not officially a nation, have chosen a national day for themselves, August 15th, and have a national anthem which begins like the Roman Catholic vespers hymn, Ave, maris stella ... Hail, star of the sea! We made an attempt at singing it. The yellow star appears on the blue stripe on their flag: blue, white and red like the French tricolore.

On s'arrange entre nous

2011-10-25T11:32:00.004-04:00

Yesterday morning I heard a talk in French given by the novelist and translator Daniel Poliquin: he was speaking about a book he has recently translated entitled Le Rêve de Champlain, written originally in English by the American historian David Hackett Fisher––Champlain's Dream, 2008; in the hardcover version it is 848 pages long.

It would have been interesting to hear M. Poliquin say more about the challenges of translating such a weighty book, and he did tell us a little about this (making the nice little aside that he thinks the French version is probably better than the original; he had been able to correct some mistakes in the English version!), how his research into nautical vocabulary had taken him three days work with an expert mariner and so on, but mostly we learned about what an impressive man Samuel de Champlain must have been, and how his vision for New France (i.e. Canada) was way ahead of his time (Champlain died in 1635). Poliquin compared his policies with those of Willi Brandt and Helmut Schmidt who advocated a peaceable (pacifique) reunification of Germany in the 1980s. "Wandel durch Handel" (change through commerce; Poliquin made the striking remark that the Berlin Wall was brought down by fax machines).

The explorer-diplomat Champlain, who crossed the Atlantic 27 times during his 16th / 17th century lifetime, had the difficult task of having to work with the "Amérindiens" on behalf of France without being too confrontational about it. His attitude mattered. He was respectful and non-judgemental. He asked the native people about their beliefs and their politics and found them as intelligent and "evolués" as the Europeans. He considered their kayaks, for example, to be one of the greatest of human inventions. Champlain having paddled (or been paddled) along the lakes and rivers from Detroit to Montreal, this was not just a casual turn of phrase.

The word "sauvage" (savage, wild), as Poliquin pointed out, comes from the Latin silva, forest, so les sauvages were actually "people of the forest."

The word caucus, used in N. American politics today, is said by some to come from an Algonquin word cau´cau-as´u, although there's some debate about this. Champlain liked the way the native Americans arrived at their decisions by consensus, after giving everyone a chance to speak his mind freely. Because of his deference to the native way, there has been no genocide perpetrated by Europeans in this northern part of the Americas. When a Frenchman was murdered by one of the native people, Champlain played for time and would not countenance a knee-jerk, vengeful reaction. He entered into discussions, persuaded the tribesmen to make amends, effected an exchange of hostages and gifts. Poliquin said that this foreshadowed typical present day Canadian behaviour:

S'il y a du trouble avec des voisins, on n'appelle pas la police, ou seulement en dernier recours. On se débrouille entre nous, on s'arrange entre nous.

Poliquin calls Champlain's vision for Canada "un rêve modeste ... et fou." But Champlain's legacy, his influence upon Canada, and his dream of a peaceful new world remains. Champlain was a Renaissance man, a humanist, a botanist, a writer, an expert navigator and cartographer, not just a governor. "Il pouvait lire la forêt" and his maps, as modern tools confirm, were astonishingly accurate. As a scientist he did make some mistakes, however, convinced that the goal of his explorations –– China –– lay not so far from Montreal. There's a suspicion he may have been a Protestant, not a Catholic, although the French régime that supported his endeavours was Catholic, and very right wing at that. He was a failure in one aspect of his life. Married at 40 to a girl of twelve, she left him when she grew up and joined a convent.

Horrors on the street

2011-10-23T09:03:00.001-04:00

I see that the Ottawa Citizen has published a report about this fund-raiser for the Ottawa Food Bank.

We crossed paths with several hundred zombies staggering through the Byward Market in Ottawa yesterday afternoon, almost all of them played by young people who'd been rather heavy handed with the gory make-up and accessories (I liked the fellow in an apron advertising Heinz Tomato Ketchup). "They look like typical students to me," said Chris, while I wondered aloud whether they might be evidence of the End Of The World that had been forecast to take place on Friday evening.

Commentators in high spirits were keeping up a good flow of remarks as the parade went by and to my amusement I heard a young man behind me say, "And now, for no apparent reason, here comes an old lady dressed in red ..." meaning me!

Cirrocumulus

2011-10-22T21:13:00.003-04:00

I was very struck by the sight of cirrocumulus clouds on our way home from town this afternoon, as the skies began to clear after some grey, wet days. Chris took a photo too, as evidence of supercooled water droplets at 20,000 ft agl. They looked as though they'd been painted onto the blue with a big brush.

Here is my own picture, looking up from the park by our street:

"Là-bas, les merveilleux nuages!" (Baudelaire)

The trees inside

2011-10-22T13:46:00.003-04:00

"Cedro di Versailles" at the AGO
"Ripetere il Bosco" is also visible
on the right hand wall in this picture

We visited the recently reconstructed AGO (Art Gallery of Ontario) in Toronto last Friday, its transformation masterminded by Frank Gehry, and in the Galleria Italia on Level 2 we were impressed by a remarkable installation called Ripetere il Bosco (Repeating the Forest), by Guiseppe Penone.

Planks of wood, attached to the high inner walls of the spacious gallery, had been painstakingly chiselled out, exposing the form of the young tree it had originally come from. Presumably the message is that the tree itself is still there, to those who know how to look for it within a man made wooden artefact.

My artwork shows [...] the essence of matter and tries to reveal [...] the hidden life within.

In March last year Penone, struggling with a language that's not his own, gave a recorded talk at the AGO:

I take a big beam ... I start to carve the beam following a ring of growing ... and I arrive to find the form of the tree... I do several times because each beam is from a different tree [with a] different history. I make evident the tree that is in the wood that surrounds us.

Penone discovering the inner tree

In his intimate dealings with trees dead and alive, he imagines that ...

The space between the tree and the bark is the future time of the tree ...

Born in the alps near Turin, Penone is a member of the Italian Arte Povera group, creating sculpture from easy to find, ordinary materials, rather than from rare, costly marble and such things. Even so, I couldn't help remembering what Michelangelo did with blocks of marble towards the end of his life. Those were sculptures of emerging forms as well.

By the way, while searching for another link to Giuseppe Penone I came across a blog published regularly since 2005: Some Landscapes. These illustrated comments on the theme of landscapes as depicted in the arts are written (compulsively, I imagine) by "Plinius"—who likes that nom de blog—from Stoke Newington. I thoroughly recommend browsing through it.

Cheng squared

2011-10-12T16:54:00.002-04:00

We went to an astonishing concert: the performers were advertised as "The Cheng²Duo"–—their names being Silvie and Bryan Cheng. The pianist Silvie has already performed at Carnegie Hall in New York and has appeared in concert with Angela Hewitt. Silvie's 'cellist brother Bryan is also due to appear at the Carnegie Hall—this weekend, playing a ¾-sized 'cello because he has not yet grown tall enough for a full sized one. His sister will be on stage again as his accompanist. Needless to say, the Cheng family was very excited about the event, and the concert we heard at a private house in Ottawa was a practice for their New York performance. We were sitting close enough to touch Bryan's 'cello, had we wanted to.

George knew the first piece, Schubert's Arpeggione Sonata in A minor, and reminded me I used to play the piano part for him to try out the slow movement on the 'cello in the old days. I do remember that 5-note descending run, I must say, absolutely gorgeous music.

Is Schubert suitable for the very young? I can't help feeling that the more experience of life, love and other mysteries you have had, the better you will know on which phrases to linger and which notes to emphasize, but perhaps I'm wrong. It's wrong to underestimate the capabilities of people who can't quite be classed as adults yet, that I do know. I have a sneaking suspicion that children and teenagers are equal to anything an adult can achieve.

We came home talking of the adolescent Yehudi Menuhin playing Elgar's violin concerto and other such prodigious feats. Bryan may be young, but when he's playing, already looks and sounds like a professional. We were glad to see that he wasn't prematurely aged, though, in spite of his extraordinary accomplishments. At the end of one virtuoso item on the programme, Bringing the Tiger down from the Mountain (by Chinese-Canadian composer Alexina Louie), Bryan, pretending to be the tiger, had leapt out at Chris (facing him in the front seats) with a roar. To the young man's delight Chris had jumped out of his seat, laughing and applauding.

The full programme was as follows:

Schubert: Sonata in A minor for Cello and Piano
Haydn: Piano Sonata No. 59 in E-flat
Paganini: Variations on One String on a theme of Rossini
Louie: Bringing the Tiger down from the Mountain II
Schumann: Piano Sonata No. 2 in G minor
Tchaikovsky: Variations on a Rococo Theme

Encore: an arrangement of the Starwars theme, this piece played on a "big 'cello" that Bryan was trying out for size!

Thoughts of travel

2011-10-01T17:50:00.008-04:00

Once again, I have been playing the accompaniments to Winterreise (by Schubert) and the Songs of Travel (by Vaughan Williams) where the piano clomps along like heavy, purposeful footsteps that keep the impetus going while the singer voices his wandering thoughts.

I have trod the upward and the downward path ...,

goes the last song in the Vaughan Williams' cycle as the aging vagabond trudges off into the sunset, softly singing to himself,

... and I have lived and loved and closed the door!

(on a high D, pianissimo).

We seem to spend our lives thinking about travel. I wake up thinking about journeys after dreaming of expanses of water. Because the marketing department at work has ideas for him, Chris keeps sending me instant messages to say: would you mind going to China again next year? ... or Korea? It seems fairly certain we'll off to Germany in December and to England next February for him to participate in software engineering conferences.

I see you stand like greyhounds in the slips,
Straining upon the start. The game's afoot:
Follow your spirit ...

(Shakespeare, Henry V)

Our son is even more of a wanderer; he's supposed to live and work in Sydney, but this year sees him popping up, for various reasons, on four continents: in Perth, Melbourne, Canberra, Li Jiang, Cheng Du, Xi'an, Beijing, Chiang Mai, Kunming, São Jose (near São Paulo) and to the borders of the Tibet Autonomous Region. It's hard to keep up with where he might be on any given day. On Monday, he and Sha will fly to Canada to visit us for Thanksgiving; that I do know.

Physics World estimates that "as they fly all over the world to observatories, conferences and meetings astronomers are averaging some 23 000 air miles per year." What restless people we all are, except for our daughter (who noticed that quotation and sent it rather pointedly to her brother); she, apart from a week on the Isle of Wight, is contentedly staying put for the whole year with her family in Hampton Hill, London.

Magician with a message

2011-09-29T17:18:00.004-04:00

I went to hear James Randi speak at the National Library. The event was hosted by CFI Ottawa: the Centre For Inquiry, whose mandate is to promote scepticism and critical thinking in the local populace. These are the people who promoted the Atheist bus ads in Ottawa a couple of years ago, allied to the British Humanist Association mentioned in my blog in October '08.

Randi is a retired professional magician, world famous for having offered:

a one-million-dollar prize to anyone who can show, under proper observing conditions, evidence of any paranormal, supernatural, or occult power or event.

To date, this prize has not been won. No one has even passed the preliminary tests to claim the prize although there are an awful lot of people claiming to have supernatural powers (and making money out of it). Mr. Randi doesn't mince his words about such people. Inventing a name for them, "woo-woos," he calls them blatant liars and cheats, especially the ones (like the multimillionaire Peter Popoff) who call themselves Reverend. They "don't give a damn if they hurt you," and the authorities that fail to control them are "so chicken ... it's disgusting."

Bona fide magicians, on the other hand, are the most honest people in the world. They are not like those tricksters on the make who try to sell you MagnaForce Shoes or Laundry Balls (containing tap water dyed blue). He thinks chiropractors are utter quacks, and as for homeopathic medicine––it's a farce and a fraud. Homeopathic doctors deal in delusion and dilution; making that neat pun as an aside, he told us how he'd once swallowed some homeopathic sleeping pills and phoned the Poison Control Centre to ask for their advice.

"I've taken an overdose of 30 pills. Do you think I'm in danger?"

"Oh yes, sir! Could you just tell us the name of the pills."

He did and said there was a long pause. He said he could hear the person trying not to giggle at the other end of the line. "Not to worry, sir. You'll be fine."

Mr. Randi is 83 years old, a little man (shorter than I am) with a long and bushy white beard and a bald head. He has recently recovered from heart bypass surgery and chemotherapy after bowel cancer. He did not look so small on stage where he spoke fluently, without notes, on his feet, for nearly three hours. For the first fifteen minutes or so of his talk he fooled us into thinking that the object he held in his hand was a microphone. Then he put it down, confessing that it was not a microphone but a beard trimmer (the like of which he rarely uses for its intended purpose, although he did tell a story about having his beard vacuumed when he visited NASA at Houston to perform a remote card trick with the astronauts on the space station). All the way through he regaled us with jokes and stories like that, all with the message: don't believe everything you see or hear. He said that some people are born sceptics ... and some are born-again sceptics. Friends of his included the illustrious Arthur C. Clark and Martin Gardner.

According to Randi, the Bush administration in the USA who recommended "faith-based thinking" was guilty of "science bashing at its absolute worst." Americans still refuse to adopt the metric units, because that system was designed by atheists, people say, and what is worse, by French atheists (laughter). He was "pretty damn' proud" that America had more recently elected a more thoughtful President ("...and I still am, so there!") but was critical of Obama too, for the way he feels he always has to bring a prayer to God into his speeches. Mr. Randi claims there are two kinds of atheist: the ones who say "There is no God!" and the ones who say "There is not enough evidence to convince me that there is a God." He (Randi) belongs to the second camp, not wishing to offend intelligent people who, if it weren't for their religious beliefs, would make good sceptics. Randi's Educational Foundation (the JREF) is therefore not atheist per se.

He was very entertaining when telling his anecdote about the levitating matchbox, an old trick that fooled a team of established scientists at the Lawrence Livermore Labs into thinking that the man levitating the matchbox might really have "psycho-kinetic powers." His account of the fake, expensive mine detector dowsing rods used by the military in Iraq and Afghanistan was not so funny. Apparently these deadly things are still on the market, still being deployed. He took one apart on stage in order to show its workings to a volunteer electrician from the audience. It had the same circuitry that you'd find in T.V. remote controllers made in Taiwan.

Mr. Randi followed this bit of seriousness with an impassioned plea to teach our children and the students in our schools to think critically, and never to accept what we hear without questioning it.

The talk ended with a standing ovation, the 7th out of 9 such presentations given across Canada to packed, enthusiastic audiences. As I walked out of the auditorium past the old gentleman who was continuing to hold people enthralled as they clustered around him, I suddenly realised whom he reminded me of: George Bernard Shaw.

G.B.S.

James Randi

From wax to sugar to New York

2011-09-24T15:37:00.001-04:00

Over my breakfast I was reading a leaflet from Eastern Approaches, a British travel group that offers guided tours to the Middle East and beyond. Its originator is the archeologist, Warwick Ball; this gentleman leads some of the tours and writes an editorial column for the company's newsletter. We'd love to meet him.

For its latest edition his subject is Delectable Comestibles and he describes how, through our appreciation of food, we can detect the spread of different cultures from the ancient to the modern world ...

Can we perhaps trace the impact of the Mongol invasions by the spread of stuffed dumplings out of China to [their] distant cousins, the pirogi of Russia, the manti of Turkey and the khinqali of Georgia and Armenia?

That's an interesting enough chain of thought, but what really caught my attention was this one:

Where would New York be without the importance of honey? The Reformation in Europe led to the collapse of bee-keeping, hitherto the preserve of monasteries because of their demand for wax; the resulting loss of honey led to a huge demand for sugar from the New World, which is why the Dutch gave their loss-making colony of New Amsterdam to the British in exchange for the cane producing colony of Surinam in 1667.

Why wasn't history this intriguing when I went to school?

Reclaiming our cities for people

2011-09-23T17:04:00.003-04:00

On Market Hill, in Cambridge

Since I visited Cambridge, England, and Cardiff, Wales, earlier this summer, I have been thinking how pleasant it would be if Ottawa and other North American cities followed the example of the British ones and eliminated more motor vehicles from the places where people congregate. As you walk towards and through Cambridge's central Market Square or along St. Mary Street in Cardiff, where cars once used to wage a continuous battle with pedestrians for priority of access, what you now hear is the sound of human voices and footsteps. What an improvement! Those are acceptable, tolerable, natural sounds; they do not raise your blood pressure. The air is easier on the lungs as well.

Four happy people walk down St. Mary Street, in Cardiff

In Cambridge we sat on a bench by the Guildhall and watched the people go by, very conscious of this quietness. In Cardiff I sat at an outdoor streetside coffee table noticing the same thing.

The only time when Ottawa's city core is reclaimed by the people is on Canada Day when the approaches to the War Memorial and the streets from Parliament Hill to the Byward Market are so thronged with partying crowds that it would be impossible for a vehicle to get through in any case. The only street that's permanently closed to traffic in downtown Ottawa is Sparks Street: "Canada's Most Unique Street" as it claimed to be (to our amusement as we discovered that there are degrees of uniqueness), when we first arrived here.

Where have the vehicles gone since they were forbidden access to the heart of the city in Cardiff and Cambridge? They have been diverted, of course. Driving into town now demands a bit of thought and planning, because you have to park around the edges and walk. Is that such a bad thing? People do get used to the idea when they discover how much more attractive their city has become since the ban on cars, and tend to stop complaining. My elderly mother told me yesterday that small vehicles––"shop mobility scooters"––have been laid on free of charge for the people who don't find walking so easy (although you have to know where to locate them). The city has obviously given this a good deal of thought, as can be seen from this leaflet. Of course it helps that the bus and rail network in and around Cardiff is very good, too.

PSWs

2011-09-21T08:28:00.007-04:00

Hourly wages for Personal Support Workers (PSWs) in Canada:

	Public	Private NFP	Private FP	Overall
Unionized	$14.65	$11.74	$13.97	$13.49
Non-Unionized	$13.42	$11.52	$11.79	$11.95
Overall	$14.41	$11.66	$12.04	$12.71

We tuned into the talk channel while driving up the road the other day and happened upon a CBC programme that shocked us. They were interviewing women who worked as care-givers in Ontario's residences for the elderly. Untrained as nurses, these PSWs are being expected / required to do nursing jobs: give insulin injections, monitor blood-sugar levels and degrees of dementia, administer narcotics and so on. This is all against the rules, but it sounds as though the real nurses are too overstretched to find time to do these tasks themselves or even––and here's the disturbing part––to train the PSWs to do these things properly. Accordingly, these untrained orderlies* are terrified by the amount of responsibility thrust upon them, are making drastic mistakes, cannot sleep at night, and are desperate to drop out, if only they could find a better job.

Meanwhile the elderly are helplessly vulnerable in the unmonitored system. Obviously proper standards of care ought to be enforced. Why not? Because if health and safety inspection officers were to have private residences closed, it would put so much more of a burden onto the public health care system which Health Canada (and, indirectly of course, taxpayers) can ill afford to pay for. So nothing much is done about it.

I'm sure Canada is not the only country that has this problem.

Should we be saving up like crazy to afford the best quality of residential life that money can buy, or trying to lobby the politicians before it's too late, or just accepting whatever fate is in store for us and our friends and relations, in the hope that our old age won't turn out to be as dire as we fear?

* I used the word "orderlies" because my dad was one of those once, a nursing orderly in the Royal Army Medical Corps. He too had to do some shocking work to help out the higher ranks when situations became critical, for very little pay, under minimal supervision (although he did get fairly thorough training). That was in wartime. The rank and file tended not to question the way things were, in those days. The RAMC motto is In Arduis Fidelis, Faithful In Adversity. They knew where they stood.

Mr. Alder's museum

2011-09-19T22:58:00.006-04:00

A model guard (with bike) at the entrance

A week last Sunday we flew with some friends from the Rockcliffe Flying Club to the old airport at Picton (a former RAF Bombing and Gunnery School) where we got talking to an extraordinary gentleman called Keith Alder. He had spent 25 years putting an aviation museum together, in his own home, and he was keen to show it to us. A friend of his lent us her car; five of us piled in with Chris driving, while John had a ride down the hill into town in the sidecar attached to Mr. Alder's bike. We drove along in formation, rolling up at the guardhouse that marks the entrance to his property, complete with a uniformed mannequin as guardsman.

Mr. Alder led us into the house, where his wife didn't seem in the least surprised to have visitors. "He brings people round all the time," she said. "We've had at least 300 this year."

Model aircraft of all shapes, sizes and origins were suspended from the ceiling, pictures and posters covered the walls, and on every surface was a variety of artifacts and momentos from the war years. Over the years, the collection––quite as inclusive as the exhibitions at Duxford's Imperial War Museum in the UK––has expanded until it became too extensive for his living room, and has spilled over into his garage, his barn, and onto his lawn. There are two large aircraft on the lawn! The fighter jet arrived in three pieces which he reassembled with loving care. The other one is a Beechcraft Musketeer from the RCAF base at Portage la Prairie.

In the barn, to John's absolute delight, because he learned his IFR skills in one at the start of his career as a pilot, we found a Link Trainer; these were first used in the 1930s.

Jill admires a corner of the permanent exhibition
in Keith's living room

The guardhouse was Mr. Alder's most recent project. Now that he has finished putting it together I asked him whether he had plans to create anything else. He said, "I'll think of something."

John talks to Keith about the Link Trainer

We could have stayed there for hours, and I'm sure he wouldn't have minded, but the lady at the airport had to have her car back, and we had to find some lunch before the restaurants closed, so we began to make a move to leave. And it was then that I had my chance to sit in the sidecar ("who'd like a ride this time?"-- I was quicker off the mark than Jill!) not going straight up the hill like the others in the car, but by a roundabout route via Picton's High Street, thronging with tourists. The road surface blurred past a few centimetres away as we thrummed along.

Going for my side-car ride ...

Mr Alder's business card is as idiosyncratic as his home. "Organizer - Promoter," it declares. "Used Land - Termites - Pet Fleas - Nails - Fly Swatters - Sailboat Fuel - Sky Hooks - Junk. Wars Fought -Revolutions Started - Governments Run - Aircraft -Lies Told - Bars Emptied - Round Squares - Antique Machinery - Also Miniskirts Shortened - Musketeer."

... which I quite enjoyed!

Lying around on my desk

2011-09-19T21:41:00.001-04:00

Bemused at the juxtaposition of words and phrases on the bits of paper lying before me, I think it's time I tidied my surfaces again.

sicherheitskritisch ... Betriebssystem ... Wahrscheinlichkeit des Versagens pro Stunde
George 12th-16th Brazil
Barbarian Migrations 375-568
courses of bricks to be removed to install through-wall flashing
seat61.com
Voices from Afghanistan
OFCP Household Collection Service Free Pick-up 613 569 6948
Caravaggio's Impact
outbound track in hold
Thurs Oct. 6 boat trip

And three lists of people's names.

Is your clutter like that, too?

Taking risks

2011-09-18T16:22:00.001-04:00

Risk management (Risikomanagement, auf Deutsch), is an often heard combination of words these days, and a friend of ours has pointed out that my husband's job, advising people in the use of safety-critical software, is trendy work to be doing.

I used to get teased for telling my children to "take care" all the time, but nowadays the whole of the western world seems obsessed with caution, security procedures, safety issues, how to mitigate the evils that might fall on us at any moment like the twin towers of New York City. Hours and hours are spent analysing the financial risks we take. Chris wrote a program to generate 1,000,000 possible futures for him and me the other day. Well, he likes playing with numbers (whereas I'm more of of a reactive than proactive sort). Not to worry, if the computer got it right, in 85% of our possible lives to come we won't end up completely destitute. That's reassuring!

We seem to have lost confidence in ourselves. Either that or we can no longer bear the thought, in this modern world, of the inevitability of death and destruction.

At the same time, the risks some people are willing to take seem to increase dramatically. A Spiderman scales skyscrapers without a safety harness, a parachutist leaps into free-fall hundreds of metres into the deepest of caves and divers throw themselves off ever higher waterfalls (see the last two minutes of this video clip). The stricter the norms, the greater our defiance of them, no doubt.

There's a sports clothing shop in town with a quotation displayed on its window: Do something that scares you every day! That's not bad advice, a bit like the Quaker slogan: Live adventurously.

Anyway I did something unusual though not exactly scary a week ago, went for a ride in a motorbike (Yamaha) sidecar without wearing a seatbelt. There I am in the picture, ready to set off. More about this in another post.

Back to work

2011-09-17T16:49:00.007-04:00

Andy making (green) tea for us in the kitchen.
He had just bought the Canadian trousers.

After a break from the blogging, I can't say I have stopped thinking about China yet. I gave a talk about it in French the other day, and friends are still coming up to ask how we fared on our long trip. Andy from Shanghai is in town this week, visiting the company headquarters; we had him round for supper and joined him for brunch today. Andy's flight over the Gatineau Hills with Chris in the Cessna this morning was an exciting experience for him (there's next to no chance to do such a thing in China)––on his first trip beyond Asia.

There is talk of our being dispatched to China again, for Chris to work there for another month or two, maybe in the new year; the fact that neither of is daunted by the prospect is proof that we must have enjoyed ourselves there. Before Christmas it looks as though we shall also be off to Germany for a week or two, so we're revising the language, especially the technical jargon. I'm working my way through a paper written by Chris that's been translated by a colleague, extracting the vocabulary he'll need for explaining things, Deutsch als primäre Konferenzsprache being spoken in Sindelfingen at the Embedded Software Engineering Kongress at which Chris must share his knowledge of Functional Safety in Complex Software Systems after the Kaffeepause on the Thursday.

Chris has just got back from Nevada where he'd been giving the engineers at Bently (GE) a three day training course in the use of safety critical software. Their workplace is located on the flat plain between high ranges of the Sierra Nevada south of Reno and Carson City, in Minden, from where it's a short but steep, winding drive over the 7000 ft high pass to Lake Tahoe on the Californian border. The sky over Minden is famous for its gliding opportunities, but he didn't have time to give it a try.

Ladies at the Diplomatic Hospitality welcome party

I have been busy getting the summer edition of Crosswinds published for the Flying Club and working as membership liaison officer for Ottawa CFUW's Diplomatic Hospitality group. 95 Canadians have enrolled so far, and more to come. We hosted a big welcome-back coffee party for the ladies of the diplomatic corps yesterday, hiring a hall at the university, laid on some entertainment for them too: a fantastic performance by the international award-winning, barefoot jazz singer, Kellylee Evans. One of the numbers she sang was Don't let me be misunderstood accompanied by the guitarist Wayne Eagles, as we snapped our fingers to keep the rhythm going. At the end of the party I told her I'd liked it, and she gave me a kiss!

Kellylee Evans on stage

This photo taken by Carol

The long haul

2011-08-23T22:43:00.001-04:00

June 18th, Saturday

Wikimedia photo of a Maglev train at Pudong airport

Waking shortly after 6 a.m., we had our boarding passes printed by the hotel receptionist and then our taxi arrived, on time, to transport us wildly and dangerously through the teaming rain to the Longyang Road metro station. This ride, over a suspension bridge and a series of flyovers, took no more than 15 minutes. Andy had predicted 45 minutes.

We took the Maglev (magnetic) train to Pudong airport (PVG), a journey of only a few minutes above flooded fields, flooded streets and probably flooded houses. Pudong is right on the coast and from there we could see container ships slowly sailing along, into the Pacific Ocean.

From Shanghai we were taking the British Airways flight to London. The check-in line was very long, but after 20 minutes Chris brightly thought to ask if there was a shorter queue for people with boarding passes who simply wanted to deposit their luggage. There was. After that, we lined up to exit the country, having our exit visas and passport photos checked. Finally, the security checks, and we had reached an attractive Departures lounge with an extraordinary, curved ceiling. So far, so good. I bought a last minute kite for my grandson. We sat down for a breakfast and I looked at the objets d'art on display between the seats: porcelain, glass, jade or bronze vessels, mostly.

We boarded our 'plane on time, all was going well, our Captain waited for his departure clearance and then ... nothing. We sat there looking out of the window at the neighbouring Finnair jet for five hours while China's air traffic controllers apparently allowed just one flight through their airspace to the border per twenty minutes, following their rule of the day. Some of us were wondering who imposes these rules, and why. We'd be next in line after the Finnair, the BA Captain announced, thanking us for our patience. After four hours, that one pulled away, and we thought our wait was nearly over, but no joy. We sat on the tarmac for another hour. Applause from the passengers when we finally began to slide away from our gate, but even then, it was another 20 minutes before we got airborne.

And then the flight itself. Seventeen hours is a terrible long time to sit in one not very comfortable seat. Most of the people around us were Brazilian, speaking Portuguese. To our vicarious horror, when we reached Heathrow at last, it was announced that their BA flight to Rio had been held back so that they could make the connection, as long as they hurried along––straight from one very long haul to another. Poor souls.

Trying to take my mind off things, I watched (mostly before take-off) an Austrian film about a love affair in avalanche country and a documentary about the Afghan national cricket team, entitled Out of the Ashes. While he was able, Chris sent our daughter text messages about the delay to ensure that our hotel room in London would not be lost.

It was frustrating, to say the least, that the Flight Tracker map on flight BA168 was either deliberately disabled or didn't work on our chair-back screens, so we could only guess where we were during that journey. I believe we overflew the Russian steppes, eventually glimpsing snow on some mountains below––were they the Urals, or were we still too far east? Our son-in-law Peter told us afterwards that he had seen the track of our flight crossing Sweden. When we were finally permitted to raise the cabin blinds––it drove us crazy, having to sit for all that length of time in the dark!––with the container ships of Shanghai still fresh in my mind, I was thrilled to see cargo ships below us in the North Sea, approaching either Harwich or Tilbury, and a pleasant British summer evening as we descended slowly over Suffolk and Essex towards Greenwich Park, the Millenium Dome and the familiar old Thames.

A lucky break: we were given priority for our approach to land at Heathrow. At the far end of the journey, Chris and I felt utterly exhausted. The bad news was that we then had to stand for a whole hour in the obligatory sheep pens, because there were too few staff manning the Customs and Immigration desks. There were ironic cheers from the crowd of passengers when the replacement shift deigned to turn up, after which the line began to shuffle forward a little more quickly. We felt sorry enough for ourselves, even sorrier for the families with small children.

Everything comes to an end, sooner or later,

Jeder Strom wird's Meer gewinnen,
Jedes Leiden auch sein Grab ...

as Chris sings in Schubert's Winterreise, and finally we were in a London taxi that was taking us to the Park Hotel in Teddington. We checked in, dragged our luggage to our room ... and went for a midnight stroll round the block, past the bistros still doing business in those quiet streets. The air was cool and dry and after forty days in China we were back in an environment we could understand. It felt like coming home.

Rainy day on the Bund

2011-08-23T09:38:00.000-04:00

Frustrating view from the Bund on my last day in China

June 17th, Friday

The Langham Yangtze Boutique Hotel had given us a room with an art-deco headboard for our bed, a big screen TV in a picture frame attached to the wall and a bathtub deep and wide enough to drown in. Along the corridor were museum worthy 1930s artifacts (amber knitting needles, bead handbag, etc) from the 1930s, when Shanghai was to all intents and purposes British, and decadent with it.

Heavy rain started to fall during my breakfast at ground level and failed to ease off, but I wasn't going to find much difficulty in passing the time while Chris was speaking at the QNX show on the 9th floor. I went up to say hello to the people in charge. The set-up for the talks looked like a 1930s theatre, complete with stage, flouncy white tablecloths and red velvet furnishings. Chris had the use of a microphone; otherwise he'd have found it hard to project his voice in there.

Parts of Shanghai could almost be London!

Brandishing my umbrella, I set out to visit the Bund, the famous Shanghai waterfront only about a kilometre away. The neighbouring streets wouldn't have looked out of place in London. It was fascinating to see this old-style, neoclassical architecture, reminiscent of British banks or Canadian railway stations, closely juxtaposed with Shanghai's ultra modern, ultra tall skyscrapers. In the other direction our hotel was within a few steps of the Renmin Gongyuan (People's Park) which once upon a time was a racecourse, quite central, and not far off was a former Music Hall (a palatial theatre built in 1930) that had to be shifted 66 metres when they wanted to widen the road. No problem to the Chinese. Mei guanxi!

I reached the Zhongshan Lu on the Bund, promising myself I would find out where the name came from. The Wikipedia tells me:

The word comes from the Hindi-Urdu word "band," which has Persian origins and meant an embankment, levée or dam ... In Chinese port cities, the English term came to mean ... the embanked quay along the shore. In English, "Bund" is pronounced to rhyme with "fund."

In the Bund Financial Square I found a gigantic bull sculpted in bronze by Arturo Ugodi Modica, a copy of his Charging Bull on Wall Street. Shanghai, like New York, is a rich city. Facing the Huang Pu River are the Custom House (sic), the Bangkok Bank and the Shanghai Pudong Development Bank, all with Corinthian pillars. Later, on a side street, I also came across a red brick cathedral and cathedral school built in the 1920s. The anglicisation of Shanghai had in fact begun in the mid 19th century around the time of the Opium Wars: "the humiliation of old China" as one of the city's historic plaques uncompromisingly puts it. The British Empire Customs building eventually became the headquarters of the People's Peace Preservation Corps after the PLA (People's Liberation Army) had "wiped out the enemy" in a series of bloody battles. At the end of the promenade by the river's edge I found an concave monument and tower (24 metres tall) to The People's Heroes, commemorating "noble minded patriots [who] devoted their sweat, blood and lives here."

The river itself is magnificent, despite the rain (one thunderstorm following another all day) and the view of the skyscrapers on the far bank must be stunning when the cloud ceiling is not so low. All manner of boats, ships and barges were sailing back and forth that day. Cruise ships and warships were anchored in the city. We were close to the coast there.

Seeking shelter from the latest downpour, I decided to treat myself to a light lunch (the previous evening's meal having left me with rather delicate insides) at Victor's on the ground floor of the famous Peace Hotel; this is a typical Fairmont hotel of the Canadian Pacific kind, its art déco interior very reminiscent of the Chateau Laurier in Ottawa or the Chateau Frontenac in Quebec.

Chris meanwhile had met a kindred spirit at his meetings, a professor from Shenzhen University. I returned to the hotel after abandoning a walk through the People's Park (too tired!) and, as I set out again for a repeat tour of the Bund with Chris in my soaked walking shoes, was encouraged to hear him say, "I'm feeling really happy." Between showers we had a sit-down at a snack bar patio table, sauntered along the riverfront, and back up the Nanjing Lu (formally Nanking Road), one of the busiest thoroughfares in the world. It reminded me of Las Ramblas in Barcelona.

By the time I got back to the Langham the second time that day I thought my walking shoes would never dry out before Heathrow, until Chris had the bright idea of training the hair dryer on them. By supper time it was raining so hard that the city's taxis were taking twice as long as usual to arrive anywhere, so the QNX group changed their minds about meeting for supper at the Peace Hotel and to my relief we simply dined quietly (on eels, and so on) at our own hotel's T'ang Court. Click on the link to see our table, under the mural. As we waited for the others in the elegant vestibule below Chris and I watched a lady singing (very well!) at the grand piano, and after supper saw another musician sitting in front of the piano in a silk gown to play delicate Chinese music on the guzheng; it sounds like a harp.

Then we finalised the arrangements for our departure, bracing ourselves for the long journey to London.

From Hangzhou to Shanghai

2011-08-22T16:35:00.004-04:00

Message sent to the family: "We're packed again and due to leave Hangzhou ... arriving at the Langham Boutique Hotel on Hankou Road in Shanghai at around 8p.m. ... Friday, Chris will be giving a presentation to Chinese customers and potential Chinese customers of QNX on the subject of The Changing Face Of Safety Critical Software before taking part in various discussions ..."

June 16th, Thursday

Four of our lunch party beside the MixC mall ice rink

It was still raining on our last morning in Hangzhou, but at lunchtime it eased off so that we felt the heat of the sun on our walk from Grandma's Kitchen at the MixC mall back to the hotel with Chris' QNX colleagues.

Me, Andy, Chris, Kimm, Yi and Bob, near the hotel

To match our initial welcome at the "golden ball," Chris and I had a send off fit for royalty, shaking hands with the many hotel staff who turned up for our departure, including the managing director; five or six people were eager to help us with our luggage. Jennifer, our initial hotel contact person, showed up looking as beautiful as ever and hopes to see us again. We would like that too. I put in a good word for our chambermaid, in the hope she'd be praised for looking after our room so efficiently.

The ride in the minivan hired from Hangzhou took just over two hours, a journey of about 200 km. Andy got the driver to stop half way so that he (Andy) could buy me a snack, one of those sticky rice pork dumplings of the Dragon Fest variety, actually quite tasty and a good idea, since we didn't get any other food till after 9 p.m.

Motorway service station between Hangzhou and Shanghai

Hangzhou's suburbs seemed to stretch for ever. After skirting the southern part of the city via the Grand Canal we followed the route the train takes, the railway being on concrete stilts all the way, incredible. Once again noticing many little towers with three balls on a spike on top, I asked about their significance. Apparently they mimic the Pearl of the Orient TV tower in Shanghai (yes, we saw that too; it glows pink in the dark) and they are an architectural feature of the local cities. Chris and I couldn't have done this drive by ourselves because of the incomprehensible road signs, but many hoardings and billboards were translated into English along the way

High Quality Baroque Flooring
Let the technology knows you better
Ecological Harmony, Happy Homeland

The landscape was mostly pylons in the soggy, flat fields that lay between the car dealerships and factories. I doubt that these fields will last much longer in this part of the world, but farm workers were still cultivating them in their straw hats, using ancient tools.

We kept stopping at toll booths where there were webcams to keep track of who was going through, or speeding, left Zhejiang province at one and entered Shanghai, after which the roadsigns became slightly more readable (e.g. "Hardened Verge"). We passed a shocking truck load of pigs packed like sardines on two levels, as I was still nibbling my pork dumpling. Then the Shanghai South Railway Station appeared ahead, like an enormous flying saucer that had landed in the midst of the new developments. Andy was very pleased with the smooth flow of traffic as we reached the downtown area of Shanghai. "I never see this fast," he said. "It's miracle!" The major buildings loomed ahead and flashed in the dark; the more ordinary ones were lit up at the higher levels ("to dress up the city," explained Andy) with the lower levels unlit. And so we homed in on our destination.

Arriving at our hotel in Shanghai, each of the ladies was handed a pink rose. It felt like walking into the 1920s as one of the western or westernized upper class, a playboy or a flapper. Jazz recordings of those old days were playing in the corridors and in our bedroom, too.

The nearby supper venue, Xian Qiang Fang, like the hotel, was vintage architecture and doubled as a Peking Opera theatre, complete with little boxes above us and curtains to the stage. Kimm's choice; she knows Shanghai. The dining area used to be a dance floor. With three more QNX people along, we saw a scene or two of the show, performed live by a man and a woman dressed very lavishly in the "Opera" garments, almost on a par with those worn by the bride and groom at our son's wedding, and singing or declaiming in that unique, highly artificial, whining manner that had caught our attention on the TV in Beijing. Chris thought the faces were masks but I think they were real faces got up to look like masks. We didn't have a clue what's going on, of course, but one of the gentlemen at our table told us that the female character was acting the part of an intoxicated concubine. The noise made by the accompanying instrumentalists (amplified erhus and drums) was absolutely ear-splitting and I was quite glad that we had taken our seats not long before the end of the act, because conversation between the nine of us round that supper table would have been impossible otherwise. But it came to an end as our first dishes were being brought out and we had another sumptuous umpteen-dish banquet served from the lazy Susan, as usual when people gather to eat in China. Eels yet again (we'd also had them for lunch) and one of those spiky fish with its mouth open, pieces of duck and what not. We did appreciate the sticks of green vegetable (asparagus?) but they tended to be too slippery to grasp in one's chopsticks without making a fool of oneself by chasing them all over the table.

Zai jian, Hangzhou!

2011-08-22T11:18:00.007-04:00

June 15th, Wednesday

Erhu player, Hangzhou

This was our last full day in Hangzhou; on the morrow we were due to depart for Shanghai where Chris was to take part in a QNX Technology Innovation Conference. He set out for work across the river taking farewell gifts for the friends he'd made in Hangzhou and received one or two in return, such as a tin box of high grade Longjing tea sachets from Henrry, which we're still very much appreciating here at home in Ottawa. Chris, who never touched tea before our trip to China, now asks for some. I can hardly believe it!

I spent the morning sorting clothes to pack which took me longer than expected. Emily came to clean the room and make the bed for us, her English not bad at all; I complimented her on it. She's a sweet girl who comes from a place that's a four hours' journey from Hangzhou. Staff like Emily live in a hostel near the hotel, so I gather, whereas others commute from home.

After a luxurious swim in the hotel pool, all to myself––one of the staff came to show visitors round as I did a lap, and the attendant popped his head round the door now and then to make sure I hadn't drowned––I caught the B2 bus to Wulin Square for a last wander-around downtown. Bought a coffee and a snack at a Best Bites Donuts outlet (quasi American fast food outlets like this are appearing all over China nowadays, a sign of the times) and found my way past the "swanky" fashion outlets on Wulin Lu to the shore of West Lake.

A game of cards under the trees

I felt a little sad to be standing there for the last time. Where Jiefang Lu meets Nanshan Lu by the lakeside there's always a crowd of amateur singers and erhu musicians and their admirers making a happy noise, elderly people walking up and down in the gardens, children playing, ladies dancing and gentlemen fanning themselves in the shade or playing card games. I found it all very foreign but knew I'd miss the scene once I left Hangzhou.

Then, having bought a banana for sustenance, I took my last ride on the K96: past the China Construction Bank, the China Welfare Lottery, the Hangzhou Bank, the Bank of China, Fox Optical, the 4-star Sunny Hotel, the 2nd Affiliated Hospital of Zhejiang University College of Medicine, with its Emergency gateway blocked with relentless traffic, China Telecom, Euromoda, the canal with the white statue of a silk goddess, Hangzhou's Tourism Vocational School and the KTV (i.e. karaoke) halls. Through the Newtown Tunnel and past the ICC TCC department store in the clothes market and the sex shop with its larger than life picture of a scantily clad female in handcuffs on its door. Across the series of busy 6, 8, 10 lane roads to the Shi min zhong xin stop where I got off to hurry across one more wide road and escape from the heat and humidity in the air conditioned hotel.

The usual crowd in the lakeside gardens

Chris was sending text messages to tell me when he'd be back from work, but got caught up in an impromptu meeting with the visiting QNX team at the end of the working day, and thereafter in a call to Germany during a taxi ride across the river in a heavy thunderstorm, sharing a cellphone with Yi on the back seat. They stayed on line as they crowded into the hotel lift with Andy, Rob and Kimm and the dripping umbrellas, and the call continued in the meeting room of the club lounge on level 18 where they all emerged. I was summoned to join the gathering up there and sat introducing myself to Kimm and Rob from Canada and the USA respectively––now snacking on the hors d'oeuvres at a lounge table (I was served green tea; the other two were sampling the wine)––while Chris and Yi from Ottawa and Andy from Shanghai wound up their international conference call behind the glass partition.

Eventually, everyone dropped down to Level 4 for a proper supper: crispy baby eels, various slippery soups, whole fish, etc., etc. which took all evening. I am proud to add that Chris' work in Hangzhou was thoroughly praised and everyone round the table stood up to toast his achievements!

Very wet

2011-08-21T21:03:00.005-04:00

Rainy morning on the Qiantang River

June 14th, Tuesday

We woke to torrential rain. The weather was being reported in the China Daily, copies of which were regularly delivered to our room, so we assumed it must be unusual. 600,000 square kilometres of farmland was flooded, so we read. (Later that week, it got worse.)

A trio of strange ships sailed by on the river while I was drinking a cup of milky coffee in the club lounge, decorated that day with stems of lotus buds, fifteen to a tall vase, as well as single orchids in the small vases.

Zhongshan Lu in better weather, looking south from Jiefang Lu

In the afternoon I decided to take the bus to town, rain or no rain. I got off before the terminus and walked south down Hangzhou's oldest street, the Zhongshan Lu, which is very long. This would be nice to explore on a fine day, with flowerbeds, a battery car for tourists and a parallel stream in a gutter with little bridges crossing it, but I was preoccupied with keeping the umbrella over me and my feet out of the puddles. Not many other people were about and the shops were empty; I saw a shopkeeper fast asleep in one.

I revisited Hefang Street, the street that sells the sort of souvenirs I generally don't want, although I did wonder about a gourd flute. In order to shelter from the wet, I went inside a few of the shops, this time, buying a mouse mat with a communist poster image for my brother-in-law, a silk tie for my son-in-law and a cute little outfit for my baby grandson. Some of Hefang Street reminded me of shops on the seafront in Scarborough, Yorkshire, in the 1960s, although I did also see a few more exclusive looking jewelry and silk outlets.

On my return to the hotel I needed a complete change of clothes, stuffing pages of the China Daily into my shoes to dry them; as soon as we set out for supper the other clothes got wet, too. No matter, we had an excellent meal at Asia Table in the MixC mall. We guessed it would be good because on the previous three occasions when we'd tried in vain for a table it had been packed with queues outside. The restaurant hires musicians, a quartet of jazz singers with a drum that evening, to entertain their waiting customers. Unfortunately this clashed with the smoochy background music inside. We chose spring rolls, a green Thai curry, sweet and sour pork, beans in spices and three bottles of beer.

Nature with added taste

2011-08-21T12:02:00.005-04:00

June 13th, Monday

In the Tai Zi Wan park

"Rustic wooden bridges and thatched cottages may evoke childhood memories," said the notice at the gate to the park at the southwestern corner of West Lake. I had got there after being stuck in the CBD tunnel on a very crowded yellow K96 bus for ten minutes on my way into town, not pleasant, but the Tai Zi Wan park relaxed me. I read that it was named after two Song Dynasty princes Zhuangwen and Jingxian (I didn't quite see how) and that it had been awarded a prize from the PRC in 1995 for being one of the best parks in China. It's interesting to note what the Chinese find praiseworthy; this place was full of what they call (or what their translation calls) "nature with added taste," which to my mind is like their adding dollops of MSG to the mass produced food.

There was another of those prefabricated churches again, this one larger than the one in the Botanical Gardens, and it had a serving hatch to the right of the door offering popcorn and soft drinks. You didn't get that in the churches of my childhood. I see from the blogpost of a British estate agent working in Hangzhou that I'm not the only outsider who found this bizarre: click here for a photo of the church interior! Also, in a muddy field, I saw the big Dutch windmill complete with sails; it turned out to be a café when I got closer.

The church in the Tai Zi Wan park

The landscaping of the Tai Zi Wan walkways, pools, streams and bridges was very attractive, all the same, with Japanese maples, ornamental grasses, irises and shapely rocks. The rain held off that morning. I found a small waterfall and sat in a thatched pavilion up winding steps on the top of a little knoll to eat my sandwiches and watch the fish in the clear pond below while birds with long striped tails flew through the branches. Piped piano music rose etherially through speakers concealed in the grass, Scott Joplin harmonising with the men who were shouting in chorus in the woods, the clang of metal barricades being dismantled after Sunday's influx of crowds, and the hum of the nearby traffic.

Inevitably, a bridal photo party appeared, the photographer with his seven or eight assistants in blue T-shirts carrying a bouquet of lilies and a huge teddy bear, the bridge and groom wearing white. As I watched, the couple was encouraged to lie down on the wet grass with the letters L-O-V-E artfully positioned around them.

There were two more such groups beside the next pond.

Crossing the road, I entered the neighbouring park: Viewing Fish in the Flowery Harbour (hua gang), where indeed there were carp by the hundreds, with hundreds of tourists looking down at them, their cameras at the ready. Round the corner I saw pigeons and white doves vying to be fed, some perching on people's heads, hands and shoulders, to the squeals of the high-heeled girls, more cameras clicking and flashing. At the other side of the lawn were rival peacocks displaying their tails while the peahens paid them no attention, ambling away down the paths, unafraid of people, or flying up to perch in the trees.

Gradually, as I followed a network of paths to the west of Xi Hu, I left the crowds behind me. I failed to find the connecting path to the Su Causeway but did come across the tiny, humped Ming Dynasty Jingxing Bridge hidden behind foliage in a swampy area; some of its stones looked genuinely old.

I asked a security guard outside the park where the nearest bus stop was, understood his answer and decided to wait for the Y2, a tourist bus with a ¥2 fare which I assumed would take me to the northeast corner of the lake. It did, eventually, but by a very circuitous route via the Lingyin Temple bus station in the hills and through several tea villages I hadn't seen before, a guide at the front telling the passengers what we were seeing, except that I hardly understood a word so just sat there.

I got out at the Broken Bridge in Melting Snow stop, no snow imaginable in that heat, with the lotus buds of midsummer just beginning to unfold.

After this excursion I flopped at the hotel, Chris coming back to take a QNX conference call to talk about whether his work in Hangzhou should be extended (but he was also wanted for projects elsewhere in the world). Then we had one of our regular suppers at the Food Republic (dà shí dài) outlets above the ice rink in the MixC mall and walked home by the river in the rain, trying not to get our feet wet.

Getting over a disappointment

2011-08-20T22:29:00.007-04:00

June 12th, Sunday

Our plan for Sunday was to visit the Canal Museum on foot then catch a waterbus into town. After walking a couple of miles we did find what had probably once been the museum, in the middle of the Grand Canal, beyond a scruffy, impoverished district east of Sanxin Road where little boys playing were playing dangerously on the wall of a subsidiary canal and where watermelons were being sold from handcarts (not every vendor could afford a tricycle cart with an electric motor in this district); people's washing hung everywhere and we barefoot toddlers and dogs were roaming in front of the sheds where they lived. The museum was boarded up and looked ready for demolition; no sign of anywhere to board a waterbus either, nothing for it but to cross the canal again and walk back the way we'd come.

Entrance to the Grand Canal

If only we'd had proper access to the Internet and not just an out-of-date leaflet for foreign tourists we would have realised that the new Canal Museum (opened in 2006) is in the Gongshu district, a long distance from where we were. Had we been able to read Chinese we might have also found a mention of it on the notice boards concerning the waterbuses from Wulinmen Square.

Barge going through the lock

Anyhow, we crossed the canal at its very first (or last) bridge; it consisted of a couple of locks side by side, admitting barges into and out of the Qiantang River with huge, heavy gates that showered the boats with water as they just about scraped through the narrow passage way.

We had lunch at our local MixC mall where the posh people shop for Louis Vuitton handbags or Armani Junior outfits for their kids––after seeing the nearby slums the contrast made me feel decidedly uncomfortable––then, already rather hot and weary, caught the usual bus into town. "Be patriotic and obey the law" said the cartoon girl on the poster in the road.

Sequoia roots by the stream, Jiuxi

After our disappointment over the museum, I wanted Chris to have a treat, so, repeating what I'd done the previous Wednesday, we caught the K4 bus to Jiuxi. It was already 3:30 p.m. when we set off on the country walk. Since Saturday night's downpour and the previous downpours, the stream I mentioned in Wednesday's email had swollen to twice its previous volume and was rushing along; new streams had formed through the tea fields, besides, pouring across the road and into what had been sandy dry gullies. Fording the stream was now impossible and the cobbled path, dusty four days earlier, had become slippery with mud. The roadside rocks were dripping wet, which encourages the growth of moss, and the sequoia roots, reaching into the water, looked weird and wonderful. The shade of the trees kept us cool, but the dampness was such that sweat doesn't evaporate at all and we soon felt as soaked as if it were still raining!

View from the Jiuxi valley

Chris was enjoying the views as much as I had done during the week, in spite of more traffic on the narrow road. We walked as far as Xizhongxi where a high waterfall tumbles down the cliff and climbed slippery steps up the side to a pavilion high on the hillside where four student types were posing in Letters of the Alphabet shapes, our alphabet, funnily enough, not theirs. They were having fun. On the way down and further on it became more peaceful. We passed people wading barefoot in the water while others were washing their cars with it, and came upon the Li'an Temple, a quiet place built in memory of a monk who'd lived at the Buddhist temples of Jiuxi and Wuyun. Abbot Zhifeng was a man who “often went downhill with a big fan to beg alms” in order to buy meat with which to tame the terror of the woods, a tiger who "carried him up and down from then on", after which they called him Abbot Tiger Tamer. It sounds somewhat unlikely to me but I like the story. Here's a mention of it in someone else's blog.

At the Xizhongxi waterfall

We got off the return bus near the Haveli restaurant and had supper there again. It was very slow in coming because the waiters, not to mention Chris, were distracted by a long table full of Chinese and Indian ladies indulging in a lavish celebration of some sort, who had invited a belly dancer to entertain them, very sinuous with a jewel in her navel and tassels round her hips which she vibrated to great effect. Chris says we should have swapped seats to let him have a better view, especially after she smiled at him through her hair. The music she danced to was deafening.

The dancer at the restaurant

We walked back to our last bus of the day under the willows underlit with floodlights, quite magical, with boats sailing by all lit up with changing colours past an elaborate fountain in mid lake, Chris quizzing me on how I'd work out the force of the water coming through the nozzles if I knew what height it reached in metres.

"Do you happy? Yes, I do."

2011-08-19T12:56:00.008-04:00

Here's a transcription of the email I sent on

June 11th, Saturday

On the bus this morning a very young Chinese child with his grandparents, who had spotted us at the bus station, tried out his English (“Good-morning-how-are-you?”) and sang to us on the bus:

There was a farmer had a dog, and Bingo was his name-oh.
B. I. N. G. O., Bingo was his name-oh.

I recognised this, though Chris didn't.

Barge on the canal

I was taking Chris on the B2 line to see the Grand Canal. As I'd predicted, he loved doing this and would happily have stood at Wulinmen Dock all day watching the barges negotiate the bend and the bridges. He liked the glass walled bridge too with its engraved maps of the other famous canals of the world: in England (Bude Canal, Manchester Ship Canal ...), Wales (Abergavenny and Brecknock), Finland, Germany (the Kiel canal, the Rhine and Danube), Egypt, Erie, New York State, but not the Rideau. We then wandered up and down the canal banks with many stops to watch the boats and the men and women who lived on them. Some barges were heavy with cargo and very low in the water, lower than the plimsoll line should allow them to be, we thought. Empty ones were bouncing along with high bows and washing hanging in the cabins at the back. A woman was scooping dirty water out of the canal, not for the cooking, we hoped.

The Brecknock and Abergavenny Canal ... in Hangzhou!

Low in the water

Finally tearing ourselves away from this scene we walked down Huangshan Lu North and Huangshan Lu West past the ancient warehouse of a clothes market not unlike the old market at Newport in Wales, but on a much bigger scale. Then we followed a subsidiary canal up to the lake where we sat on a bench with our umbrellas up (the rain starting to fall again) to watch the people, like watching a play. Chris wants one of those T-shirts with English words on, especially the one that says: Do you happy? Yes, I do.

At the lakeside kiosks you can pay for a photo of yourself wearing satiny dressing-up clothes and twirling a parasol. Men sit outside them calling out for customers and sample photos decorate the outside walls of these huts which also sell coconuts, windmills (in the shape of flowers and butterflies), ice cream, popcorn, bird whistles, plastic frogs that make a croaking noise and blow bubbles for children to play with, pot noodles, fans and scarves. Then on to the bus for a rattly ride back here so that Chris could do some more work on his priority inversion techniques.

He took a break this evening to take me down to the hotel bar where I ordered a Cosmopolitan Martini cocktail which came decorated with lemon peel on the rim of the glass, twisted into a bow. The pretty girls in their slinky long black and golden outfits followed a recipe to prepare it (shaken, not stirred). As we sat on a velvet settee to have our drinks, nibbling our salted walnuts and cashews rolled in herbs, we watched the coloured lights change and the lifts slide up and down the lift shaft as he told me how priority inversion had affected the Mars Rover project because of a flaw in the programming. It seems he's pretty excited about his work here.

Works of art and expensive merchandise

2011-08-19T12:15:00.006-04:00

June 10th, Friday

Painting seen at the
Zhejiang West Lake gallery

I woke from a dream in which I'd slept right the way through a long haul flight in a first class recliner, which made me think that my life of luxury at the Intercontinental might not be doing me much good. When I looked out of the window I could see 15 barges on the river as well as 18 smaller boats. It was damp and hazy again.

As a prelude to our departure the following week, I sorted out the gifts and souvenirs I'd bought so far. There were still a few more purchases to make, but most of the goods in the nearby MixC Mall were too expensive. I looked around a silk goods store on the top floor selling items for 5-figure prices. One was a silk scroll reproduction of what some call "The Mona Lisa Of China" (meaning the nation's most famous work of art): a 12th century scene in a picturesque landscape crowded with people, animals and boats, known as Along the River during the Qingming Festival (Qīngmíng Shànghé Tú). Cheaper reproductions can be found as well. When we got to London I gave my grandson Alexander a fan printed with this picture; he liked the little details that showed up as we unfolded it segment by segment.

Chinese painting would be a fascinating subject to study. Hampered by my inability to read the script, I didn't take in as much art in Hangzhou as I'd have liked to. The main branch of the National Academy of Fine Arts in China is on the Nanshan Lu, and has a gallery next door which I'd visited on May 25th (I didn't mention it in that day's blogpost) but I hadn't understood the exhibition notes. I'd seen a gallery full of photos of faces and landscapes, possibly by the same photographer, including one that I can still visualise vividly: a beautiful young girl breastfeeding her baby. I gave it my own title: the Madonna of Tibet. In adjoining galleries were oil paintings and sketches in a non-controversial style, including some inferior copies of famous European masterpieces. The other art museum I saw in Hangzhou was the one on Gushan at the northern end of the lake. That too was full of very derivative art, their 10th century ink and wash landscapes really no different from their recent, 21st century ones, but originality may not be seen as a virtue in the Chinese art world. I don't think "derivative" has such negative connotations to the Chinese as it does to us, a copy being more of a deferential tribute to the old masters than a cop-out. At least, that's how it seems to me.

I must say that the most beautiful works of art I saw in Hangzhou were the gardens and courtyards.

On the basement level of the MixC mall the Pizza Hut sold me a nice risotto and after that, sitting on a bench in the CBD sculpture garden during a slow walk back to the hotel, I finished reading David Lodge's novel Deaf Sentence (which I'd bought in the bookshop at the mall a week or so before): good read, depressing subject.

In the sculpture garden

Then I rode up to the 18th floor and had another swim in the hotel pool (click! ––the hotel's website has been updated, so you can now find a picture of the pool online). I didn't venture into the "Touch Spa" because it sounded somewhat dubious:

We open the gateway to commune with heaven-sent elements and experience truly rewarding ancient rituals and wisdom to enhance the body-mind-soul interdependence.

Instead, I enjoyed a couple of Skype chats with my children, catching a glimpse of George observing pulsar signals at the radio telescope at Parkes in Australia and Emma feeding her baby in London, England. The Internet is a truly wonderful thing; to restrict people's access to it seems all wrong.

Botanical Gardens of Hangzhou

2011-08-18T11:29:00.004-04:00

June 9th, Thursday

In the afternoon, from the 16th floor, over a pot of green tea of which I drank the lot, being so dehydrated from the heat, I watched a humdinger of a thunderstorm. I was lucky to have got indoors in time. From the bus stop to the hotel entrance the sky was dark with flying dust and litter blown up high in the downdraft from the storm; my eyes felt gritty. Cyclists looked up anxiously and started to put their coloured capes on. Then from the hotel I saw the barges buffeting upstream against waves breaking on the Qiantang, the wind coming from the west as it does in Canada, and terrific lines of lightning as well as sheet lightning over the skyscrapers.

There was astonishing clarity after the storm. I saw ranges of hills I'd never known were there.

(My camera lens steamed up in the heat and humidity!)

The day had begun hot (really hot) and sunny; I took a taxi to the Botanical Gardens with an entrance fee of 10 yuan, senior's rate. The numerous signposts in the gardens weren't of much help, since everything is shady garden in that part of town for miles and miles around, with ponds interspersed, but I managed to identify Watching Fish at Yuquan, a scenic spot famous since the 12th century, with "bamboos and ancient trees reaching into skies" where "various flowers contend in beauty." More trees than flowers, actually, and I learned that the ones with mottled, peeling bark were plantanus hispanicus and that the yew-like bushes with thick, wide needles, were podocarpus marcrophyllus. The feathery tall trees in the woods were beautiful examples of metasequoia glyptostroboides and I compiled a list of several more Latin names for my botanist sister.

The city's official tree is the cinnamomum camphora:

The ancient camphor trees are elegant in groups; thousands of leaf layers, falling their shade everywhere. At the cusp of spring and summer the green small flowers split the full branches. The light breeze delivers the fragrance and gladdens the heart.

and the city's flower is the osmanthus fragrans:

The light yellowish sweet osmanthus, has exaggerated Hangzhou with the deep inside story of two big cultures, Wu and Yue, and has exaggerated the happiness of Hangzhou’s person.

Stepping stones over a lily pond

(to quote from the International College Zhejiang University website) ... not in bloom during my stay. The famous peach and plum trees growing in the Botanical Gardens and on the causeways across the lake were no longer blossoming either, but one of Chris' Huawei colleagues had given us some deliciously fresh peaches from his orchard, to eat at our hotel.

"Did you find any surprises at the Botanical Gardens?" asked Chris. I did come across a cluster of small metal huts in the forest that puzzled me, one got up to look like a miniature Christian chapel with crosses on its porch and roof and linked hearts inside behind the "altar." A row of hooped arches decorated with coloured, artificial flowers led to its doorway, the pathway beneath them covered in confetti, so then I realised what that was for. I wasn't so sure about the other little huts.

It's obviously a trendy thing for the Chinese to borrow ideas from western culture, but they don't always get it quite right, like the restaurant named "Dollar Store" or the shops playing "Santa ... hurry down the chimney tonight" as background music while you do your shopping in June, and the street sweeping vehicles warning you to get out of the way with a merry, repetitive, electronic tune: "Happy Birthday to you, happy Birthday to you..."

On my way back to Jiefang Lu I passed one of my favourite quirky juxtapositions, the Casablanca Country Pub in the park beside Hubin Lu where I picked up a leaflet for tourists in English:

You CANNOT stop the Water Bus by waving hands.

It also gives some advice regarding the climate:

Summer, hot. Good to wear cotton thin clothes (skirt) and topee.

In the countryside at Jiuxi

2011-08-18T09:14:00.010-04:00

June 8th, Wednesday

Doing her washing in the stream

Pleased to see the sun come out in a blue sky for once, I was apprehensive about the heat it might generate. I was aiming to take the Y4 bus through the hills. In the end I couldn't find a Y4 so got onto a K4 instead, taking it to its terminus which was Jiuxi Zhan, a bus station by the Qiantang River, a few miles upstream from our hotel. The bus took me through the woods south of West Lake, past the zoo on the Hupao Road lined with the mottled trunks of plane trees.

Washing line in the tea fields

There didn't seem to be anything touristy outside the bus terminus; I didn't mind that. Jiuxi was a village not unlike the one at the bottom of the Fragrant Hill near Beijing. My walk started in a small park with green grass still soggy from the recent rain and continued up a surprisingly narrow road which one of my maps calls “Misty Trees Along The Nine Bend Stream” and which the signpost called “Nine Creeks” (the literal translation of jiǔ xī; other pointers to this part of the countryside call it "Nine Creeks and Eighteen Gullies"). It looked appealingly traffic free so I walked on into the valley. Almost at once there were tea plantations in all directions, near the stream I was following and above me on the high terraces. All this scenery to myself, so peaceful! Occasional cars or bikes went past and in the fields the tea farmers were having an early lunch break. I came across groups of people grilling kebabs under plastic gazebos in the fields nearest the houses. It felt a lot more old-fashioned than the city. People were washing their clothes, bedding and dishcloths in the weirs of the stream.

Tea workers' lunch break

The water was clean and clear up there. I followed a damp, cobbled footpath under the trees parallel to the lane and found a rock to sit on where I could dangle my feet in the water. The woodland flowers are familiar European varieties but the trees are different. Black tailed butterflies fluttered around me and I heard a bird call with a long low whistle.

I found a shady pavilion with pictures on its inner walls “full of Zen implications” apparently but they were lost on me: pictures of incomprehensible folk tales, I assume, the captions composed by a Taoist poet who lived through many upheavals, dying in 1931, Fan Zengxiang. A chap sat on a bench in there minding his own business, maybe in the middle of a Zen meditation, I couldn't tell.

Cooling my feet

At the Linhai Pavilion

Having walked part way up that valley, I also explored part of a side path the other side of the village leading towards the Wuyun Peak (too many steps for me to attempt the whole walk, too hot). The street at the start of this trail was more residential than the other one, with people's washing hanging everywhere from balconies and over walls and bridges. Three dogs wandering around, old folk sitting in doorways, a huddle of men playing cards in a yard and a young woman carrying a baby tied to her back in a cloth. The name Wuyun refers to the five auspiciously coloured clouds that surrounded this hill but there were no clouds today. Following a concrete footpath through the fields I sat in the shade half way up the hill on a stone which was the "Boundary Mark of West Lake Cultural Landscape Heritage," to be precise, eating my home-made sandwiches and drinking some water, with a view of the rolling tea fields, the semi-tropical forest and the skyscrapers in the hazy distance on the far bank of the Qiantang River. It felt good.

Jiuxi village street

*****

After supper that night we went for our usual stroll by the river and saw people flying kites. One was a floppy red bat. The kites and their strings were lit up with little lights so that their owners, adult men holding reels to their chests, wouldn't lose track of them in the dark.

Facts about West Lake, and a cure for colds

2011-08-17T14:52:00.005-04:00

Mooring station for gondolas on Xi Hu

June 7th, Tuesday

Chris suffered from a sore throat all night and got up feeling lousy, but had his breakfast and left for work all the same. Later in the morning I set off into town again. The lake was still grey, pewter coloured, and smooth. After some gift shopping I sat at an upstairs window seat at the lakeside Starbucks for ages, writing my diary and looking down on the gondolas moored by the promenade. The uniformed gondoliers stood there, smoking, or sat in their boats to eat a packed lunch with chopsticks.

Afterwards I took myself to the West Lake Museum (opened in 2005 on Nanshan Lu) to learn some facts.

Scorpion, Hangzhou

Because not everything was translated into English, I was puzzled by the diorama of an historically important man having his back tattooed with Chinese characters, but the display of stuffed animals from Zhejiang province was fairly self explanatory. It included seven different kinds of snakes including one I didn't like the look of, the dangerous naja naja atra (cobra) ... don't click on that link if you don't want to, Emma! It occurred to me later that maybe it hadn't been so prudent to wander around in the tea plantations in open toed sandals. There was a swan or goose, a wild cat of some sort, a ferret like creature and a kind of stunted deer. I didn't see anything about the scorpion Chris and I had nearly stepped on during our visit to the Lingyin Temple.

Dredging Xi Hu during the reign of Qian Liu (10th century)

West Lake, it seems, is not a very old geographical feature. A lagoon was formed from mountain streams some 2600 years ago and various local leaders have had it dredged and refined since, Su Shi, for instance, planting lotus to keep the water clean. In my last blogpost I mentioned the Su causeway, the western dyke he had constructed. A shorter dyke, the baigong di, was created earlier, in 822, and named after Bai Juyi, a famous poet from the Tang period.

Once again I read that Emperor Kangxi had built a palace on Gushan, the ruins of which I'd seen on my explorations, and was famous for naming the ten beauty spots (西湖十景). His son, who reigned between 1723 and 1735, went one better and named eighteen more must-see views! It was obviously the thing to do in the Qing Dynasty days.

In the evening the QNX team from Shanghai, Andy and Alan (not their original names, of course ... we had some discussion about that), took us out by car for a meal in the fish restaurant at the top level of the MixC Mall. It had an extraordinary ceiling made from strips of wood to ressemble a curvaceous fishing net. The dining booths were partitioned by walls of bamboo sticks. Andy and Alan were very solicitous about Chris' cold, and for about an hour before we actually ate anything we were obliged to share vast quantities of hot ginseng tea, drinking it from tiny cups. A beautiful girl performed the tea ceremony for us. The eventual food was good too, including a hot consommée soup, again for medicinal purposes. Chris asked what it was made of, and they alarmed him by answering: "pig lung soup, good for the lungs." He was absolutely forbidden to consume anything cold during his supper.

Westerners may scoff at Chinese medicine, but next morning, Chris felt completely better.

Circumambulation

2011-08-16T12:08:00.010-04:00

June 6th, Monday

No dragon boats to report, I'm afraid. They were all at the Xixi Wetlands which we decided would be too wet for us that day. Also we'd have had to hire a chauffeur.

Instead, we walked right around the West Lake. Starting out around midday at the Jiefang Lu corner, we went through the park––Orioles Singing In The Willows––sitting on a damp bench to eat sandwiches from the supermarket smothered in salad cream (which makes for soggy bread) during a break between showers, then stopping further on to rent a "self-driving" boat for an hour, i.e. one that had a little electric motor that could propel us forward, backward or be turned off altogether so that we could enjoy the peace and quiet away from the shore and watch the Chinese herons fishing as we sat close together on the small seat under the little canopy. It started raining while we were on the water so I put up my umbrella.

That afternoon, we walked the length of the Su Causeway (苏堤) named after Su Dongpo, a poet-governor of the 11th century, who had the lake dredged and this dyke constructed from the silt. He planted peach trees and willows on it and they're still there. We walked alongside many families and tourists riding bikes or the little open sided buses (like golf carts). Sometimes the shores were visible with the misty hills and pagodas beyond, sometimes not. It was a metaphor for life, so it struck me later, all these strangers merging for a short while, mostly cheerful, occasionally acknowledging one another's presence with smiles, confined to a narrow route through the mist. With mysterious water lapping on either side of us, we were obliged to keep moving along in a straight line towards a destination we couldn't quite see, some old, some younger and arm-in-arm, some pausing at the side of the path to embrace under the trees. Little children were being picked up and carried. At intervals, stall keepers would vie for our attention and try to sell us things. Purposeful individuals were striding along by themselves at a fast pace, others dawdling in groups, the youngsters indulging in horseplay. From one end of the causeway to the other, we crossed six stone arches (bridges).

A causeway bridge, Xi Hu, Hangzhou

The Western Causeway across Kunming Lake at Beijing's imperial Summer Palace was a deliberate copy of this.

We returned to town via the Gushan once again, having a long sit-down in, of all places, a Costa Coffee outlet in a dark, wooden pagoda surrounded by magnolia grandiflora trees and tropical palms and such, all wet. Not like the Costa coffee place on Reading railway station, indeed no.

When it gets dark, they put on a free show in the lake, near the mooring place for the giant, golden dragon (a three deck pleasure boat), with fountains leaping in time to amplified music and lit up by lights of changing colours. Just beautiful with the hills in the background, lights showing dimly through the trees on their slopes. The little pavilions round the edges of the lake are also floodlit.

A quotation from the directions to visitors to West Lake:

Please be a good behaved visitor. Please obey the law and social morality, protect the environment and visit attractions in a healthy way. Please do not pluck flowers and branches and do not catch wide (sic) animals willfully. The attraction is a civilised place for people to learn knowledge, enrich life, mould temperament and enjoy nature.

Under the umbrellas

2011-08-16T12:00:00.007-04:00

Southeast corner of Xi Hu, in the rain

It was cooler on Saturday, but the rainy season had now begun; between this first weekend in June and the end of our stay in China we had a great many wet days and so will forever associate Hangzhou in our minds with umbrellas.

It was a holiday weekend in China, the Dragon Boat Festival, a three-day break for Chris although he had to do a day's work in total hours in our hotel room in order to meet his contract equirements. Whenever he took a break we went for a walk in the rain. The true Hangzhou atmosphere, misty, wet and mysterious. When I closed my eyes at night I saw thousands of dark, wet leaves with rippling water in the background, and thousands of umbrellas bobbing up and down in a variety of pastel shades as people moved along beneath them. From a distance, a line of umbrellas slowly moving over the bridges, which would have made a lovely impressionist painting.

June 4th, Saturday

was a recovery day for me, although for the sake of fresh air Chris insisted on our going out twice, the second time catching the bus downtown. We wandered along by the lakeside, getting soaked but not cold, and sheltering in pavilions for ages with the friendly crowds. At the end of the afternoon I remembered having seen an Indian restaurant on the Nanshan Lu, Haveli. We had a delicious supper there––onion bajees, creamy chicken saag, basmati rice (an agreeable change from sticky rice), naan bread and tea, slowly drying off in our window seats with colourful cushions and satin and velvet napkins.

June 5th, Sunday

We had made an over-optimistic mistake on the Sunday, leaving our umbrellas behind (the one I'd brought from Canada plus one that had been lent to us by the hotel staff), so had to buy a couple more on Gushan in order not to become objects of pity for the natives. In fact we were shamed into buying the umbrellas by the number of people who gallantly offered us the use of theirs. The Solitary Mountain wasn't as solitary as all that. About 100,000 people were crossing the causeway to get there, but surprisingly Chris and I did find a little pavilion in the woods on the hill which we had to ourselves for a few minutes before a friendly chap came along to join us and talk to us in his language. We had also had a ride in a gondola during which the nice girl sitting on the seat opposite had chatted to us as well and had grabbed the spare paddle so as to hand it to Chris to have a go, once she discovered out we were Canadian.

Where we heard the bird singing

Continuing towards Lotus Swaying in the Breeze, a part of the lakeside I particularly wanted to share with Chris, barges carrying the lighting equipment for the Son et Lumière show sailed past us. We reached yet another pavilion by the lily pond, stopping to watch the fish and listening to a very musical bird singing on and on, some kind of nightingale perhaps. This was another China moment that we'll not forget.

On the "mainland" we walked back round the northeastern corner of the lake (along Beishan Lu, behind which are some eye catching, older than usual houses, to Hubin Lu) to find a restaurant for a salty supper in wet clothes, avoiding the option of Snake that we found on the menu. With dripping umbrellas we caught the last bus of the day from the Jiefang Lu terminus. A beggar whom we'd seen before was playing the flute in a shop doorway; a slim girl got onto the bus in bare feet.

Finding silks and losing my way

2011-08-14T16:10:00.005-04:00

Hangzhou silk town between Fengqi Lu and Tiyuchang Lu

June 3rd, Friday

Once again, I found the Feel Best Coffee shop above the Foreign Bookstore on Fengqi Lu, had lunch there, and following my map also found Hangzhou's famous silk market, (zhong guo si chou cheng), which took my breath away, it was so extensive. This street of shops selling silk products is more than a kilometre long, colourfully decorated and closed to traffic other than bikes and scooters. I shopped for gifts here, keeping in the shade; even so, the heat that day was debilitating.

The other end of the thoroughfare

In order to reach the bus stop I had to follow a path by a canal, walk under the Zhonghe flyover onto Huangcheng Lu along a cycle path, then up and down the steps of a pedestrian bridge and then another few blocks by the ring road. It was approaching the rush hour by the time I boarded a bus that would take me back to our hotel, as I thought ... only the B2 doesn't always take the same route and doesn't always end up at the shi min zhongxin where I needed to get off. Because I was too illiterate to read the destination stop on the front I was ignorant of that fact until the broadcast announcement, translated into English: "next stop, Railway Station." The railway station is several blocks south of the Jiefang Road, and between the station and our hotel lies a canal and all the railway tracks. The only way across is to drive through a tunnel or across a flyover. Walking is out of the question.

Wikimedia image of taxis emerging from the Hangzhou station

I told the bus driver that I wanted to be at the shi min zhongxin, but he just shook his head and waved me off the bus with everybody else. My Chinese wasn't up to asking further questions, so I went right up to the station. Other buses galore, but none I recognised. No taxis. Finding an hotel on the concourse, I went in there to ask where the taxis were. Go down the stairs and turn left. I did as I was told and found myself in a deserted corridor. I walked in the other direction into a corridor jam-packed with people and luggage: the queue for the taxis, obviously. It was going nowhere. People kept joining the queue but I was always at the back because, being British, I don't push in front of other people. Taxi touts kept approaching me and the other despairing types at the back of the line to offer alternative transport for big bucks (big yuan?) but my son George had warned me about these people so I dismissed them with: bu yao! I also pretty soon dismissed the idea of getting a taxi from here any time before nightfall and climbed the steps back into the heat and chaos of the station approach.

A driver of the No. 96

It bore some similarity to that squalid bus station we had seen in Beijing, near the zoo, not an area you'd want to linger in.

I set off walking in a random direction and soon found myself at the bottom of the motorway flyover. Wo mi lu le, I was lost! The traffic was at a standstill and the three taxi drivers I tried to hire from there shooed me away again. I kept walking, hoping it was towards a district that I knew. Hordes of schoolboys were crossing the big roads with me; there's safety in numbers. Finally I spotted some buildings I remembered seeing from my faithful old Bus 96 and this oriented me. I had guessed right; the Jiefang Lu was ahead, the bus stop for the 96 still a fair distance away, but at least I knew how to get there. I saw the Sunny Hotel and felt relieved.

Bus and taxi on Jiefang Lu

In the evening I didn't have much recovery time from this exhausting experience before Chris' colleague Andy, visiting again from Shanghai, invited me to join a supper party in a glass walled booth at the lower level hotel restaurant where the tables were decorated with elaborate Ikebana arrangements. The flowers were removed before supper was served; otherwise there wouldn't have been room for all the dishes. The slender waitresses wore black and gold satin trouser suits, the epitome of elegance. Much of the conversation around the table was in Chinese because Chris and I were not the only ones present. I could understand very little of this but was fascinated by the body language of the Chinese gentlemen doing business over that meal.

Tea

2011-08-12T11:52:00.005-04:00

Tea plantation, Hangzhou

June 2nd, Thursday

I did something I've often dreamed of-- I walked through a tea plantation. You'd think you were in the open countryside, surrounded by steep wooded hills, but in fact this is only a couple of miles from the city centre and West Lake, up the Longjing Road. Hangzhou's Longjing tea is famous for its quality, because conditions are just right for the production of green tea here: warm days, cool, misty nights, and mountain streams to water the crop. I saw a lady in a straw hat watering some bushes with a tool like a long, wooden, giant-sized spoon. I also spotted a shiny blue tailed lizard slithering along an irrigation channel as white butterflies fluttered around the tea leaves.

I'd come up this road in order to visit the National Tea Museum (chá bó) which offered free admission, like the Silk Museum. Again, the surroundings were so attractive, with statues, little waterfalls, quiet tea houses, flowerbeds and lily ponds as well as the plantation, that I wandered around outside the building for a considerable while before actually going in to see the indoor exhibits. Besides, it was already very hot out of doors mid-morning, and I thought that postponing the cooler part of my visit might be a good idea.

Tea tasting paraphernalia

Inside, I was refreshed in more senses than one. I had just started to take in the information about the different kinds of tea processing, when one of the staff interrupted me with an invitation to join a young chap from France and another young chap from Russia to go across the garden for a tea tasting in the adjacent building. So I followed along very willingly. When we went in there, she put the young men in one room and asked me to wait in another room-- maybe she thought I'd misbehave if I stayed with the young men; who knows! Anyway, it meant that I had a demonstration all to myself and when the tea girl arrived, she spoke to me in Chinese, having asked me if I understood any. I'd said, "yi dian dian," a little bit.

Tea growing near the museum

To my delight she did use quite a lot of Chinese in her explanation of the tea ceremony, interspersing it with some English when I got stuck, but we kept going and I learned some new vocabulary. I sampled the local green tea, hong cha (black tea), Jasmine (hua) tea and oolong. The flower she steeped in the glass tea pot, letting me watch its magical opening in the hot water, was called the tian re hong flower. "Daytime sun, red," I think that means. She did the ritual of pouring hot water all over the cups, the tray, the utensils, raising and lowering the spout as she poured, three times, paying her respects to me, her guest. This has a mesmeric effect, and though we didn't soak a jade green rabbit this time like the one in Beijing, the colour of the dragon design on the porcelain pot did change when scalded. The taste of the individual teas, drunk out of those tiny cups, was wonderful. You're supposed to hold the wooden saucer with your thumbs and the cup on it with your finger tips, then raise the whole thing to your mouth to sip. It's not like having a cup at Tim Hortons. The flower tea tastes perfumed, if that's the right word. The little balls of oolong tea when they unfold and stew in the water, taste slightly sweet. Pure water should be used, either spring water or distilled.

Tea leaf roller

Wu Lizhen of Sichuan,
first planter of tea

Different teas are produced by different processes. White tea is simply withered and dried leaves. Black tea has been heated, rolled, heaped (fermented) and dried. Yellow tea has the leaves "smothered" at some stage in its production. Green tea is "pan fired," rolled and dried. I tried manipulating the large, wooden "tea-twisting" contraption that usually takes four people to use. The "bud leaves" are favoured. I hadn't realised that the tea bushes produce quite large white flowers with orange stamens and have big seeds about the shape and size of hazelnuts. I learned a lot about what tea can do for you, of course, how it agrees with "those who have excessive yang." Black tea helps to tonify the spleen; it "reduces turbid and aids digestion." Oolong tea is a suitable drink after a high fat or high protein meal. White tea can relieve toothache and any dark tea decreases your "blood fat." They claim that there are as many as 500 healthy chemicals in tea.

Photo opportunity in the tea fields

In the rest of the museum, I saw displays of tea buckets, bull horn tea measures, jade tea pots, a lacquered tea tray with a clam shell inlay, and a mdong mo for Tibetan butter tea, with auspicious animals decorating it. I saw copper saucers decorated with paintings of cabbages and huge panchang copper kettles with a space for fuel underneath. The first ever monograph on tea was written on a scroll by a man called Lu Yu in the 8th century, mid-Tang Dynasty.

On my way back to the bus, I spotted a young couple having their pre-wedding photos taken in the tea bushes, and before I caught bus No. 27 I had some lunch at an airy roadside restaurant with bamboo furnishings––chicken (with its head lolling over the edge of the bowl, unfortunately) with rice, and weak tea from a cedar goblet.

A day for the children

2011-08-11T17:35:00.005-04:00

June 1st, Wednesday

Boats on the Qiantang River. What are they?

June 1st was Children's Day in China so the MixC Mall with its skating rink, its IMAX cinema (showing Pirates of the Caribbean) and its branch of Toys-R-Us was swarming with noisy kids. After a lazy start to the day, I'd walked there along the river esplanade around lunchtime, seeing some strange boats.

Child in Hangzhou

The hotel pool, "under renovation" since our arrival, had now been declared ready for use, so I went up to the 18th floor to try it out. The changing room had lockers with padded clothes hangers covered with satin, and complimentary flip flops. On the dressing tables, along with the lit candles in black ceramic candle holders, were brushes, lotions, and another display of orchids. The pool itself was large, curved and overlapped its rim. Around the edge were tropical trees in pots and sun beds facing the windows in a neat row with a rolled white bath towel at the foot end of each one, garnished, as it were, with a single orchid. I felt it would be a sacrilege to disturb these so went to help myself to a towel in the changing room, also neatly rolled; the orchids in there were adorning the flannels instead. The bathtowels were very fluffy, very big. At one end of the pool was a cluster of patio tables and settees, and at the other end a juice bar with stools. The whole place was deserted on my arrival but the attendants with whom I'd signed in, knowing I was there, put on some soothing music for me with incorporated birdsong and brought me a cup of water. Later another guest arrived with two little girls who joined me in the pool. I doubt whether both girls were her own children, probably not. We encountered hardly any families in China with more than an only child.

After dark, Chris and I went for our customary walk by the river and watched a young man shouting vigorously at a line of half a dozen little boys trying to master the art of roller blading. The instructor demonstrated the technique he was trying to teach and then the little boys were encouraged by a shove on their helmets to imitate him, one by one. They each got it wrong and the many adults watching laughed.

Street scenes, Hangzhou

2011-08-11T16:58:00.001-04:00

Before I go on with the narrative, here are a few general snaps to compare with the ones I took in Beijing.

Bikes for hire by the Nanshan Lu, Hangzhou

Street cleaners' siesta

Couple crossing a city street

Tourists on a hot day near the Leifeng Pagoda

Refuse collector on a wet day in the Central Business District

A breeze in the lotus leaves

2011-08-11T11:06:00.004-04:00

May 31st, Tuesday

On the last day of May I walked through another of the Ten Best Views of West Lake and its environs, this place being called Lotus Swaying in the Breeze at Qu Yuan. According to the tourist info Qu Yuan means "Crooked Courtyard"-- maybe because it was the site of a "wine distillery" (sic) in the days of the Nan Song dynasty, and people couldn't see straight after drinking the stuff. In the pavilions I saw carvings and sculptures of those olden day drinkers and their retinue, all looking pretty happy. Nowadays the gardens and the peaceful views of the water are enough to keep everyone in a state of euphoria without any need for alcohol. A group of people doing Tai Chi exercises on one side of a lawn and a lady singing to the accompaniment of a gentleman playing the erhu on the other side. Ducks in the lily pads under the weeping willows and a peacock or magpie with a stripy tail flying through the taller trees. I saw dragonflies and a blue butterfly. The water lilies were in bloom and a gardener sailed slowly up the pond on a punt, one of the rainbow shaped bridges reflected in the water.

Carving at Quyuan

Before returning to the city side of the lake, where the skyscrapers are, I climbed Gushan (Solitary Hill) to see some imperial ruins and walked along two causeways, ancient dykes lined with willows and peach trees. At the end of the Su Causeway is the replica of an ancient tomb (destroyed during the Cultural Revolution) of a "sing song girl," Su Xiaoxiao, who had written poems during her short life. She was born in the year 479 and died in 502. The poems are still remembered and written up beside the tomb, unfortunately without a translation.

My lunch was another thing of beauty, in a private room open with a bamboo grove on the other side of the open window. The table was of polished slatted wood with a wickerwork trim, the serving cupboard also of polished wood with engraved doors. Out of delicate ceramic bowls and plates I was served a mushroom soup nothing like what Heinz gives you in a tin. I counted seven different varieties of mushroom in the delicious broth and also identified slices of bamboo and bok choy greens. Soup (tang) was one of the only very few words the waitress and I had in common, the others being yi xiao wan mifan (a small bowl of rice) and lu cha, green tea, which was of high quality and came in a tall glass, with the soup. There was no English on the menu and no pictures either, so I think I did well.

Sculpture group at the site of the former distillery

My lunch

Hot day in Hangzhou

2011-08-10T22:36:00.004-04:00

May 30th, Monday

Grand Canal and Global Centre, seen from Wulinmen Wharf

The temperature display on the bus read 40º when I returned from my trip to the northern part of the inner city to find the Foreign Languages Bookshop on Fengqi Lu; it had the best collection of art books I've ever come across, and a huge section on modern architecture, landscaping and interior decorating. Over a coffee I looked at a well illustrated book in Chinese: Hangzhou de Guqiao, which I think means "The old bridges of Hangzhou"––there are hundreds of them––and made a sketch of one of the photos. I bought another map, some postcards, some pens for Chris and a history of China from which I learned more about the very ancient canal, a feature of China since 486 B.C., which means that parts of it were already well over a thousand years old in the Middle Ages. This waterway was already 1700km long by the early 7th century, at which time Hangzhou used to be China's main international port. Getting off the B2 bus at Wulin Square, it is easy to find the canal just beyond the northern side of the road with barges going under the bridges.

A bridge in Hangzhou

On the way back to the bus stop, like all the other ladies of Hangzhou, I used my umbrella as a parasol. On the verge under the trees near the hotel sat a cluster of people in suits and long, silky evening dresses squatting in the shade to eat a lunch of rice, meat and vegetables from plastic trays, served from polystyrene boxes stored the back of a van.

I wrote in my diary, "The Chinese puzzle me sometimes."

Evensong at the Lingyin Temple

2011-08-07T20:33:00.009-04:00

May 29th, Sunday

Incense burner, Lingyin temple

Evensong is, I suppose, the nearest western equivalent to what we witnessed that Sunday afternoon at the Lingyin temple. As we sat on a wall behind the Hall of the Great Sage (dàxíong bǎodiàn), inhaling the pervasive smoke from the incense burners, we heard a gong strike, at which chanting began. It was a procession of Buddhist monks in ochre coloured robes approaching the hall to hold a ceremony there. We crept up to watch, not daring to take photographs because the atmosphere was so solemn. There were 40 monks, maybe more, shaven bald, some young, some very old––I was impressed by the faces of these old men. A cantor led the chanting with a powerful voice, striking a gong at irregular intervals while the elderly priest in the centre mimed a ritual, cups of tea being proffered to the Buddha, a young couple in ordinary clothes joining in. A tall monk banged a drum. The chanting was loud, continuous and somewhat monotonous (just as Judeo-Christian psalms must sound to an outsider), but I detected changes in the melody; some bystanders were joining in. The crowd seemed respectful, and as interested as we were. In the background, we could hear birdsong and chirruping sparrows. When the monks eventually processed out, we saw that several of them had percussion instruments, such as a triangle and a small pair of cymbals.

The Big Belly Buddha

We had reached the place by taxi and on foot. Pathways followed a stream through the woods; it was similar to the walk beyond Beijing's Botanical Gardens, with precipitous steps up the rocks on either side of the valley and the girls in tottering high heels as usual. No railings to hold onto. There were caves on the slopes and many holy figures, some obviously influenced by Indian sculptures, with crowns, elephants or extra arms, had been carved out of the rock, some around 1000 years old. The carving of the "big belly buddha" and his arhats was the most memorable:

His belly is big enough to contain all intolerable things ... his mouth ever ready to laugh at all snobbish people on the earth.

Monk in a temple yard

Our views were of the steep and jungly forest, in the distance the Feilaifeng Peak with a chairlift up it. The highest point we climbed to was a cluster of hilltop temples around a monastery in the Fayun Historic Village, from which we caught a glimpse of West Lake and the city on the horizon. Genuine monks live up here, some meditating in the gardens and one accepting a handful of peanuts, as alms. In the temples one sees a buddha (or three) enthroned, with tall vases, a bronze bell and a drum beside him and yellow hassocks embroidered with lotus flowers in front. On his altar will be a bowl of neatly piled fruit: oranges, apples, a melon perhaps or those spiky pink dragon fruit. There's usually a prominent wooden box with a slot for the money offered to pay for incense sticks. Some worshippers burn a whole bunch of sticks together. At one point we saw officials carry away a large amount of coins and banknotes, which they'd tipped into a transparent plastic sack.

Cats in sleek condition had made a home in the temples; I saw one curled on a hassock, and lower down the valley I'd been allowed to stroke a kitten belonging to a lady selling packs of incense sticks and salty crisps marked "cool and refreshing" on the packet.

Around the monastery buildings are small tea plantations and gardens, spring water being channeled into a stone basin down a bamboo pipe. Nearby is a fish pond with swirls of multicoloured fish. There were palm trees, gingko trees, pines and other bonsais in pots. The monks have a basketball court, too, and a "music hall" where some act of worship was taking place that day.

Integrated into all this is a rather exclusive tourist resort.

The Great Sage of the Lingyin temple,
the largest wooden Buddha in China.
The ceiling above is 33 metres from the ground.

The Linyin Temple itself, where the largest wooden buddha in China is to be found, is at the foot of the hill. His altar had more fruit and flowers. The burners had bigger flames. I worried that the little girls' dresses might catch fire as they imitated their mothers' obeisances with their votive incense sticks. If you pray, you have to bow to the four points of the compass, and the more devout you aspire to be, the lower you bow. Does your piety also depend upon the number of sticks you burn at once? I have my doubts. It was the same as in European cathedrals; some people looked genuinely moved by the act of worship and others were just pretending.

Worshipping with incense sticks

Behind the giant buddha, painted gold, was another, with a 30 metre high Last Judgement sort of scene on the wall facing the door, with the dramatis personae covered in dust when we saw them, riding monstrous fish or boating down vertical rivers crossed by Chinese bridges. A confusing plethora of characters in this scene, laughing buddhas, elephants, a tiger and the stern arhats again, including the one with the long eyebrows, as seen in Beijing.

Shops in the precincts sell loose tea, silk wares, amber dragons and the usual fans and battery powered windmills, as well as many buddha-related nicknacks––pendants and bracelets that looked like Catholic rosaries and incense stick holders in the shape of cabbages. We found something to eat: half a roasted chicken wrapped in leaves with an egg-drop tomato soup on the side.

Our K7 bus back to town was the fourth in a row after a long wait in the queue at the bus station. Chris and I sat squashed together on a tiny seat, mercifully at the front of the bus so we could see out. It was so crowded (with uncomplaining Chinese tourists) that we could hardly breathe.

Back to the hotel on Bus 96 and finally, around 8p.m., some supper: a (xiǎo) pizza from the Pizzahut at the MixC mall, with a glass of iced jasmine tea topped with a vanilla-flavoured, sugary foam.

A serendipitous supper

2011-08-04T15:24:00.008-04:00

May 27th, Friday

I explored the streets south of the Jiefang Lu as far as Qinghefang gujie, the souvenir street, already packed with tourists at 10 in the morning. Too many stalls selling kitsch for my liking; I retreated onto a side street which had art shops, some rubbishy, some not, in a quiet corner of town, with more of those mottled trees. Rediscovering the lake front I succumbed to my craving for caffeine in an empty coffee bar. A flautist was teaching a woman to sing to his accompaniment under one of the canopies. I searched for a shop near the lake selling silk products and found a small one where I bought a red scarf and a fan in a silk case.

Back at the hotel the maid brought me two new flower arrangements. One of them, in a square glass vase lined with leaves and white pebbles, had pink roses entwined with bamboo shoots, a white lily's head at its base: bǎihé means lily. I made a sketch of it, wrote emails in the lounge and sat by the river. The downstream barges turn left out of sight before reaching the bridge. There must be a port down there, almost within walking distance ...

May 28th, Saturday

In the morning I shared my some of my recent discoveries with Chris, showing him Qian Liu's temple, taking him for a boat ride on the lake, etc. Predictably, he liked all of it.

A barge entering the Grand Canal from the Qiantang River

Later in the day, we took a fancy to walking the length of the wall by the river as far as we could, to find out where the barges go when they turn the corner. In fact this is the mouth of the Grand Canal, that reaches all the way to Beijing, some parts of it dating back 25 centuries! We couldn't see round the corner for barricades beyond yet another construction site where the workers, living in their sheds, were hanging their washing in the trees and cooking their suppers.

Talking of suppers, the meal we ate that night was the most magnificent I think I've ever tasted. We came across it quite by chance––feeling hungry I went up the steps of what looked like a riverside restaurant to check it out, Chris hanging back in case I was making an embarrassing mistake. No mistake, though! The place was new; they were eager to receive customers and we ended up having our supper prepared before our eyes on the stainless steel flat top grill, in a dining room all to ourselves, by our own private chef, a girl whose English was excellent and whose manners were impeccable. She wore a very tall chef's hat, a red necktie and a holster round her slim waist holding her utensils. It was like watching theatre. The other staff, hovering in the background, had us under observation as well; we weren't left alone for one moment, our used plates and cutlery constantly whisked away and replaced. After we'd finished our meal the staff even accompanied us in groups to the washrooms, so that we wouldn't go astray. "Is boys ... is girls," one helpfully pointed out. I giggled helplessly inside one of the cubicles.

The supper, slowly consumed:

Hot water in a wine glass
Juices served at various stages of the meal
Amuse-gueules: fried fish skin, pickles, dips, very thinly sliced cucumber
A set of three starters: smoked salmon with gratings of white carrot, a roll of something herby, a strip of sweet potato on a lettuce leaf
Goose liver and caviar served on a slice of apple with a melon / orange garnish and a soy sauce dip
Slice of garlic bread freshly fried
Bowls of corn chowder
A whole mǎ tóu (horse head) fish (we refused the head so she set it aside for the manager to eat)
Bok choy, steamed under a domed lid and served with a thin slice of bacon finely chopped and fried
Tiny beef steaks done to perfection and served with a blob of wine sauce
Fried rice with chopped carrots, mushrooms, onions, chopped omelette and many condiments. Chopped greens were added last.

"Wouldn't you like a dessert?"

Melon, with orange and mint to garnish, served with a spider's web of yoghurt, caramel and chocolate sauces.
Yam (that had been baked for 3 hours), mashed and rolled into freshly made crêpes
A little green tea jelly, swimming in a white fruit juice

Hangzhou's four letter words

2011-08-03T08:41:00.002-04:00

May 26th (continued)

Leifeng Tǎ south of Xi Hu (seen from the middle of the lake)

From the Silk Museum I caught a No. 12 bus down Yuhangshan Lu to the "Orioles Singing in the Willows" (柳浪聞鶯) where I'd so much enjoyed myself the previous day. This park was named according to the ancient Chinese tradition of giving meaningful places beautiful, four-character names. All around the West Lake are similar place names: "Autumn Moon on Calm Lake" (平湖秋月), "Plum Viewing at Xixi," "Fish Leaping at Jade Spring", "Breeze-ruffled Lotus at Winding Garden," and so on. It must be hard to find adequately poetic, pithy translations into English for the benefit of visitors like me when there are so many of these pleasure spots in the Hangzhou region. "Viewing Fish at Flowery Pond" (花港觀魚) sounds rather too prosaic, and "Fish Ponds with Autumn Cottonroses Hibiscuses" has obviously lost something in translation, but I liked the sound of "Twin Peaks Piercing the Clouds" (雙峰插雲) and the name "Woodman Song Echoed in Lingshi Hill" which evokes the same kind of atmosphere as we experienced near Beijing when we went hiking in the Fragrant Hills and heard people singing in the forest. "Returning Cranes in Plum Woods" sounded appealing as well. Artists liked to embroider images of cranes on silk, so I had just discovered. There was a hermit who lived in the plum woods during the Song Dynasty, a fellow called Lin Bu. Not needing human company, he had plum blossom for a wife and cranes for children, so people said.

A pleasure boat returning its passengers to the city

I learned this by taking a boat from the shore where the orioles sing in the willows to an island in Xi Hu that contains its own lakes and has been known since the 12th century as "Three Pools Mirroring the Moon (三潭印月). It is featured on a ¥1 banknote (see below). There was a little exhibition in one of the pavilions there, explaining the poetic names. The boat itself looked like a floating pavilion and had bamboo blinds over its windows in case the passengers need shade. It was cool enough for me, with a breeze blowing over the water. On the island I sat in a quiet spot behind a stall that sells silks and fans, eating the sandwiches I'd made for myself. Bullfrogs croaked in the pond, birds sang, weeping willows rustled their branches, and a history prof from Pittsburg came up and asked me what I was doing in China.

Three Pools Mirroring the Moon, decorating the ¥1 note

Life happens

2011-07-29T22:51:00.001-04:00

Image borrowed from the Côte du Sud website

There will have to be a short pause or hiatus in my blog posts about China because Chris and I are intending to fly our 'plane to the Isle aux Grues tomorrow, a little island (or archipelago) in the St. Lawrence River east of Quebec, to spend a couple of days and nights at the Auberge des Dunes during the August Long Weekend.

As my daughter predicted, it's proving impossible to record what I'm experiencing this summer while more and more experiences keep coming. "You'll never catch up with reality!" she said.

Since I started writing my China report in Ottawa, I have been to twelve as yet unmentioned concerts.

As my husband observes, shades of Tristram Shandy!

Sericulture and a wealth of silks

2011-07-29T09:33:00.007-04:00

National Silk Museum, Hangzhou

May 26th, Thursday

I took a taxi through a couple of tunnels to the National Silk Museum on Yuhangshan Lu, up the hill from the southern end of West Lake. The museum is free; after my driver dropped me at the foot of the steps I walked straight into an almost empty modern and spacious exhibition hall, finding silk worms, fat, white caterpillars about 5 cm long, crawling around in a display case crammed with mulberry leaves. It takes 30 days from egg to silk. The smallest grubs, emerging from the hundreds of eggs laid by each female moth, are black; they turn gradually whiter as they fatten, sloughing off skins. They spin their cocoons onto a nest of sticks which is the point at which the silk fibres can be harvested, traditionally by hand, the ladies making a sort of glove out of them that they dip in water to wash. Eventually the pretty, silky white moths free themselves from the cocoons, mate with the males, lay their many eggs and promptly die. Fascinated, I watched this process on video.

At the museum: silk worms on mulberry leaves

Silk worms were first cultivated 5000 years ago, it seems, in the Neolithic age, and the silk trade has been international since the 7th century Tang Dynasty. In fact the cloth was used as currency for the slave trade, a 15 year old slave, for example, being worth about 6 bolts of silk. This area was an important source of silk which was then transported via Suzhou and Nanjing, thence to Beijing by sea, following the coastline. In the 3rd century BC, silk manufacturing methods influenced the invention of paper.

I saw several displays about the Silk Road, used from the 5th century BC, stretching all the way from China to Syria, to Turkey, to Hungary. Some of the "road" was across the ocean, to Madras and Arabia, even to Somalia, the Philippines and Rome. The bales of silk were either carried by camel or transported on ships such as the 12th century one I saw a model of; these vessels were 24 metres long, with 13 cabins.

There are as many as fourteen main types of silk cloth, including gauze, chiffon, crepe, brocade, velvet ... Different shuttle patterns in the weaving too, tabby, twill, satin, etc. Looms have been found near here by archeologists, their ornaments 4000 years old or more. I saw examples of the different kinds of dyeing. To decorate the cloth, they used wax or ash (if wax was scarce) and tie-dyeing techniques. Styles of embroidery and types of stitch were regional, though the subjects didn't differ much: cranes, dragons and winged horses. These "auspicious symbols" are still to be seen all around Hangzhou, engraved on paving stones on the side walks for instance, expressing "people's yearn for a well-being life," as the info board at the silk museum quaintly puts it. Bats, lions, peonies and the Chinese character meaning longevity. By the time the Qing Dynasty came along, the Chinese were also exporting silk in patterns created for western tastes (e.g. "greater western flowers" for Louis XV's mistresses in France). The tiny embroidered silk shoes, for the Qing Dynasty ladies' and children's bound feet made me feel sad.

Mulberry bushes at the silk museum

Outside the museum was a mulberry grove. I walked through that too and at the back of the building came across five shops selling silk from bales.

Qian Liu, good king of Hangzhou

2011-07-28T11:00:00.001-04:00

May 25th, Wednesday

Peaches ripening by West Lake

The sun had come out, so I stayed under the shade of the many, many trees near the West Lake. I'd intended to take a boat ride but enjoyed the waterfront so much that I simply ambled along, taking things in, for five hours, through a park called Orioles Singing in the Willows. Not sure about the orioles, but I saw and heard blackbirds and some more of the birds I'd first noticed in Suzhou with the flecks of yellow and black and white crowned heads (which I now believe to be Chinese bulbuls, Pycnonotus sinensis), and there were willows all around me, also plane trees with mottled trunks (platanus orientalis, I guess). What an idyllic place. One little tree hanging over the water was a peach tree.

Sculpture of the legend

To my delight, I found a tourist attraction that had hardly any other people going round it and which only cost me 15 CNY to explore: a restored temple with subsidiary buildings and courtyards dedicated to the memory of the founder of Hangzhou, Qian Liu, and his successors.

There was a legend about this good king's birth illustrated by a sculpture in one of the courtyards. When he was born in the year 852 a red light flashed in the sky and his parents, local peasants, were frightened by "the sounds of troops and horses"-- a thunderstorm, I daresay, but the baby's father took it to be an ill omen and decided to throw his newborn son down a well. An old woman, Po Liu, prevented him from doing this. The Poliu well is still there, by the way. The child grew up as a seller of salt, but at the age of 20, upset by the riots flaring up at the end of the Tang Dynasty, he joined the army. He made his way up through the ranks of the military and finally became king of the 13 cantons of Wu Yue prefecture in the year 923. He was the first ruler to have walls built around the city of Hangzhou and encouraged peaceful pursuits among his subjects, weaving, agriculture. He also built an extensive dyke along the Qiantang River to counteract the tidal bore that still happens regularly (like the Severn bore in Britain).

Inside the temple

King Qian Liu, sculpted far larger than life in the main hall along with his four immediate successors (slightly smaller in size) was revered to almost godlike status. The medieval writer Su Shi wrote about Qian Liu's achievements on four stone tablets, three of which I saw, re-inscribed by a Ming Dynasty carver. He died at the age of 81, having set a high value on children's education, inventing codes of conduct for his family which basically amounted to

Don't be arrogant.
Don't be extravagant.

Wikipedia lists 38 sons of Qian Liu! His descendants have largely been philosophers, educators, literary men, scientists. I saw a wall of their faces, some of them photographs because the line has continued to the present day. The king's grandson was also "remarked highly by historians" for peacefully "submitting" his territory to the Song Dynasty regime, thus taking responsibility for the peaceful unification of China in those days.

Stele at the temple, inscribed with the good king's history

Entrance to Orioles Singing in the Willows