geeking out at a shipyard

so much to write about (after a long, dry spell, i've got a ton of notes in my little bloggy notebook), but my connection is a bit iffy and they're going to black out the starboard side of the ship to change some breakers, so these photos of the fabulous remontowa shipyard in gdansk will have to suffice for now. this is from the back deck, tenth story of our ship.

and a view in the other direction. there's a big floating offshore rig in for repairs next to us and a lot of other ships. some of them don't even show up on marine traffic (the best app for shipspotting geeks), so they're so out of service their ais systems must be turned off.

in the dry dock, the ship rests on these big steel beams, topped with wood. and nothing else. it's amazing they can hold an enormous ship!

and here, i even dared to walk around down underneath the ship, even tho' it's balancing on so little. so utterly amazing to walk around underneath a ship.

all of this is making my molecules hum in alignment once again. turns out what it took to make all things right in my little world, was a bit of quality time in the company of ships (and some of the pretty cool people who make them run).

london calling

a few blissful days in london. part work, part play. all wonderful. meeting old friends. and new ones. seeing the sights. taking in the crowds and the noise. going to museums. eating new and interesting food. trying on clothes. drinking loads of starbucks. battling the heat. and ducking rain showers (in the gap, of course). tracking down bathrooms (after all that coffee). it was a full (almost) week.

landing from travels, even if they're only a time zone away and a short hour-long flight, always takes time. processing. finding your feet again at home. settling into the old rhythms after the disruption of another place. but disruption is good and healthy and shakes you from your complacency. it gives you a different view of the world. makes you appreciate home a little bit more. and tho' there are mountains of laundry to do, i'd rather just sit for a little while with a cat in my lap and absorb it all. i really did miss those cats.

toto, we're not in kansas anymore

during my usual sunday morning troll of the internet, i watched this wonderful TED talk by pico iyer on the subject of home:

as one who is by choice displaced, i often ponder what home means. quite often here on this very blog. i think that instead of getting easier to answer, the longer you are gone from home (your original home, the place of your birth), the more muddied the waters become. you begin to feel that place isn't home and this place, where you live and make your life and even find a lot of happiness, sometimes even on a daily basis, definitely isn't home either. and it leaves you all with what i like to call my mid-atlantic feeling (as in cast adrift in the middle of the atlantic, neither here nor there). and it is, as always, a lonely feeling, tho' it can also leave you feeling utterly unique and who doesn't, especially in their moments of private solipsism, want to feel unique, even if it unique in your own particular brand of lonely.

and so i struggle with notions of home. and making a home. and feeling at home. and maybe it's a normal state if 220 million of us are living outside the country of our birth, as iyer suggests. so maybe i should just lighten up and go with it. because this makes me sound like i'm unhappy and i'm far from that. i just don't really know if i know what home is in this age when so much is in flux. it's where you keep your important books, i thought at one time, but when our books now fit on an iPad, then home is wherever i find myself (provided i have my iPad with me) by that definition.

i suppose, as iyer says, i somehow do manage to stitch together a sense of home (and thus identity), from the various pieces i carry around inside me...where i was raised, where i live now, all of the places i have traveled, all of the experiences i've had, all of the memories i've created. i carry it all within me, no matter where i am. and my actual house is filled with things gathered on those travels...trinkets, statues, glassware, rugs, scarves, so it reflects that sense of home that i attempt to construct, almost unconsciously. and what is a home? a nest, a place to feel safe. a place to call your own. a place to house your important books. and i can't complain because i do have that, even if i couldn't have imagined how it would look and what it would be like, had you asked me to do that 20 years ago.

and so i muddle along, like so many others, constructing a life, a home, a family and filling it with deeds and memories.

there's no place like...

as i was packing up the bookshelves in the blue room, i took a moment to arrange these blocks against the beloved blue background. they're letterpress blocks from my dad's letterpress (why didn't i learn how to operate that when i had the chance?). i think they once assembled to spell the name of some or other horse that i had, and i've carried them around the world with me more than once. they're precious and i wouldn't want to be without them, even if they are occasionally jumbled into a box and not used.

moving brings on such mixed feelings. i'm excited and looking forward to the new house and all that we're going to do it to transform it into the house we'd like it to be. i'm going to love having our own lake and a lawn big enough to play football on (not that i want to do that, but knowing that i could is a good thing). space for a horse and chickens and maybe a truffling pig or two, oh and lambs. i'm so looking forward to all of that.

but i've loved this house too and we did so much to it to make it our own and give it our character and leave our mark on it. when we moved in, it was like stepping into a 70s time warp, even the garden looked like some evergreen-covered churchyard, full of low bushes that even looked totally seventies. we leave it transformed and we will miss it.

but as i said when i posted this picture on flickr the other day, we are not our house and we are able to make a home wherever we go. because the things that make a home are all of the things, packed with memory and meaning, that we take with us. even if it is a royal pain packing them all up.

three times trees

the troll hill (troldebakken) across from our house on thursday, december 17, 2009
straight out of the camera (SOOC)

8:29 a.m.

10:42 a.m.

4:04 p.m.

proving once again that light makes all the difference in the world.

let me count the ways...

i know that i've been likening singapore to disneyland time and again, but i've never really explained what i mean by that. so i've composed a little list of ways in which singapore is exactly like disneyland:

1. it's extremely artificial, tho' well-done artificial.

at the aquarium on sentosa, someone swimming in the tank reminds you of the artificiality.

oh, and that you're on a moving, rolling walkway, tho' that doesn't show in the picture.

this is a little artificial swimming area for children that is ON THE BEACH.

because it's not enough that you can go into the south china sea, RIGHT THERE.

2. it's very safe.

i believe this sign bears no explanation.

3. it's incredibly clean and even sanitized - example, you cannot buy chewing gum in singapore. it's illegal to import it and sell it there. if you have some in your bag when you come in, that's ok, but don't try to sell it to anyone! and for odin's sake, do NOT spit it out on the ground.

these capsules on the singapore flyer are sanitized by a team of cleaners between when one group gets off and the next gets on. it's astonishing to watch. and i was so astonished, i failed to photograph the three guys doing the cleaning. 

4. it's all surface and if you scratch that surface, you find that what's below it is totally artificial (this is kind of a repeat of 1, but it's so marked it bears repeating).

this is a fake tree, made of concrete. of course, a real tree has grown up around it, but the tree trunk in the picture is a well-made fake concrete tree that supports the little bridge over to the point that claims to be the farthest southern point of the asian continent. tho' it's probably a fake little manmade island. and i'm not sure that counts.

5. you can be entertained at every moment if you choose that.

one of the ways we chose to be entertained...the fish-touching tank at the aquarium on sentosa.

sabin touching a little shark.

6. the landscaping is lovely.

in the butterfly garden on sentosa

7. they both have the death penalty (ok, not so sure disneyland has the death penalty, but i did get kicked out once for wearing a bikini top).

i had no picture that went with this, so this is just another gratuitous shot of clarke quay since y'all liked the other one so well.

8. both are climate-controlled.

you can see the umbrella-like roofs which keep in the outdoor airconditioning at clarke quay.

and it's not just misters, it's actual giant air-conditioning units.

i can't get over it!

9. pink dolphins. admittedly, i don't know if disney has any pink dolphins, but it would be kinda disney-esque.

yes, this photo is a bit grainy, i forgot to reset the ISO from inside the aquarium. my bad.

10. there's lots of drama in any performance, whether it's the dolphin show on sentosa island or the disembodied voice when you reach the top of the singapore flyer or the animal show at the night safari and the singapore zoo--they're all over-dramatized.

even the birds were overly dramatic!

three of them hopped onto sabin's hand to get the sweet liquid. she wasn't entirely pleased about that.

the drama was especially evident in the announcers at the various shows we attended--night safari animal show, dolphin show, etc. but there are no pictures that do it justice.

11. it's all about consumerism, baby!

in the vivo mall at harbor front

fancy new ion mall on orchard road next to wisma atria (another mall)

12. there is a shocking lack of awareness of the issues facing the world (global warming, global financial crisis, you get the picture).

and while i think it's undoubtedly an excellent place to be an ex-pat, i don't think i could live there long-term. i'd have to know that it was a specific, pre-defined amount of time, or i'd go crazy. but it is a nice place to visit. there's lots to do and it's clean and safe and the taxis are cheap and the food is great, but we are definitely glad to be home.

looks like we made it

i'll admit it was touch and go for a little bit there in amsterdam. nerves were wearing thin after 10 days of non-stop togetherness and 12 hours cramped together on the plane. there was a bit of snapping. and husband showed himself to be rather prissily annoyingly danish rule-oriented and admonished me for taking the next picture, snarking, "you know it's illegal to take photographs in an airport," in a neah-neah-i-hope-they-haul-you-away-and-we-never-see-you-again voice.

but i think it turned out pretty well, despite what he said. morning sunshine on a shiny, clean plane that's just waiting to take you home is a lovely sight indeed.

then just to be defiant of husband and his grown-up rules and stuff, i took this shot of the pilot's feet as he went by.

and nobody said a word to me about taking pictures. legal or not. so neah-neah yourself, husband. yup, i can be very mature.

then we got home at last and the day is completely glorious and the garden is beautiful (if fading a little, with hints of autumn here and there) and that (and a shower) made things better. as did hanging out in the garden with a book, relaxing and getting acquainted with little guys like this one...i think he's a moth, not a butterfly, but he's pretty anyway.

and soon, there will be cold white wine and charcoals starting up and yummy tarragon mustard potato salad and grilled ribs. and all that long journey will prove to have been worth it if only because it makes us appreciate home.

will be back soon with many of the impressions and stories i've been collecting over the past week or so...in the meantime, happy weekend!

EDIT: i have since looked into the question of legality of taking photos in airports...it seems that it varies by airport and some (like AMS) actually have areas where they allow/encourage it. however, where they generally don't encourage it is at security, so do be careful when photographing in airports! the photos i took were probably quite ok, since there's no security facilities in sight, tho' they might have objected to the detail of the activity around the plane itself in the shot of the plane being loaded at the gate.

the things you hold onto

there's no place like home

i've lived away from my country of birth during the whole monica lewinsky thing + the entire bush administration, that's now more than a decade. people always ask me what i miss. and aside from my family, which is a given, i usually say, just The Gap. and i do miss the gap. except when they forget that what they do is make great hooded sweatshirts, but i'm confident they'll remember soon.

but when i think about it, there are other things. like hot rollers. nobody does hot rollers where i live and i'd like to have the occasional curly hair day (that would make my mom happy as well, she always thinks that a look is never really complete if you have flat hair).

and there's the fact that clabber girl baking powder is the best kind. we, of course, have baking powder too, but it's just not the same. however, our yeast (blocks of the fresh kind) totally kicks those wussy dry packets. and mom sends me clabber girl when i need it.

and although ikea now has a form of zip-loc bag available, you can't get that really nice little snack size zip-locs that are ideal for sabin's lunches. so we still import those.

i would say that i let go of other things in stages. for the first couple of years, i imported mentadent toothpaste. i loved that stuff, but now i've gotten used to colgate (because it's available here too) and i no longer need to use up valuable luggage space on that. i'm not even sure they still make it. i think i liked that little push thingie it came in.

i also would lay in a large supply of dry idea deodorant whenever i was home, but now i can deal with whatever's available on the grocery store shelf--rexona or whatever. it really all works equally well. (except when you forget to pack it.)

i miss regular access to vanity fair and atlantic monthly and the new yorker, but perhaps enjoy them more because i only get them once in awhile when i pass through an airport or city that has them, so the pain is less than i would once have imagined.

same with movies. i used to have to see every movie in the theatre on the weekend it came out. now, pretty much the only time i see movies is on a long-haul flight. and i don't miss it, not even a little bit. perhaps my taste has improved or movies have not. but with something like a new james bond, we do still go on opening weekend. (perhaps i should take a lesson from this on the whole getting rid of the t.v. notion.)

some of these are surely products of growing older, but they're also about the adaptability of humans to their surroundings. i have my frustrations with what i at times perceive as the impoliteness of danes, but for the most part, i feel i'm home. it's here my best and favorite people are and our home is filled with memories of our life, even if we use different products than i was once used to.

i think it was B who said it not long ago, home is where your books are. your toothpaste and deodorant, those change. and as you can see, my books are most decidedly here...