Skip to main content

Fwip-Schuummm


That is the sound of the last two months going by.
     Once you've been to so many cities and X amount of museums and Y amount of art galleries and Z amount of top-of-the-world best-panoramic-view-ever places, they start to blur into one a little bit. Memory becomes a flip-book. Each image on its own makes no sense, but as part of a swift-moving whole they are imperative to the overall effect. Though separated by a bus journey or a series of roadsigns, each city, museum, tall place visited forms part of one big multi-coloured moving drawing.
     Once you return home, you get asked How Was The Trip, challenged to describe the last couple of months in a few choice words. I still can't do it. I sat in a sweat lodge for four hours with scantily-clad strangers, I've climbed mountains and weeded vegetable patches and pulled all-nighters in New York and New Orleans, I've made pancakes with the natives and taken a bike around Stanley Park. Been at the top of the CN Tower and at the bottom of the Flat Iron building. I've crashed with people I met on the internet, made brick paths and sat on the back of a tractor planting onions.
     'Fantastic' doesn't quite cover it.
     Still, most travelers will agree that it's nice to be home. There's a quote from the back of a starbuck's cup that goes-

"Une aventure n'est jamais une aventure pendant qu'elle a lieu"
"An adventure is never an adventure when it's happening

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Calgary, Alberta

Yesterday I ran around the city a bit, trying to see as much as possible for as little as possible...      It was hard.      The walk from Sean's place in Renfrew was long but scenic. Cold and crisp, Calgary did turn out to be mostly suburb, with a pretty concentrated centre with all your usual tourist hangouts just south of the Bow river where a lot of money can be spent very easily. Like $14 for going up Calgary Tower, $9 for a student ticket to the Glenbow Museum, and all those malls! They're all interconnected, so you could probably walk from shop to shop most of the way across the city without having to see sunlight. This is probably the idea behind the Plus Fifteen, too- a heated walkway above the streets so the Calgarians don't have to freeze in winter.      The Glenbow offered your normal mix of traditional art, weird modern stuff, rooms full of the extensive and glorious history of Alberta, all 150 years of it,...

You Say It Best...

(originally published by The Student )      Watch any western, any black-and-white adventure film, any rags-to-riches adaptation, and you'll realise we've seen this all before. The guy gets the girl, the evil tyrant falls and the True King rises, be it Middle Earth or the Mid-West. We've seen these scenes repeated across time and space, and we know how it goes. Without the speech, the scene still goes the same way. New film The Artist proves this, without saying a word. Aside from the picture-perfect cast and a dog which will reach cult celebrity status any day now, the film addresses the transition between '20s movies and '30s talkies, and a sparse use of sound which offers a challenge to the film-makers.      In one scene, uncharacteristically static, a pair of old friends meet and greet, swap stories, laugh- the details, irrelevant, are replaced by an emotive score and some close camera-work, all of which makes us feel no less connected to the...

Grains of Hope

     There's an advent tradition here in Provence that was entirely unknown to me until a few days ago when I picked up a leaflet in town about Saint Barbe and Le Blé de l'Espérance . Today, the 4th of December, is Saint Barbe's day, and many Provencial people will have bought wheat seeds from street vendors to plant in her honour.      Sainte Barbe was around in Lebanon in the 3rd century, and according to various highly respected sources accessible via Google, was either locked in a tower to keep her away from troublesome leanings towards Christianity, or locked herself in there to get out of marrying some Prince. Either way, she managed to sneak a priest in, who gave her a good baptising, saved her soul, and really annoyed her dad.      You know how it goes with these saints: once they've sworn their faith aloud, they get a get-out-of-death-free pass, though sometimes this isn't such a blessing. Every time they re-swear their faith, God...