Forty-Two

Eating the sacred Lotus

2010-03-24T02:13:00.000-07:00

The lotus plant is prolific in Cambodia. We see it everywhere; growing in ponds, in large pots, on the edge of the river, in the architecture, in the typography, names of Hotels and Guesthouses, tour agencies and restaurants and just about anywhere there is a temple or a crowd of people.

An aquatic plant with a showy blossom which comes in pinks, pale blue and white and is just as stunning as a bud as it when when it opens flat. According to sacred scripture it can have more than a hundred petals.

Spiritually the lotus is an important plant to Buddhists, Hindus (it is the national flower of India) and the ancient Egyptians. According to one creation myth it was a giant lotus which first rose out of the watery chaos, an infinate ocean of water called Nun, at the beginning of time. The lotus blossom opened and out stepped the sun god, Atum, as a child (some versions say it was in fact Ra) to create the first day. He returns to the lotus each evening and as the lotus blossom closes for the night he disappears.

Creating a similar image in both Buddhism and Hinduism the lotus regularly appears as a symbol of purity, peace, enlightenment, beauty, rebirth, transcendence and fertility and is considered to be of divine origin. Buddha was said to sleep on a lotus six months of the year, and Shambala- Buddhist heaven- is sometimes protrayed as a field of sacred lotus blossoms.

The idea of the symbolic connection to enlightenment is, I think, a beautiful metaphor. The lotus begins its life humbly in the mud and grows through the sometimes turbulent, often dirty and occasionally deep water (representing the trials of life) to the warmth and light of the sun where it can show its beautiful delicate face and bask in the warmth. Lotus flowers ‘wake up’ (open) at dawn and go to sleep (close) in the afternoon, at about the same time I have my natural low ebb. Some lotuses have even been known to open up at night and close during the day, ignoring the normal sunlight hours favoured by the majority of flowering plants, and effectively transcending normal time cycles.

For Hindus it is from an opening lotus bud that emerged from the navel of a slumbering Vishnu, the preserver of life, long ago, at the end of the aeons, when the whole universe had been engulfed in an ocean, and Creation was all but lost. From the flower came an egg which held a sleeping Brahma, the creator of all, who as he stirred nudged the creation of new worlds and gods and life could begin again.

The lotus is the only plant to fruit and flower simultaneously which means that you can buy bunches of lotus buds as offerings and the flat green seed pods with seeds to snack on while you wait in the temple queue. The riverfront in Phnom Penh is currently being developed. Soon you will be able to walk all the way from the new public toilets and visitors centre opposite the Royal Palace to Street 106 where the night market is which is great because it is a favourite meeting place for locals and tourists alike. At about 5 o'clock when the day begins to lose it's intensity the boardwalk and nearby park fill with people exercising, socialising, eating, peddling and just resting. There are two shrines, one always busier than the other, at one end and a variety of lotus sellers from which to buy your bunches of buds and insence sticks. There are also lotus sellers dealing in the edible bits hidden in the flat round green pods with the kind of 'modern' shape coveted by a contemporary florist.

A bunch of three pods laced together with dried grass cost J 3000 riel (about 75 cents).

Pull the pod apart to reveal the pale green seed.

Peel the soft thick skin off each seed and eat. They taste a lot like sun warmed fresh peas straight off the vine.

It didn't take long before we were surrounded by some of the little kids who seemed more intent on playing yesterday than they did begging, their usual evening occupation. 'Just one, just one' they giggled. The little one opposite me kept coming back for 'one more, one more'. She even said thank you.

We shared a pod then gave the other two away to two other little boys who were sitting watching the boats on the water.

Apparently lotus seeds are good for chronic diarrhea not a bad thing to know in these parts!

There is a place. Like no place on Earth. A land full of wonder, mystery, and danger! Some say to survive it: You need to be as mad as a hatter.

2010-03-24T02:05:00.000-07:00

We snuck away to Singapore for the weekend and stayed here which is further away from Orchard Road than we usually stay but still just three stops on the MRT. Originally we had booked a four night stay for three of us with days of theatre, movies, eating and sticking up on underwear but a week out J was called to Jakarta for work and ended up leaving Sunday. He did manage to catch 'To Kill a Mockingbird' on stage at the National Library Theatre and the very last showing of Avatar in 3D at Shaw House with us before he left with strict instructions not to forget the candles from Ikea on his way back through.

We felt like we were the last people on earth to see Avatar, sitting in a half empty cinema at lunchtime, wearing a pair of thick rimmed Joe Ninety 3D glasses. We have had the (2D) DVD for a few weeks now but hadn't opened it wanting our first watch to be the way it was intended and now it will probably stay in its box. After seeing it's 3D incarnation I am pretty sure the 2D version will seem rather flat- pun intended! The visual effects were impressive. Being in 3D meant I felt pulled into the story. It reminded me of when surround sound first came out and all of a sudden Maverick and Goose were flying around the room yelling first in one ear then the other. Definately groundbreaking.

I snuck my wee finepix in and managed to snap a couple of fairly clear photos too.

On Sunday we went to see Harper Lee's 'To Kill a Mockingbird' by Singapore's Toy Factory productions surrounded by a fairly well behaved school group in the libraries enviable little theatre.

The American classic is still required reading, so I've discovered, in International schools. M is reading it in English right now. He managed to finish on the plane trip over as he didn't want artistic director Goh Boon Teck's vision to influence his first read through. The clever modern set design was simple and dramatic; a completely blackened stage punctuated only by a row of 6 doorways, tall chrome legged stackable bar stools as props and scene appropriate lighting, requiring the actors to carry the well known and much loved work which, for the most part, they did. The experienced multiracial cast shouldered the responsibility of not only convincing the audience of their characters and their sincerity through accents that were varied but never southern but also of creating the scene with only the stools. The result was a fine piece of choreography to go with some sage and enduring lines and a throughly modern and enjoyable production.

Next on the agenda, after J had flown our crumpled coop, was Tim Burton's 'Alice in Wonderland', also in 3D of course. I like Burton /Depp /Bonham Carter compilations and Alice was no exception.

The staging and the makeup were incredible. Wonderland exactly as I had imagined it the numerous times I have read Lewis Carroll's printed version. Burton's Alice, technically a mix of "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland' and 'Through the looking glass and what Aice found there', is bold and ravishing, whimsical and heart stoppingly surreal.

I loved the inclusion of recognisable lines straight from the pages of a childhood Alice and the inclusion of the Jabberwocky with Carroll's fabulous fantastical onomatopaeia mouthed so easily by the Mad Hatter;

'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves

Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;

All mimsy were the borogoves,

And the mome raths outgrabe.

As if he knows what it all means!

I also managed a coffee with the talented Leone whose blog I have been reading (and photographs I have been devouring) ironically since we moved to Cambodia although Leone and her husband moved to Singapore at about the same time we did. We flew home on Tuesday in skies so clear I swear I saw heaven.

Better to write for yourself and have no public than to write the public and have no self. ~Cyril Connolly

2010-03-22T03:17:00.000-07:00

I have been rather quiet lately and not by choice.
It all started when we came home from Italy to an extraordinarily slow internet connection which, it turned out, was caused by the speedy erection of this building to the point where it blocked our signal. No sooner was I back online when I began having problems with Blogger. It wouldnt stop loading meaning my account never fully opened and I couldnt post. I fiddled around with the settings a bit and managed a couple of uploads using the basic mode and then was frozen out again. Thankfully I could still see all your blogs and was able to post comments so I didnt feel too much out of the loop!
I finally worked out how to find the forum and discovered it was a Blogger problem not my computer, connection or Cambodia but still couldnt get in successfully. Finally just as I was about to abandon Blogger altogether in favour of a Wordpress account I was back still feeling rather trepacious and gun-shy but back then our router spat the dummy. According to the Ezecom guy who came and spent more than an hour sorting things out for me the electricity fluctuations and outages play havok with the routers settings and after a while they just stop working necessitating a complete reset...which he happily did for no charge at all.

And so I'm back...I hope for a while....wait while I go find some wood to touch....

If I could tell you that I wouldnt have to dance it.

2010-03-05T02:12:00.000-08:00

We had a weekend of culture this weekend and not the kind of culture we are usually exposed to.

Friday night saw us at another of the recitals that follow the classical music workshops organised by the German embassy. This night featured German pianist and teacher, Professor Rolf-Dieter Arens performing mostly solo pieces from Bach, Beethoven, Mozart and a complicated piece by Liszt involving long pauses which were both confusing and amusing for the Khmer in the audience. The final piece involved the students that participated in the workshop; two violinists, a pair of flutists, a cellist and the Professor on the piano.

On sunday we went down to the park in front of Wat Botum to watch the final performance in a month long series of dance events sponsored by the CCF (Centre Culturel Francais) and Amrita. I had read in the paper the organisers were a bit worried about possible competition for both floor and air space as this park, as well as just about every other public park in the capital, usually play host to open air aerobics classes complete with huge boom boxes pumping out a heavy beat at as many decibels as the speakers will allow. Their concerns were unfounded, however, as new back lit temporary stages were more than enough to peak the interest of local exercisers.

The evening began with a slide show of photographs taken by Anders Jiras of the various events and dancers during the month on a large prominent screen.

People were free to wander the area or claim their seat on the mats in front of each stage as they desired. We watched the slides and kind of hovered between a couple of stages until we realised that the dancers were taking turns at each stage and if we just stayed put we would get to see a good slice of what was on offer.

The first performance at our stage was a classical piece which followed the traditional line of many classical dance themes; boy eyes girl who, although shes not really interested dances fetchingly in front of him. He eventually wins her over, after the obligatory misunderstandings are cleared up, and a pas de deux ensues. Khmer dance is very restrained, despite the subject matter, using hands and foot positions to show emotion and expression. These two also used some lifts and balance moves that were not the usual traditional technique and we wondered whether they had been inspired by visiting contemporary choreographers to slip them into their set.

Then we watched some hiphop come B Boy moves again with few recognisable contemporary dance lifts thrown in for good measure. Tiny Toones, where these dancers came from, is an education NGO run by a American Cambodian deportee Tuy Sobi,l or KK, who teaches street kids and at risk youth the fine art of Hip Hop and B Boy dancing (those of you who had to click the link because they didnt know what I was talking about...shame on you!!). The story goes that KK was approached by some street kids who had learned that he used to be a notable break dancer. They wanted him to teach them how to dance. At first KK wasnt so enthusiastic after all he had just been ejected from the only country he had ever known to a country he was supposed to be from but felt no connection to. KK, a Cambodian refugee born in a camp on the Thai boarder during the rough Khmer Rouge years, was one of the many refugees that had eventually managed to flee his troubled homeland and had settled in Long Beach California with his family but without ever becoming an American citizen after becoming involved with the gang scene and a decade in the American penal system he was summarily and unceremoniously deported. The kids were persistent and eventually wore him down. Today Tiny Toones has positively impacted the lives of over 500 at risk teens in the Phnom Penh area teaching them Khmer and English literacy, breakdancing (or B Boying), DJ skills and rap. It is an inspirational story, yes? The dancers are an inspirational bunch too with some barely reaching double digits in age. I'm sure they would give Nigel Lythgoe something to smile about!

The next set was a contemporary piece about two trash collectors which began with a very clever heart felt pas de deux between boy and trash bag.

There was no word on how long the dancer had been dancing but he had impressive control and expression already.

Then his partner came on and the set evolved to include some recognisably contemporary lifts and body shapes. I was enthralled. We are incredibly lucky in New Zealand to have had the opportunity to be exposed to quite a lot of dance in many of it's forms. Both M and I were students at an American Jazz studio for many years before moving to Samoa. Dance is our soul food.

New Zealand often plays host to some fantastic dance companies from all over the world and we are blessed to have a few classical and contemporary choreographers we can call our own as well as the exceptionally capable and awe inspiring Royal New Zealand Ballet Company which like the Sydney Dance Company is as good performing a Balanchine as they are a Douglas Wright or a Michael Parmenter. As a genre contemporary dance is not easy as Isadora Duncan once said when asked to describe the style, 'If I could tell you that I wouldn't have to dance it!'

Contemporary dance was developed in the early 20th century as a reaction against the rigid techniques of ballet. Pioneers such as Isadora Duncan and Martha Graham searched for ease of movement using the body's natural lines and energy, allowing for a greater range and fluidity of movement than conventional dance techniques and encouraging dancers and choreographers to push the boundaries of dance and physical movement. New Zealands Footnote Dance Company has been teaching and dancing contemporary dance for more than 22 years and has spawned many a stunningly capable and beautifully expressive dancer and choreographer. We now have schools in Auckland (here and here), Wellington (and here) and at Otago teaching dance in all its genres.

Characterised by its versatility, contemporary dance can be danced to almost any style of music, or melded with other dance forms which in New Zealand has meant we have been treated to some very unique dance borrowing and inspired by traditional indigenous movement from Maori and Pacific island styles. Companies like Black Grace, Merenia Gray and Atamira as well as solo performers, choreographers and integrated dance companies such as Jolt and Touch Compass that push the boundaries and perceptions of physical abilities. I love the raw human expression in the genre and the fact it can be as easily accompanied by Vivaldi as it can by The Blackeyed Peas. Can you tell I've missed it?

The next dancer was a tutor who performed a very modern contemporary piece more about movement than telling a story.

And then more B Boying, innovative and demanding, Khmer style.

The final item we saw was a contemporary narrative about a hunter and various animals in the forest.

Despite what this looks like there was no killing!

The audience at our stage sat and stood enthralled through most of the performances and applauded enthusiastically, as did we. The variety ensured there was something for everyone and it's an event I am hoping I wont have to wait another year to see again.

On the way home I couldnt resist taking this picture of Independence Monument all lit up like a temple tower.

The shuttlecock

2010-03-02T23:06:00.000-08:00

Every evening in the parks, the spaces in front of shops and houses and on Riverside, where these pics were taken, Cambodians come out to exercise and socialise. One of the more spectacular games they play is Sey- Sey dock, Sey tot, Sey paen and Sey mey loang depending on the variation of the shuttle-a simplier variation of the 'Shuttlecock sport' which is an official sport played at the South East Asian Games. In it's official form the Shuttlecock sport, a kind of amalgamation of volleyball, badminton and soccer/football, is popular all over Asia and in parts of Europe.

It's an athletic sport where the players try to keep a kind of weighted shuttlecock in the air without using their hands. The result looks a bit like capoeira with more elaborate kicks and leaps scoring more points although most of the games we see are not so much point scoring as a social event- can you spot the player on the phone? The really good players can do aerial bicycle kicks and flips.

The game is ancient. Archeologists have found evidence, in China, of the existence of a shuttlecock game dating back to 5 BCE when it was used as training for battle.

Sometimes you see them playing with a woven rattan ball called Mey loang.

I can no longer claim to be the mother of two teenagers

2010-02-26T09:00:00.000-08:00

IF.....

IF you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or being hated, don't give way to hating,
And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise:
If you can dream - and not make dreams your master;
If you can think - and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build 'em up with worn-out tools:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: 'Hold on!'

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
' Or walk with Kings - nor lose the common touch,
if neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And - which is more - you'll be a Man, my son!

Happy 20th Birthday B xx

Slightly off balance

2010-02-23T01:18:00.000-08:00

The next day, our last day in Rome, we had left free intending to use it for a day trip by train to either Pompeii, to the south east, or to Pisa, to the north. The forecast the night before had been for all day rain which we decided would make exploring Pompeii fairly miserable so Pisa it was. We woke early to a damp, grey morning, rugged up and trudged, umbrellas in hand, the by now familiar path to the tram then the central station where we bought return tickets from the yellow automated ticket boxes for the not quite three hour trip to Pisa.

Pisa, population about 87 000, manages to feel both quaint and working class at the same time. The twenty minute walk from the station to the world famous Leaning Tower takes you through cobbled pedestrian streets dodging bicycle riding locals, past cafes full of university students, through narrow lanes lined with fabulous doorways, balconys and arches, crosses busy 'main' throughfares where Italians drive Italian made cars at break neck speed ignoring both lights and pedestrian crossings- felt right at home we did!- and over the thick grey Arno River.

Finally at the end of the street we saw this...

...emerging like a fairy tale, out of the mist. The tourists, the rain, the cold all fell away muzzled by the dreamlike scene that was unfolding at the end of the road.

The tower is part of the aptly named Square of Miracles, a world heritage site. It's historical name is the Piazza del Duomo, a walled area inside the city walls of Old Pisa that encompasses the Duomo, the Baptistry, Camposanto and two museums, the Museo dell'Opera del Duomo and Museo del Sinopie and of course the Torre pendente di Pisa. Entry tickets can be bought separately or in combinations. Of course we went for the upsized whoppa combo and booked in for the next time slot, in a not too shabby 45 minutes time, for the tower tour. With time on our hands, after a quick stop at the some of the cleanest toilets in Italy, we headed towards the main door of the Duomo.

The heavily decorated cast bronze doors of the Cathedral are incredible and were made by students after the originals were destroyed by fire in 1595. Each of the six doors is made up of narrative panels of biblical scenes like pages of a story book.

The outside of the church, like it's accompanying campanile (the bell tower we all know better as the Leaning Tower of Pisa) and Baptistry, is embellished in exquisite detail like sugar icing on a wedding cake...

...with the delicate columns and fine rounded arches that are characteristic of the Romanesque style.

Inside the nave is all slim striped arches, tall columns and for the size of the church an abundance of large luminous pieces of Renaissance art, huge golden mosaics and colourful wall frescos.

The bronze chandelier, hanging at the centre of the nave, is known as Galileo's chandelier due to an impossible legend that claims that Galileo Galilei's theories relative to the pendulum, came to him while he was at mass and became distracted by the oscillating chandelier. Unfortunately, although it does paint a fabulous image of a pew bound Galileo eyes heavenward, the story of the chandelier can't possibly be true since the light was hung four years after he went public with his theory. Galileo was, however, born in Pisa and even taught at Pisa University where in his notes he uses the tower to dispute Aristotle's theory that objects fall at a speed proportionate to their weight. While Galileo didn't actually drop anything from the tower, as his experiment described, a student of his did only to find one of the balls did hit the ground slightly faster satisfying Aristotle's smug followers who obviously hadn't read about Galileo's theories of viscosity or wind friction.

Amid all the clean simple lines of the churches interior a heavily ornate piece stands out. The pulpit- just seen in the left of the picture- by Giovanni Pisano took eight long years to complete then, considered a gothic eyesore during the renovations after the fire, was dismantled and stored in a crate for the next 330 years. Rediscovered in 1926 it was painstakingly reassembled (although slightly differently from it's original) and placed further from the altar than its original place on the north side of the nave.

The lower supports are a combination of simple colums and sculptured figures. Pisa or Ecclesia is shown suckling two newborns and the female personification of Fortitude holds a lion. Prudence is depicted as 'Venus pudica', with her modesty intact unlike poor Hercules, seen above, who is shown older than his usual six packed form and with a vaguely resigned look about him I thought.

The platform of Pisano's elaborate rostrum has nine carved panels that lean outwards slightly, towards it's audience. Again they depict biblical stories and are packed tight with animated characters. The undercutting is so deep in places the figures seem to animate right out of the reliefs.

Being inside Italy's churches is like being inside a prism with treasure all around. Walls, floors and ceilings all hold eye candy and food for the soul.

Our next stop in the Square of Miracles was the probably the most famous and the most visited campanile in the world.

You are not allowed to take any bags, purses or 'containers of any kind' up the tower so after depositing our one handbag sized backpack at the bag check we waited, as we'd been instructed, in the warmth of the waiting room for the clock to tick slowly past our ticketed time. The 'guide' our small group had been told would meet us in true Italian style never eventuated so with the intention of clarifying the instructions we approached the two guards at the towers entrance. They checked the ticket time and then simply waved us through the scafolding to the bottom of the 294 helicodal steps. The passageway is not really wide enough for the two way traffic it services although it's definately wider than the climb up to Saint Peter's cupola. The marble steps were wet because of the rain, worn away in the middle by centuries of footfalls and tilted outwards and then inwards with the tower's inclination as we spiraled our way to the top. It was not quite enough to make me dizzy but definately left me with a heady sense of pending nausea. The cool misty air at the top was welcome relief.

The main steps come out at the seventh level, the logge, a viewing platform from where the whole of the grassed area of the square can be clearly seen. It is thought that on festival and market days dignitaries and visitors would climb the tower for the best view of the proceedings below. There is another tunnel like set of steps leading to a circular walkway at the very top of the towers apex where you can see J in the photo above.

The platform area also houses the 'bell theatre'. Five big bells hang in a circle tuned clockwise to a rising musical scale though they haven't been heard for 60 years as there are fears their vibrations could cause a catastrophic collapse. The biggest bell, called L'Assunta, weighs in at 3620kgs. It really is no wonder the tower is slowly sinking into the tundra!

The towers first stone was laid in 1173 but it took twelve years to get as high as the third floor and by then the building was already beginning to lean. Built as a boastful statement to bitter rivals Florence (Genoa) it's construction was a stop start affair due to frequent warring with the neighbouring state. It must have made the Genoans smile to learn the tower skite was in fact sinking into the ground.

The problem was pondered for nearly a century while the ground beneath 'settled' then begun again by Giovanni di Simone, the architect of the nearby Camposanto (which we visited later), who made the subsequent floors higher in an effort to compensate. It didn't.

Over the centuries there have been a number of attempts to correct the lean and thus save the tower from it's eventual collapse. In 1990 the tilt was measured at 13 feet and it was promptly closed off while experts from around the world were called in to find a way to rectify the situation. Straightening the tower enough to make it safe again without completely removing the character that gave it it's name, defacing the globally recognisable building in any way or adversally affecting any of the area in the famous square was a mammoth task. According to the lego animation of the restoration we watched at one of the museums on site; steel stabilising cables were first attached to the tower in a way such that they could be easily removed without damaging the towers exterior then 870 metric tons of counterweight added to the 'tall' side which not only halted the slippage but pulled the tower gently back towards centre. A wedge of soil was then carefully removed from the side opposite the tilt using a corkscrew like action correcting at the rate of about a degree a month and the existing foundation anchored in place with concrete. A complex system of computerised monitors measures the progress over several more months and eventually the tower is slowly, tenuously bought back to an acceptable lean. All of this took ten years. When the tower was reopened to the public again in 2001 it was 'guaranteed' for the next 200 years. Data from the still imbedded computers has suggested the tower has now actually stopped moving entirely.

All this meddling may have saved the tower but it's lesser tilt meant it lost its place in the Guinness Book of World Records to a German church steeple.

Gelato dreaming

2010-02-21T01:33:00.000-08:00

I don't usually eat ice cream, it hurts my teeth and I'm dairy intolerant, but I ate gelato nearly everyday while we were away although some days it was more sorbet than a dairy food. We even ate it in negative temperatures in Milan and on what felt like the coldest day on our trip in Pisa which made my lips turn blue and my insides freeze in horror.

Stories of cold icy desserts can be traced back to ancient Chinese Emperors who flavoured snow with fruit, wine and honey and Nero who added spices, leaves and fruit. In Italy gelato has been made for centuries. Those in the north used a more creamy recipe with milk, cream, sugar and eggs whereas the Sicilians, way down at the bottom of the boot, made a water based mixture but used more sugar calling it sorbetto. Over the years the recipes have been played with and refined to create todays gelato, the milky version, which has between a third and a quarter less fat than ice cream but nearly twice as much sugar the proportions of which are responsible for the gloopyness. It is frozen in small batches to expose more surface area (than in traditional ice cream production) to the air which gives it it's velvety, gossamer texture and intense flavours. The Italians are justifiably proud of their luxurious desert.
Incidently it was the Italians who invented the cone too.

Burning money in clay pots

2010-02-14T20:29:00.000-08:00

Chinese New Year and Valentines Day are at the same time this year. The streets of Phnom Penh are full of lolly coloured soft toys, stuffed plush hearts and ribbon wrapped bouquets of flowers and the gutters are stopped with pots of fake burning money.

Although not officially a Cambodian holiday many shops and businesses close for the best part of a week during Chinese New Year as anyone who can afford to goes home to the provinces. Like the Chinese and the Vietnamese the Khmer burn red, gold or green printed paper 'money' in various sizes and often in fantastically large denominations, in clay or tin pots on the footpath or in the gutter outside their homes. It is considered a good omen if the wind blows the smoke inside the house.

Valentine's Day isn't a statutory holiday either but that doesn't stop Cambodians from buying flowers and cheesy gifts- for all their loved ones. This year Valentine's Day has got the government a bit worried. The Ministry of Women's Affairs has broadcast ads on Khmer television warning teenagers against engaging in promiscuity. As is common when western traditions are adopted by non western developing societies, based on their superficial presentation rather than any real understanding as to history or purpose, the meaning and even intention of Valentines day has been misinterpreted. It seems many believe Valentine's day to be the day they must offer up their virginity to their partners- if they haven't already- 'without thinking about their furture and the honor of their family and culture.'

A local NGO is more concerned with the spread of AIDS although if the official statistics are correct Cambodia is a kind of poster child for stemming the spread of AIDS in the region. According to the government's statistics, the prevalence of infection rate has declined from 4% in 1997 to 2% in 2006 then 0.9% in 2008 for adults aged 15 and 49, and it is expected the rate will fall even further by 2010. UNAIDS attributes the drop to a political commitment that has seen the prime minister's wife, Bun Rany, personally champion the cause and the Ministry of Health, over the years, implement a wide range of activities and campaigns including a '100% condom use program' which means many of J's staff can attest to having sold or given away condoms during their working lives. AIDS and the affects of AIDS are still major issues in the kingdom with the government coming under frequent fire for their treatment and discriminition of suffers and their families. Late last year Bun Rany was awarded special recognition by the UN for her role which, truth be told, revolves mainly around orphans and the less dirty tasks of supporting access to retrovirals and positive (hands off) PR to help reduce stigma and community prejudice. At the same time her husbands government has evicted and forcibly relocated AIDS suffers to squats outside of town often with no water or toilet facilities making it nigh on impossible for them to get to clinics for daily drugs or markets for food.

This year is the year of the tiger on the Chinese calendar. Sadly Cambodia's wild tiger population is all but gone due to logging activities and the illegal and completely unnecessary poaching of these beautiful majestic big cats for their meat, bones, skin and other organs. WWF has launched the 'Year of the Tiger Campaign- Double or Nothing' aimed at doubling the wild population by 2022. I really hope they can get the active support they need from countries like Cambodia which forms part of the habitat of the Indochinese tiger.

But as George Bernard Shaw once said:

'When a man wants to murder a tiger, he calls it sport; when the tiger wants to murder him, he calls it ferocity. The distinction between crime and justice is no greater.'

He was a wise man, George...

The Living Room of Rome

2010-02-01T05:42:00.000-08:00

A short ride in the metro from near the Trevi Fountain is another Roman location often seen in movies. The confusingly named Spanish Steps, officially called Scalinata di Trinita dei Monti, were funded by the French and built to aid access to the twin towered church at the top.

The steps get their nickname from the Spanish Embassy in the piazza at the bottom which also houses the headquarters of some of Italy's high fashion houses and Italy's first MacDonalds- which was opened amid much controversy and protest. Also at the bottom is one of the most understated Baroque fountains I had seen in Rome designed by a teenage Bernini and his father. It seems more than a little odd that Fontana della Barcaccia, meaning the old boat, sits in the middle of a landlocked piazza. The best explanation I could find was that the Pope at the time had it modelled after a boat he admired that had become stranded after flooding on the river Tiber.

Also at the bottom of the steps is the house the poet John Keats lived in for a short time before he died of consumption in 1821. He had made the journey to Rome by boat, as you did in those days, already weak and very, very sick, hoping the milder Italian weather would help. Not long after arrival his doctor began aggressive treatment that included a stingy diet of 'an anchovy and a piece of bread' a day and the common practise of blood letting which may well have hastened his end. Sadly the only thing he managed to write while living in the pink house at the bottom of the steps was a line for his tombstone- Here lies one whose name was writ in water.

The outside of the house is still much the same as it was then although inside is now the Shelley Keats Museum with such treasures as a lock of Keats hair and his death mask.

The top of the 138 steps is littered with portrait artists. It was fun to sit on the balustrade with back to the view and the sun and watch them for a while. Look at all the people, a slowly advancing sea of black winter coats and hats, in the street directly opposite!

The wee church at the top is known as Trinita dei Monte- Trinity on the hill- or more specifically Santissima Trinità al Monte Pincio- Holy Trinity on Pincio hill. Begun by Louis XII, to accompany the monestary beside it, in the 16th century it was 80 years before it was finally consecrated.

Inside is a small simple interior with a wide congressional belly full of wooden pews and niches with canvases...

..a marble sculpture by one of Michelangelo's proteges and some intricate frescos.

Outside, the pièce de résistance is of course the view which stretches all the way to the horizon, a jigsaw of roofs and spires, domes and windowed arches- the shapes of Rome.

On our way back to the metro I could't resist snapping this shot of a Roman fortune teller. It was hard to tell if the news was good or not.

The city of echoes, the city of illusions, and the city of yearning-Giotto di Bondone

2010-01-29T02:52:00.001-08:00

Although we had already seen Vittorio Emanuel II's monument it is here that his body is buried. The Pantheon, the 'best preserved' of Rome's ancient buildings, has survived 20 centuries of war, plunder, pillage and the occasional remodel. It was originally built, and looked very different, as a Roman Temple to 'pan theos'- meaning all the gods- in 20 to 25 CE.

The portico is the only part left of the rectangular building, built by Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa, son-in-law of Augustus, first Emperor of Rome, that would look anything like it did back then. Sometime between 118 and 125 CE Haddrian rebuilt the structure that can still, almost two thousand years later, claim to be the largest unreinforced dome in the world.

The giant dome that dominates the interior quite simply takes your breath away. At 43m in around the dome completely dominates the inside of the building, in fact once inside it becomes the building. They say if you could find a soccer ball(that's football for those of you not familiar with Kiwispeak) big enough it would fit exactly in the perfectly round space- for the distance from the floor to the top of the dome is exactly equal to its diameter.

The recesses in the dome, apart from making it lighter on the eye, reduce it's actual weight as does the pumice cement used closer to the middle. The oculus, the hole in the top of the dome, is the main light source for the interior and yes sometimes it rains inside too and slips down the cleverly slanted floor into unobtrusive drains.

Converted into a Christian church in the 17th century and dedicated to the Virgin Mary,the main altar holds a 7th century icon featuring the Madonna and child. The apse above it features a golden mosaic decorated with crosses.

There are, in fact, many examples of the Madonna and child found in other recesses around the churches interior.

Detail from another Baroque Madonna and child probably an 'adoration' where Mary is painted with the baby Jesus in the middle of a group of, in this case, either the shepherds or magi I can't remember which. (It would be cool to have a place to put wee notes on the camera next to each picture sometimes dont you think?)

Another Madonna and child above the tomb of the artist Raphael.

Madonna of the Girdle and St Nicholas of Bari painted in 1686 by an unknown artist.

A sculpture by Il Lorenzone of St Anne and the Blessed Virgin.

After visiting the Pantheon in 2005 a New Zealand writer and expert in timekeeping suggested the building could have a secret identity as a giant ancient sundial of sorts. He had observed, apart from the path it traces around the dome, down the wall and across the floor during the year, that the light that comes through the oculus during the two equinoxes, in March and September, strikes the grille directly above the Pantheon's huge heavy northern doors. The grille allows just a slither to escape and mark a spot on the courtyard in front. Coincidence? Maybe not if you take into account the perfect celestial hemisphere the dome forms inside, an integrated actualisation of the Greeks mathematically conceptualized theory of the cosmos, in a building that bears a remarkable resemblance to the general composition of sundials of the time albeit on a majestic scale. It's name, Pantheon meaning 'all of the gods', adds further weight to the theory that it at least presents a mirror image of the home of the gods especially during the equinox when the sun is on the celestial equator (where Earth's equator would lie if projected into space), the most stable part of the sky and thus the assumed home of the myriad of Greek and Roman gods.

The building certainly does have a special aura about it and the effort it must have taken to not only design and build such a magnificent dome, that despite its immense size seems to lightly hover on its supporting walls, but to have it centuries later, still stand omnipotent in all its silent grandeur really does inspire awe a reaction I would consider apt for a Heaven on Earth.

In the plaza outside the Pantheon is a fountain topped by an ancient Egyptian obelisk erected by Pope Clement XI.

The next stop was Trevi Fountain, probably the most famous fountain in Rome. Most of the pictures you see are like this...

and I guess I just assumed it would be, like many of the other fountains and 'go-to' sites we had seen in both Rome and Venice, in a sprawlling piazza or at the very least an open space but it's not.

Much of the approach to Rome's biggest fountain is like this...

... which pops out at the top left hand corner of this photo.

Oddly familiar in that 'I can't quite place where I've seen you before' kind of way the lavish fountain is a grand 26 meters high and 20 meters wide and has been around since the middle of the 15th century when the tradition of building fountains to mark the end point of an acqueduct was rekindled. The aqueduct it marks, the Acqua Vergine, however, predates the beginning of the Common Era although it was destroyed by invaders in the 6th century. The fountain you see today was finished in 1762 after years of false starts and is now a culmination of many diverted springs rather than the one pure spring that inspired it's legend.

The story goes that a bunch of Roman soldiers were dispatched to find a source of spring water closest to Rome. They were met by a young and beautiful girl who led them to the purest of springs which they christened the 'Acqua Vergine', Virgin water.

Until about 40 years ago visitors would drink the fountain water, some would even collect it for tea.

This is the other side of the fountain...squashed into a tiny space that barely copes with the hordes drawn to the cascading water not the bulging biceps or chiseled abdominals of it's star, Oceanus, but by a story that has compelled everyone from Marylin Monroe to the Olsen twins to do this...

Another well told legend, one that motivated a movie called 'Three coins in the Fountain' (1954), holds that if visitors to the fountain throw a coin (in the movie three women each throw a coin hence the 'three coins'), with your right hand over your left shoulder, into the fountain, they are ensured a return Rome.

Approximately $3500 is thrown into the now heavily chlorinated waters of the Trevi Fountain each day. The coins are collected at night and used to subsidize a supermarket for Rome's poor population.

I ask no monument, proud and high, to arrest the gaze of passersby.

2010-01-28T06:49:00.001-08:00

After retracing our steps back to the station we caught the train to Colosseo station to begin our walk to Rome's three most visited free attractions. The ring road around the Colosseum was closed off to traffic and there was a festive atmosphere brewing. There were street performers everywhere.

The 'I bet I can do this longer than you can' artist. I bet he can too!

The 'We're a long way from home, please buy our CD' artists.

The ever popular 'Boys from the Global Ghetto'.

And this guy who used a few cans of spray paint, some stencils, crushed up newspaper, cardboard and about 15 minutes to create these... right in front of an appreciative and growing audience.

Not far from the Colosseum is Rome's enormous tomb of the Unknown Soldier. The monument is actually the Monumento Nazionale a Vittorio Emanuele II, the National Monument of Victor Emmanuel II, the first King of unified Italy. Designed by Giuseppe Sacconi in 1895 it wasn't finished until 1935 which isn't surprising considering its size and grandeur. It's a staggering 135m wide and 70 m high not including the bronzed winged victories.

If you walk up the steps at the front you can see that it is also Rome's Tomb of the Unknown Soldier a practice used throughout the world to memorialise unidentified soldiers who have died in modern wars.

Experts believe the tradition was begun with a simple ceremony during the Peloponnesian Wars in Ancient Greece where an empty stretcher was carried in recognition of the fallen. A silent tribute was introduced on Armistice Day, at 11am on the 11th day of the 11th month 1918 as part of a commemorative ceremony at Whitehall. King George V had requested that all Britons suspend what they were doing for 2 minutes as a mark of respect for those that had died during WWI.

The first actual burial of an unknown soldier representing all those whose remains were buried unidentified was thought to have taken place at Westminster Abbey a year later when the actual remains of a returned soldier from the battlefields on the Western Front were interred with full military honours in what is known as the Tomb of the Unknown Warrior. This was followed closely by a similar ceremony in France at the Arc de Triomphe in 1920 and most other Allied Nations in the following years. Advances in DNA identification over the years has meant that many of the unknown have been given back their identities which for some has meant a request by the families to rebury their relative in family graves, leaving some of the world's Unknown Soldier tombs empty.

Up until 2004 New Zealand had War Memorials to remember our dead.

This part of a commemorative wall, on the top floor of the Auckland Museum, has two of my mother's uncles names on it. One was killed in front of her father- his brother- by 'friendly fire' something that affected my Grandad so badly after the war, he only ever spoke of it once to my father, years later.

Of the 250 000 New Zealanders who have served in armed forces 30 000 died overseas, 9000 of those remains have either never been found or they have no known grave. On the 11th November 2004 a World War I Digger, a Kiwi, was returned home for burial in the new Tomb of the Unknown Warrior at the National War Memorial, Wellington. The ceremonial programme was probably the largest commemorative programme ever undertaken in New Zealand.

He is one of 30,000 who died in service. One of over 9000 who have no known grave or whose remains could never be recovered. His remains were chosen by the Commission from the First World War Caterpillar Valley Cemetery in the Somme, France, an area where the greatest number of the various New Zealand regiments and battalions are known to have fought. The soldier, whose name, rank, regiment, race, religion and other details are unknown, represents and honours all New Zealanders who became lost to their families in war.

The body of the unknown soldier in Rome's memorial was chosen from 11 unknown remains on October 26, 1921 by Maria Bergamas, whose only child was killed during World War I. His body was never recovered. The selected soldier was moved from Aquileia, where the ceremony with Bergamas had taken place, to Rome and buried in a state funeral on November 4, 1921

The full quote I used for the title of this post reads:
'I ask no monument, proud and high, to arrest the gaze of passersby. All that my yearning spirit craves, is bury me not in a land of slaves.'Attributed to Frances Ellen Watkins Harper; Pacifist; Abolitionist; Feminist; Poet (1825-1911)

Of Saints, Popes and martyrs

2010-01-20T00:40:00.001-08:00

We had planned the next day to go to the Catacombs of the Appian Way which were a tram, then Metro, then bus ride away so it was a relatively early start to get there before the two hour lunch shut down at noon. Now practised, confident and carrying our trusty Roma Passes we made it to Termini, the central train station and the beginning of many of our Roman journeys. Through the turnstile and onto the train was easy too. Even catching the 218 bus from San Giovanni Metro stop was a cinch- it was waiting right across the road. Trying to work out the correct stop? Not so easy. We guessed and pulled the buzzer probably a couple of stops too early and ended up trotting at a fair clip to get to the ticket booth before the cut off time. Up the little country lane, into the well marked driveway and through some beautiful serene rural scenery not even an hour out of central Rome.

The Via Appia Antica was the first of Rome's great roads stretching all the way from here, Saint Sebastians Gate...

...to Brindisi in the south -where we would be heading in a day or two's time.

Since it was illegal to bury their dead inside the city walls it makes sense that Roman tombs were located, here, just outside the city limits, where they could be still be visited and cared for easily. Pagan Romans tended to be cremated but for Christians, who believed in resurrection, this wasn't an option, so they needed land. A few wealthy Christians allowed their land to be used as burial places as most Christians were too poor to be landowners. To make the most of the donated land they dug tunnels, an estimated 375 miles of tomb lined tunnels, as deep as five layers, in the volcanic tuff. Tuff is soft enough to cut relatively easily but durable and not prone to collapse, perfect for the 60 or so known catacombs outside Rome. At a time when Christians, in particular, were persecuted, the Catacombs became a relatively safe place to bury the dead.

There are three sites tourists can visit today each with different opening times and days. We had chosen the Catacombe de San Callisto because it was open when we wnated to go and the closest option.

The five euro ticket gets you a guided tour by an expert and if you are lucky an enthusiast but 'no photos allowed'. The morning was sunny and the 20 or so minute wait for the start of the English tour was warm and pleasant and there was plenty of people watching to do.

See the dog collars? Incidently my mum used to make dads clerical collars out of washed Janola bottles long before recycling was trendy.

The Callixtian Complex is a large area of nearly 90 acres of land, homes, school buildings, dormatories and the Catacombs, which cover about half the area, underfoot. People have been coming to this area to bury, tend to or pay homage to their dead since about 5 CE (or maybe in this case it is appropriate to use the term AD). The Christianisation of Rome, in 313 AD, led to a cult of pilgrimage. As there would be no more recently persecuted martyrs to connect and to inspire they needed to be regularly reminded. The Pope of the time, St. Zephyrinus, entrusted the administration of these particular Catacombs to Callixtus, a decon. He had to provide a tomb for every Christian, the poor and slaves, so that each would have a worthy burial. On Zephyrinus' death, Callixtus was elected pope. He enlarged the Catacombs, which became the official cemetery of the Church of Rome.

The most ancient parts of the Catacombs of St.Callixtus include the 'Crypts of Lucina', the 'Area of the Popes' and the 'Tomb of St. Cecilia'. It is thought that maybe even the bodies of Saints Peter and Paul may have been bought here for safe keeping during the 3rd century.

Our guide was an energetic nun dressed in modern civies, her only tell a simple cross around her neck and a cross pin on her collar. She led us down a box lined garden path and into a chapel where we sat on low wooden benches. Using a set of large painted panels that slid in and out of a frame she gave quite an entertaining historical summary and background to the symbols we could already see in the marble pieces mounted in the chapel walls- which she pointed out were the real deal. In fact everything that we were about to see in the underground chambers and corridors is as it was, except for the lack of bodies which is largely due to looting by relic mongers rather than more sinister reasons. I had sat next to B in an effort to relay as many of the main points as possible which was taking significant concentration as her thick Italian accented English kept getting swallowed by the dense walls but I think we did okay. I was glad I had read up beforehand.

The Catacombs of St. Callixtus are the most important and imposing of the catacombs of Rome. They are considered by Christians, historians and anthropologists alike as 'the cradle of Christianity', 'the Archives of the primitive Church' because of the way they illustrate the usage and customs of the early Christians, their religious beliefs, the way they were expressed and the history of martyrdom. They provide an intriguing way of studying early Christian symbols too. Their secret language.

The Good Shepherd, carrying a sheep, represents Jesus waiting to guide his followers to heaven, the sheep is the saved soul. The fish, representing both Jesus and his disciples, taken from the biblical reference 'I will make you fishers of men' in the book of Matthew and because the first letters of Jesus Christ, Son of God and Saviour spelled 'fish' in Greek. The dove, representing the soul, can be seen quenching its thirst (worshipping), with an olive branch (resting ), or happily perched (arrived in paradise). Peacocks embodied immortality. The anchor, used to disguise a cross, was already a symbol of hope so it seemed appropriate. A simple banana shaped boat with a hoisted sail, a symbol of safe passage in a turbulent world, could also hide a cross. The capital letter M signified the tomb of a martyr and the 'chi-rho' symbol, the first two letters of Christ in Greek XP making a kind of star.

The entrance steps lead straight to the second level past more pieces of engraved sealing stones, epitaphs and a statue of the Good Shepherd on the landing. The enscriptions on the epitaphal stones give a 'birth day' rather than a death date as the belief was they would be reborn 'into the light', 'Cuius dies inluxit'. In fact I think I remember our guide saying that the word 'Catacomb' means bed, as they like to think of their loved ones just falling asleep and waking in heaven rather than dying. There is even pilgrim grafitti scratched on the wall.

The tunnels are more than tall enough to walk comfortably through and wide enough to pass. There are hollows in the walls sized to fit the occupier, usually poor and unable to afford a room, the most poignant are child or even baby sized.

The first stop, the Crypt of the Popes which although now empty, once held 9 Popes and 8 Bishops of the 3rd century. Original inscriptions, broken and now incomplete, are still on the wall indicate their names and titles in Greek and symbols. There is also a large plaque with parts of a poem by Damasus. Further down the cool packed dirt corridor is the Crypt of Saint Cecilia, another notable martyr, the patron saint of muscians and church music, who died a terrible long drawn out death after her brother and husband were killed by Turcius Almachius. They apparently tried to kill her by smothering her with steam and when that didn't work somehow tried and failed to cut her head off- how thats even possible I don't know! She was holding out to receive the Last Rights. Her body was later found, where she finally succombed, three fingers outstretched on one hand and one on the other, signifying her eternal belief in the Holy Trinity. In her tomb now lies a white marble statue in the position she was discovered complete with sword cuts to the neck!

The rest of the tour took us through rooms which once held families in a similar way to how a cemetery plot can be reserved for generations now. There are regular shaped holes like the drawers have been pulled out and left and sometimes still artifacts such as pots and utensils. There was often a table in the room and space enough for the remaining family members to hold services and ritual feasts. Some of the rooms still have parts of frescos and mosaics depicting Baptism, the Eucharist and other biblical scenes and stories.

What we saw was but a small part of the huge underground burial chamber. Walking through the chambers among the tombs of so many faithful in the footsteps that so many have walked before really does leave an impression on you. It took incredible effort and sacrifice against sometimes, it must have seemed, insurmountable odds, especially during the persecution, to hold on so tight to their faith to a God they couldn't see and it must have seemed, at times, had completely forsaken them. Our guide led us into one of the last family tombs and asked permission to say a simple prayer which, considering the company we were in, seemed appropriate, and then we climbed the steps back out into the sunlight.

As the swarming hollow of a hive, the whole Basillica- Alive!- Browning

2010-01-19T01:25:00.000-08:00

Following the steady line of people, like a trail of bread crumbs leading to the altar after Sunday mass, we skirted the wall that surrounds the Vatican grounds, through some lofty arches and into Saint Peter's Square. I'm not sure why, because it happens every time, but I was surprised at how affected I felt. I'm not a particularly religious person in the sense that I don't believe in any one thing or follow any one organised religion and although I am certainly not Catholic, I am the daughter of a liberal theologian and Presbyterian minister who has been a teacher of World Religion at tertiary institutions since I was born. Religious performance, ritual and practice, in it's many forms and guises is, to me, an expression of culture, of people and of being. It's human nature, a primal instinct. People have been doing it for as long as we have existed, in fact the further back you go the more superstitious we become. Saint Peter's Square and the Basillica represent the symbolic mother lode of, at the very least, the Catholic church if not Christendom as a whole. The mighty and majestic basillica is the largest church building in the world able to hold 60 000 people within her belly. As what must surely amount to a magnanimous act of piety and devotion as great as the ancient Egyptian temples or the temples of Angkor Wat, Saint Peter's was built entirely by hand.

The square that lies before the basillica was designed, by Bernini, to give the greatest number of people a decent view of the Pope as he gives his blessing, from either the middle of the façade of the church or from a window in the Vatican Palaceby. Bernini, a deeply religious man, had to contend with an already placed obelisk, a large fountain off to one side and an irregularly shaped open area. He solved the balance problem by placing a matching fountain on the opposite side of the Egyptian obelisk and by dividing the entire area in two. The space immediately in front of the church is trapezoidal, narrowing as it moves out into the square making the facade of the church seem even bigger than it already is. The main area of the piazza is a huge ellipsis around the 360 ton obelisk at the centre. It slopes slightly downwards towards the monument. The whole area is boardered by a simple double pillared colonade, wide enough to accommodate a horse and carriage, that alledgedly cost more than a million dollars. That's a huge amount in the mid 1500s. It stretches around the piazza, save a bit opposite the church that gives a view all the way down the road to the River Tiber, symbolically gathering worshippers into it's fold.

Standing motionless on top of the colonades and church facade are 140 figures of saints keeping a watchful eye on the millions of people from all over the world who come into the busy square every year. The figures weren't made by one artist but by many over a period of 41 years. And in front of the church raised on a plinth stands Saint Peter himself.

Beside the Obelisk was a huge traditionally lit christmas tree and a platform with a presepi, a nativity scene. The tradition of the nativity scene is an Italian one. St Francis of Assisi is credited with staging the first one in a cave in Greccio using live subjects in 1223. A hundred years later nearly every church in Italy had it's own although they were already beginning to substitute static scenes. Living scenes are still popular in some parts of Italy including in Assisi, where it all began. I had read that, in Italy, the baby Jesus was left out of the crib until Christmas morning but all the ones we saw in Venice, before Christmas, had an occupied manger. The Jesus used seems to be the same, traditional but not very probable, ceramic bub. A blonde, blue eyed, curly haired, naked cherub lying on a white blanket, a little grey 'nappy' preserving his modesty, a kind of condoling look on his face and wee arms in the palm up, out stretched 'let us pray' (or maybe just 'pick me up?') pose. His parents, however, although they still have soft oval symetrical faces, at least have the dark hair and brown eyes that are more historically and culturally accurate.

To get into the basillica we joined the 5 or 6 queues of people being fed through the 4 security machines in a pretty much constantly moving stream. Once cleared we walked past the door guarded by Alice in Wonderland extras- or Swiss guards depending on who you ask- that leads to the Perfecture of the Papal Household, where you can get a free ticket for a private audience with Pope Benedict although you have to do it at least a week ahead of time, and up the steps and through the doors into the long portico.

Built on what was once a pagan cemetery, the remains of which can still be found beneath the impressive building, the basillica rises from the exact spot where the then Apostle Peter was crucified, in 67CE, in a spectacle that included battles between slaves, gladiators and beasts in what was known, appropriately by the sounds of it, as 'Nero's Circus'. Peter's body lies under the Altar of Confession (in the middle of the picture)...

...which was hewn from a single block of marble and like most early Christian altars faces east directly under Michelangelo's, dome.

The canopy, a baldacchino, is again Bernini. In his typically ephemeral style the bronze supporting columns are heavily detailed with olive and bay leaf branches, bees, Saint Peter's keys and scrolls, angels and floral festoons and then crowned with a drapping effect like wind blown cloth.

The Main Tribune, or apse, which holds the Cathedra Petri, St Peter's Throne, is also a Bernini.

Above, on the golden background of the frieze, is the Latin inscription:
'O Pastor Ecclesiae, tu omnes Christi pascis agnos et oves' -O pastor of the Church, you feed all Christ's lambs and sheep.
On the right is the same in Greek.
The ornate chair, it is said, is the same one in which Saint Peter sat to teach. The dove just visable in the centre of the golden halo represents the Holy Spirit which like the chair has survived revolutions and persecutions and so symbolizes the perpetual continuity of the Christian doctrine and its promise of infallibility. It is certainly not subtle, the shining crown visible from the moment you walk into the nave of the church.

Other notable works in the churches many little chapel niches include Michelangelo's Pieta.

He carved this depicition of the Virgin Mary holding her dying son, when he was only 24. It is the only piece he ever signed and he is said to have regreted his 'act of arrogance' for the rest of his life. 'Pieta' means pity in Italian which, I think, doesn't acknowledge the strength in Mary's face. The overall picture is one of sorrow, a mother's personal sorrow, as she cradles her grown son like a helpless baby, but Mary's expression is one of acceptance rather than despair.

The Altar of Our Lady Succor is the only icon (because it is painted on wood) in the basillica. It is embellished with 'the rarest' alabaster and decorated with precious stones. Underneath lie the remains of Saint Gregory of Nazianzus.

Over one of the doors near the back of the church is this little beauty, the Monument to Alexander VII- the Pope who commissioned the colonaded courtyard. Crafted by Bernini ,who was nearly 80 at the time, at first glance it looks like many of the other white marble statue compositions but look closer...can you see the skeleton with his feet hanging over the door? The Pontiff, who is out of the picture on the top of the work is kneeling and absorbed in prayer, not at all disturbed by the sudden appearance of Death, the skelton, who is brandishing an hour-glass to indicate that time has passed. The four statues around the base represent the virtues practiced by the Pontiff: Charity, with a child in her arms, Truth, with a foot on a map of the world, Prudence and Justice.

This ancient bronze of Saint Peter has had it's toes worn to indistinction by the hands of centuries of pilgrims.

It was getting late and entry to the cupola, the dome on the roof of the basillica, closes earlier in winter so we followed the signs to the end of the thick queue. This was to be the first and one of the only slow moving lines we experienced during our whole time in Italy and it moved so painfully slow we really didn't think we would be let in. One tiny little window was serving both those who wanted a ticket to the lift and those who were going to do the pilgrimage up the 400+ stairs to the top. If you buy an only slightly more expensive lift ticket you still have to climb about half the stairs so we thought we may as well do the whole pilgrimage. The sign at the bottom cautioned those who were claustrophobic and those with lung or heart problems so I was expecting much worse than the wide half steps to the first level where we walked across the flat roof between uplit domes just above the front of the church.

The second set of steps left the climber with a bit less room width wise but there was still room to pass and to turn around.

They take you to a very special spot though- the inside of the dome- where there is a skinny completely caged walkway around the inside edge.

The view down into the church nave is breathtaking and being so close to age old mosaics memorable...

...but it is where you go next that will really blow your mind.

The staircase corridor is just wide enough for one, no going back, no stopping and absolutely no passing (the exit is a separate but almost identical staircase)and it seemed to get even more narrow as we climbed. To make things even more adventurous (or comical depending on how you look at it)they seem to lean outwards which is just as well when they disappear into nothing more than a metal spiral with room for no hand rail on either side suitable only for anorexics with a death wish. There is, however, no going back- remember I said you can't turn around- a wall on one side with which to hug with both hands and a thick rope dangling down the middle should you need extra reassurance.

The view from the lantern at the very, very top is, quite frankly, utterly worth the effort and the heart palpitations.

Now there's a couple of people you don't see that often on this blog!

Little did we realise that climbing steep and precarious staircases to the top of some of Italy's monuments was going to be remembered as a main characteristic of this holiday.

Psst ....Italy is obsessed with nutella

2010-01-17T01:52:00.000-08:00

I swear I have never seen Nutella jars as big as the jars we saw in Italy. I didn't even know they came house sized! Just as well probably...

(from here)

The frequency of Nutella sightings was not something I was expecting either. Italians it seems eat Nutella with...well...with just about anything. If it said chocolate it probably meant Nutella, something B discovered to his chagrin when ordering what turned out to be a Nutella and Nutella and cream gelato one afternoon. It seems Italy just can't get enough of the stuff so it wasnt surprising to find out it is actually as Italian as the ice cream cone, the espresso machine and the human torpedo . Created in the 1940's by Pietro Ferrero, who also flogs those little gold wrapped chocolatey nuggets of the best part of a dollar. Born out of necessity during World War II, when there was a chronic chocolate shortage, Ferrero, looking for a suitable dilutant, mixed chocolate and hazelnut butter and sold the result as a block. In 1951he began selling a spreadable variant he called 'supercrema gianduja' and the version was born. The name Nutella wasn't adopted until 1964. Incidently 'gianduja', a mixture of chocolate and 30% hazelnut paste, was invented in Turin in 1852.

The family Ferrero has done rather well out of the chocolate hazelnut combination. Last year Forbes voted 82 year old Michele Ferrero, who currently runs the business, the richest man in Italy with a, more than, 9 billion dollar worth.

What economic downturn?

Four years ago Shelley and Ms Adventures in Italy proclaimed February 5th to be world Nutella Day.

If you hack the Vatican server, have you tampered in God's domain?- Aaron Allston

2010-01-15T19:40:00.000-08:00

Rome only has seven hills. The exit to Palatine Hill sits about three quarters of the way up Capitoline Hill. At the top sits a piazza, surrounded by Renassiance buildings housing the Capitoline Museums, designed by an elderly Michelangelo who died before it was realised. The Piazza del Campidoglio is a perfectly proportioned square on a trapezoid shaped site (something which caused it's designer endless headaches) with the 2nd century bronze equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius in the center. Actually it's a replica swapped for the real thing in 1997, a little more worse for wear now thanks to modern air pollution, which is safely inside. The fact it survived at all is considered pretty remarkable as Aurelius was a pagan. It is thought it's resemblance to Constantine, a Christian, was probably what saved it. Legend says that when the original statues gold patina returns, it will herald the end of the world.

Commissioned by Pope Paul III, the artist turned the orientation of the square away from the Forum, to face Saint Peter's and the Vatican, to symbolise Rome's Christian allegiance.

The remains of the infamous, 6th century BCE, Temple of Jupiter was discovered, during a restoration by Mussolini on the site, controversally exposing artifacts such as 16th century tombs of children.

The Statue of the Nile (Tiber is there too), discovered on Quirinal Hill, and placed here, at the bottom of the staircase, just as Michelangelo had envisioned.

The two imposing figures at the top of the stairs, designed with a gentle incline so as to accommodate carriages, are Castor and Pollux. Twins who were born of different fathers the significance of which was realised when Castor died leaving Pollux, who was immortal, to plead to Zeus to share his immortality with his brother. Zeus complied and they became Gemini. The remains of the Temple of Castor and Pollux, you might remember, is down in the Forum. Again, these are not the original Michelangelo sculptures which are now in front of the President of Italy's palace on yet another, the highest, hill in Rome.

Inside the museum is the oldest public collection of art in the world. The vast majority of it is sculpture in marble, stone and bronze, busts, life size figures, colossal gods, mythological creatures, Popes and Heads of State -pun intended. Many of the male figures have amusingly and quite obviously had their maleness removed by the early Catholic church, to preserve the piety of the onlooker but of course it only succeeds in drawing ones attention to the fact- even at the ripe old age of 40!

Even though it was still raining this prodigious figure of Neptune really did deserve a closer look.

It was getting dark outside so we called it quits for the day and went instead in search of food.

Day two in Rome dawned dry. Trying to be relatively organised and avoid unnecessary queues we had purchased our tickets to the Vatican Museums online a couple of weeks before our departure. The lines at the Vatican are legendary and the 27th of December was no exception. Around the block and down the road they stretched almost as far as the eye could see. The line at the adjacent entrance for those with reservations, however, was completely non existent so for no extra cost we were able to stroll casually through the door to join the security shuffle.

It was a bit hard to know exactly where to go to get into where the museum actually started. In the end we just followed what seemed like the majority of people up the stairs through the 'Bookshop' where we were able to swipe our tickets on an entry turnstile and proclaim successful entry.

The Vatican Museums are physically huge and almost every surface is decorated. I took just as many pictures of the tile and mosiac floor as I did the beautiful ceiling frescos.

The advice was to work out which of the 14km of galleries you wanted to see and stick to the plan. There are supposedly signs at the beginning showing you where to go for the 2 hour, 3 hour and 5 hour self guided tours, thereby cutting out the bits you weren't as interested in, but we didn't see them. You can of course get yourself onto a guided tour, for a price, but with a Deafie in our midst we have found that often proves more trouble than it's worth as someone has to 'translate' all the time, so he gets some benefit out of it too, which means inevitably the 'translator' and B miss sometimes more than they 'hear'. You can also download audio tours off the internet or rent tours and headsets near the bookshop at the beginning.

Having finally found some direction we moved quickly through the first gallery of pilfered Egyptian antiquities, including more than one mummy, and into a set of rooms called 'Museo Pio-Clementino', a collection of ancient Greek and Roman sculpture that was the original core of the Vatican's collection. Gathered by the Popes Julius II, Leo X, Clement VII and Paul III during the fourteenth century but then lost, as the bulk of it was gifted away. What you see now was painstakingly recollected by the Popes Clement XIV and Pius VI.

There are ceiling frescoes and mosaic images on the floor to look at too.

Yep, that was on the floor under ours and the winter boots of literally thousands of others.

There are 11 named rooms, that make up the Pio-Clementino collection, all full of worldly treasures and significant eye candy. One, the Sala Rotonda, built by Simonetti, was based on the Pantheon which we planned to see the next day.

The tapestry room is impressive and not just for the huge carpet size hangings with the tiniest wool, silk and silver stitches I think have ever seen.

Every inch of the barrel shaped ceiling in the 120 meter Gallery of Maps is ornately decorated with incredible delicate paintings, gold gilded embellishments and pale naked ladies.

The maps, commissioned in the late 1500s by Pope Gregory XIII, are incredibly detailed and, considering they were painted well before GPS, amazingly accurate.

A priceless collection of early printed books and manuscripts are not the only extraordinary things in the Vatican library. Every surface is covered with scenes of early religious and Papal life.

Again remembering to look both up

...and down so nothing is missed.

You could certainly spend an entire day in the museum except feet eventually get tired on the hard tile floor, eyes get sore and brains get so full everything begins to look similar. I am an art and a religion buff and after three hours or so I was fatigued and we still hadn't found the famous Sistine chapel although we were following the signs swept along in the river of humanity that washes the Vatican halls and galleries everyday.

And then we were there.

The Cappella Sistina. Now I've really run dry of superlatives.

Compared to what we had already seen of the Vatican's treasures the chapel seemed more quiet, less busy, despite the intermittent barked instructions from the guards. 'No photos please!', 'Move down please', 'SSSHHHH!!' Even surrounded by bent necks and furtively captured pictures it was possible to feel reverence for the work, for the artist, for the place.

That Michelangelo, a sculpter not a painter, composed the legendary work under duress is astounding considering how intricate the illustration is and how time consuming the art of fresco is. Because Frescos are painted on wet plaster a new section of plaster had to be laid fresh each day. He used a broad wash technique, applying colour to larger areas of the wet plaster returning after the section had dried a bit to add detail and outlines. The height of the ceiling does nothing to diminish the impact and clarity of the 'Last Judgement'. We stood and gazed and we resisted....

....which is why I dont have any photos to show you....

After the Sistine Chapel it was hard not to feel finished. We made our way through the rest of the galleries and on the to the Vatican Post Office...

...where we bought and wrote a postcard to Grammy and Pop and to Nana then exited using the spectacular spiral staircase designed, by Giuseppe Momo, in 1932. The spiral double helix, like the DNA, suggests life.

The only way of catching a train I ever discovered is to miss the train before. ~G.K. Chesterton

2010-01-14T20:31:00.000-08:00

Travelling by train in Italy was very easy. We bought ‘ticketless’ tickets online using the Trenitalia site but also used the machines at the station which you could change to English, took both cash and credit cards and out tickets with reserved seat numbers. Apparently not all credit cards work on the site but we had no problems with both our New Zealand and our Cambodian cards. We even changed a departure time, online from the airport in Zurich, which you are able to do once for each trip without incurring any more cost.

Most of the trains we caught either originated or terminated, or both, at the destinations we were departing from or travelling to but when they didn’t they don’t stop for long so it pays to be ready and move quickly especially when you have a couple of layers, hat, scarf, gloves and packs to don! All the seats we had came with electrical plugs, should you have your computer with you, and either a tray table, or in the case of four seats facing each other, a shared skinny table between the seats. There didn’t seem to be much difference between 1st and 2nd class seats although maybe the 1st class toilets were a bit bigger but no one would have stopped you from walking the length of the train to use the bathroom in 1st class if you’d wanted to.

Most of the journeys we took were only a few hours long and during the day but we chose to travel by sleeper train from Brindisi to Milan as it was easier and more reliable than flying Alitalia, which is notorious for delays and cancellations, and it meant we saved the cost of a nights’ accommodation. It turned out to be quite a cosy, comfortable experience even with the four of us bunked up and down in one cabin though with all the rocking I don’t think I did much more than doze all night. The train originated at Lecce about 30 minutes drive from Brindisi and pulled in at the station in Brindisi at 10-30pm for about 2 minutes to let 15 people including four of us on. We had hedged our bets and were standing in the middle of the platform, still wearing jackets and packs, and had to trot to nearly the end to find our carriage. B had just lifted his foot from the last step into the train when we felt the cars begin to move. The cabins, which were as warm as a just toasted crumpet, were already set up as bunks with a doubled over sheet and small square pillow on each and a, still surprisingly clean in the morning, shared toilet cubicle similar to an airplane bathroom at either end of each carriage.

Once at our destination we used the bus or tram or in Pisa just walked. We found it easier to buy biglietto, tickets, from the tabbacci- usually a newsagent- for a euro each for the busses and trams but used the machines for metro and vaporetto tickets. We bought the Roma Pass in Rome which, along with free entry to three of the first attractions you see and discounts for most others, came with three days unlimited travel on all public transport.

There is a big thing about remembering to validate tickets on all the forums and information websites I used for our travel research. You do still have to for the busses and trams, there are yellow boxes at either end and in the middle of the vehicle, but metro ticket validation is now a part of the automatic entry barriers on the way down to the platform. You do still need to validate for a long haul national train if you don’t have reserved seats or if you have changed your booking –again the yellow boxes are at the end of the platforms- but are still using the original tickets but not if you have a ‘ticketless’ booking, which we had printed out, but you can just quote the booking number to the conductor or even show him an email or texted copy which we saw people do too.

The first train we took was from Milan Centrale to Venezia Santa Lucia, a three and a half hour ride in the dark, too tired to be that interested in what was out the window but nervous enough not to allow ourselves to fall asleep completely. The trip on Christmas day from Venice to Roma was very different. Again we sat in four seats facing each other and spent the time reading, talking and watching the Italian countryside pass by. The next trip from Rome to Brindisi was the longest daytime trip we took lasting about 5 hours. We sat airplane style in twos across the centre aisle. B had his computer so, after swapping seats with M and I as his electrical plug didn't work, he and his father spent much of the trip watching 'Bad Lieutenant' which J said was indeed very bad! I spent a lot of time scenery gazing. The Italian countryside reminded me a lot of parts New Zealand; lush green farm land, rapid filled streams, vineyards and olive groves. The farmhouses are quite different, however, with stone or adobe like buildings in regular square or rectangular shapes with tiny dark windows as opposed to New Zealands obsession with the sprawlling wooden villa with huge windows and a wrapped veranda. The biggest difference, I thought, was the distinct absence of farm animals. We saw no more than a handfull of cows, goats, horses and sheep in the whole time we were in Italy and the sheep were in a field at the Catacombs!

The average sized farm in New Zealand is about 536 acres (215ha)out of a total land mass of 103 738 square miles. The average size of an Italian farm is much smaller at just 6.5ha out of a similar total land size of 116 346 square miles. New Zealand farms have to be bigger to be profitable as our government does not provide subsidies like Italian farmers get. It used to be said that there were 20 sheep for every New Zealander in New Zealand, now the number is more like 14 but it still makes for a lot of sheep. Add to that 1 dairy and 1 beef cow, 3 cartons of exported apples and pears, 40 trays of kiwifruit and even 13 litres of wine produced per year per person in Aotearoa and all from just 268 680 km² or 103 738 sq miles. Incidently there are 4 million 350 thousand odd people in New Zealand. Italy has a population of just over 58 million and according to this site and only 11 million sheep and 7 million beef cattle. It is, however, the second largest producer of wine in the world and ranks right up there in Olive oil production too. The vast majority of the land between Naples and the coast, it would appear from the window of our high speed train, is wine and olive orchards and often both together.

The land of the boot has a long long history in viticulture. The Etruscans and Greeks were producing Italian wine in the country long before the Romans began in the 2nd C BCE. Today grapes are grown in nearly every region in Italy with more than 1 million orchards under cultivation. We managed to sample quite a few bottles of both red and white and much of it we found fairly palatable (that was quite hard for a proud kiwi to say) even a bottle we bought for less than 2 euro!

The beating heart of Rome is not the marble of the senate, it's the sand of the coliseum-Gracchus (Gladiator)

2010-01-13T20:51:00.000-08:00

We woke on Christmas day to a breakfast of Panetone, hot chocolate and coffee and the news that although, again, the acqua alta levels had hit record highs over night they had already receeded back to the lip of the canal outside. Thankfully we weren't going to have to schlep our packs through a lobby and streets knee deep in salty canal water then sit in wet pants for the four hour train journey to Rome.

Our Christmas Day 2009 day was spent getting to the train, waiting for the train, riding the train. Waiting for the tram outside Termini, the central station in Rome, then giving up (it was wet and cold and the packs were getting heavy) and getting a taxi instead. The search for food was looking fruitless too as most things were closed for Christmas but we were eventually rescued by an amused publican who didn't speak a word of English but managed to stear us in the direction of a little hole in the wall and some hot pizza for a couple of euro each.

We finally collapsed on our modern double bunks- with television and cable box top and bottom- and it wasn't long before three out of four of us were asleep (one of us -who shall remain nameless- had problems extricating himself from the free internet on offer and probably didn't sleep much as the rest of us for the next four nights!).

Boxing Day dawned cloudy but thankfully a couple of degrees warmer than Venice. We had already decided that, as we were planning on using the train, tram and buses for the next four days, the Roma Pass was probably going to be a good deal plus at least for the first three places we chose to go it would allow us to avoid any long admission queues. Back at 'Termini', with our newly dated 'passes' in hand, we made for metro line B that would take us, in two stops, to the Colosseum.

Using the Roma Pass for the metro was as simple as using an 'ezlink card' in Singapore. You just post it into the slot in the front of the entry barrier wait till it pops out another in the top and you are in. No need to worry about validation or buying tickets for the three days the pass is valid for. It took a couple of false starts to work out which side of the platform we were supposed to be on then we were off.

Colosseo, the stop for the Colosseum is directly opposite the building in question. Arguably the world's most famous sports arena, even though it has been well over 1500 years since it has seen any of the bloody action it is so famous for, the huge arches and it's unmistakable silhouette. Built on what was once a huge lake in Nero's Park and originally called the Flavian Amphitheatre it got it's nickname, 'colosseum', from an enormous bronze statue (or colossus) of Nero that was opposite at his residence on Palatine Hill. Begun by Vespasian, the 9th Roman Emperor, in 72CE but not finished till after his death the Colosseum is actually elliptical something thats quite hard to tell from the ground. Just like many of todays large stadiums it could hold 55 000 spectators.

After reading the information and history boards we made our way up the stairs where wooden shelving holds some of the more interesting bits that have been unearthed or returned. Most are fragments of larger statues, lintels, columns or sculptures. Life size marble torsos, distinctly Roman busts, slabs of carved or even graffitied stone, huge intricate leafy capitals and the curved cheeks of a horses arse complete with dangling testicles, which we somehow managed to get two photos of.

The first level has a massive 80 arched entrances large enough for even the biggest animal to lumber easily through lead into a tiered arena, or what's left of it after earthquakes and considerable plundering for marble and precut building materials ensued. A poster child for the heirarchy of Roman architecture the columns get more ornate with each level. The heavier plain Doric level at the bottom, the scrolled tops characterising the Ionic level in the middle and the highly decorative Corinthian level at the top amusingly, at least to me, in direct contrast to the seating hierarchy which held that the dignitories occupied the ring side seats on the first tier and the women and riff raff sat in the gods butted against the roof, an enormous retractable awning called a velarium, dragged back and forth by 1000 men using pulleys and poles.

Sections of the floor were retractable too, useful when a huge elephant or rhino had finally succumed. Rather than dragging the huge beast off they could simply lower it down into the underground chambers and dispose of it there. Evidence of a complex system of pulleys (there were pulleys in the display shelves in the foyer)and even hydraulics which allowed both lowering, lifting and even flooding the arena.

The very word 'arena', meaning sand, comes from the sand that was strewn on the stage of the ampitheatre to soak up the blood. The inaugural contest at the colosseum itself was said to have lasted 100 days during which time the gratuitous slaughter of between 5000 and 9000 beasts (depending on where your information comes from) and countless gladiators was meant to have occurred.

There is no theatre floor left anymore save a bit that's been rebuilt. You can clearly see the 'hypogem',which literally means 'the underground', the subterranean network of chambers and hallways. Underground tunnels that led out of the complex allowed animals and performers to be bought directly from their cages and barracks. It is a huge structure made even more magnanimous by it's tall arches. It has presence even as Rome's largest roundabout!

On the way out you pass the impressive Triumphant Arco di Constantino which stands largely unscathed save it's bronze letters which were probably palmed. You can still clearly read the inscription though.

IMP • CAES • FL • CONSTANTINO • MAXIMO • P • F • AVGUSTO • S • P • Q • R • QVOD • INSTINCTV • DIVINITATIS • MENTIS • MAGNITVDINE • CVM • EXERCITV • SVO • TAM • DE • TYRANNO • QVAM • DE • OMNI • EIVS • FACTIONE • VNO • TEMPORE • IVSTIS • REM-PVBLICAM • VLTVS • EST • ARMIS • ARCVM • TRIVMPHIS • INSIGNEM • DICAVIT

To the Emperor Caesar Flavius Constantinus, the greatest, pious, and blessed Augustus: because he, inspired by the divine, and by the greatness of his mind, has delivered the state from the tyrant and all of his followers at the same time, with his army and just force of arms, the Senate and People of Rome have dedicated this arch, decorated with triumphs.

Across the road is Palatine Hill where, according to Roman mythology, the twins Romulus and Remus were found hiding in a cave being suckled by a she wolf. Once grown up they fought over who would be the one to run the city. Romulus hit his brother over the head with a shovel, killed him and became the first King of Rome, named in his honour. So you could say it was here that the Roman Empire began.

After the grandeur of the Colosseum the entrance to Palatine is simple and unassuming.

Essentially just a tree scattered hilltop littered with the ruins of the palaces and luxurious gardens of ancient patrician families and early emperors it covers quite an area and at the top of the hill affords awesome views of the city and the Foro Romano below through the ever falling drops of rain.

The Roman Forum used to be free but entry is now a part of the ticket for Palatine Hill.

Built on drained lowland the public 'forum' with its arches, basillicas and temples, was once the heart of the Roman city. Beginning from the Arco di Constantine, now outside the ticketed boundaries, is Via Sacra, the 'sacred way' which once saw great processions of conquest. Further up the Arch of Septimius Severus and the Arch of Titus.

All that is left of the Temple of Saturn, the agricultural god of sowing. It's tall columns, that once formed the entrance to the temple, are the oldest surviving structure in the Forum.

The Temple of Antonius and Faustina, was originally dedicated to the wife of the Emperor Antonius Faustina the Elder but after his death was changed to include Antonius Pius as well.

Behind it stands the church of San Lorenzo in Miranda. The original temple, built in 141 CE, was converted in about the 7th century but partially demolished to make way for restoration in 1536.

The area to the left of the photo once held the Temple of Concord. The last three standing columns stand out against a backdrop of what looks from a distance to be mostly rubble. The goddess Concordia was the goddess of agreement, understanding, and marital harmony.

The largest most formidable building in the Forum is the Basillica of Maxentius and Constantine completed in 312 CE.

Apart from the temples, basillicas and memorials the Forum also held the Regia, originally the residence of the kings of Rome or at least their main headquarters, and later the office of the Pontifex Maximus, the high priest of Roman religion. The Rostra, from where politicians made their speeches to the Roman citizens. The Curia Hostilia, the site of the Roman Senate. The Tabularium, the records office of Rome. The aptly named Umbilicus Urbi, the designated centre of the city from which and to which all distances in Rome and the Roman Empire were measured. The Atrium Vestae, the house of the Vestal Virgins and the Tullianum, the prison used to hold various foreign leaders and generals.

Even with the guide book it was sometime difficult to descipher what was what. Many of the significant buildings have been altered and restored many times over as Rome adopted new leaders and the area has presumably been effected by the same earthquakes that devastated the Colosseum across the road. It would be easy to spend much longer than we did in the Roman Forum and the gardens of Palatine Hill but eventually the rain and the cold drove us out a turnstile at the top of Capitoline Hill where we discovered the ginormous Musei Capitolini.

Ay, because the sea's the street there; and 'tis arched by . . .

2010-01-10T22:17:00.000-08:00

. . . what you call . . . Shylock's bridge with houses on it, where they kept the carnival- Robert Browning 'A Toccata of Galuppi's' (1855)

Shylock's bridge is the Rialto Bridge, Ponte di Rialto to the Italians. It was the first and therefore is the oldest of Venice's bridges that cross the Grand Canal. The bridge that is used today replaced a boat bridge and three wooden foot bridges in 1591 and remained the only way to walk across the canal until the Accademia was built 263 years later. Like most of Venice's bridges big and small it is an arched bridge designed to allow the passage of galleys, much smaller boats on the smaller canals of course. The architect, who beat out the likes of Michelangelo and Palladio for the honour, became known as, appropriately enough, Antonio da Ponte, or 'Anthony of the Bridge'.

The bridge is pretty big for a footbridge. It has a walkway on each side along the inside of the balustrades and a wider pathway through the middle with an almost uninterupted threadlike row of narrow shops in the arches lining the steps both up and down. At the top is a taller arch open to each side to allow access to the outside paths and the view.

Here we are on the steps at night. Notice my clenched fists? It was very cold!

On the picture below you can see an embellishment. The bridge has, on one side the Virgin and an angel with the Holy Ghost in the middle and on the other side the two Saints, Mark and Teodoro. I am guessing this is one of the Saints although I'm not sure which.

Many people it seems think the bridge is a bit overrated as an 'attraction' with it's dirt and graffiti, hordes of tourists and tourist orientated shops and market stalls and it is all that (although a lot less tourists when we were there) but I think for the views alone it is worth the climb.

This is looking towards all the eateries that can claim a bridge view, for a small surcharge of course.

And this is looking in the other direction.

We visited the bridge a few times in the two full days we were in Venice during the day and at night and even bought some Murano earrings and a couple of pairs of cufflinks from the shops on the steps and Mac bought a harlequin mask from one of the stalls at the bottom of the steps for about the same as we'd seen them everywhere else.

Not far from the Rialto Bridge is the Rialto Market the reason for the present permanent location of the bridge.

The Rialto area has been settled since the 9th century but it's significance was secured when the market moved there in 1097. The market grew and warehouses were built, shops selling upmarket goods, banks and insurance agents and even the city's abattoir.

Even Venice's tax office moved to be where all the action was. In 1514 a huge fire destroyed all but the San Giacomo di Rialto church.

This is the fishy part of the market, campo della pescheria, strewn with ice still even though it is late in the afternoon.

But still stalls around and about selling fresh fish for the Christmas table.

Artichokes at the erberia, the greengrocers.

Never one to shy away from potential communication difficulties here is J buying some fresh fruit for the train ride to Rome the next day.

Circle, Square, Man

2010-01-10T09:26:00.001-08:00

The next day dawned cold and drizzly...so out came the umbrellas and the leather boots. Walking with an umbrella in Venice takes a certain amount of skill as the 'calle' are so narrow, some wide enough for only one person, that there is a lot of tipping- to the side- away from oncoming traffic and raising or lowering umbrellas, like a little pas de deux, as people weave in and out of each other. Unlike here or even in Singapore people generally walk on one side- their right- so the side step is rarely needed.

We strolled purposefully, but still slow enough to digitally record even more charming vistas, around the canal following the maze of calles over pontes past Ponte di Rialto in the general direction of the Accademia Bridge and Galley. Ponte dell'Accademia, or the Accademia Bridge, is one of only four bridges that cross the grand canal in Venice. It joins the sestiere of San Marco with Dorsoduro at the final bend in the busy S shaped Canale Grande.

The long wooden bridge that curves over the waterway was actually meant to be only temporary. The original steel bridge, built in 1854, was substituted for the first wooden Accademia Bridge in 1932 and when it began to fall apart a competition was announced to design a new one. In 1985 the rotting temporary bridge was replaced yet again by a wooden replica despite public preference for a stone one.
More recently Venice's council wants the bridge redesigned to accommodate wheelchair access but is not willing (or maybe able) to pay for it so bidding construction firms will have to prove their abilities to also come up with the estimated 5 million euro sponsorship required. Noone seems too optimistic.

The view from the bridge is enchanting, like many of Venice's vistas. We were lucky, I think, as the morning was so dismal there were few people out. The ubiquitous African men selling fake Gucci handbags and umbrellas far out numbered the tourists.

The lack of people on the bridge translated to a complete lack of people waiting to buy tickets for the Accademia Gallery and yet again despite being warned about queues that stretched the circumference of the building, as entry is limited to 100 at any one time due to fire regulations, we were the only ones there. Out of all the gallery and museum options in Venice we had chosen Galleria dell'Accademia because for the first time in a long time Da Vinci's Vitruvian Man was on show. Such is the delicacy of the single yellowed A4 size page with the iconic pen and ink naked man in a circle...in a square, that it is usually kept behind closed doors. As fate would have it we were in Venice during it's latest showing seven years after the previous outing. On January the 10th it went back into it's climate controlled, darkened room.

Founded in 1750 the gallery houses some of Venice's most magnificent and most treasured works by artists Venetian as well as from some of it's more artistic admirers.

After surrendering our small daytrip backpack at the front desk (you'll get it back in exchange for 0.50 euro at the end) we climbed the huge stone staircase that leads into a kind of foyer, the first 'room', filled with 14th century mostly religious paintings depicting saints and biblical scenes in brilliant golds and rich reds and greens.

They are labelled with the title-which is often explanation enough- artist, date and sometimes the latest date of restoration. At the beginning of this and each of the successive rooms is a stand with helpful and sometimes lengthy laminated explanations of the paintings in the room, in both English and Italian. It would have taken more than one trip to read every inscription and study every painting so we wandered the walls going back and forth between rooms as something caught someones eye and either deserved sharing or required further explanation.

Arranged in chronological order the gallery winds its way around 24 rooms that were once three separate buildings. During the invasion of Napoleon in 1807 it was moved for safekeeping to the Scuola della Carità, the Convento dei Canonici Lateranensi and the church of Santa Maria della Carità- a school, a convent and a church. We dallied through titles such as 'Coronation of the Virgin' and 'Madonna and Child with two Votaries' by Paolo Veneziano 'Christ before Pilate' and 'Kiss of Judas', by an unknown Venetian painter from the 14th century. Then works from late 15th and early 16th centuries including 'Carpaccio’s Crucifixion' and 'Glorification of the Ten Thousand Martyrs of Mount Ararat' by Giovani Bellini. Then Bellini's series of Madonna's painted during the Renaissance period. Considered one of the most influential painters of his time (and he lived to the ripe old age of 90!) there are many of Bellini's works in the Accademia often depicting Venetian scenes. Two of his later works, 'Procession in Piazza San Marco' and 'Miracle of the Cross at the Bridge of San Lorenzo' record when remnants of 'the True Cross' (believed to be actual remains of the cross Jesus was crucified on) were bought to the city.
There are huge rural scenes of the area too, complete with dancing rubenesque women,romantic crumbling archways and tumbling streams. The 10th room is completely dominated by 'Christ in the house of Levi' by Paolo Veronese (Caliari). Plush, decadent and crammed with activity it was originally a rendering of the Last Supper but had to be renamed when the Inquisition threatened to charge him with heresy.

As you can probably tell I devour all things historical especially when they are to do with culture and religion but I also love art. We have collected art from emerging as well as some from established artists for many years now although much of our New Zealand stuff is back 'home' in storage. Thankfully the boys have grown up with my obsessions and are quite used to me heading straight for the nearest gallery or museum, church or temple and will indulge my dilly dallying...for a while- actually quite a while now. I like to think some of my appreciation has rubbed off. M, in particular, enjoys the controversy, symbolism and drama.

Anyway after a couple of hours both feet and eyes were getting tired and we still had not seen what had led us across the bridge in the first place. And then there it was tucked away in a room not much wider than a hallway, arguably one of Leonardo da Vinci's most famous works, thanks to Dan Brown... Vitruvian Man.

Based on the presumption of Roman architect, Marcus Vitruvius Pollio, that the proportions for the structure and arrangement of manmade structures should be based on the natural laws of harmony and beauty which can be best symbolised by the symmetry and proportions of the human body, being the earthly model of divine perfection. His idea was that the human body, arms and legs extended, should fit exactly into both the circle and the square, symbols for heaven and earth(mortal existence). Vitruvian Man is thus the perfect illustration of the duality of man- his potential divinity and grounded mortality- which was an idea originally expressed by Pythagoras at least two millennium before Leonardo da Vinci.

There were plenty of attempts at illustrating this idea before da Vinci but the squashing of the figure into both shapes always resulted in unbalanced limbs. Da Vinci, who spent years perfecting his depiction of the human form by dissecting actual human bodies before drawing detailed diagrams and illustrations, eventually worked out that for the drawings proportions to work the square could not have the same central point on the human body as the circle (the navel) but actually needs to be a bit lower.

Even though M and I had seen the global travelling da Vinci exhibition in Singapore I could not help being surprised at it's small size. It's clarity, though, after all these years is impressive.

Back outside in the cold and the damp we decided to walk to Santa Maria della Salute on the same side of the Canale Grande. She sits right on the end of the peninsula, exposed on all sides to the days creeping chill which seemed appropriate for a 'plague church'.

For nearly three years beginning in the summer of 1629 Venice was hit with waves of Bubonic Plague wiping out almost a third of the population. The city, frightened and desperate that all medicines and prayers were proving futile, devised a plan. A procession around Piazza San Marco was organised and for three days and three nights most of Venice's 10 000 survivors marched, with lit torches, solemnly around the square. In the end a more significant but equally elaborate gesture was called for and a declaration was made-if the city was saved the Venetian Doge promised to build a church, more beautiful than the rest, dedicated to, not just a saint, but to the Virgin herself. The story goes that the very next week the weather changed and the humid conditions that had been aiding the course of disease cleared.

The epidemic slowed and just two weeks later it had diminished altogether.

La Salute's, as she is most often called, distinctive location was chosen because of its easy processional access from the Piazza San Marco, just across the end of the canal. After a competition to decide the architect for the dramatic double domed basillica, construction was begun. More than 300 000 posts support her weight and prevent the octagonal stone and marmorino(brick covered with marble dust)structure from sinking into the lagoon.

This stunning expression of gratitude and piety, considered classic Baroque, is chock full of Marian symbolism. From the outside; the dome- her crown, the dimly lit interior -her womb but from the inside the entire structure of the cavernous space could be likened to an upturned chalise or reliquary (a container for religious relics). The octagonal design and the eight altar niches inside mirror the eight points of the Virgin's emblematic star. The high altar is a beautiful serene Byzantine Madonna and child.

The church was finally consecrated on 21st November 1687.

It seemed an appropriate place to visit on Christmas Eve but even inside the church the temperature must have been close to freezing so we decided to keep moving. Back outside we made our way again towards the Accademia Bridge and then, as it was beginning to get dark, towards the lights of the Rialto, probably the most famous of Venice's big bridges.

Not all those who wander are lost- J R Tolkien

2010-01-09T02:52:00.000-08:00

By the time we emerged from our suite at the Palazzo Rosa in Cannaregio it was more lunch than dinner time so, conscious of having already lost what amounted to a full day, we donned layers of icebreaker (in my case singlet, long sleeved T, cotton short sleeved T, icebreaker jersey, knee length jacket, scarf, hat and gloves)and set off on a mission- to get lost.

There are many curiosities in Venice, or 'Serenissima Repubblica' (the serene republic) as it was once known, one of the most obvious being the fact that it is built on not one but 117 small islands, connected by mostly stone arched bridges with steps on either side which were often occupied not only by winter boot clad feet but also by the tiny wheels one might find on the bottom of suitcases or loading trolleys or of the sort of shopping trolleys the elderly use bumping their way up and down the other side. Either side of the canals are candy coloured multi storey attached houses many with entrances directly off the canal creating picturesque images of doorways to nowhere and little boat ramps often marked by striped poles.

According to tradition, Venice was founded in 421 AD on April 25th, Saint Mark's day. The most important village in the lagoon, at the time, was not 'Venice' but Torcello, where in 639 a beautiful gold mosaic Cathedral was built.

Step by step, as the city grew, more islands were built on and bridges were constructed to link them to each other. To make the marshy islands stable and solid enough to build on millions of wooden pilings were driven through the mud and into the more solid base of sand and clay below. Oak planks were placed on top and then layers of heavy, water resistent marble for the actual building foundations. Over the years the salty sea water has petrified the wooden struts making them harder than stone but the weight of the marble foundations and the stone and brick buildings has slowly driven them further into the sandy base to the tune of a few centimeters a century. To add to the slump the hundreds of wells around the city were once used to remove water from subterranean aquifers eventually 'deflating' the bubble that was propping Venice up.

Because of Venice’s tendency to flood between November and March- the frequency of which has increased markedly over the years due, they say, more to global warming than to the idea that Venice is sinking- many of the residences have abandoned the first or ground floor but 'calle', or street, facing houses and shops still have to cope with the regular influx of the canals not so clean water. Most use wooden or metal barriers across the bottom of the doorway but the water still seeps through.

I woke twice, in the three nights we were there, to the otherworldly sounds of the acqua alta warning tones that echo off the walls of the city and rise melodically with the severity of the expected tide. Christmas Eve, the night before we left, I was again teased out of sleep by three tones eerily reminisent of the alien lure in 'Close Encounters'. I've found an example here press 'tone 3' to hear what we did. We were very lucky that high tide was in the early hours or we would have found ourselves with the prospect of getting our feet wet although the raised platforms you see here

are used by pedestrians which is most people as the streets of Venice are car free. The locals are well prepared with wardrobes of colourful gumboots, hip high waders and even, for tourists, disposable plastic knee high 'boots' to keep your toes dry. Still the prospect of lugging our packs to the nearest vaporetto thigh deep in freezing smelly water and then sitting for four and a half hours in wet clothes on the train to Rome was not very appealing.

Throughout history many have been seduced and enchanted by the fairytale like beauty of Venice with her cobbled labyrintine lanes and curved stone bridges. The water and closeness of her buildings seem to play with the light at all hours of the day and with the shadows at night. We were immediately betwitched. It was hard not to take photos of every canal and from the top of each 'ponte' and around every corner. There is an empyral, gossamer, whimsical feel to Venice. The boundaries between reality and fantasy become blurred in window boxes and plush gondola seats, in leaning bell towers and crooked doorways. Every few steps is a corner and around every corner is a painting.

We walked and walked, stopped for coffee and hot chocolate- which was more like pure melted chocolate- poked around christmas stalls and peered into warm shop windows and then walked some more.

Eventually we rounded a corner and caught our first glimpse of the San Marco Basillica.

Saint Mark, an Apostle who is said to be the author of the biblical book of Mark, is the patron Saint of Venice. He is also the Patron Saint of insect bites! The story goes that Mark was asked to write his 'book' by Peter. He did this in Rome. The Venetians chose him as their Patron Saint because of his ties with Rome which allowed them to declare their independence of the Byzantine Church.

The original Patron Saint of Venice was St.Teodoro (Saint Theodore of Amasea) whose body, when he was usurped by Mark, was moved to Brindisi. Mark's body was originally buried in Egypt after a particularly brutal very public death that was rumoured to have coloured the streets with his blood-literally! The story of San Marco's remains says that two Christian merchants smuggled him out of Alexandria to protect him from desecration and, alledgedly to deter detection by Muslim boarder guards, hid him between slices of pork. His remains were initially buried in a chapel in the Doge's Palace but later a church was built that was to be his perpetual resting place.

The majestic San Marco Basillica has, over the years, undergone many modifications including after a fire during the rebellion in 976 that was thought to have destroyed the saint's remains. They were eventually found in a pillar by a Doge in 1094.

St.Mark's main facade is unique. Modelled on typical a Byzantine design it is really more Gothic with soaring columns, ribbed arches, vast reverberant domes and fine spires ... oh and the reliefs, incredibly descriptive reliefs like pages of a story book. The five arched entrances all have richly tiled lintels with more tales told, this time of Saint Mark himself. During the Middle Ages owning a saint's remains assured attention and prosperity. There would have been just as many tourists crowding the churches corridors and spacious belly as there are (or are usually)today. Venice didn't possess just any Saint either- Mark was one of only four Evangelists- and they had his whole body! A feat almost unheard of.

Of the five arched doorways only two were open whenwe got there and, in complete contrast to what we had been warned, there were no queues. Two guards stood at the entrance doorway checking bags (usually backpacks are not allowed in but J was able to take in the small one he was wearing) and we passed a sign saying no photos so although they are supposedly lax about enforcment we respected the rule and our cameras stayed in our bags.

Just past the guards is a long hallway that runs horizontally the lehgth of the front of the church. Just as with all the other churches we were to encounter in Italy the structure was magnificent in the omnipotent sense of the word. Inside the five domes create a space grandiose and commanding which it needs to be to accommodate the brilliance of the 8000 sq meters of golden mosaics that depict scenes from the Gospel. The tiny squares of colour lean in different directions in order to catch any light there is which makes them appear to glitter like stars. The Basillica has one of the most extravagant and treasured altar screens in the world too. Covered in more than 3000 precious jewels and icons it is inlayed entirely in gold.

The square outside, Piazza San Marco, is the only square in Venice big enough to be legitimately called a piazza (the smaller ones are called campo's) and can sometimes be heard refered to as 'The Living Room of Europe'. It is the lowest place in Venice so is one of the first places to flood during an acqua alta and as the 'centre' of Venice is also one of the first places tourists visit. Here it is the night before we left, on Christmas Eve.

Shining bright in the rain like a Christmas ornament.

The bit that runs from the Basillica past the Doge's Palace, which we ran out of time to visit this time round, towards the lagoon is called Piazzetta San Marco and used to be a dock but was filled in in 1177.

This was a stance oft seen in Italy, necks bent as far back as possible, eyes trained skyward gazing at all the embellishments the roofs, spires and towers were holding. The boys are standing with the Doge's palace behind them. They are probably looking at the clock on the clock tower opposite which is distinctive in that it uses the signs of the zodiac.

The lion you can just see on the top of the pillar at the end of the Piazzetta is the symbol of Saint Mark.

At the end of the Piazzetta is a wide promenade where you can catch ferries to the islands or gondola's for a ride back through the canals. It is here where, on Ascension Day (40 days after Easter in the Christian calendar), a Doge and the city's most important members sailed out from into the Adriatic and to the Lido port where he threw a ring and pronounced: 'We wed you oh sea, in the sign of true, eternal dominion'.

A very long day

2010-01-08T19:38:00.000-08:00

After a busy day of last minute chores and a few final market purchases our flight to Bangkok left the ground on time at 8pm. We waited out a couple of hours dozing in transit then were finally on our way to Venice, Italy via Malpensa airport Milan and a 3 1/2 hr train ride on the National Eurostar- not to be confused with this Eurostar- or so we thought.

A semi horizontal, relatively comfortable few hours fitful kip, thanks to a half empty plane, were broken a couple of hours before landing by the sounds of our small airborne village making it's way one by one to the teeny bathroom cubicles and the smell of sausage and cheesy omlette snaking it's way down the aisle- not exactly a vegetarians favourite wake up call. Being only about 5 am at our destination it was still black as night outside so to get my bearings I flipped my screen on and clicked till I found the flight plan map. Our plane, it showed, was slightly more north than I had expected and an announcement about half an hour later provided the explanation.

While we slumbered the already arctic conditions in Milan had blown themselves into a fierce snow storm necessitating a diversion to Zurich to wait for the all clear. We landed a while later, at dawn, and watched the light leak over the alps from the plane as the authorities decided what to do with about 200 odd visa free interlopers(although techniquely as Kiwis WE do not require visas to enter Switzerland). Eventually we were let into the glass terminal with vouchers for 'lunch' which we should have realised was a pretty clear indication of how the day would progress.

The view as stunning as it is could could only sustain a restless holiday ready mob for so long.

After changing our train reservation to Venice to the 5-30pm instead of the 11-30am we were obviously not going to make, numerous games of card Scrabble, Egyptian Rat Screw and Spot That Chalet (ok that last one doesn't require cards) a tedious drawn out 8 hours later we were back in the same seats and

flown over some incredible scenery (we would not have seen otherwise) to a newly scraped runway banked by a good half a meter of snow and a still well below freezing Milan, in chaos.

In what was the first of a series of lucky catches we purchased shuttle tickets and squeezed into the last four seats on the crowded shuttle into Milan Centrale Statione. The usual 40 minute journey turned into a 2 hour ordeal on clogged roads punctuated by the intermittent sound of huge clods of snow hitting the roof as they became dislodged from power lines and tree branches. We hit the station running (very carefully on the slippery marble tile) a pack each front and back, towards the platforms a good hour after our revised train was supposed to have left.

'What do we do?' J asked our e-ticket clutched tightly in his ungloved and by now almost certainly numb hand.
The 'Tourist information booth' was helpfully closed.
'There', I huffed between chattering teeth pointing to an open door with a sign that read 'Passenger Assistance'.
'Try in there'.
I watched him disappear into the muddle of displaced humanity bitterly conscious that if we got separated without a working phone we would be forced to stay put helpless and freezing until he found us again. It was incredibly cold and in the rush none of us had had time to put nearly enough clothes on for the conditions. I was beyond shivering.
Then suddenly he was back.
'She said to just get on' he flung over his shoulder as he plundered past.
We all followed in silence.

A train sat mutely at the end of the tracks it's doors steamed firmly shut. The digital sign above the platform said Venezia SL and, I think, 5-30? People were fading down the platform then reappearing still dragging bags or lugging, like us brightly coloured packs. After a few minutes someone managed to open the first door and we all fell in and rolled into the first four seats that were facing each other around a tiny bench table. J was sent on a sortie down the length of the train to see if we could get into our reserved seats but quickly came back after finding the through carriage door still locked and the rest of the train still dark. Too tired to do anything else we just sat and slowly the carriage filled. At 9pm almost unbelievably and without any fanfare at all the train began to move.

The conductor who checked our tickets didn't say anything about the fact we were supposed to be on the 5-30 but he did point out we were in the wrong seats.

'It's no problem' said the Italian man opposite, 'the snow...it's Italy...they tell us we should bring sandwiches for tourists on the train (he flung his arms in the air)...this is Italy...' he said by way of explanation.
We sat wordlessly, no longer cold just relieved and exhausted beyond belief. The next 3 1/2 hours we sat eyes propped open with failing toothpicks watching the snow piled landscape pass as the train hissed through deserted dimmly lit stations and the carriage slowly emptied again. Finally I saw 'Mestre'.
'Next station' I prodded.
Venezia Sainta Lucia was wet AND cold. Piles of dirty ice were heaped in corners and the canal in front of the station entrance was full of choppy inky water. We headed for the vaporetto dock and tried to work out the stops, the directions, the lines. Our B and B directions said clearly line 1, stop Ca'd'oro. We bought 4 tickets from the machine and debated whether to 'validate' them in the yellow box at the end of the bobbing gangplank. Deciding against it for the moment and realising we had just missed our boat we could do nothing but wait. Thankfully a few minutes later another boat turned up and we tumbled on with sleep deprived lack of balance and damp numb toes. The boat captain did nothing more than glance at J's fistfull of tickets before going back to his wheel, there are usually big fines for unvalidated tickets.

At our stop, which was clearly marked even in the post midnight darkness, aware that tourists often get hopelessly lost in Venice's tight lanes even in the daylight, we followed a bunch of locals who looked like they knew where they were headed for the length of a couple of alleyways and through a small square and then we were abruptly alone.

'Where to?' I asked.
'Maybe back' mumbled J rereading the instructions. 'It's supposed to be only minutes from the stop.'
We backtracked, tried the opening in the little campo that had been previously obscured by a large round fountain and were immediately rewarded by a picturesque little arched bridge and alongside the canal on the other side the door of our little B and B.
'Watch the water' whispered J as he buzzed us in.

We were greeted warmly, even at 1am, and quickly in hushed tones in exchange for our passports were given our key.
'You can do the rest in the morning'

Later that morning, after a long sleep-in, we were to learn we had 'just missed' a meter high tide- the acqua alta- which had flooded the ground floor by half a meter. In fact as high tide was during the early hours although there was an even higher meter and a half rise the night before we left we never had to wade as the locals do or use the boardwalks that are placed helpfully along the main oft flooded throughfares. Just as well as there wasnt any room in the pack for 4 full sized gumboots and 30 Euro each for new ones would have meant a lot less gelato!

Look who flew into Phnom Penh this morning

2009-12-19T02:10:00.000-08:00

Look who flew into Phnom Penh this morning at about 9am.

It is B's first trip to Cambodia and he gets 3 days before we are all back at the airport ready for another 10+ hours squashed into an economy class bench. So we hit the town. We surrounded ourselves with a bit of history...

...had a decidedly one sided conversation with a monkey who was too busy concentrating on his rambutan to even notice we were there.

Climbed the steps of Wat Phnom...

...and watched some sure footed boys do an impossible task at the end of an almost rungless ladder.

And later after the sun had disappeared over the hazy horizon we danced with the evening traffic and the disco fountain at Botum Park...

...before dinner at Fish and an early night.

XL

2009-12-17T20:32:00.000-08:00

(From here)

Its my 40th birthday today so it's fitting, I think, that by tuesday I will be the closest to the place that I was born than I have been yet. As I think I've mentioned in a previous post I was born to a couple of young Kiwis finishing a PhD at Birmingham University in England on the 17th of December 1969. Six weeks later, at the end of January, my brave parents left the fog and drizzle of a brummy winter and moved to the thick 30C humidity of Makassar, Indonesia. Indignant and probably a bit confused I immediately embarked on a nursing strike and loudly refused to sleep. Eventually a Dutch doctor was called in. He sedated both mum and me and we all began again.

The first almost decade of my life was spent in South East Asia, outside of both the country of my birth and the country which passport I carry (although techniquely I could carry both a Kiwi and a British passport) making me an Adult Third Culture Kid (ATCK), a relatively new term used to describe someone who has spent significant amount time outside of their own culture during their developing years. Like many ATCK's, when we ended up 'back' in New Zealand the sense of belonging I had expected didn't happen. I looked the same, talked with a similar accent, spoke the same language but all the unwritten rules, the expectations, the unspoken cultural lingo that becomes a part of our psyche, absorbed by osmosis from the day we are born was, at best, patchy. I often felt exposed, different, slow and confused. I rebelled, self medicated and stopped eating, anything to try and regain control of a situation I didn't really understand. Then I turned 20 and we suddenly had B and I was responsible for more than me. I didn't fit became we didn't fit.

Eventually, after a few years of working on J (an Adult Lived Here All My Life Kid) he took a position in Apia, Samoa and I expatriated, again, 20 years on. It dawned on me sometime during that first year that I was much happier being different, where I wasn't expected to be the same, that I am comfortable boarderless and wear adventure and chaos like a favourite sloppy Tee. Two and a half years later I came back to live in Singapore and discovered despite her metamorphasis, her glamourous new clothes, like an old friend, she and I still fit and we had plenty to talk about! Cambodia too has a familiar feel, probably because she resembles Makassar in the 70's.

It has taken 40 years to begin work out who I am. It'll probably take another 40 to work out how to articulate it and by then I hope to have seen a lot more of the world and lived in a few more countries starting with the little boot shaped bit above the African coastline.

It's gonna be cold!

2009-12-13T22:30:00.000-08:00

(from here )

I have been googling Wunderground every other day (which I found thanks to Leone) watching the temperatures in the parts of Italy we are a week or so away from visiting with a mixture of fear and amusement. They are dropping like the preverbial stone and while theoretically none of this is unexpected practically the idea of sub ten celcius sends much, much more than a shiver down my tropically half cooked bones.

Today wunderground says this week Venice manages a high of 5C dipping on friday to an inconceivable -6, which I have absolutely no point of reference for at all anymore, minus 10 by saturday!

Sure it was cold in New Zealand in July.

Freezing in fact.

But there was no snow!

Wunderland declared Venice is expecting a coating of the white stuff today and Rome on Saturday.

Thankfully it's Italy and being a huge Christmas fan I may very well be distracted by choirs in churches, rich and beautiful presepi- nativity scenes- some with real people, twinkling duomo's, toy and ornament markets, pannettone and possibly a sprinkling of tiny super cooled droplets of crystaline water.

Our first ever white Christmas!

Bring on the icebreaker, the warm puffy jackets, the hats, the gloves and scarves as big as knee blankets we are ready!

A confession

2009-12-10T04:46:00.000-08:00

(from dianasneighbourhood.com)

I hate pasta.

There i said it.

I think I must be one of the only people in the world but I really truly don't like pasta...any pasta; wheat, egg, rice flour, barley, corn flour, noodles, spagetti, gnocchi, lasagna, farfalle, canneloni, fettucini, macaroni, linguini, soba, udon, bean thread, vermicelli, tubed, pillowed, flat, frilled, stuffed, smothered, oiled, green, red, black or white (actually usually really more of an off white) organic, store bought, homemade or made especially for me (in which case I'd probably just eat it and pretend to like it because thats how I was bought up). I just don't understand the fuss.

I'm only saying this because we are about a week away from a 2 and a half week trip to Italy, pasta capital of the world, and while I am aware there is plenty else to eat in Italy it is the worlds largest producer and consumer.

(from stevennoble.com)

So what is the big deal with pasta anyway?

Like tofu, which I confess to liking in most forms (except perhaps the famed 'stinky tofu' which I have yet to try), pasta is used mainly as a carrier of added flavours, rather than it's own flour and water with an optional hint of egg taste, which combined with its huge range of incarnations makes it one of the most versatile staples available and gives it global appeal.

Pasta's recorded history predates the Romans. It has been found depicted in tomb drawings of the mysterious Etruscan peoples of ancient Italy and was probably being made and eaten in a similar form in China at about the same time.

Pasta is considered a nutritious food; low in fat and sodium(depending on what you add to it) and high in complex carbohydrates, the kind which because it digests slowly gives you an energy release over time as opposed to simple carbs which are converted quickly causing a rapid rise in blood sugar levels leaving you with a 'sugar rush' and then the inevitable crash. Generally speaking whole wheat products with minimal processing are considered better, the more interference a food has had, the smaller the chains of starch become and the easier it is to digest. Pasta, while still being a 'processed' food has molecules packed so tightly that only about half is rapidly digested when the pasta is cooked 'al dente' leaving the other half to be absorbed at a slower rate.

(By Stefania Ferri from allposters.com)

None of this is changing my mind.

I'd still rather eat rice....risotto anyone?

Although eventually it might not matter because according to a report by the British Met Office, last month, scientists predicted that Italy’s durum wheat yields (the best wheat varietal to make pasta semolina from) are at risk of being effected by projected climate change, raised temperatures and decreased rainfall.

I wonder if anyone would notice if I just licked off the sauce?

Lets get lost

2009-12-02T04:11:00.001-08:00

‘Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?’
‘That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,’ said the Cat.
‘I don’t much care where—’ said Alice.
`Then it doesn’t matter which way to go,’ said the Cat.
‘—so long as I get somewhere,‘ Alice added as an explanation.
‘Oh, you’re sure to do that,’ said the Cat, ‘if you only walk long enough.’
~ Lewis Carroll, in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

One of my favourite things to do on holiday is walk.

It also happens to be, in my opinion, one of the best ways to see a new city or town. Of course some places are just not meant for walking and Phnom Penh is one of them. It’s hot -even the few steps from the relative comfort of an air conditioned car or a moving tuk tuk are enough to induce a sweat moustache- you have to negotiate the lack of a footpath or a footpath cluttered with cars, motos and tuk tuks, tuk tuk drivers and motodops ask if you need a ride every couple of minutes even though they saw you get out of your car not three steps away or heard you say 'mien laan' (have car) to the guy in the previous tuk tuk and finally the stuff you really want to see is spread out over half the city so you'd be walking for ages just to get from riverside to central market.

So when we do go anywhere else I am even more motivated than ever to, as the ad on the Nat Geo Adventure channel says,'get lost'.

We got lost in Shanghai...

for a while anyway...

J seems to have a highly developed inbuilt GPS system.

I am dying to try it out in Venice, a city people say is as easy to get lost in as it is to be found. It will be a much tougher ask when sometimes you can't see more than a sliver of sky let alone a landmark highrise party hat.

The other side of the river

2009-11-22T22:28:00.000-08:00

The day we decided to go to the Pudong side of the river the temperature dropped over night from a relatively comfortable 27 degrees (and a lot less humidity than we are used to at home) to a bone chilling but thankfully sunny 12 degrees. We had come partially perpared with a thermal top each and sweatshirts but not jackets as we were expecting a rather less crippling, but still cold when you are used to year around 30+, 20 degrees so we layered up and took off at a stiff arms-folded-against-the-building-breeze pace towards the metro station at People's Park. A couple of stops later we popped out of the underground station tunnel onto a massive multi lane, multi road intersection directly opposite one of the most recognisable buildings in Shanghai, the pink 468 meter high Oriental Pearl Tower.

Crossing the road towards the tower to peppy rounded Boyband pop which was kind of appropriate considering the design of the building is based on a verse of a poem by Bai Juyi, penned during the Tang Dynasty. 'Pipa Xing' -Pipa Play- describes a chance encounter with a female pipa player on the Yangtze River.

The bold strings rattled like splatters of sudden rain,
The fine strings hummed like lovers' whispers.
Chattering and pattering, pattering and chattering,
As pearls, large and small, on a jade plate fall.

Following the road towards the river we ended up on a wide boardwalk butted up against the grey wind churned water of the Huangpu with the most incredible view of the endless contemporary science fiction shapes of Shanghai's skyline...

...which like the Imperial planet Coruscant becomes a 'blaze of light and sparkling colours' after night fall complete with violent red sunsets and daytime smokey haze.

(Actually for Star Wars fans I imagine many of Coruscant's descriptions could be used to describe Shanghai- 'a world with enough diversions for just about anyone'...'the long-overdue fall of the corrupt Old Republic, and the sweeping introduction of the Emperor's resplendent New Order'...and 'The recorded history of Coruscant stretches back so far that it becomes indistinguishable from legend…' )

After a necessary hour or so stocking up on jeans etc at the nearby Super Brand Mall we headed back past the tower to the Aquarium...

...to ride the longest sightseeing underwater tunnel in the world...

...and of course see some really big fish, some really rare aquatic animals and some ugly cute sea creatures...

...oh and the sharks, crocs and turtles too.

When we were done it was dark and much colder than when we went in. Time to head back and find some dinner and a warm blanket to snuggle under.

(We finally got some stable electricity so I uploaded photos like a fiend!)

A museum well worth seeing

2009-11-09T22:35:00.001-08:00

The Shanghai museum, on the South side of People's Square, is hard to miss. Designed by a Chinese architect it is supposed to resemble an ancient 'ding', a bronze cooking pot either round or square on three or four short chubby legs, used throughout Chinese ancient history often for sacrificial offerings and buried with its owner as a spiritual utensil.

The number of 'ding' in a tomb can be considered an indication of the rank or importance of the inhabitant. The specific 'ding' the museum was designed after is inside one of the museums ten galleries.

Outside the building appears square at the bottom with a circular open top. Inside this translates to a huge three storey high central atrium topped by a large round skylight with the galleries, arranged by theme rather than dynasty, on mezzanine floors facing inward.

We wandered the darkened sculpture room first inspecting the old, the very old and the almost unimaginably old (or about 475 B.C.E to 1644 C.E for those needing a bit more accuracy)...wood

...bronze and stone...the quirky, the serious and the downright sour...then the ancient Bronze galleries collection of 400 odd vessels (18th to the 3rd centuries B.C.E) including THE three legged 'ding'. Most things were labelled in both Chinese and English with general information on larger wall plaques,, also in both scripts, and on the left of each gallery entrance there is even more information in takeaway leaflet form should you need it. We picked one up at each gallery we explored but ended up recycling most back to their piles after walking around.

We raced through the ceramics gallery stopping to linger longer at the few bits that stood out from the rest of the largely bowls and plates then after a brief team discussion headed to thGallery of Calligraphy. Often described as the 'art' of writing, Chinese calligraphy is, truely, an art. Not only does it perform the practical task of communicating in recognisable symbols, in a similar way as our romanised characters do, but it's form also conveys the character, emotion, culture and even moral integrity of the artist to the reader and has the power to provoke feeling in the viewer the same way a painting might. Created about 4500 years ago Chinese written communication, in pictorial form, evolved from a much more simple set of rather more recognisable figures to the sophisticated medium it is today.

Here's an example of running characters

The final room we saw was the Seal Gallery. I had no idea there were so many shapes, sizes and roles of seals. Seals have been and are still used as official and private identification monikers but did you know that they are magic too? According to one tale, a yellow dragon gave the first seal to the Yellow Emperor during the Han Dynasty. Another story claims it was a phoenix who gave it to Emperor Yao. It is said that he who possess the seal has the Mandate of Heaven and as such the right to rule the empire. In Taoism seals can be used to stamp a protective circle or line that wild animals can not cross (did anyone see the Spiderwick Chronicles?).

Private seals are unregulated in size, material and shape so can be pretty different. The seals above look more like game pieces from a monopoly set than signature stamps. Some of these, called 'leisure seals', can include a short quote or inscription that the owner finds meaningful a bit like the modern day use of imbedded quotes at the bottom of a persons email.

I love the press printing effect and have spent many hours carving and turning the wheel on an old printing press at the art centre in Apia working in positives and negatives, knowing just how much to slick the roller and reworking the tension to get the perfect image. The balance and line of the resulting images of the various seals are delicate and beautiful. What a great way to leave your mark.

This last one is a whole story complete with picture like a tribal tattoo that has been passed down from generation to generation added to as the family history grows in years and experience forever etched in stone.

An ancient garden and a bit of calm

2009-11-08T01:03:00.001-08:00

Tranquil YuYuan Garden- which since 'yuan' means garden literally translates to Yu Garden Garden- is right smack bang in the middle of one of the busiest tourist areas in Shanghai. NanShi or 'Old City', a renovated-in-traditional-style shopping street, was once inside the walled part of Old Shanghai and is still surrounded by non renovated alleyways and lanes where we found some fabulous street food.

The 5 acres of garden have a traditional Chinese feel with rockery, pavillions, doorways and gates and koi ponds. It was created more than 400 years ago, during the Ming Dynasty, as a filial present from a son to his high ranking father. It apparently took Pan Yunduan twenty years and all his life savings to build. The guide books don't say whether his father was pleased after he died it became neglected and fell into disrepair until the mid 18th century when it was bought by merchants. During the Opium Wars in the mid 19th century the British army occupied the area and it was used again during the mid 20th century by Japanese Imperial troops none of whom were particularly respectful of the beauty they were residing in. Twenty years later the Shanghai government restored it to its former glory and reopened it to the public and in 1982 declared it a national monument.

We wandered through the delightfully named gardens and pavillions; Ten Thousand Flower Tower, Hall of Observing in Quietness, Tower of Happiness and watched a pink silk clad all girl orchestra on the balcony of one of the pavillions playing traditional blue and white china, string and percussion instruments.

We ducked through asymetrical doorways (an important Feng Shui principle) of various shapes guarded by Ming stone lions, followed paths over arched bridges and past pagodas their roofs inhabited by tiny protective mythical stone creatures and old Chinese men with long moustaches and thin beards and hung with red tasseled lanterns. The vistas have been carefully created to invoke a feeling of peace and stillness which the garden retains even as a major (read: heavily populated by clumps of flag led tour groups) tourist attraction.

Looking for the famed Nine Cornered Zig Zag bridge we ended up back at the beginning and realised that the bridge was actually outside the walls of the garden in the middle of the melaee of Old Street mall.

Not far away is Chengxian Ge Temple a Buddhist nunnery built in 1600 and another oasis in the middle of Shanghai's tourist district.

Like YuYuan Garden, Chengxian was built by Pan Yunduan, this time to honour his mother and it too was all but destroyed during the cultural revolution even housing a factory for a time. In 1989 restoration began and it is now not only one of Shnaghai's many temple tourist attractions but an important functioning nunnery.

Next was a Daiost Temple, The White Cloud Temple or Xuanmiaoguan, near the former western gate of Shnghai's old city wall. The two story complex is built in a square around a wide square courtyard, rooms facing inwards edged with carved balconies.

This golden god was at the front door complete with a gesture I'm guessing doesn't mean the same in China as it does to a Kiwi (look at his left hand).

Daoism is more a philosophy than a religion. The concept of 'dao', generally defined as the right or morally correct way to behave, is common in many Eastern religions. In Daoism the concept is more broad, complex and inclusive and the dao becomes a force on it's own. Life and death are viewed as stages of 'Absolute Dao', in a cycle similar to that of Buddhism and Hinduism, in a way of life that seeks to bring followers closer to conformity with nature and natural order. It's 'laws' and community order come from Confucianism. When blended with Buddhism Daoism becomes Zen which wasn't surprising because the whole temple complex was simple, open, uncluttered and calm.

We spent a while wandering the balconies and sitting in the sun in the courtyard as the blue clad monks went quietly about their business around us.

And then it was time to brave the crowds again in search of some sustenance to get us through the afternoon.

Potted, stuffed and a bit dusty

2009-11-07T17:28:00.000-08:00

We followed the signs to an unobtrusive front door, bought tickets, 5RMB, from the hole in the wall, climbed the steps and pushed through the heavy double glass and wood front doors. The lobby was reminiscent of the 20's with a mosaic tile floor and grimy stained glass windows. The former cotton exchange, still carries echoes it's previous inhabitants with drapped silk and fox furs crossing into the grand atrium with it's domed glass ceiling and moulded architraves. It's current collection of stuffed, ripened and potted specimens, largely donated by the British Museum in the mid 1950's sits gathering dust in grimy cabinets along peeling walls tagged with bilingual (Chinese and Latin) labels typed on an old manual typewriter.

The most exciting bit, the raison d'etre, is back downstairs in the huge atrium where a complete, four storey tall, 145-150 million year old dinosaur skeleton stands it's head tucked into the corner of the dome. The Mamenchisaurus (which looks like a brontosaurus to me)was discovered in 1952 on a highway construction site in Sichuan, China and named after the place it was found.
Beside the giant, sharing it's stage, are two more Chinese dinos; the 12 foot tall herb eating Tsintaosaurus with characteristic duck bill snout is posed reared up on back legs and the lumbering Tuojiangosaurus also from Sichuan with it's fiercesome spiked tail.

And as if thats not enough beside the dinosaurs, on its own plinth is a Yellow River Woolly skeleton, Manfred from Ice Age, the ancient elephant- in fact the mammoth is more closely related to the Asian than the African elephant.
Just around the corner in a red walled alcove are two Ming Dynasty mummies unearthed during the construction of Dapu Lu (road).

So even though the signs sounds apologetic:

"As we are limited by time, ability, and financial capacity, the exhibition might have many shortcomings. Therefore we will be very grateful to those who can give us good opintons."

...we felt like we'd hit the jackpot!

A little bit of history

2009-11-07T01:48:00.000-08:00

New Zealand history dates back about 700 years.

Chinese history dates back to 400 000BCE.

When the first Polynesians were making their way towards Aotearoa the Chinese had already been making silk for nearly 5 thousand years, they had fought numerous battles, been ruled by Monarchy, Dynasty, Kingdoms and Emperors, had been using paper currency since 800BCE, invented fireworks, gunpowder, the flame thrower, the wheelbarrow, parachutes, the rudder and compass and been planting in rows all well before the Current Era began. And they had been keeping records for at least three thousand years.

For a Chinese city Shanghai is relatively new it's history spans just eight Dynasties. From a sleepy town of a few thousand families Shanghai grew to 250000 after cementing itself as a cotton and textile manufacturing centre in the 13th century and grew exponentially again during the Qing Dynasty as the British forced a concession after the Opium Wars and trade routes with the West formed up the Yangtze river. By the early 19th century Shanghai had a robust expat population of traders, bankers and real estate investors and an infamous reputation as an exotic 'port of call'. World War II saw Shanghai fall into Japanese hands, it's foreigners left en masse and stayed away even after the war as China became a communist state and firmly closed it's doors for nearly thirty years. Today Shanghai is again a modern cosmopolitan city, the second largest in China after Chongqing.

The city centre is divided into two by the Huangpu River and usually you can stroll along both shores to admire the skyline on each side.

A stroll along The Bund, on the historical side, would typically afford great views of Pudong, the commercial centre on the other side of the murky waters, and a more close up look at the line up of some of Shanghai's most beautiful buildings that once housed banks and trading across the road. I say usually because The Bund is currently undergoing renovation and encircled by a 6 foot tall fence but should be back to its promenading glory early next year just in time for Expo 2010. We walked all the way down Nanjing Road, Shanghai's shopping street, until we hit Zongshan Road, which boarders The Bund, then continued right, down the building side. Fifty-two buildings (minus number four of course) range in architectural styles from gothic to baroque, romanesque to renaissance. Apparently Shanghai has one of the richest art deco collections in the world.

Just south of The Bund lies the remnants of Shanghai's old city wall. In 1553, during the Ming Dynasty, the city of Shanghai constructed a city wall, nearly 5 km around, to protect itself against Japanese pirates. Today just 50 meters is all that is left dating back to the Qing Dynasty and bears the names of Emperors Xianfeng (1851-61) and Tongzhi (1862-74).

The Dajing Ge Pavilion, one of the 30 original towers has not long been rebuilt. For 5 RMB each you can explore. There is a photographic exhibit on life in the old Chinese city and a model in a glass case. The four characters on the piece of the wall of Dajing Ge, a Guan Yu temple, above, translate as 'To keep the faith for thousands of years.' Guan Yu is the Taoist God of War, a Chinese Military General, a hero in ancient China.

There are also shrines to gods inside the temple pavillion but I couldnt find anything about them.

(I've finally worked out I can't upload pictures onto Blogger from home due to the intermittent speed of our electricity at the moment so these are back dated posts I am posting as I add pics using J's work computer.)

A lost nights sleep and a fast train

2009-11-05T23:08:00.000-08:00

The flight from Phnom Penh to Shanghai was at the inhospitable time of 11.45pm and our plane was delayed another hour and a half. We waited in the terminal, eye lids propped open with toothpicks and caffiene, trying to recall how we had so nochalantly taken midnight flights in and out of Samoa a few years ago. The darkness unhelpfully closed in as the duty free shops switched off their lights, slowly pulled their roller doors down and the queue at the gate grew hopefully longer. Eventually the flight was called and people shuffled towards their polyester clad seats, pulled their blue polarfleece blankets towards their chins and determinedly squeezed their eyes shut. We managed to stay that way, dozing fitfully through the 4 hour flight despite food being served shortly after take off.

Shanghai airport is a massive, shiny hangerlike building with all the mod cons including Singapore clean toilets, fast moving customs queues and uneventful speedy baggage collection. The delay meant we were able to ride the maglev, short for magnetic levitation, which has since January 2004 provided a fast way of getting from the airport to Shanghai's Longyang metro station Pudong . A very fast way. The maglev, with a top speed of 431km an hour makes the 30km trip in about 8 minutes.

For reasons I haven't been able to uncover the train's speed varies depending on time of day and at about 6-30am, one of its first runs, it maxed out at only 301km hour but on our way back 6 days later (at 4-30) we hit 431. We transfered from the maglev's spacious comfort to the Shanghai metro line 2 at rush hour and standing room only. By 8am we were spread out over a comfy chair each in a 15th floor 2 bedroom apartment at New Harbour Serviced Apartments five minutes walk from People's Square downtown Shanghai, ready for a couple of hours catch up kip before exploring our new city.

Driven out by hunger and still a little foggy we made our way back towards the huge park that is People Square and a Starbucks we had spotted earlier. Fortified by coffee and scone we headed back across the road and into the park.

Peoples Square is as it name suggests is a large public square in the Huangpu district of Shanghai, the same area as the infamous pedestrian street, Nanjing Road-'Bag, watch, DVD?' Before communism, and the subsequent outlawing of horse racing and associated gambling, part of the park was The Shanghai Racecourse. The park now includes some pretty architecturally distinct buildings; The Shanghai Grand Theatre, The Urban Planning Exhibition Hall and The Shanghai Museum, where we thought we'd head to next.

The museum, which used to be housed in an office building somewhere nearby, is designed in the shape of a 'ding', a bronze carved bowl which sits on four stout legs used in times gone by for cooking. More specifically the 'Da Ke Ding' which you can see inside. It has a solid square base and round open top which symbolises the Chinese, 'round sky, square earth'. The museum is currently free after a recent Chinese government edict to make some of Shanghai's museums and galleries more accessible to it's people. Eleven galleries and three exhibition halls over three (or four I can't remember now) floors hold ancient bronze works, cjade, eramics, beautiful historic examples of calligraphy, fabulous ancient sculpture and a whole gallery full of seals. We wandered through the galleries until our previous nights lack of sleep began to steer us back to the apartment.

(I have loads of picture I have spent the last week or so trying to upload with very sporadic success. Hopefully I can figure out whats going on and add some more at a later date)

A wee break

2009-10-27T00:41:00.000-07:00

A last minute decision saw us grappling for our passports at the end of last week. Downloading visa forms and diligently filling them in before our driver dropped them off at the Chinese Embassy, where he was given more forms, which we hurriedly completed and tried to drop off at the prescribed time.

Of course it was shut.

Open again at 8?

J went back at 8 the next morning (I had a meeting at the school) where there was a futile wait under the already hot Cambodian sun for some kind of action. He abandoned ship an hour later dripping under his long sleeved business shirt and suit pants. We still don't know when the office finally did open but Chunthy our driver eventually managed to hand in our documents in exchange for a receipt which said we would have visas on tuesday....thats today.

Sure enough Chunthy went back down to the Embassy after dropping me at the gym and was handed them on the spot.

So on thursday at midnight we get on a plane and end up here...

...somewhere we can fly direct from Phnom Penh...somewhere north about 3 and a half hours from Phnom Penh...have you guessed yet?

Shanghai, the largest city in China, famous for 'The Bund' a mile long wide footpath lined with fabulous old buildings along the bend (English for 'bund') in the Huangpu River- which is currently a huge construction site till 2010- and its ever changing modern skyline. I'm looking forward to being able to walk without breaking into an instant sweat, parks with big trees, Starbucks (even though where chains go I prefer Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf), Ikea, museums and art galleries and a week without housework. Cameras are charged, jeans are packed- well nearly I'm not really that organised- and school is almost out. See you on the other side...

The impermanence of sand

2009-10-19T03:14:00.000-07:00

I saw this on the BBC the other day and just about cried....actually I lie ...I did cry. What she does is beautiful and haunting.

Kseniya Simonova was the 2009 winner of Ukraine's got Talent. The 24 year old only began making these sand drawings on the beach a year ago and now uses much less sand, a portable lightbox and a soundtrack to help her tell her story. The stories she tells are of love and war, timeless and relevant the world over, set in the Ukraine during 'The Great patriotic War' (World War II. )In the Ukraine it was a conflict that killed between 8 and 11 Ukrainians, nearly 1 in 4, almost 20% of all the casualties suffered during the war. A truely devastating statistic in a country that was already reeling from Stalin's manufactured famines.

Once Kseniya's story is told it is swept away, merely sand again, back into a box, leaving behind emotion and memories.

Fun Rally 2009

2009-10-18T18:04:00.000-07:00

For weeks I had been part of the organising committee for the third annual ISPP Fun Rally Phnom Penh writing clues, finding prizes, coercing sponsors, creating posters and fliers, getting T shirts and hats printed, distributing said posters and fliers, selling tickets and managing the caterer.

On a sunday a couple of weekends ago four of us piled into a tuktuk for a four hour dry run of the Adult Route that took us in a meandering 20km loop from the Elementary school gate around the answers to 79 clues and tasks and back again hungry, hot, with spent brains and tummys sore from laughing. The route was slimmed down by five clues or aproximately one hour and the final copies printed.

There were two routes. One for adults- the clues more cryptic and the route longer- and one for children. Teams could be a mixture of both adults and kids but had to chose one of the routes, without seeing the clues and tasks, before they left. Clue booklets were a mixture of straight decipher and answer questions and those that invloved a task. The first clue of the Adult Route, for example, took contestants to the school athletic field where they had to run and then brave a ten gallon drum of goo to retrieve a teeny tiny crystal 'diamond'. The kids had much nicer tasks- decorating and eating cookies, fishing from a swimming pool and making sure their parents/guardians completed a set of push ups. Both teams delivered bags of goodies to orphanages on their routes and books to Open Book and ended back where they started...hopefully!

The day before we dressed the elementary school in Rally posters and red balloons, packed bags for the charity task with rice, donated stationary items and toys, and the book bags for 'Open Book', positioned the registration tables under sponsors umbrellas and we were ready.

Sunday dawned cloudy and with a hint of impending rain- perfect!

J and I manned the table for late registrations and sold tickets right up until the last teams were leaving. Teams, in either tuktuks or cars, were ceremoniously flagged off and times recorded in case of a point tie (which actually did happen for both first and second place in the Adult Route).

Two and a half hours later the first teams, doing the Childrens Route, began to dribble in. Followed closely by the eventual winners of the Adult Route. We spent the next couple of hours frantically marking route answers while the contestants were treated to a barbeque lunch and entertained by some clowns from Sovanna Phum and an energetic MC with a hand full of spot prizes.

The eventual winners received a grab bag full of vouchers from various very generous businesses around town and little handmade christmas decorations from Mekong Quilts and Ida Ira and other prizes were given out for 'best dressed' and the 'slowest'.

We arrived back home hot and tired after a glass or two of champagne and a job well done brimming with ideas for next years Rally.

The butterfly

2009-10-10T18:50:00.001-07:00

While my sister and her family were here we took a customary trip down the river. Called a sunset cruise it is usually a two hour jaunt down the Tonle Sap round the huge sand dredger and then up the Mekong for a short way zig zagging across the two rivers as we go. The boat we took this time, The Butterfly, was a smaller boat than I had been on before, only one level but with the welcome addition of a lounging bed at one end.

We started our trip at about 4-30 just as the light was beginning to soften.

The shore on the other side of the Tonle Sap was littered with people playing da cau a kicking game with a shuttle cock instead of a hacky sack, badminton, washing clothes for tomorrow, cooking dinner, swimming...

...and just socialising in colourful groups. As the light dimmed fishermen began returning home on their picturesque vessels.

We saw a boat and it's friendly crew go past packed to the roof with massive stalks of green bananas.

The Royal Palace looks like a fantastical castle from the river.

The sand dredger looks as out of place as it is!

We motored and drifted for a very enjoyable couple of hours eating stuffed paninis and double decker sandwiches and drinking wine and beer Lao ending up back where we started ready for a cooling sorbet from Frescos before bed.

Eating spiders

2009-10-05T00:05:00.001-07:00

We had dinner at Romdeng the other night. Famous for the eight legged addition to it's menu the eatery is a teaching restaurant, like Jamie Olivers 'Fifteen'. It is a part of the non profit, non government, non denominational organisation Mith Samlanh (meaning 'Friends' in Khmer). It helps provide about 2000 kids an education and vocational training in trades such as hairdressing, mechanics, electronics, welding, the design and creation of products for the Friends shop and training in all aspects of the restaurant trade. The training workshops are designed as income generating businesses. Have a wee look at their website and some of the funky products they make.

The students of the restaurant begin their training, back at 'Friends', in the schools canteen learning basic cooking and serving skills. Then they move on to Romdeng and finally to 'Friends Restaurant' on street 13 not far from the museum.

Romdeng, a lovely airy villa on street 174, has a menu of about 40 odd traditional cambodian dishes.

With kids and a fish eating vegetarian (me) at the table we ordered a variety of dishes to share including the spider starter and prahok, a fermented fish paste that is Cambodia's version of stinky ripe gorgonzola or Samoa's fermented breadfuit. I had tried to order prahok before but we were eating with our driver that night and he was adamant I would not like it. I should have known better. Most Cambodian food I have tasted is rather bland in flavour and I am definately a stinky cheese person. I crave strong flavours. The prahok came in 3 slightly different variations none of which I found particularly pungent but it was still tasty enough to order again. The spiders, too, were edible, rather like eating skinny fries with no expected squelch, pop and goo as I bit into the body.

Eating fried tarantulas as a snack in Cambodia is said to have begun during the reign of the Khmer Rouge during the 70's when a lack of usual food drove people to try alternatives such as field rats, crickets and spiders. The tarantulas, 'a-ping' in Khmer, that are eaten, come from Skuon in Kampong Cham province and are devenomed and fried to a blackened crisp.

For Cambodians these spiders are not just eaten for their taste but also for their reputed medicinal qualities. They are said to cure a cough, back ache, lung problems and have a positive affect on male sexuality.

Up the stairs inside the two storey villa is an exhibition, 'Lizards, Barks & Fragrances', of Cambodian spices, small animals and their presumed remedies, which runs until Dec. 10th.

Lizard on a stick anyone?

Bats are said to help with respiritory ailments too. Tumeric has anti inflamatory qualities as does its ginger like cousin, galangal, which is also taken for nausea, flatulence, dyspepsia, rheumatism, catarrh and enteritis. It also possesses tonic, aphrodisiac and antibacterial qualities. The knobbly skinned Kaffir lime is traditionally used medicinally to clear the head and cleanse the skin. Its scent is believed to lift spirits as well as relax and its juice is highly astringent.

We slowly made our way through the table load of dishes we had ordered including a Muslim Beef curry, Taro and Pork spring rolls, Three colour Pomelo salad with shrimp, Green Mango and Banana flower salad with dried shrimp...yum!

There were also desserts but we have always been so full from main courses that I'm afraid we have yet to savour a Romdeng dessert. Some of the appetising seductions offered are, crispy rice flake dumplings stuffed with banana and palm sugar syrup, red sticky rice porrige with coconut and longans, red bean and banana ice cream, homemade coconut sorbet as well as ever changing weekly specials.

Oudong for the beginning of Bonn Kathen

2009-10-04T00:27:00.000-07:00

We had taken mum and dad to Oudong, the old capital and the centre of Buddhism in Cambodia, when they came in February so it was only fair my sister and her family did the 500 step trek to the temple at the top as well. We left fairly early in a, usually futile, bid to beat the heat. The kids were kept entertained counting tuktuks and increasing numbers of people on a single motorbike.
'You nephew?' said Chunthy, our driver, later that week, 'he talk SO much!'

On pulling into the Cambodia Vipassana Dhura Buddhist Meditation Center at the base of the hill it became obvious we had stumbled on a special day. There were people everywhere. Instead of the relative silence of the last visit the air was filled with the amplified sound of dueling dhamma lessons, the smell of burning incense and lotus buds. The grounds were filled with women dressed in 'wat clothes', white lacy long sleeved tops and straight long silk skirts in different variations of sundays colour-plum or the standard default- black.

We walked around the huge ceremonial pool, marvelled at the gold lady and her reptilian steed and the strange arrangement of characters under the tree with the silver leaves.

We strolled past the open hall, full of shaved headed nuns all in white and mostly women worshippers, that was leaking the rhythmic chanting. We slipped past the many food vendors who held out bamboo tubes of sticky rice and colourful woven trinkets. We walked towards the stilted house, the kodi, that holds Sam Bunthoern, the mummified monk, and we grew silent. We happened to reach the room at the top of the stairs, where Bunthoerns body lies in a glass case, during a lull and it was empty apart from a couple of orange robed monks who smilingly eyed my sisters young children as curiously as they returned their gaze.
'His eyes are open'

'He's a bit wrinkly'

'Is he real?'

It's not often you get to see a 'real live' mummy.

Back out on the balcony we noticed the doors of the massive building opposite, that were firmly shut on our previous visit, were open so it was back down the stairs of Bunthoern's shrine and up the wider stone stairs of the much more imposing temple building. With shoes off we stepped over the threshold and onto a cool clean tile floor. The inside of the huge hall was quite simply breath taking.

All the walls and the ceiling were intricately painted with scenes of Buddhas life, laid out in squares like a spiritual comic strip, except for the end wall which held a larger than life bodhi tree, the backdrop for a ginormous green jade (?) buddha.

More nuns were sitting to one side of the Buddha. One stood up and walked slowly over to where we were at the edge of the kneeling mat.

She indicated that for a small donation she would bless us and we obliged, after all how often does one get the chance to be blessed at the feet of one of the biggest seated Buddhas I have ever seen, by a tiny bald headed nun in the ancient capital of Cambodia.

We sat for a while, on our knees, afterwards and drank in the increasingly busy scene before us wondering what they were 'celebrating'.

Back outside we asked our driver.

'The last day of the rainy season.' He offered.

A bit early we thought but the season this year, as with much of the Asian world, HAS been a bit extreme. Maybe a bit of wishful thinking WAS in order.

Before climbing the 500 steps to the view we investigated a new reclining Buddha around the back of the Temple Hall.

He serenely lay, with head on hands, facing the direction of the Jade Buddha oblivious to the inspection of tiny hands.

We decided to take the back route up (the path we had been unable to find the first time) Phnom Oudong past some ancient stupas that allegedly contain the ashes and spirits of former Kings. This time the steps were less steep and the assent easier, broken by some stupa exploration.

When we finally reached the top it was crowded with local Khmer but we managed to squeeze into a spot to marvel at the view which was a lot more water logged than the last time we saw it.

We took the kids underneath to the room with the hundred buddhas before descending the much steeper and more crowded steps at the front of the temple to the sounds Cambodian hiphop, from a portable boom box, into the carpark where Chunthy was waiting.

It wasn't until we got back to Phnom Penh that I was worked out it was the first day of Bonn Kathen (Kathin), which begins 15 days exactly after the final day of P'chum Ben, that we had witnessed. Bonn Kathen is a 29 day period at the end of vassa, the month of confinement of the monks (which includes P'chum Ben). During Bonn Kathen, which means 'offering saffron robes', monks exchange their old robes for new ones donated by members of neighbouring wats. It has the affect of not only earning merit for both parties in the exchange but also for strengthening and nurturing ties within the wider community. The donations can include not only new robes but also money to help in the maintenance of the wat, the grounds and the school. Apparently the merit points gained during this transaction are quite specific.

For the Bhikkhus, a fully ordained male monk, the merits include:
anamantacaro - the Bhikkhu can go anywhere without telling the other Bhikkhus asamadanacaro- the Bhikkhu can go anywhere without taking Tricivara (his robes) with him kanabhojanam- the Bhikkhu who serve the foods can call the name of those foods (in other words he can ask for what he wants to eat)
yavadatthacivaram - the Bhikkhu can keep or use the civara without vikabba and adhitdhana (determination and resolution ie being mindful about it)
yo catatthacivarubbado so ne sam bhavissati - the civaras (robes) happened in that avasa (monk house) will be for those bhikkhus (in other words they dont have to share their new robes with the other monks.

The donor too gets spiritual credit:
susanthanara - to have complete organs (I think that means in the next life!)
surubata - to be good looking or handsome
suvannata- to have good colour (not sure whether this is to do with health or with having the much sort after pale skin tone)
adhibaccambarivaro - to have many servants
and susurata- to have a sweet sound
And in addition the person who makes the 'right clothing' will 'avoid to be born' in the four least desirable places in the next life; the place of ghosts, of evils, hell and the place of wild animals (I think that means as a wild animal)

Plus the organizers of the ceremony are destined to be born into rich families.

A morning at the Royal Palace

2009-10-03T02:35:00.000-07:00

The Royal Palace in Phnom Penh opens early which is just as well as there isn't much shade once you pay your 6USD entry fee and walk through the turnstile. The complex, Preah Barom Reachea Vaeng Chaktomuk in Khmer, was constructed nearly a century and a half ago as the residence of the King and his family and as a venue for the ritual symbolism of Cambodia- functions it still serves today. The Royal complex and grounds, surrounded by thick protective walls, consist of several buildings many of which have been replaced and expanded since its original installation opposite a busy riverfront park.

Not much other than distinctive golden Cambodian rooftop silhouettes and the fading painted ceiling of the Chanchhaya Pavillion hint at what lies behind the wall. Inside the noise, dirt and poverty of Cambodia's capital fades and Royal buildings sit like pretty pieces on an orderly chess board surrounded by wide swept paths and clipped, green hedges.

The Palace compound is divided into three main areas separated by more thick walls. The central space is dominated size wise by the Throne Hall but it is another much smaller building that immediately grabs your attention. Most of the buildings of the Royal Palace have distinctive traditional Khmer architectural features. One, however, stands out. A delicate silver dollhouse in a room full of boys toys. Its plaque says, in French, that it was a gift from Napoleon III in 1876 to the then King Norodom.

Originally created for Empress Eugenie to live in during the construction of the Suez Canal the prefabricated pressed iron building was later presented to Norodom and according to smug French Officials of the time it became the Kings favourite residence. They were equally self congratulatory that the doors and windows, which had already been etched with an 'N' for Napoleon, would not have to be replaced for 'N'-orodom.

Today it is rusting quietly in the humidity, it's visable ceilings peeling and cracking and is mostly closed although the guide book says it is used as an art gallery and houses a collection of oil paintings and family photos, some of the Royal wardrobe, a chart of the Royal Family tree, The Preah Moha Mokot Reach (The Great Crown of Victory), The Preah Khan Reach (The Sacred Sword), The Preah Lompeng Chey (The Victory Spear), The Kriss (The Dagger), The Preah Soporbatea (The Slippers) and The Veal Vichani (The Fan)!

Beside Napoleon's elaborate present is the Throne Hall, Preah Thineang Dheva Vinnichay in Khmer, which means 'The sacred seat of judgement'.

It is a huge cross shaped building crowned with three spires the tallest of which is topped with the four faced head of Brahma, the Hindu g-d of creation which you can see reflected in the windows of the Napoleon Pavillion in the first photo of this post. It gives the building an even more storybook like appearance that together with its already whimsical traditional Khmer features make you feel as if you've walked into the pages of a fairytale.

Here is a closer view.

The Royal Throne Hall is still used today, as it always was, for royal and religious ceremonies and as a meeting place for distinguished guests. Inside there is, as one would assume from it's title, a throne (actually two thrones) and a series of busts of past Kings of Cambodia.

On the wall, visible from the road outside, is the statuesque open air Chanchhaya Pavilion, also dreamily known as the 'Moonlight Pavilion', which serves as a venue for rare performances by the Royal dancers and as a platform for the King to address the crowds and watch the races on the river during Water Festival. In typical Cambodian style its ornately decorated ceilings are now faded and peeling, left largely to the elements.

The smaller Pho Chan pavillion has suffered a similar fate.

Two smaller buildings sit either side of the Throne Hall. One was open and had air conditioning, the only building on the compound to be artificially cooled, a welcome respite from the direct morning sun. Inside, in dusty glass cases, is an eclectic collection of Royal curios and Royal outfits.

On the the south-west of the Royal compound the Khemarin Palace, where the current King Shihamoni resides, is off limits to general riffraff and so instead it was through the poetically artistic gates to the Silver Pagoda...

...which isn't Silver at all on the outside but gets it's name from the 5 329 silver tiles, that line the pagoda's floor, protected by carpets. It's proper name is Wat Preah Keo Morokat, which means 'The Temple of the Emerald Buddha,' after the central Green Crystal Buddha perched on a high gilded pedestal with a 90kg life size solid gold Buddha inlaid with 2086 diamonds, including a 25 carat monstrosity. But you are just going to have to take my word for it as, like the Throne Hall, there are no photos allowed inside.

The Silver Pagoda was built, in 1892, as a place inside palace grounds, where royalty could listen to sermons on Ubosoth- the 8 precepts of Buddha; no killing, no stealing, no adultery, no lying or slander, eating must be done at the prescribed times, 'worldly gifts' are to be avoided and the use of ointments is prohibted.

Cambodian Buddhism has changed markedly since then!

The pagoda compound, as a whole, contains several buildings surrounded by a mostly potted garden arranged on very hot reflective concrete. The other structures include a library, concrete moulded stupas or chedi, shrines, a bell tower and the galleries of the Reamker.

M and I walked around the muraled wall in the shade with the added protection of our shared umbrella.

The 604 metre fresco painted by a team of forty artists between 1903 and 1904 and is modelled on the Thai Ramakien murals of their Royal Palace and tell the story of the Reamker the Cambodian version of the Ramayana.

One of the shrines was open and further inspection revealed a rather happy, beautifully silk attired Khmer lady was having her fortune told.

She lit some incense, poked it into the mass of spent sticks in a pot outside and knelt in front of a large mostly silver effigy of Shiva's mount Nandi. The fortune teller handed her a sandlewood book which she held above her head and with eyes squeezed shut poked it's attached peg into the thin engraved pages.

The augur read the resulting fortune and she smiled broadly. By the third reading she was giggling and nodding vigorously.

The four stupas on the grounds are memorials to various Kings and Queens two contain Royal ashes.

It was getting hotter by the minute so we called it a day and retired a block or two down at the road at Cafe 33 for a round of Pink Cows and ice laden lime in tall cool glasses.

The lady of the hill

2009-10-02T00:08:00.000-07:00

My sister and her family dropped into Phnom Penh for a few days between Hongkong Disney and the temples of Siem Reap so after a trip to the museum I took them to Wat Phnom somewhere I have driven past often but never actually explored. Wat Phnom, the only hill in town, stands 27 meters above sea level, has it's own legend, smoke stained temple, saddled elephant and band of merry monkeys.

Legend has it that six hundred years ago, when Cambodia was ruled by Kings and temples and was still a powerful and prosperous empire, Old Lady Penh pulled a tree trunk out of the swollen Mekong river. Nestled inside she found five statues of buddha which she carried to the top of a near by hill. The shrine she built to hold them she called Temple of the Hill or Wat Phnom. Wat Phnom has been rebuilt many times over the years but has retained it's status as one of the holiest places in Phnom Penh, the Hill of Lady Penh.

After paying 1USD each, the kids are free, we made our way up the pink naga lined, lion guarded staircase to the landing just under the main temple at the top.

Young entrepreneurs lay in wait with cages full of tiny birds. For another dollar you could set one free. Liberating a trapped animal, a 'good' thing to do, is a way of accumulating Buddhist merit, a credit towards being born in a superior position in the next life. Of course this requires someone to trap the bird first which I imagine does the opposite! The freed birds often do not remain free either. They are frequently recaged ready to help their little 'owner' make another dollar in exchange for a few seeds.

West of the vihara is an enormous bell shaped stupa containing the ashes of King Ponhea Yat who reigned from 1405 to 1467.

In a small pavillion near the door an eclectic shrine to the smiling, plump, bespectacled genie Preah Chau, revered by the Vietnamese, her head backlit by a multicoloured halo.

The smokey vihara, rebuilt in 1434, 1806 , 1894, and most recently, in 1926, houses window sized murals depicting the life of Buddha.

The ceiling too is painted but years of incense and candle smoke has dulled the colours making them difficult to see in the dim light.

Wooden monks in brown robes sit cross legged around the central buddha a lotus bud and riel note in their laps.

Today, many people come here to pray for good luck and success in lives much harder than that of lady Penh. When their hopes are granted they return with offerings; garlands of flowers, bunches of mauve and cream lotus buds, fruit or riel pledged when wishes were made.

Back at the bottom of the hill Sambo, Phnom Penh's resident elephant, waits patiently for her next rider.

But the kids were hot and hungry so we called it a day and went back to the cool of their hotel pool.

Something unimaginable

2009-09-30T01:57:00.000-07:00

The beautiful south coast of Samoa.

I woke this morning to the news of a tsunami, triggered by an 8.3 earthquake, in Samoa. My heart leapt, hands began to shake and tears blurred vision as I pushed the on button on the computer.

As some of you know Samoa was our first expat posting and one we all found very hard to leave. We still have friends we keep regular contact with on the islands, our email address remains 'gone2samoa' and I still think of its aqua blue seas, picturesque bent palms and smiling people on a daily basis. Googling news websites offered only patchy information so I wrote messages on peoples facebook pages in the hope at least someone would still have access. As the day has gone by I am slowly hearing from people and piecing news together thanks to the internet. As news sites and the BBC get pictures and reports the death toll rises. Stories of survival and heroic acts remind me of Aceh January 2004. It has been 5 and a half years and fishermen still refuse to go into the water, people are still in recovery- will Samoa be the same.

The well established tsunami warning system apparently triggered as it was supposed to but the earthquake was too close. The wave energy, created by the strong tremor, travels at several hundred kilometers an hour. Four huge waves reached the shore in minutes. Samoan villages sit right on the water with often only a paved road and a string of palm trees between fales and the sea, many people just could not get away in time.

On the two islands of Samoa, Savai'i and Upolu, 140 people have been convirmed dead, up to 15000 people have been made homeless and 50 villages along the south and south east coasts have been reduced to rubble.

Beach fales on the south coast of Samoa

The pier at Sinalei

(photo from stuff.co.nz)

A story about a googol

2009-09-27T01:15:00.000-07:00

In 1996, in Room 360 of the Gates CS Building at Stanford University, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, who were sharing their work space with other graduates, began calling their brand new search engine 'BackRub' inspired by the way it used the webs 'back links'. A year later when 'BackRub' was actually starting to look like something effective and sophisticated enough to share with the general public, a brainstorming session was called and 'googolplex' was suggested. A 'googol' is the name given to 10 to the power of 100. A 'googolplex' is 10 to the power of 'googol' or 1o to the power of in brackets 10 to the power of 100.

Are you still with me?

Mathmatician Edward Kasner's nine-year-old nephew Milton Sirotta suggested the term 'googolplex' to describe the number '1 followed by as many zeros as you can write until you get too tired to write any more'. His father, being a mathmatician and therefore prone to specifics, proposed the more formal definition. Milton's picture of a number so big it you run out of energy before you finish writing it- and so big there is not enough physical space in the universe to actually write it- is exactly what Page and Brin, the inventors of 'Google' (Larry Page wasn't the best speller) were looking for.

Google - a search engine big enough to be able to index an amount of data so big it makes you tired just thinking about it.

On September the 15th 1997 the name 'google.com' became a registered domain name.

Do you Google?

The hard questions

2009-09-25T02:47:00.001-07:00

I love this. The reactions are just priceless...

The view from Phnom Chisor

2009-09-23T04:11:00.000-07:00

We were in the car and out of town on National Highway No 2 before 8am on Sunday morning. It was P'chum Ben and a long holiday weekend so traffic was relatively light and it was a quick 45 minutes before we turned off onto a dirt road that headed straight towards a looming 'phnom' (hill) between rice paddys. We bumped laboriously along the road slowing to pass riel notes to sets of small children who raced from under the shade of trees to dump hoe lots of dirt into ruts and puddles to 'smooth' our way.

The bottom of the 500 or so steps to the temple on the top of Chisor is marked by platformed shacks stocked with bottles of water, cans of syrupy soft drink, a variety of barbequed titbits and -bizzarely I thought- chewing gum. Most of the evidence of the gum scattered around the path and through the surrounding trees was the distinctive green Wrigglys wrapper and it's silver backed lining and not the chewed part. Do Cambodians swallow the actual gum?

Like Odong the top of the Phnom is reached by climbing about 500 steps under the dappled shade of the hills trees. Less touristy than Odong, the climb up Chisor could be made without the constant chatter of Cambodia's youngest members of the workforce as they padded up beside you 'guiding' for 'one dollar'. There were, however, a few kids at odd intervals who stuck out their little hands and said simply, 'sumoney' - which I would have gladly given had they picked up some of the rubbish that carpeted the forest floor. We handed a dollar instead to a blind man sitting cross legged and chanting under a canopy about halfway up the steps.

Arrival at the top of Phnom Chisor came without fanfare, the steps just stopped on a flat stretch, the view obscured by trees. This was not, it seemed, quite the top. To the left, on a knoll, was a small wat with story painted walls. We took our shoes off and walked around the veranda drinking in the breeze and finally a view but still couldn't see Phnom Chisor's ancient temple.

'Look more stairs', I nudged.

We backtracked the few steps to the top of the original climb and, after paying our $2USD each, collected a 'Visitting ticket for foreigner'.

'Takeo tourism office would like to thank you the customer your support for the maintaining PHNOM CHISO site and take care for sanitation environment'.

The stairs to the left of the ticket seller led to another little sanctuary, a stupa and a flat cleared area with a large ceremonial pool filled with green opaque water(in the foreground of the picture above), a small shrine containing a concrete boy and his cow, a gold painted statue a typically Khmer style roof protecting it from the hot sun and a small round empty pool containing two entwined concrete hooded naga (just seen in the far right of the photo). It has been pretty difficult to find out anything about these particular structures.

Here is the boy and his cow, Prasat Preah Ko Preah Kaew, who were according to one legend the off spring of a woman who gave birth to them after she fell out of a mango tree presumably in the area.

The many shrines or spirit houses, called Neak Ta, that you see around temple compounds, in fields and in villages, are not strictly a part of Buddhism but rather animist beliefs that have become so intwined with Cambodian Buddhist beliefs the result often resembles a new kind of Buddhism. The rituals and practises surrounding P'chum Ben, for example, are not all Buddhist but take place in the grounds of the wat under the guidance of the monks.

This Neak Ta was within the crumbling ancient temple walls of Phnom Chisor's 11th century temple. The shrines of Neak Ta contain at least one statue- the words 'neak ta' mean an old man- as well as other objects that represent land, water and spirit elements such as incense. Some even have carved bits of one of Cambodia's many ancient temple ruins. People visit these places with a mixture of fear and reverence to make offerings to ask for protection and good luck.

Originally known as Sun Mountain, Suryadri, (or Suryagiri) Phnom Chisor was used in the eleventh century by Suryavarman I to build Prasat Boran to house one of four sacred linga he installed at temples on the boundaries of his kingdom. Constructed of pitted but eternally durable laterite, bricks and the more readily carvable sandstone for lintels the temple stands on the eastern most side of the 'mountain'.

It's partially ruined walls dotted with large square windows and gopuras surround a two and a half meter wide gallery which houses a variety of sanctuaries and parts of now decayed structures.

The inside like many of the other structures on Phnom Chisor were decorated for P'chum Ben with gold paper and fabric banners and pendants.

Sadly the inner courtyard smelled like a public toilet in a rarely used railway station and watching where one placed their foot was all too necessary. The reason for the 'sanitation' message on the ticket was immediately and consistently evident although I doubt it was the 'foreigners' who were responsible for the desecration of a still sacred site.

The double east wall has a gopura (gate or doorway) and two gate houses leading out onto a gloriously unobscurred view across the green (it's the rainy season) plains of Cambodia and onwards to the boarder with Vietnam.

At the bottom of the steep steps is a sacred pool, Tonl Om and two other temples. The closer and more wrecked Sen Thmol and even further to the east, Sen Ravang.

During rituals held here nine hundred years ago the King his brahmans and entourage would approach Prasat Boran, on top of the phnom, using these much more precipitous steps rather than the more gentle approach taken by most of todays visitors facing west- the direction of Angkor Wat.

Phnom Chisor was teemimg with people, mostly local Khmer, thanks to the holiday but it is also a modern Buddhist compound complete with monks quarters and a school classroom. We bought some 'vi', pronounced 'vee' (the Samoan name- I can never remember what the Cambodian word for them is), like a hard green pear, which the woman skined and scored to make easier to eat and strolled around the rest of the compound.

Past a doorway neatly laid with shoes of the faithful who were being blessed in quiet rhythmic tones inside...

... and the monks quarters.

A reclining new Buddha watched over by a nun in white and a gold painted Buddha sitting on a naga in the middle of a lotus pond.

We made our way back down the steps to the car in the now much hotter midday sun thankful we had made the early morning start.

Peace One Day

2009-09-22T02:11:00.000-07:00

In 1999 during a Womad concert English filmmaker Jeremy Gilley came up with the idea of declaring one day a year free of conflict. He wondered if he could create a movement big enough to actually result in an annual day of global truce, 24 hours of worldwide ceasefire. Beginning with students and peace activists he began to circulate the idea. Then he added NGOs, government representatives, heads of state, and United Nations officials, His Holiness the Dalai Lama, the then United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Mary Robinson, Secretary General of the League of Arab States Amre Moussa, Peace Laureate and former Israeli President Shimon Peres, former Costa Rican President and Nobel Peace Laureate Oscar Arias Sanchez, Nelson Mandela and UN Secretary General Kofi Annan. He filmed all of his travels and meetings and made a documentary film called, appropriately, 'Peace One Day'.It took perseverance and determination but by September 2001 he had the commitment of the United Nations who duly passed a resolution to make September 21st the Day of Peace. There have been huge concerts in different places around the world since then including one at Albert Hall in 2004.

He aha te mea nui o te ao? He tangata, he tangata, he tangata! What is the most important thing in the world? It is people, people, people!

Peace

2009-09-20T18:39:00.000-07:00

We have taken literally hundreds of photos since we began our expat adventure. Since we arrived in Asia our happy snaps have often included someone making the 'v- sign'. Many took the art of embellishing their portraits with gesture very seriously creating other 'cute' enhancements with their fingers and hands.
There is the heart made with the thumbs and pointer fingers of both hands and placed just under the chin or the larger version using whole arms and disconcertingly reminisent of the 'M' in 'YMCA'. There is the frame for the face again using thumb and first fingers of both hands making the right angled corners of a square with your face in the middle or the backs of both hands in a V shape under the chin.
I asked a Korean friend why they do this in photos and she said it was because they (Koreans) found it hard to just pose and smile for photos. Making a sign, like the 'v- sign' made them feel less stiff and self conscious and gave them something to do which actually makes sense I thought.
Then I found this and I just had to share...

Wellington on a good day

2009-09-11T17:47:00.001-07:00

It's true you can't live here by chance, You have to do and be, Not simply watch or even describe. This is the city of action, The world headquarters of the verb-Lauris Edmond

The Wellington waterfront has developed into something Wellingtonians should and are proud of after all they have had a say in its planning and development and hopefully it stays that way. You can walk all the way from the Kumutoto district near the Wellington Railway Station to Oriental Bay and around the corner to the Bays beyond on footpaths. A really keen walker, runner or biker can get all the way to Seatoun on an almost uninterrupted path.

-The picturesque boat houses Oriental Bay

This area is often quite busy whatever the season especially during lunch hour when just as many elect to don running shoes or cycling pants as do a perch on a comfy seat in one of Wellington's many cafes. It has developed quite a lot in the years since we have been global nomads. In fact the area has been almost constantly developing since Wellington was not much more than pegged lots. Way back in 1840 the first sizable reclamations began, starting with an extension below Willis Street.

There was an extra 70 acres of land on Wellington's foreshore by the end of the 1870s although most of it was still privately owned. With the formation of the Wellington Harbour Board just before the turn of the century and reclamations for railway by the City Council, land on the waterfront became public. It is possible to trace the original shoreline using the 14 plaques the Historic Places Trust has placed from Pipitea Point, along Lambton Quay, Mercer Street, Lower Cuba Street, Wakefield Street and finally to Oriental Parade.

A walk along todays waterfront takes you past eateries, museums, pieces of visual and written art and landscaping with intention.

Then out of the tunnel and Wellington burst like a bomb. It opened like a flower was lit up like a room, explained itself exactly, became the capital... - Maurice Gee

From Chaffers Marina to Frank Kitts Park, there are a series of concrete plaques inscribed with quotations from New Zealand writers, who have all lived in Wellington at some time. Writers such as Katherine Mansfield, Bill Manhire, Robin Hyde, Maurice Gee, Patricia Grace and Bruce Mason.

This town of ours kind of flattened across the creasesof an imaginary map a touch of the parchment surrealism here no wonder the lights are wavering all over the place tonight not a straight town at all- Fiona Kidman

The quotations recognise and celebrate the significance our windy city has had in their lives. There is a map which you can get free from libraries, book shops, and information centres, that shows you where the extracts are or you can simply walk and happen upon or even sit on the passages. Of the fifteen citations three are on seats. I love the idea of sitting first and then finding the bench you are on has been gifted with more meaning than just a spot to watch the world go by. You can't help but be inspired by the poetic illustrations of the city, the heart and the r-e-s-p-e-c-t with which it is gifted by some of it's most elloquent.

Then with the coming of darkness the bay opened up beneath us, a shell splashed with beads of light...- Marilyn Duckworth

Walking along the waterfront takes you past sculpture with both function and form, traditional and contemporary. This is called 'Solace in the wind' and is on loan for a year. It is the work of Max Patte, a senior sculptor at Weta Workshop, who visited this very spot on the waterfront when he first arrived in Wellington to lessen his homesickness and loneliness. It's about surrendering to the elements. The man leans into the wind, palms and chest open and quietly rusts in yellow and orange striations painted by the conditions.

This is a much older and more conventional kind of sculpture. I remember when Kupe- the first to reach New Zealand and return home about a thousand years ago- his wife Hine and the tohunga (priest) stood in the dark foyer of the Central Railway Station a morning amid a mix of Wellington's school uniforms and grey corporate suits. The great navigators gaze is now more appropriately fixed across the harbour, Te Whanganui-a-Tara, towards Matiu, Makaro and Mokopuna Islands that he named after his daughters (or nieces depending on which version you have been told). The tinest, Mokopuna, means simply, grandchild.

The City to Sea Bridge connects Civic Square and the Financial district with the waterfront. On the 'city' side is the Central Library, The City Gallery (which was closed for renovation) and the Michael Fowler Centre. Suspended 14 metres above the square in the centre is a huge silver sphere, 3 1/2 metres in diameter. Created by Neil Dawson, the sphere uses the Silver Fern, an internationally recognisable New Zealand icon, as a link to Athfields Nikau Palms. Strung up by barely visible wires it appears to hang in the sky like the moon, its delicate fronds picking up light and shadow to give it form without dominating the space.

The Bridge itself is alluded to rather than seen from the square. Marked by a split pyramid, 'Te Aho a Maui', Maui's line, symbolising the mountains tumbling down to the sea, is Para Machitt's 'How we got here', metal birds and stars hanging in the heavens just as they did when the Maori used them to steer their way across the Pacific towards this land.

The timber sculptured bridge, which crosses busy Jervois Quay, is Machitt's design too. It's wedge shape represents the prow of a waka pointing out to the sea. The wood ages and changes with time, absorbs the noise and fumes from the road beneath and provides a transition between the glass and mortar of the city's buildings and the tidal ebb and flow of the sea before it.

The Boatshed on the sea side of the Bridge, an Historic Places Trust building, was originally built as a boat-house for the Wellington Naval Artillery Volunteers in 1894. It became the first ambulance station of the Wellington Free Ambulance in 1927 who adapted it to house four cars, a casualty room, as well as the superintendants private accommodation up stairs. When they moved out in 1931 the Wellington Rowing Club took it over as their club house and storage for their boats. They have remained there ever since. Sometime during the winter months of 1986 it was where a class full of freezing cold Queen Margaret school girls learned to roll our canoes while keeping a close eye on the cat sized water rats that lived in the murky depths.

Further around on Oriental Bay, scene of stolen sunny afternoons that should have been spent in the classroom, is 'Tail of the Whale' by Colin Webster-Watson. For Wellington, in it's place at the bottom of the North Island, is, according to legend, the tale of the great whale, Te Ikaroa a Maui, that formed Aotearoa.

The Wellington waterfront is a living, breathing, functioning part of the city. Open to Wellington's notoriously windy squalls but also, on a good day, irresistibly bathed in glorious Wellington sunshine.

I couldn't resist this shot- I think it sums up Wellington perfectly.

Absolutely positively ...nothing to hide...

2009-09-10T01:10:00.000-07:00

We flew into New Zealand at the end of June on a relatively comfortable (as comfortable as one can be on a night flight in 'cattle class') Singapore Airlines flight from Singapore. With a fleet that averages only 6 and a half years old flying Singapore Airlines always feels as if you are in a new plane. As always the staff were professional and gracious in a reserved kind of way.

Then we flew from Auckland to Wellington on a domestic Air New Zealand flight and instantly knew we were home. Grins a mile wide and friendly banter warmed the cabin.
'Lollies, vege chips or biscuits?'

Once everyone was seated the ceiling mounted video screens flickered raising negligable interest from a cabin full of people 'engrossed' in their papers or airline mags. For those of us who are frequent flyers on various global airlines the resulting safety message offers a retoric so generic and uninspiring it goes unnoticed blending into the humm of warming engines, the tones of seat belts being adjusted and overhead lockers being clicked shut. Although I have been aware of its content for years now I had never actually 'counted the seats to your nearest exit'. There is also a kind of superstition that exists in the same way as we avoid mentioning the rain if we have a day biking or temple hopping planned, or pointing out that the Australia Network hasn't yet lost coverage during an All Blacks game, or marvelling that the electricity has stayed on all weekend on a sunday night.
'Kia Ora, we'd like to welcome you aboard our boeing 737-300.'
Hang on a minute isn't she...?
'Shortly we'll be winging our way to your next port of call.'
She is!
'But before we lift off we'd like to give you what we call, the bare essentials of safety aboard this flight.'
So is he. They are wearing nothing but....body paint!
Yep, by this stage there was almost 100% rapt attention. Eyes were glued to the little screens suspended above our seats. For the first time in a very long time I watched the whole video and, yes, even counted the seats to my nearest exit and I saw quite a few ahead of me do the same.

Your turn now

See what I mean. If you google 'air nz safety video' you get pages of blog posts featuring 'The bare essentials'. People are talking and more importantly they are watching. Good on you Air New Zealand!

Heres the blooper vid too

As an aside, on Monday the 7th September Samoa - where we began our expat travels- became the first country in 40 years to switch the side of the road they drive despite months of protest. The prime minister, Tuilaepa Sailele Malielegaoi, had made the call to encourage some of the 170,000 expatriate Samoans living in Australasia to buy and ship used cars back to relatives in the islands. A two day holiday was declared to lessen the amount of cars on the road and a three day ban on liquor sales to encourage sober driving. Samoans aren't known for their adherence to the road rules nor for their quick reactions behind the wheel. I am still surprised I made it through 2 and a half years with out someone plowing into me although there was many a time a found myself facing a speeding car or bus racing toward me - on my side of Cross Island Road and quick evasive action was required. Many Samoans are unstandably scared at what the results might be but the prime minister has remained staunch. The change will be made.

• Some 34 per cent of the world’s population drive on the left-hand side of the road, including many former British colonies, such as Australia, India and South Africa

• Napoleon spread the French custom of driving on the right with his series of conquests in the early 1800s, while Russia forced Finland to switch in 1858

• Hitler decreed right-hand driving in Austria after annexing the country in 1938. Mussolini also converted Italy by decree in 1924

• In Lunenburg County, Canada, 1923 was known as the “year of the free beef”: when driving switched from left to right, the oxen that could not learn the new rules were simply eaten.

Number 9

2009-09-09T00:22:00.000-07:00

Like many mathematicians then and since Pythagoras noted 9's many properties both numerical and mystical.

A trick many kids have picked up on is, that the sum of the two digits resulting from nine multiplied by any other single digit number will equal nine- 9x3=27, and 2+7=9.

Today, September 9, 2009, is the 252nd day of the year and 2+5+2 equals 9.
3X9 = 27 and 7+2=9.

Multiply nine by any two, three or four-digit number and the sums of those will also break down to nine- 9x62 = 558; 5+5+8=18; 1+8=9.

(from Leo Reynolds on Flickr)

The day, today, 09-09-09, falls on a Wednesday and both Wednesday and September have 9 letters.

Numerologists believe mystical significance is attached to the number 9. They associate it with compassion, forgiveness and success and since many believe you can't have success without a certain amount of arrogance and self righteousness-those too.

The number 9 has religious significance too.

According to the Abjad system of adding up the number values in a word to give a single digit number the word Baha' relates to 9. 9 is also associated with unity and completeness (due to it being the largest single digit number) shown in their use of the enneagram, the 9 pointed star and in the architecture of the Bahai temples.

Heres the temple at Tiapapata, Apia, Samoa not far up the road from where we used to live.

The nine points on the star also represent 'the nine great world religions'. Sometimes the star can be seen with a symbol of each of those religions at each of the nine points- Baha'i, Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, Islam, Jainism, Judaism, Shinto, and Sikhism.

Hinduism, too, believes 9 to represent completeness. Buddhists see the sky divided into nine celestial levels and many important rituals are performed by nine monks. In Islam there are nine spheres in the universe. Ramadan is in the ninth month of the Islamic calendar. There are nine choirs of angels in the Christian Angelic Heirarchy and Saint Paul enumerates nine 'fruits of the Spirit'- love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, trustfulness, gentleness, and self-control. There are nine nodes of the bamboo for the Taoists.

Nine, for the Chinese, is a lucky number because it sounds like the word for 'longlasting'. As an odd number it is 'yang' representing strength and masculinity. The magic Chinese dragon, associated with power has nine forms described as 'attributes' - the head of a camel, eyes of a demon, ears of a cow, horns of a stag, neck of a snake and belly of a clam. The soles of its feet are a tigers, claws are that of an eagles and it has the scales of a carp.

The Northern Dipper or Ursa Major, has played an important role in official and religious life due to it's apotropaic powers. The Northern Dipper is made up of 9 stars and like its name suggests lies in the north, the Origin, the beginning and end , both Yin and Yang. Jiu Zhou, a poetic name, refers to the fact the nine states that make up Chinese territory are beyond measure. The highest heavens were referred to as the ninth heaven or the ninth spring, the afterlife. As the number nine is linked to the Supreme power of the Emperor, doors, windows, stairs and fixtures in the palace or monastery were often in multiples of 9 or totalled a number containing nine. All the entrances in the Forbidden, for example, except for one have nine rows of nine knobs. The East Flowery Gate has nine rows with eight knobs. Eight being an even number and therefore 'ying' because it was the gate the funeral processions of the three Qing emperors passed through.

As a symbol of extremity, 9 in Chinese culture can also be seen as a warning of change or transformation.

Celebrating his birthday today is Indonesia's president Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono who turns the big 6 -oh.

And

Apple Corp chose 09-09-09 to release the entire Beatles studio album collection digitally remastered.

I was going to post Revolution 9 by the Beatles but as intriguing as it is it doesn't make for very relaxing listening so Ive posted 'I am the walrus' instead which I love.

Not everyone considers nine an auspicious number. The Japanese steer clear of the number 9 because it sounds similar to the Japanese word for 'pain' or 'distress'.

Turn triple nine upside down and you get 666 the number of 'the beast' or satan.

09-09-09 is the last time we see repeating single digit dates for almost a century.

A Vicious Cycle Tour

2009-09-06T00:14:00.000-07:00

We met before 8 on Sunday morning at Vicious cycles on St 130, a block from Riverside. Seventeen of us, four guides and 2 tourists who had seen a lively assortment of helmet clutching adventurers and asked to join in the ramble. We found our alloted bikes, seats and handle bars already tailored to our heights (we'd given earlier)and each loaded with a bottle of water all that was left to do was a final spin down the road to reaquaint our thighs and bums with the intimacies of biking- because a one hour spin class a week is NOT the same as four hours in the saddle- and we were off.

We loaded the bikes one by one onto the ferry, via the wobbly board, to the Chruoy Changvar peninsular on the other side of the Tonle Sap.

Once off loaded we headed off on Tonle Sap road back towards the Japanese Bridge led by Marie clad in Grasshopper just-in case-we-lose-her green.

We stopped at a gardenia scented Chinese pagoda on the banks of the Tonle Sap.

Then on to another ferry to one of the 'Silk Islands' in the Mekong. The lead up to P'Chum Ben has started so the family aat the house we stopped at weren't silk weaving but one of the girls agreed to give us a quick demonstration anyway.

Marie said the house was 35 years old. 'Older than me!' she grinned.

We cycled along hard packed dirt roads for a few kilometers before turning onto a farm track. Since the rainy season has well and truely begun the going was very muddy in places requiring detours through banana, papaya and mango plantations.

We had seven kids aged between 7 and 14 so it wasn't long before we stopped again- this time for some banana and sticky rice parcels and fruit.

While we were eating a farmer arrived with his cattle. The cows in Cambodia are Brahman, so named as they are the sacred cow of India. Perfect examples of survival of the fittest, Brahman cattle evolved in the unforgiving climates of India. Cattle had to be able to walk long distances to find good grazing and water and they had to be able to continue their reproductive cycles in temperatures well above 100oF. Natural selection allowed only he hardiest animals to thrive.

These wise looking animals have very distinctive physical characteristics. Large, upward curving horns, a hump over the shoulder and neck, large pendulous ears and excess skin around the throat and underbelly. This increased surface area of skin is specifically adapted to keep them cool in hot harsh climates. Under their loose skin heavy muscles twitch strongly giving them the ability to shake off insects and as added protection they secrete an oily substance thought to serve as an insect deterrent.

They are pretty docile although, as some of our group found out later on, a bit skittish when passed by 21 sweaty, muddy helmet clad cyclists and their chunky bikes all in a puffing, chatty row.

The day was kind- not too hot by Cambodian standards and the scenery was a welcome change from the hustle and bustle of Phnom Penh life.

By lunchtime we had reached the ferry 'terminal', an open wooden hut complete with pool table-occupied by some local boys- plenty of cold drinks, relatively clean squat toilets and plastic chairs with which to park our saddle sore behinds. We snacked and talked until our chartered boat arrived to take us back to the Riverside.