Tuesday 20 May 2008

Chinese Trains-lation

Life has been busy!

Last week, my sister and I spent the day with my cousin Aaron, who was here from Toronto for my Granny's funeral. Kaeli, Joel and I took him on the LRT with us to go vote for Natasha's Vue Box at the art gallery. We talked a lot about the train systems in Edmonton and Toronto (and San Francisco!) as we rode the friendly rails of Edmonton's Transit System.

When I got home, I had an email from my long lost friend Abby with a link to a video of a train in China. It is insane. When I was in grade 7 social studies, I remember learning about the special "pushers" on the trains who wear white gloves, but I never could quite imagine it. Until I saw this. Incredible.

On another only marginally-related note, the song "Chinese Translation" by M. Ward is pretty much awesome and you should listen to it. In fact, I really like the whole album. I put it on while I was hanging out at Joel's house last week while Kevin D. was giving him landscape architecture insights (very helpful and impressive insights, I might add). Since then I have been itching to buy it for myself.

In retrospect, this post didn't really address the fact that life has been busy, so I guess you will just have to take my word for it.

Thursday 8 May 2008

Love Much.

Love much. Earth has enough of bitter in it.
— Ella Wheeler Wilcox

Friday 2 May 2008

"You two just keep celebratin' your friendship"

For most of the past week, I was in San Francisco with Joel.


On the way there, I read "The Secret Life of Bees" by Sue Monk Kidd on the plane, and on the way home I read "Grace (Eventually)" by Anne Lamott. It felt great to just sit and read for hours on end. Both books were lovely by the way. Perfect for travel reading. It takes a certain kind of book I think to be a good travel companion. There has to be a certain lightness about it that can keep you interested and distracted even while you have to pee and the old lady next to you is sleeping and won't let you out. Both of these books had that without being flaky. And yes, I did have to pee and the old lady next to me was sleeping.

Other than the flights there and back being literarily satisfying, the city itself was also pretty great. Cable cars, seafood, oceans, bridges, croissants, museums, and shopping make San Francisco a very fun city to hang out in. We had some great seafood at Fisherman's Wharf and wicked sushi, and they had a sourdough bread bakery that would blow your mind even if you didn't like sourdough. We bought cable car / bus / train passes to get around with and walked a ton every day, which was extremely satisfying. It felt so good to be outside in the sunshine walking around instead of sitting on my ass. We tired ourselves out so much walking around the first day that we accidentally fell asleep at 9 p.m. and slept through to the next day. I think we made up for it by packing our days full though.

For all you who are wondering: I did not visit the Full House house. Although apparently it actually is in San Francisco. We did watch the Full House opening credits on youtube.com though. And Uncle Jesse's music video "Forever", which was not as good as I remembered. Wait a minute, I just watched it again when I inserted the link, and I take that back. It's incredible.

It was really windy almost the whole time we were there, especially when we went to the Golden Gate Bridge. As a great American city, I would rate San Francisco as a winner.

Along with all of the cool stuff in the city, we visited some sweet stores and eating establishments including: