| Life in a Banana Republic, Part 3 |
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| 04:12am 02/03/2008 |
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mood:  tired
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My crazy sister took a Monday off, and so we went off into the wilds of the Andean highlands for three days over the weekend. In her tiny toy four wheel drive (actually a very practical vehicle), we drove over the worst roads I had ever encountered. Adding further potholes could have only made the ride more even. For long stretches, water and traffic had created even created waves in the dirt surface perpendicular the the road, so it was like driving over endless little speedbumps. In defence of my spine, I put my seat at a forty-five degree angle for most of the journey.
Still, as dreadful as the roads were, the landscape was beautiful. We were driving around the Quilotoa loop, a vague ring of roads that connects several quite remote mountain villages and takes one to almost 4 kilometres altitude. It's named after Quilotoa volcano, a quasi-extinct beast with a beautiful lake in its crater, which we stopped to visit on the first day. We climbed all the half-kilometre down to the sulphurous lake, and after we had finished poking around my crazy sister took a donkey ride back up. I refused to take a donkey, claiming that I should get some exercise as I had been sitting in a car all day, and I doggedly followed her and the guide up on foot. Almost halfway up, I couldn't keep up any more, but testosteronic pride had possessed me so I continued to refuse the donkey still on offer. I finally made it to the top after many rest stops, some half and hour after my sister, trembling and wet through.
We stopped at various villages along the way, sometimes buying snacks. Local snacks include such healthy delicacies as beans. :( Yum. Beans. In a little bag. As if they were sweets. Just in case those were too healthy, of course, the soft drinks you can buy with them taste poisonously artificial. Fortunately, I'd brought along some Jamon bellota from Spain, and we ate it sitting in the mountain grass above the treeline.
There are dogs everywhere, all the same size (about as big as you can safely tuck under one arm) with varying degrees of cuteness. Even more no-one's-watching-so-let's-take-one-home were the ubiquitous little black pigs. Come to think of it, all the livestock was rather bijou, just like the humans, as if the thin mountain air didn't let creatures grow very big.
At the village of Tigua, we bought some of their famous hide paintings, and at 18:00 of the first evening we ended up at the Black Sheep inn. My sister had lived in Ecuador for 5 years, and had always wanted to stay there, but had never before found a victim to give her an excuse, as she put it. Frankly, this was the kind of abuse I could learn to live with. |
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| Life in a Banana Republic, Part 2 |
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| 03:26am 01/03/2008 |
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mood:  calm
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Quito has the best preserved historic centre of any town in South America. It was designated the first UNESCO World Heritage Cultural Site, along with the historic centre of Krakow, Poland, in 1978. It's as pretty as you might imagine, with some incredible Baroque churches. I spent my first few days wandering around and sightseeing.
Being some 25 kilometres from the Equator, but at 2,800m, Quito's climate is eternal spring. Sunny, but not hot. It never rains in the morning, but sometimes in the afternoon. The day always lasts 12 hours. My crazy sister, who's lived there 5 years, tells me that it drives you nuts after a while: seasons allow one to gauge the passage of time, but when the weather never changes, you lose track. Has a season passed? A year passed? Two years? Me, I'll take a bit of temporal disorientation over English winters any day.
However, this being the Equator but at altitude, the sun is brutally radioactive around midday. There's a reason EVERYONE wears hats around here - It's on the equator, and the radiation is some 40 % stronger than at sea level. I, however, refuse to wear hats - in England there is a correlation between hat-wearing people and people I want to smack for reasons other than their hat wearing - so I'd spend the hours around midday in restaurants or cybercafes. You can't throw a rock in Quito centre without caving in a flat-screen.
Speaking of hats, this is the country where the Panama hat comes from. Not Panama. I bought one at the airport for my housemate. $31. The more expensive ones cost $500, but I'm not that fond of him. :) |
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| Life in a Banana Republic, Part 1 |
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| 01:25pm 29/02/2008 |
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mood:  hungry
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Having arrived in Quito, I finally got to meet my crazy sister's rabbits, Bunny and Conny. I wasn't much impressed at first - they aren't as immediately engaging as kitties - but within a few days I'd warmed to them, or at least Bunny, who was softer, braver, and keener to be stroked.
They live in a very small apartment in a very rich neigbourhood, and thence I took cabs into Quito proper - I never tried the buses, but then my most expensive cab trip during my whole stay was $4.
Ecuador is dollarised, by the way. They use a mixture of their own coins, yankee coins, and greenbacks. One thing I encountered was the dollar coin, but this turned out to be genuine E Pluribus Unum Gringo currency. I lived in the USA for some 6 years, and never saw one, but in Ecuador, they're everywhere! I bet if I tried to spend one in the US, I couldn't. Why is it that they felt the NEED to introduce the bimetallic £2 coin here in the UK (worth some $4), but the largest coin the Yanks have in general, every-day use is the quarter?
Quito is at 2,800 m altitude, but I didn't suffer any ill effects - I must be fitter than I generally feel. Ecuadorians are best described as short, round and friendly with impressive noses, and they like to eat. I couldn't verify whether they had hairy feet, but they don't appear to live in holes. The food is nicer than pretty much anything I can find at home, and there appears to be an inverse price/tastiness relationship. The best meals I had were in the market, where a stuff-my-face lunch plate with a glass of fresh fruit juice (and Ecuador is famous for its juices) cost me all of $2.
At one point I had Guatita...a peanut sauce soup coining chunks of intestine. Hmmm...intestine. I've never been a lover of entrails, but it turns out they taste quite nice! No wonder lions eat intestines first - the general structure and villi tentacles are offputting, but if you can ignore that...wow.
And another time I had a goat stew with rice that makes my mouth water at the thought.
And the ice cream, made with local fruit juices. And the empanadas...
I need to go eat something NOW. |
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| Not dead but dreaming |
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| 11:26am 28/02/2008 |
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mood:  sleepy
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Hi! I'm Ludwig Kayser. You may remember me from 2007 posts such as Help! I've Fallen and the Ice Weasels are Gaining. A one month loss of internet connectivity left me with a backlog of posts and, eventually, a total lack of will to catch up with posting.
Anyway...what's happened over the last 'few' months? Lots, but I can't be bothered to mention it all. Apparently, I'm now a 3rd Kyu. The grading was horrible. I asked to re-do it, but Sensei won't let me. Oh well...2nd Kyu next.
Oh, and I went to Quito, Ecuador, to visit my crazy sister Uta. Technically, she's my half-sister, but she HATES being called that. I need the "half" to explain to people why we don't look much alike except for blue eyes and dimples - people kept on assuming we were a mated pair.
Anyway, my crazy sister works as a lawyer/administrator/warrior for Quiport (Quito airport) - although she should be spending her time organising the transfer to the newly built airport on the edge of town, she mostly fights airlines who don't want to pay their airport fees.
So, after a 12 hour flight during which I killed time by amusing the six-year old girl sitting next to me by spinning coins and making faces (at one point she felt compelled to show me her underwear - why can't I have that effect on older specimens?), I was met at the airport by my crazy sister, who used her corrupt airport powers to speed me through customs. Thus began my South American adventure. More later. |
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| Ascension |
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| 08:27am 06/10/2007 |
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mood:  impressed
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Earlier this year the BBC (I think) had this big national vote-in competition to find out who was the greatest Briton of all time. I can't remember who won, but that's because the whole thing repelled me somewhat because many people had voted for vacuous celebrities.
However, my visit to London reminded of Admiral Nelson, who, in the 1800s, would have won the competition hands down. This man was already and considered a hero even before the battle of Trafalgar, famous for his ability to inspire loyalty in his colleagues and his men, infamous for repeatedly disobeying the orders of his superiors and achieving amazing victories thereby, notable for often leading boarding actions on enemy ships, which is something that high-ranking military officers did not normally do. There was almost no-one in the country who didn't speak of him in awe and adoration. By the end, he had lost an eye and an arm; he would introduce himself "I am Admiral Nelson, and this is my fin."
THEN he fought the battle of Trafalgar. After signalling to his fleet the now famous phrase "England Expects Every Man Will Do His Duty", he abandoned conventional tactics, ordered his ships to stream straight towards the enemy in two lances, cutting the numerically superior joint French and Spanish fleet in three, but the British fleet being raked by vicious cannonfire all the way and unable to return fire. In close fighting, and the Spanish/French fleet discombobulated by the move and unable to coordinate properly, the British fleet tore the enemy fleet to pieces, and from then on Britannia unquestionably did rule the waves. Nelson was mortally wounded in the heaviest close fighting between the flagships, and died just after the battle was won; the perfect death for a hero.
What could the British do? They named one of London's grandest squares after his battle, carved a statue of Nelson and raised him (in that square) up to Heaven on a pillar so massive and tall, you can barely see the man from the ground.
"Rawk", as they say... |
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| Lessons Learned at the Centre of the Universe |
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| 12:03pm 02/10/2007 |
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mood:  intrigued
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Well, I have ridden the iron snake back from London!
My passport renewal at the German embassy was very quick and painless and they say they'll send it me in 6 to 8 weeks. I suspect I'll actually receive it in about 2 weeks. :)
Celia (Spanish girl I know in London) has a seven-year-old daughter called Andrea, whom I had never met before. A clever young lady, fluent in both (admittedly Laaandon) English and (Andaluz - she says "pa ti" instead of "para ti", for example) Spanish. I'm not very good at talking to children - I never know what approach to take - so I tend to treat them exactly like (slightly dense) adults. With her, at least, it worked very well.
On Saturday evening, she made me watch all her Tom and Jerry cartoons. Not that I minded. I remembered quite a few of them from my youth, and they were still lots of fun. She also got me to watch her favourite film ever, Pocahontas, which I now regret having missed when it came out; it was genuinely good - visually a work of art even - and not as dreadfully schmalzy as I had feared.
To return the favour I then went and bought My Neighbour Totoro, Kiki's Delivery Service and Princess Mononoke, the last being one of my three favourite films (next to Dr. Strangelove and The Seven Samurai) for her. No child should grow up and not have been exposed to the works of Miyazaki.
We watched Princess Mononoke and it occurred to me a little too late that a film featuring swearing, leprosy, prostitutes, profuse dismemberment and decapitation, a very high bodycount, horrid tentacle demons and cthulhoid gods of life and death and a social commentary that is very much shades of grey, might not necessarily be appropriate for a seven-year old. But it turns out that children are quite resilient about death, horror and that sort of thing. From what I could tell from her commentary, she was following the plot very well. Afterwards, she said she loved it and it was very beautiful.
My work here is done.
I'm quite grateful that so many of my friends are having children; I should be able to learn much by experimenting on their offspring before I generate my own.
Still, any advice lest I break one? |
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| 12:58pm 28/09/2007 |
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mood:  chipper
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After three nights straight of practising the 3rd Dan Jo Kata, I can honestly say it's the most awfully hard thing I've ever done in Aiki. Also, my arms are so sore I can barely move them. They'd end up as thick as treetrunks if we did this sort of thing more often.
Going to London this weekend: need to renew my passport. |
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| Jo/Jo Mojo |
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| 03:31pm 25/09/2007 |
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mood:  sore
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We fought with Sticks last night! Brinkhurst Sensei is doing another week-long seminar, and ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) aprogressivist came along on the open Monday evening, had fun, and learnt the techniques faster than I ever had. Martin came, but only for a short while, and not to join in, as he was busy for most of the evening. He brought along his two little girls, who ran around on the mats, orbiting us in circles for minutes on end as we stretched. Very cute. I wish I could still have tremendous fun just running in circles...
After I went to bed last night, I got a phone call from Steve-sama asking whether I'd like to come to the Yudansha (blackskirt) practices! I said yes. They're probably a man short, or maybe they just enjoy hitting me with sticks. Either way, it'll be 4 nights of Jo work for me this week, and I already pulled some arm muscles on the first night! Wish me luck. |
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| Ueber Alles |
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| 11:17am 24/09/2007 |
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mood:  content
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So there I was, innocently listening to some Haydn on the radio, and I'm stunned to hear the melody to the German national anthem! Turns out that it comes from Haydn's String Quartet in C and is called the Emperor's Hymn. I suppose it had to come from somewhere. The original is very melodious.
The fact that the two standard melodies played at weddings are those of Wagner (not dreadfully fond of jews) and Mendlessohn (jew) tickles me still. I'm easily amused.
Sore throat and nausea went away within a day, but I'm still congested and coughy. |
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| Disease |
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| 04:40am 21/09/2007 |
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mood:  Nurgled
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Well, the Karmic Krokodile has come to chew on my posterior.
Just a day ago, I was bragging about my evident genetic superiority (I appear to have the adenosine receptor mutation that makes me able to fall asleep almost anywhere at the drop of a hat, highly resistant to caffeine, and have the movement patterns of a seal on crack while asleep, a mutation shared with about 10% of the population) on shadawyn's journal who, like guru_bob, sometimes has problems getting to sleep.
I have now got a viciously sore throat that woke me up not long past midnight and is keeping me from sweet dreams, instead sitting at my housemate's computer wearing my bedsheets like a toga. It's now 4:30 AM. Serves me quite right.
However, I possibly infected chris_maslen when he came over to play Bioshock on my computer last night (he liked it, but found it too wrong and creepy) and I doubt he, wryelle or their newborn baby deserve to suffer whatever filthy pathogen I'm carrying. O_O
Back to bed...I feel tired enough that not even pain should keep me awake now...*crosses fingers* |
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| Firestick! |
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| 11:27am 20/09/2007 |
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mood:  Armed and Dangerous
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I forgot to mention: I'm now the proud owner of a soldering iron. I bought it in an attempt to repair my wireless ethernet adapter but it turned out that a faulty connection wasn't the principal reason for its not working. Still, I know own a soldering iron, as well as the fluxed solder to go with it. guru_bob will be jealous. ^_^
Soldering reminded me of days of yore in Libya with my father when we used to sneak across the road from the Bab-el-Bahar hotel to hack the lead lining out of the roofing of demolished buildings. We'd then melt it down to make fun things like...fake coins...and...er...doorstops. Which we also used as shot-puts. And near Christmas, at Silvester-time, we'd pour molten lead into buckets of water and the strange and sinuous resulting shapes were supposed to foretell one's future.
Inhaling lead fumes is on the list of things that have probably contributed to making me as stupid as I am today, along with falling over my bike straight onto my head (I still have a barely visible scar on my forehead, but no magic powers), and oxygen deprivation due to sleeping under the covers for several years after seeing Aliens; I wasn't afraid of the big ones (no more than lions and tigers and bear, oh my!), but the facehuggers horrified me because I had read quite a few natural history books and that sort of parasitism is quite pervasive in the real world.
Anyway...soldering iron. I can now engrave my initials on my tanto with FIRE! |
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| :) |
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| 04:22pm 17/09/2007 |
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mood:  amused
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One of our Australian Yudansha (blackskirts) is spending a protracted period in Japan, and made some observations. You may find these amusing, and perhaps familiar if you've lived in Japan for a while, as one or two of you have.
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Stuff I've discovered from using Japanese in Japan...
1. It actually works! It's pretty surreal to be communicating in a second language. And its awesome fun.
2. Katakana in actually extremely useful. Much more useful than hiragana. All you can ever read in hiragana is "desu" and "arigato gozaimasu". Katakana you can use for building names, reading restraunt menus and writing your own damn name and OOSUTARARIA on your postcards so they make it back home.
3. Its quite alarming hearing the zaiten-sushi waitress count your plates "yon-mae"... and you're thinking, wait, did she just say "That'll be 40,000 yen?! Oh... right... 4 flat things."
4. No-one ever says "O genki desuka?" Actually, the only thing you ever here in the full polite form really is "Domo Arigato Gozaimasu."
5. Once you learn the following 3 phrases "Onegai shimasu" "Sumimasen" and "Arigato gozaimasu" you can understand two-thirds of what is being said in Japan. You will still have no idea what is going on.
6. During O-Bon, this changes, and all anyone says in "O-Bon ne?"
If you're gaijin, everyone will attempt to explain O-Bon to you, just in case you are totally brain dead and haven't heard the previous 20,000 explanations of O-Bon. I am so happy that O-Bon is over.
7. No matter how well you say them, Japanese people will not understand the following phrases..... "No fish." "I'm a vegetarian." "Please don't put an egg on it, or, god forbid, any mayonaiise." and "I don't drink alcohol."
8. Speaking any Japanese at all makes you instantly friends with all of Japan.
9. If you look at all asian, everyone will assume you speak fluent Japanese. No matter how many times you tell them "I'm American, I don't understand." You're Japanese friends will also introduce you as "not Japanese".
Example: 1.This is Jess, she works with Larry. This is Daniel, he's a new teacher from Australia. This is Mai. She's NOT Japanese.
2. Really? Turns to Mai and says in Japanese You're not Japanese?
Mai. I'm American. I don't understand.
10. "Nomihoudai" means all you can drink. It usually costs about 3500 yen and lasts for around 3 or 4 hours. Usually izakayas will also provide a companion "Tabehoudai" (all you can eat).
"Nomu biiru.... yottsu!"
"KAMPAI!" |
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| "Would You Kindly..." |
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| 11:46am 14/09/2007 |
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mood:  weird
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Having played Bioshock quite a bit now, I have now developed automatic reactions to certain stimuli in normal life. This has happened with other games in the past: with GTA the urge is to leap into empty cars and drive off with them, most first person shooters make me hug walls and scope out corners of rooms I enter for snipers, and Black & White inculcated in me the need to make cryptic but undeniably offensive gestures at people who annoy me.
But thanks to Bioshock, whenever I now see little girls in the street I feel the need to shoot their fathers, stroke their little heads, then head straight to a vending machine.
I think that's a good indication of how very WEIRD and WRONG this game is. |
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| AVE NODENS |
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| 11:01am 12/09/2007 |
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mood: tired
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I had a dream last night that I remember quite well, which is unusual. I sitting in a large bed with guru_bob and Paul Torrington (who is now teaching Physics to expat brats in Shanghai), and we were all eating from plates of rice. Then we were approached by a rather interesting young chinese lady, chaperoned by an elder sister. After exchanging a few phrases of English and very rudimentary Mandarin, she introduced herself as "Poet" and when I asked her what that was in Chinese, she immediately gave me a two-syllable response beginning with "n" that somehow made a lot of sense at the time. She carefully and disapprovingly scraped the rice from the edges of my plate to the centre, as I had made a bit of a mess, and then she and I went across the river. I suppose I should stop there for decency's sake. >_>
I've had far more interesting dreams in my time (I've kung-fu fought-mushrooms in suits under Bath abbey, for example) but I so rarely remember them that I think I should record them somewhere when I do. It's odd how effortlessly narrative dreaming is; you writer types might do well to practice lucid dreaming! No more writer's block, although the reviewers might suspect you may have been on drugs...
Aiki was fun last night. It is quite unsettling to train with beginners, as they don't know how they're "supposed" to act and react, and you end up being reminded that you're not actually very good at techniques you thought you had got the grip of. This is certainly a good thing.
One thing I'll say about aprogressivist - he may weigh as much as an anaemic chicken, but he has a pin like a vice! |
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| "Please wake up, Mr. Bubbles!" |
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| 10:36am 10/09/2007 |
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mood:  bouncy
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Another post following a long hiatus. I have a partial excuse in that my ethernet wireless adapter failed. Gosh how I hate wireless. Give me good old cable any day: totally secure and guaranteed a good connection. Also, I feel there's something intrinsically pretentious about using wireless for home networking. I mean...why?
Chris and Barbara's baby has passed from the newborn-comatose phase into the howling-all-night phase, and they aren't getting much sleep, which means they have a proper baby now! Newborns are really still embryos, pushed out early because if they developed any more within the mother, the risk of killing her at birth would higher than acceptable. Mother nature is ever practical. I plan to make "WAAAAH!" noises at Chris next time I see him (if I ever do) to see how he reacts.
I had an adventure last week! I left home without my keys on a Tuesday night. When I returned, my housemate neil_exile wasn't in yet and, after half an hour, it quickly occurred to me he might not be back for hours. The neighbour whom I had once let into my house to crawl over the back garden fence (I am convinced that dense people, like celestial bodies, must spacially cluster) into her garden now offered to allow me to do the same. So I did so, barely escaping the loving clutches of the roses. I then dragged the barbeque up to the conservatory wall, climbed up on it, pulled one of the 2 metre roof slats off the conservatory roof, pulled myself over and leapt down onto the table in the conservatory. 2 minutes later, neil_exile returned. Still, I had fun. May be a lucrative career as a burglar in it for me.
neil_exile's brother Martin came to stay over for the weekend. He's a graphic designer living in Beijing, and so I had the opportunity to practice my awful Mandarin on him. Turns out his ain't so hot either, and he doesn't even know the correct tones for half the things he can say, but apparently it doesn't really matter as long as you talk fast enough.
BIOSHOCK! Unable to wait until guru_bob finished playing it, I bought the damned thing. You'd think that, having waited literally several years for it to come out, I could have waited a few weeks longer, but noooo. I then spent almost a day trying to make the copy protection (OF DOOM!) allow me to play the game I had legitimately bought with the sweat of my brow but that was forgiven when I finally got it up and running, because it truly is RATHER GOOD. blueberrycowboy said it wasn't as quite as good as System Shock 2 and I'd have to agree, but ONLY because it doesn't have SHODAN in it and, frankly, that's a criticism I could quite unfairly make of any game. ^_^ |
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| But What Does It DO? |
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| 09:17am 18/08/2007 |
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mood:  cheerful
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Chris and Barbara, some Scottish friends of mine who live nearby, successfully produced a hybrid of themselves last week. neil_exile and I visited them on Wednesday evening and saw the baby girl, named Marhi Gribbin. She was actually quite cute but I had to suppress the urge to say "Wow. It's not at all as ugly as other babies I've seen!"
I had the feeling that it might not have been taken as the truthful and sincere compliment it would have been. I SHOULD, of course, have said "She's beautiful!" but that would have been less than sincere because babies just aren't (unlike, say, cats or spiders), except maybe in some cheesily ephemeral Isn't-life-glorious? kind of way or perhaps even in a Mother-has-sharp-implements-within-arm's-reach way.
But very cute.
It was also very strange to consider that, this being a human life and therefore theoretically rather important, they let untrained civilians have a go at keeping them alive and raising them properly. I can't shake the feeling that you should really need a licence for this sort of thing. I'm not really worried about Chris and Babs, as they're both biologists and quite clever, but they even let stupid people and chavs raise children without professional supervision. You have to be vetted and qualified to be a child-minder but anyone is allowed to make their own. Funny world.
Still, in the beginning, I suppose it's only about input, output and thermal equilibrium and you do learn on the job.
We then took Chris to the pub where he proceeded to explain to us in gruesome detail the process and tribulations of labour and childbirth. I'm not sure whether it was the biologist in him or just a shell-shocked outpouring but it certainly was interesting. Apparently, it's nightmarish beyond my capacity to comprehend and women have a hormonal mechanism that makes them forget quite how horrible it was or they'd probably never breed again. Also, apparently, you have to wake a baby us to feed it because they generally won't do so of their own accord near the beginning. How did we get this far as a species?
Do you chaps find the whole thing as odd as I? Do you plan to progenerate? |
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| Thick Brains |
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| 05:44pm 09/08/2007 |
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mood:  nauseated
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What is the data storage capacity of the human brain? Not in terms of terabytes or whatever, as you can't really measure "capacity" of a neural net that way...what I mean is...does it ever get full? Is that why things are harder to learn as you get old? Is forgetting a mechanism to free up more space? Do people with eidetic memory not run out of space real quick-like?
I know so much useless gunk that I would happily delete if it could let me learn other stuff more efficiently.
Today I learned: Ribena does not mix well with milk. |
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happy
enRaptured