It's finally raining here in Cincinnati! We've had a few sprinkles here and there over the past week or so, but nothing exciting (except for the storm we got yesterday, but I was in church and couldn't fully appreciate it). As I sit here typing and frequently stopping to admire the rain, I remember why I love it so.
It brings a wholesome, fresh smell from the ground. It was this smell that I noticed first, before even the sound and sight of the rain. The smell wafted through my open window and filled me with a peaceful sort of happiness.
Once I smelled the rain smell, I immediately recognized that the sound I had mistaken for the wind continuing to buffet the trees was in fact the rain pattering on the grass and houses and everything else. The wind still blew strong, but the sound of the raindrops mixed into the music.
A split second later I looked out the window and saw the rain as well. It fell slant-wise from the force of the wind and blurred the stand of Austrian pines across the field in a lovely way. Even now that the rain has lightened and the wind calmed, the swift fall of the rain to the ground is soothing.
During the height of the cloudburst, I could even feel the rain. The wild wind occasionally pushed stray raindrops through my window where the screen scattered them into a spray that refreshed my arms and face.
Unfortunately I couldn't taste the rain (I did try, but not hard enough), but the plants can. Well, I suppose they can't literally taste it, but they can drink in its life-giving goodness. As the playwright* said, "Water is life."
I know that if the rain continued for days on end, my peaceful, cozy contentedness would turn to sadness, but when I've waited so long for rain, the only sadness is the happy sorrow (if that makes sense) that the rainsong brings to me.
*The playwright I speak of is the screenwriter for "Dune." I don't know if playwright was the right word to use there, but poet didn't quite fit, and I didn't know what other word to use.
Wednesday, August 18, 2010
Thursday, August 12, 2010
Book Review: The Thousand and Second Arabian Night and The Mystery of Marie Roget
I've finally caught back up to events after my fast, but not quite to the present. Expect real-time posts starting next week when I'm back at school.
Through a chain of events, I found myself at Josh's house with nothing to do. I availed myself of his Poe collection and proceeded to pick out some stories I hadn't read yet. The two I chose were, as the post title indicates, "The Thousand and Second Arabian Night" and "The Mystery of Marie Roget."
I was in the mood for some stereotypical Poe: dark and fantastic with a hint of depression and/or madness. The first story I picked, "The Thousand and Second Arabian Night," didn't fit that category, but it was still an interesting read. I learned a lot of new facts, which I've probably mostly forgotten already. The premise was this: after the thousand and first Arabian night, Scheherazade continued to tell stories of Sinbad's travels. On the thousand and second night, all the sights and wonders from her story were based on real things (Mammoth Caves was one, but I forget the rest) described in unusual but truthful ways. In the end, the king decided her story was far too ridiculous and had her executed.
I picked the next story because I recognized it as one in my collection of Poe stories, but I had somehow not read it yet. "The Mystery of Marie Roget" was Poe's second mystery story and was based on details and news articles from real events in New York City surrounding Mary Rogers' apparent murder. According to Josh's anthology, Poe solved the mystery correctly based solely on these newspaper excerpts. According to every other account I've found on the internet, he was wrong. He even released an edited version of the story in which the detective reasoned that Marie died as Mary actually did. It wasn't exactly the sort of story I was in the mood for either, but I enjoyed it more than I did the first I read. I do love a mystery story every so often.
Story Information
Titles: The Thousand and Second Arabian Night, The Mystery of Marie Roget
Author: Edgar Allan Poe
Years Published: 1845, 1842
Through a chain of events, I found myself at Josh's house with nothing to do. I availed myself of his Poe collection and proceeded to pick out some stories I hadn't read yet. The two I chose were, as the post title indicates, "The Thousand and Second Arabian Night" and "The Mystery of Marie Roget."
I was in the mood for some stereotypical Poe: dark and fantastic with a hint of depression and/or madness. The first story I picked, "The Thousand and Second Arabian Night," didn't fit that category, but it was still an interesting read. I learned a lot of new facts, which I've probably mostly forgotten already. The premise was this: after the thousand and first Arabian night, Scheherazade continued to tell stories of Sinbad's travels. On the thousand and second night, all the sights and wonders from her story were based on real things (Mammoth Caves was one, but I forget the rest) described in unusual but truthful ways. In the end, the king decided her story was far too ridiculous and had her executed.
I picked the next story because I recognized it as one in my collection of Poe stories, but I had somehow not read it yet. "The Mystery of Marie Roget" was Poe's second mystery story and was based on details and news articles from real events in New York City surrounding Mary Rogers' apparent murder. According to Josh's anthology, Poe solved the mystery correctly based solely on these newspaper excerpts. According to every other account I've found on the internet, he was wrong. He even released an edited version of the story in which the detective reasoned that Marie died as Mary actually did. It wasn't exactly the sort of story I was in the mood for either, but I enjoyed it more than I did the first I read. I do love a mystery story every so often.
Story Information
Titles: The Thousand and Second Arabian Night, The Mystery of Marie Roget
Author: Edgar Allan Poe
Years Published: 1845, 1842
Saturday, July 31, 2010
Colombia: Cultural Tidbits
This will be the final post in my Colombia series. There will be no real connection between all these little blurbs, and it will irritate me that I can’t organize it, but I’ll have to get over that. These facts I’ll be sharing are relevant only to the areas we worked in, unless noted otherwise.
Ice cream is huge there. Almost every little store that sells food (and some that don’t) sells ice cream. In the mall, you can stand in any given place and spot at least one ice cream place. At the bigger mall, you can always spot at least two. And it’s good ice cream, too.
The garbage trucks and not the ice cream trucks play the music we associate with ice cream here in the U.S.
There are two ways to rank the affluence of a person by their home: their roof and their walls. Very well-off people have concrete roofs. Everyone else has corrugated metal. Fiberglass panels with the metal serve as sky lights in nicer houses. Bolts hold the roof tight in better houses, while bricks and rocks serve the purpose in worse houses. The best houses are made of bricks covered in concrete and painted bright colors. Minus colors is worse, then minus the concrete layer, and the worst is a house made of boards or corrugated metal tacked and tied together with tarps over the gaps.
Black coffee is sometimes referred to as “la tinta,” which literally means ink.
The most commonly eaten meats are chicken and beef.
Complex carbs are responsible for most of their diet. Potatoes, plantains, yucca, and rice are the most common, but pasta can also be found.
Fruit typically comes from street vendors who bring in their goods from their farms every day in trucks that we would consider valuable antiques.
Their hot chocolate is stronger and a touch more bitter than ours. I like it a lot more.
When they make fruit juice, they take the fruit, remove leaves or stems, stick it in a blender, add a bit of water, and blend it all up. It adds a whole new dimension of texture to your juice experience.
There are stray dogs all over the place. You can walk one block and see a dozen. They ignore you if you ignore them. From what I can tell, they live off of garbage and the occasional rat. At night they like to bark endlessly.
At church they have a few customary question and response things they use at the beginning of a service or whenever they need to get people's attention. It goes like this: "Que vive?" "Christo!" "Y su nombre es?" "Gloria!" It translates to this: "Who lives?" "Christ!" "And what is his name?" "Glorious!" It's neat to hear everyone shout the answers.
The day starts when the sun comes up. At 5:30 am there are already people up and about, mariachi music playing from windows, and stores open.
Few people have cars, but the ones who do drive aggressively. As do the motorcycles, taxis, buses, and trucks. Traffic is insane down there. Only the brave can manage to get anywhere.
Nobody has room for a garden, but house plants are popular, especially geraniums.
When someone can afford to paint their house, they use bright colors and patterns. Most of the patterns feature diamonds, sometimes with circles.
All doors and windows have metal gratings to reduce theft. These gratings come in all sort of designs and patterns from rectangles to rays to flowers. They add charm to any home.
Their Coke is made with cane sugar and is therefore superior in taste to American Coke. Even I, who am not well acquainted with any sort of pop, recognized this.
Chickens roam the city, like the dogs, but in lesser quantities. They can be found on roofs, unlike the dogs, and are noisy in the morning rather than at night.
It is common for friends, especially females, to greet each other with a kiss on the cheek.
When you say hello at church, "Dios bendiga" is the key phrase. It means "God bless you."
Ice cream is huge there. Almost every little store that sells food (and some that don’t) sells ice cream. In the mall, you can stand in any given place and spot at least one ice cream place. At the bigger mall, you can always spot at least two. And it’s good ice cream, too.
The garbage trucks and not the ice cream trucks play the music we associate with ice cream here in the U.S.
There are two ways to rank the affluence of a person by their home: their roof and their walls. Very well-off people have concrete roofs. Everyone else has corrugated metal. Fiberglass panels with the metal serve as sky lights in nicer houses. Bolts hold the roof tight in better houses, while bricks and rocks serve the purpose in worse houses. The best houses are made of bricks covered in concrete and painted bright colors. Minus colors is worse, then minus the concrete layer, and the worst is a house made of boards or corrugated metal tacked and tied together with tarps over the gaps.
Black coffee is sometimes referred to as “la tinta,” which literally means ink.
The most commonly eaten meats are chicken and beef.
Complex carbs are responsible for most of their diet. Potatoes, plantains, yucca, and rice are the most common, but pasta can also be found.
Fruit typically comes from street vendors who bring in their goods from their farms every day in trucks that we would consider valuable antiques.
Their hot chocolate is stronger and a touch more bitter than ours. I like it a lot more.
When they make fruit juice, they take the fruit, remove leaves or stems, stick it in a blender, add a bit of water, and blend it all up. It adds a whole new dimension of texture to your juice experience.
There are stray dogs all over the place. You can walk one block and see a dozen. They ignore you if you ignore them. From what I can tell, they live off of garbage and the occasional rat. At night they like to bark endlessly.
At church they have a few customary question and response things they use at the beginning of a service or whenever they need to get people's attention. It goes like this: "Que vive?" "Christo!" "Y su nombre es?" "Gloria!" It translates to this: "Who lives?" "Christ!" "And what is his name?" "Glorious!" It's neat to hear everyone shout the answers.
The day starts when the sun comes up. At 5:30 am there are already people up and about, mariachi music playing from windows, and stores open.
Few people have cars, but the ones who do drive aggressively. As do the motorcycles, taxis, buses, and trucks. Traffic is insane down there. Only the brave can manage to get anywhere.
Nobody has room for a garden, but house plants are popular, especially geraniums.
When someone can afford to paint their house, they use bright colors and patterns. Most of the patterns feature diamonds, sometimes with circles.
All doors and windows have metal gratings to reduce theft. These gratings come in all sort of designs and patterns from rectangles to rays to flowers. They add charm to any home.
Their Coke is made with cane sugar and is therefore superior in taste to American Coke. Even I, who am not well acquainted with any sort of pop, recognized this.
Chickens roam the city, like the dogs, but in lesser quantities. They can be found on roofs, unlike the dogs, and are noisy in the morning rather than at night.
It is common for friends, especially females, to greet each other with a kiss on the cheek.
When you say hello at church, "Dios bendiga" is the key phrase. It means "God bless you."
I'm back!
Today marks the end of my semi-internet fast. As you can see, my blog has undergone some aesthetic changes. There's no guarantee that I'll keep the current layout. In fact, I can almost guarantee that it will changing fairly frequently. With so many new options and none that strike me as absolutely perfect, I'll be cycling through various backgrounds depending on my mood and whatnot. At the moment I'm thinking I will loosely tie the blog's feel to the seasons, but there will probably be days or weeks in there when I choose something completely unrelated.
Tomorrow I will start posting one entry a day of things I typed while I was off the blog. I currently have five book reviews, three question-based entries, and seven descriptions of travel adventures lined up for sharing. It is important to note that I will be dating them based on when I would have posted them, so you'll have to scroll past this entry to get to the new ones until I catch up.
Tomorrow I will start posting one entry a day of things I typed while I was off the blog. I currently have five book reviews, three question-based entries, and seven descriptions of travel adventures lined up for sharing. It is important to note that I will be dating them based on when I would have posted them, so you'll have to scroll past this entry to get to the new ones until I catch up.
Friday, July 30, 2010
Colombia: Tourist Days
Our three VBS and construction days were flanked by two days of touristy stuff. On Monday we visited Monserrate and the largest mall and South America, and on Friday we went to the Salt Cathedral and a smaller mall.
For those of us who went on the trip two years ago, this was our second time at Monserrate. Monserrate is a chapel perched atop the highest point in Bogota. It has beautiful gardens, charming architecture, and a spectacular view of the massive city of Bogota. I loved it last time, and it was no less exciting to me this time around. To get up to the chapel, you ride the Funicular, a cable car sort of thing that you stand in as you head up the steep mountainside. At the top, we were given free rein to wander as we wished. I looked around at the scenery for a while and then headed to the alley full of vendors. I bought three pairs of earrings and a purse. I’ve decided to downgrade purse sizes. My old purse consistently weighed about ten pounds. I couldn’t carry it at Purdue along with my book-bag, or it would give me back and shoulder problems. My new purse is less than half the capacity. It holds the bare necessities (from my point of view) from my old purse. I still have the other one, and thanks to the fact that I kept its contents compartmentalized into pouches I can quickly switch back to it if the occasion calls for my characteristic Mary Poppins purse. We got a group picture, rode back down in the Funicular, and waited for our bus. We were waiting next to a man with a saddled llama. He could tell that we were amused by his llama, so he let all of us who were interested take turns sitting on the llama. We finished right about when the bus arrived.
The mall wasn’t terribly exciting to me. I don’t much care for malls in the U.S., and this one wasn’t much different. It was well-designed and decorated though, I must say. My dad and brother weren’t too excited by it either, so after I helped Bill and Keri order from Dunkin’ Donuts and ordered ice cream for the three of us, we went back outside and sat near a fountain until it was time to go.
After our three days of work, we took another day off to leave the city and visit El Cathedral de Sal in the neighboring city of Zipaquira. The Salt Cathedral is built into a salt mine. Everything is carved into the salt and is completely made of salt (except for a few places where granite or marble were used to reinforce the floor). It is comprised of fourteen “chapels” representing the fourteen stages of the cross, according to Catholic tradition. At each stage is a sculpture involving a cross and the surrounding salt symbolizing the events of that stage. We were led through the cathedral by an English-speaking Colombian man who seemed to have learned his English from someone from Australia. He was not only informative, but also incredibly entertaining - even more entertaining than he intended to be. It was a beautiful place. While some stopped at the coffee shop at the end of the tour (after all, there is no other coffee shop in the world farther beneath the surface than the one there), I set off to take pictures.
After the Salt Cathedral, we drove to another mall smaller than the first. We ate lunch there, and then I sat down and read. I had become very dehydrated and was starting to feel dizzy with an insanely fast pulse. Fortunately I had brought both a book and a water bottle in my purse, so once I sat down and drank some I started to feel better. The drive back was long, but we passed through some beautiful countryside areas and colorful urban regions. Colombia is a beautiful country.
For those of us who went on the trip two years ago, this was our second time at Monserrate. Monserrate is a chapel perched atop the highest point in Bogota. It has beautiful gardens, charming architecture, and a spectacular view of the massive city of Bogota. I loved it last time, and it was no less exciting to me this time around. To get up to the chapel, you ride the Funicular, a cable car sort of thing that you stand in as you head up the steep mountainside. At the top, we were given free rein to wander as we wished. I looked around at the scenery for a while and then headed to the alley full of vendors. I bought three pairs of earrings and a purse. I’ve decided to downgrade purse sizes. My old purse consistently weighed about ten pounds. I couldn’t carry it at Purdue along with my book-bag, or it would give me back and shoulder problems. My new purse is less than half the capacity. It holds the bare necessities (from my point of view) from my old purse. I still have the other one, and thanks to the fact that I kept its contents compartmentalized into pouches I can quickly switch back to it if the occasion calls for my characteristic Mary Poppins purse. We got a group picture, rode back down in the Funicular, and waited for our bus. We were waiting next to a man with a saddled llama. He could tell that we were amused by his llama, so he let all of us who were interested take turns sitting on the llama. We finished right about when the bus arrived.
The mall wasn’t terribly exciting to me. I don’t much care for malls in the U.S., and this one wasn’t much different. It was well-designed and decorated though, I must say. My dad and brother weren’t too excited by it either, so after I helped Bill and Keri order from Dunkin’ Donuts and ordered ice cream for the three of us, we went back outside and sat near a fountain until it was time to go.
After our three days of work, we took another day off to leave the city and visit El Cathedral de Sal in the neighboring city of Zipaquira. The Salt Cathedral is built into a salt mine. Everything is carved into the salt and is completely made of salt (except for a few places where granite or marble were used to reinforce the floor). It is comprised of fourteen “chapels” representing the fourteen stages of the cross, according to Catholic tradition. At each stage is a sculpture involving a cross and the surrounding salt symbolizing the events of that stage. We were led through the cathedral by an English-speaking Colombian man who seemed to have learned his English from someone from Australia. He was not only informative, but also incredibly entertaining - even more entertaining than he intended to be. It was a beautiful place. While some stopped at the coffee shop at the end of the tour (after all, there is no other coffee shop in the world farther beneath the surface than the one there), I set off to take pictures.
After the Salt Cathedral, we drove to another mall smaller than the first. We ate lunch there, and then I sat down and read. I had become very dehydrated and was starting to feel dizzy with an insanely fast pulse. Fortunately I had brought both a book and a water bottle in my purse, so once I sat down and drank some I started to feel better. The drive back was long, but we passed through some beautiful countryside areas and colorful urban regions. Colombia is a beautiful country.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)