this is an old song, these are old blues

I made blueberry pie today in my bee-oo-ti-ful new pyrex pie dish. I continue to fail at making the correct amount of pastry, though, and ended up making bizarre leaf shapes to go on the top. This, disappointingly enough, is the first successful pie I've made since I've had access to a kitchen in Vancouver. The other three attempts kind of...melted. 'Twas odd, and offputting. Thus I have not attempted making another until I moved into my new apartment where - joy of joys - there is an oven that does what you tell it to do. I comfort myself with the notion that it was oven failure before, rather than failure on the part of the baker.



Oh, and that's the view from my apartment now. JFC, I know. It's definitely the nicest place I am ever going to live in over the course of my entire life.

Pied Beauty

Gerard Manley Hopkins

Glory be to God for dappled things—
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough;
And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise him.

( Cut for scary-ass graphic nightmare description.Collapse )

Thank you so much, inner psyche. It's not as though I ever needed to sleep again.

I just arrived back at my dorm after watching the opening ceremonies of the Olympics and hanging out with people at the pub (just like a real life social university student! Fact: this is the first time this has happened to me).

Soooo uhhh it was really weird to watch the telecast knowing that if I walked outside and down the mountain a bit I would be able to see BC Place, where it was all happening. And then to see the torch taken down the street by Gretzky and recognizing the buildings and streets and, my god, even some of the faces in the crowd. Incredibly odd. I was born in Calgary during the 1988 Olympics and just this fall I was at the actual site of Olympia just days before the torch was lit for the Vancouver 2010 games.

And yet? Not all that excited.

I mean, I'm proud of my country. I'm proud of my city - warily so. I do want the world to come away with a positive view of Vancouver and Canada, but I don't know that I'm still happy that the world's eyes are on us in the first place.

Over the past few weeks it's become harder and harder to take the bus down East Hastings and see the obscene amount of poverty and homelessness, all the while with shiny new Olympic banners and buses and buildings pressing in on the cardboard and the piss and the sick. It's hard to do First Nations studies and talk with other First Nations and Métis students and still feel comfortable about the way aboriginal groups are presented in our culture, our media and these games. It's hard to explain! Even though I identify with one of the groups represented in the opening ceremonies (Métis Nation of Alberta), it still feels like idealized Native culture is used as a tourism shtick. It's a hard balance, and it's hard to put my finger on why I feel uncomfortable about it without coming off as defensive and overly politically correct.

That being said, I was really pleased to see Vancouver poet Shane Koyczan and KD Lang perform during the opening ceremony. They are so so so incredibly talented - the contrast between Lang and the girl who sang the Canadian anthem at the beginning of the ceremony! I hate that so much of musical performance in the media these days is centred on that awful style of American Idol singing. Just sing the fucking note! Strong singers like KD Lang don't need the showy stuff - the sheer quality of their voices in the first place is enough.

Also! Koyczan and Lang are hardly the types of people you see perform on broadcasts. Straight up, they're chubby and aren't conventionally attractive. But they're still fucking awesome. You know who else was awesome? Donald Sutherland, Nancy Greene, Anne Murray, Romeo Dalliare...all the people who carried in the Olympic flag. Sutherland made that white suit look damned good. He reminds me quite a bit of my dad, who had pure white silvery hair by the time he was in his 40s and had the same sort of longish face shape.

All that being said, I'm not even sticking around Vancouver for most of the Olympics! I'm going out to Victoria with my mom on Monday to hang out for 10 days or so. It's just too much to try and do anything in Vancouver over my spring break. It's too insane. I made the mistake of going downtown last week well before the events started and it was completely overwhelming. No thanks!

Hopefully I will have a good post or two to write about Victoria. With pictures this time, I promise.

I am no longer in Greece, strangely enough. I’m posting this from one of the myriad of airports I need to pass through before arriving back in Calgary for Christmas. Right now it is mostly travel stress and no sleep and a deep desire for a shower. I am certain that within a few days of getting home I will begin to miss Poros intensely but I’m more excited about being in one place for an extended period of time again. Oh, and my mom’s cooking. I won’t lie about that. Three and a half years of living away from home has not cured me of that.

( What more to tell you? What handful of images can I scatter at your feet?Collapse )

Please bring strange things.
Please come bringing new things.
Let very old things come into your hands.
Let what you do not know come into your eyes.
Let desert sand harden your feet.
Let the arch of your feet be the mountains.
Let the paths of your fingertips be your maps
and the ways you go be the lines on your palms.
Let there be deep snow in your inbreathing
and your outbreath be the shining of ice.
May your mouth contain the shapes of strange words.
May you smell food cooking you have not eaten.
May the spring of a foreign river be your navel.
May your soul be at home where there are no houses.
Walk carefully, well loved one,
walk mindfully, well loved one,
walk fearlessly, well loved one.
Return with us, return to us,
be always coming home.

- Ursula LeGuin

The real reason I bought myself a shiny digital SLR before coming out to Greece? Partially because I ruined the screen on my point and shoot by leaving it at the bottom of my backpack during a six hour trip back to SFU from Vancouver Island. Partially because I am a little bit of a snob and wanted to feel like I had actually put effort into taking pictures instead of dealing with automated settings all the time.

But the overwhelming real reason?



I wanted to take long exposure shots of the night sky. This is the early evening sky over the Ionian sea last week. Since we're still in the Northern Hemisphere it's familar enough to be recognizable, but the shift eastwards from Canada means that, night after night, I still find it difficult to orientate myself with Orion on the eastern horizon instead of directly overhead. Luckily I am attending the sort of field school that gives you cushy rooms in studio apartments instead of having you kip in the bush. Because, you know what? Going to the bathroom at 3am while camping does require some knowledge of north-south-east-west in order to allow you find your way back to your sleeping bag instead of heading off in the wrong direction into God knows what.

( the stars wheel overheadCollapse )

The weekend after Thanksgiving was a long weekend holiday sort of deal in Kefalonia, so we had a five day stretch without digging or classwork. A few people flew to Crete, a few to Corfu, a few stayed to explore Kefalonia a bit more. A fellow Albertan, Cat, and I went to the mainland again to visit Sparta. Actual Sparta! Pretty wicked. Mostly. Sparti is the main city in the area and is kind of the centre of the ancient Spartan sites and artifacts. The museum is fabulous, with a set of beautiful (and unpublished to boot, tasty to see!) 3rd century AD Roman frescos. It was the first time I’ve ever seen any depiction or mention of a sea-centaur which is, quite frankly, just badass. The town itself...meh. I profess to prefer the non-touristy areas of Greece but I speak Greek horribly and am fairly dependent on shopkeepers and waiters who are able to speak a few words of English. Beyond the museum there wasn’t much to do/see in Sparti. The site is interesting, but has no signage at all and without a lecturer like our field school director, Geoffrey, I kind of blank out. Classicist I am not.



( the flowers of monemvasiaCollapse )

So, yeah. When I retire a billionaire I am going to have a house in Monemvasia for the winters and I’m going to dress up in medieval clothing and faff about all day on sunny terraces playing a lyre or something. It was so ridiculously idyllic. There was a moment on the last morning where Cat and I were sitting on the terrace of a cafe, drinking very fresh orange juice with very warm, very buttery chocolate filled croissants, looking over the terracotta rooftiles to the ocean and listening to the birds singing in the lemon trees beside us...it was surreal. If ever you get to go to Greece, go to Monemvasia, my dears. It’s worth the bus ride from Athens.

Thanksgiving weekend (or at least Thanksgiving for Canadians) everyone as a group headed to the mainland Peloponnese area to go to Olympia and Pylos for some school planned tourism activities. Flickr set!

( fairytale castles and ruined palacesCollapse )



An update about the trip to Sparta will come as soon as I’ve finished uploading the pictures , which should be in the next day or two.

I am going to update soon, I swear. Last weekend the group was on the mainland to go to Pylos and Olympia. This weekend is a long weekend on kefalonia, so I am going to the mainland this afternoon, again, to trek around the Sparta area of the Pelopponese with another girl from the group. Most people seem to be flying out to Corfu/Crete/Santorini but I would rather not get on a plane, no thank you.



It's been chillier than usual the past few days but mostly it makes me miss good old Canadian autumnal weather. Especially Halloween - I believe we are going to have some sort of bonfire/ghost story night to celebrate it out here. I bought a book of M.R. James ghost stories in Argostoli. They're super oldschool early 20th century style ghost stories, and all seem to consist of educated gentlemen going abroad, finding an antique or artifact of some kind (usually from the Crusades, good Protestant that James was) and being visited upon by strange horrors in the night in their hotel rooms. Yeah, just the kind of stuff I need to be reading right now.

And I have come upon this place
By lost ways, by a nod, by words,
By faces, by an old man's face
...
By words, by voices, a lost way - ,
And here above the chimney stack
The unknown constellations sway -
And by what way shall I go back?
-Archibald MacLeish

In the summer of 1953 there was a massive earthquake in Kefalonia, which I had heard/read about prior to coming here. I didn’t expect to see the effects of it still so clearly visible around the island.

( we will wake the dead and take them to places they have never beenCollapse )



This is the platform visible on the right side of the picture of the municipality building. Yes, I have jumped off it, but it's disappointingly non-scary. :D