An Off-Day in Di World

I wonder who makes these rules about moving countries ... I imagine a little man, someone who goes to his windowless office in a suit everyday, talks to no one and goes home to an empty house. A man who never travels and who accidently found himself the maker of rules about residency and work permits ... a mistake made when his tea-making certificate was seen as an application for the job of rule-maker to the immigrants ... a race he's never met but he fears because he receives the extreme right's newsletter in his mailbox.

And I don't think my grandfather and all those other New Zealanders had to wait almost a year to be processed and enter Belgium when they came here to fight and die during the First World War ... how times change, how we evolve.

Anil in India

Anil left a comment that made me curious about the person who saw a truth so clearly in a photograph ...

The site is superb, beautiful photographs and stories of things seen and people spoken to.

By way of introduction, Anil writes: Give me a hill and let me slide down its slopes, and a lake where I can stand on its banks and look out into the distance, and windy blue skies I can look at and search for familiar shapes in the clouds that wind across, and I'll be happy. In 2003, I returned to Bombay from Goa, not an easy decision to make. A software company let me in, then another, then yet another. Time ran past. This time around I was wise enough not to give chase. So occasionally I take my camera along, searching for corners, finding them where none exist. And some of them are painted blue.

"We must be willing to let go of the life we have planned,
so as to have the life that is waiting for us."

Joseph Campbell

Making the decision to have a child - it's momentous.
It is to decide forever to have your heart go walking outside your body.
Elizabeth Stone.

Pigeons perched on the side of a Mosque, Istanbul.

One of my favourite photos ... I loved wandering with my camera in Istanbul.

Now that I know this one place a little, I read with doubled perception. The guide directs me to the acacia-shaded lane along the inside wall of the town, and I immediately remember the modest stone houses on one side, the view over the Val di Chiana on the other.

I see, too, the three-legged dog I know lives in the house that always has the enormous underpants drying on a line. I see the cane-bottomed chairs all the people who live along that glorious stretch of wall pull out at evening when they view the sunset and check in with the stars.

Yesterday, walking there, I almost stepped on a still soft dead rat. Inside one of the doorways that opens right out onto the narrow street, I glimpsed a woman holding her head in her hands at the kitchen table. Whether she was weeping or catching a catnap, I don't know.

Frances Mayes
from, Under the Tuscan Sun

100 photographs that changed the world

Ms Baker recently posted on 100 photos that changed the world, from LIFE magazine

Tiananmen Square 1989
A hunger strike by 3,000 students in Beijing had grown to a protest of more than a million as the injustices of a nation cried for reform. For seven weeks the people and the People’s Republic, in the person of soldiers dispatched by a riven Communist Party, warily eyed each other as the world waited. When this young man simply would not move, standing with his meager bags before a line of tanks, a hero was born. A second hero emerged as the tank driver refused to crush the man, and instead drove his killing machine around him. Soon this dream would end, and blood would fill Tiananmen. But this picture had shown a billion Chinese that there is hope.

"I think the best pictures are often on the edges of any situation, I don't find photographing the situation nearly as interesting as photographing the edges."

William Albert Allard

A lovely quote I lifted from Tara's site.

DavidWallPhoto.com

One should be so careful opening emails that come from photographer friends back home in New Zealand ....

Dave had included an update of latest work in his online photo library in the email.

I spent 2 years living in Te Anau ... Fiordland, New Zealand ... it was my place.

Oh yes, I can just wander over to Dave's place any time I want a good dose of homesickness ...

Poetry Thursday

Wednesday afternoon

my father is “having fun”
cleaning the floor
he uses the plugged in sink as a bucket
wears rags on his feet
and shimmies to a cleaning beat
he asks me to read the label
on the bottle for him
he wants our floor to shine
and laughs when (surprise)
it does
this is how I will remember him
moonwalking across our kitchen floor
rags under his feet
“that’s how my mother taught me”
he says
“but I never take any note
it takes me forty years to do what she say”

I loved the imagery in this poem. It takes me home, even if my New Zealand experience was something else.

KARLO MILA was born in Rotorua in 1974 to a Tongan father and a Pakeha mother. Karlo is an emerging poet and her poetry has been published in a small number of anthologies including Whetu Moana, Short Fuse: The Global Anthology of Fusion Poetry and Coffee and Coconuts. Karlo performs live poetry regularly in Auckland and is working on her first collection of poems. A lot of her work focuses on identity and the various negotiations of what it means to be Pacific in New Zealand.

Snow and STUFF

A phonecall from home and I became aware of the snow ...

I went searching and came across this story ... in STUFF, an interesting site for those wanting news of New Zealand.

The past three days have been hard slog ('hard work', for non-Kiwi readers) on Hugh and Diane Taylor's View Hill property.

And there is no rest in sight as the thick blanket of snow over their Raineys Road farm, west of Oxford, retreats painfully slowly.

It was only knee-deep yesterday – an improvement on the previous two days when it reached up their thighs. But the depth is of little consequence. It is still taking eight hours to feed just over 1000 cattle and 2500 breeding ewes, a task that normally takes an hour and a half.

Down on their feedlot they had to shovel snow out of the troughs for the grain-fed cattle whose meat is destined for Belgium and Spain. It was a gut-wrenching task digging, but the only way to ensure the penned cattle got a good belly full of food.

A Cautionary Tale

I was telling my learned friend, Martin, that I had consumed vast quantities of M&Ms this morning and as a result of the energy surge I had cleaned the apartment however I was now suffering from a horrible M&M downer.

Martin informed me that tartrazine can do that ... just reading the word tartrazine made me feel ill and so, in order to regain my health, I opted for the 'red wine cure' and explained my rationale to Gert, issuing my very own medical dispensation at the same time.

I thought he already knew I could do this thing with my eyes and I leaned into him, asking if my eyes looked okay after eating the tartrazine.

I wiggled my eyeballs rapidly ... Gert leapt back, shouting a very bad word and was still clutching his chest sometime later.

I almost fell over laughing.

You see, I can move my eyes rapidly ... kind of wiggle them, and clearly it's rather disturbing up close.

Gert's recovering slowly and I do believe the wine will cure me.

A Game for the cinema

I have to confess, I'm tempted to try the da vinci code: the drinking game as per Heather's post at This Fish Needs a Bicycle.

Scissors, Dendermonde and catching those trains

I'm never quite sure about life and of course, at the moment I'm in the unusual position of not having to plan for it. And so it goes that life sometimes gifts me interesting people and unusual events.

I had biked to Rivierenhof Park to meet a friend on Monday and ended up getting my hair cut, as one does ... or not.

Ahhh memories of my previous haircut: Alison's birthday, a little Dutch gin, some red wine, an American with scissors and a Canadian acting in an advisory capacity ... voila, my hair was cut. This time it was Heidi wielding the scissors.

Tuesday, after my cycling adventures, was all about making my train connections and spending time with an interesting writer I had met at the ANZAC Day ceremony in Ieper.

Sometimes it occurs to me to be glad that there's no video of my life, as an audience might find it amusing ... there's me biking through the red light, having my haircut by friends who aren't hairdressers, and racing down stairways in railway stations completely focused on that 4 minute window of time in which I have to find my connecting train and the new platform.

It's not only that, it's that these events usually involve strangers, be it the old man who rescued the bike I almost knocked over at the bakery yesterday or the innocent Belgians waiting for trains ... I'm the one that pops up beside them with my 'Excuse me, where's this train going?' It's always an adventure out there.

I made my connections, arrived in Dendermonde and wandered round town with the writer. We spent a long time sitting in the tranquil grounds of the Dendermonde Beguinage, talking of life and all kinds of important things as we sat on a bench in the sun. Beguinages ... I wrote a little about them here.

We had dinner, talked without watching the time and I missed all the trains before 10pm. Suddenly I was faced with train connections that put me in Antwerp at 11pm ... now it's not that I'm a chicken but I do have an aversion to being stranded in small Belgian towns close to midnight. The pressure was on and despite some 'interesting' moments, like the train being disturbingly empty and the timetable screen moving 20 minutes ahead of the trains at Sint Niklaas, making it look like I'd missed my connection... I was home by 11.30pm.

The map shows my travels, highlighting the fact that Dendermonde is a difficult destination ... it's there in the middle, between Antwerp, Brussels and Ghent.

Sirpa Alalääkkölä, Artist

I met Sirpa Alalääkkölä when I was living in Marlborough, New Zealand. We bought one of her massive paintings, having completely fallen in love with her style.

She was born in Alatornio, Finland in 1964, studied in the Art School of Lapland in Tornio (1984-1990), Academy of Fine Arts (1985-1990) and at the University of Arts and Design in Helsinki.

I spent ages trying to choose a favourite painting just now ... they are massive and always tug at my heartstrings with what they capture of Kiwis and their way of life.

I lost my painting to the divorce, and perhaps rightly so in the end, it wasn't of a size that could have travelled with me but looking through them today made me think of all that I miss back home in that place called New Zealand.

Thanks for sending news of the site Chris.

A Topkapi Palace Tour

Istanbul Metblogs has offered new forms of nostalgia for this kiwi who misses their city.

Have a look here. It's the Topkapi Palace Tour and well worth a look.

Thanks Seyda.

Day One: Di's Biking Report

As I rode through the red light on my Belgian bicycle, I noticed the ambulance guys on the other side of the lights watching my flamboyant self fly by, and I had this feeling that they were probably discussing the fact that I would be one of their jobs in the near future.

The red light ... well, I didn't see it, I was too busy thinking about how masterfully well I was doing on my first outing alone on my bike.

Previous to that incident there had only been one other moment; the one where I was forced to attempt my best impression of innocent kiwi abroad, as I cycled past the police van while on the wrong side of the road. Although on the bikepath, I wasn't sure if there was a fine involved in this act of ignorance.

So I managed to do my first errand without police intervention, the supermarket went well and afterwards, I found the cycle lane through to a road that I recognised (not to be sneezed at when you're in a new country).

And I smiled as I peeped in at the pub on the corner and noticed that the first beers of the day had been poured ... before 9am. How my Scottish forefathers would have tut-tutted. In New Zealand it's considered wise not to drink before 5pm regularly, any earlier could indicate problems ... 9am would indicate massive problems. Not here ... they were all lined up at the bar, old blokes just hanging out.

The worst thing about biking alone has to be the almost constant 'Oh my god, am I on the right side of the road???'

A quick glance ahead and my poor addled Southern Hemisphere brain takes note of the parked cars ... I relax, only to think 'ohmygod ...' a few minutes later.

I messed up my money when I called in at the bakers and I almost knocked someone else's bike over as I removed mine ... thanks to the old man who saved the day, riding off afterwards without saying a word. He was behind me in the bakery, waiting as the baker counted out the correct money because I had misheard the total... you can't do anything right for some people, and he was clearly my man today.

So I'm home without injurious incident, my pride only slightly dented.

As long as I live, I can only improve ...

5 a.m

A combination of the heat from so many days of 30+o C and multiple mosquito attacks in the night finds me too itchy and too hot to sleep anymore.

We have a small forest of silver birches and other trees just out the window next to my desk, it can't help thinking that it was almost worth getting up now to hear how it simply explodes with the sound of the birdlife living there.

The people who talk about weather have promised thunderstorms later today and there are rumours of dropping down to a 21 degree day around about Thursday. I can't believe this sounds good after the long cold bleak winter we've just come through ... but it does.

Erkan made me do it.

You Should Spend Your Summer at the Beach

You're a free spirit who is always thinking of new ways to have fun. And you don't just love summer... you live for it. So, you really should blow off your responsibilities and head to the beach!

Where Should You Spend Your Summer?