I’m standing in the shower to take this, by the way. Back in Singapore.
Travel
Archived Posts from this Category
29 June 2011
I think the ones where we climbed and got a view (and a breeze) were my favorite.
28 June 2011
We had to break out the compass to find our way out of Ta Prohm.
27 March 2011
Forgot I had this one! Watched the sun set on the Pacific.
22 March 2011
I am refusing to pay for Internet, but suddenly appreciating my choice to drive to this restaurant more.
Oh, and the buildings aren’t really that color. I hit the right sundown hour.
19 March 2011
Not so springy, but a nice break. 25th floor. Guesses on the city are fine.
10 August 2010
I decided a couple of years ago that I wanted to do a piece of big, disorienting travel every year, to a place where I wouldn’t know the language, or wouldn’t be familiar with the rhythms of everyday life, and to head off by myself, at least, even if I met up and stayed with someone there. …Once you’re a grown-up, life doesn’t just hand you opportunities to discover that you have capabilities greater than you knew.
Alyssa Rosenberg, guest-blogging at Ta-Nehisi Coates
Me, I discover I have capabilities greater than I knew at my sewing machine, but that’s because I really don’t react well to being disoriented.
21 July 2010
View from front door. Mountains and coast in the distance, if the photo is good enough.
4 January 2010
About salsa: “it’s not mom-hot, but it’s hot enough.” “mom-hot” is short of “Thai-hot”, but probably hotter than anything else you’ve eaten.
“5RPMs short”: measurement of how hard I need to step on the gas with a short merge lane. Will differ for every car.
Definition of the suburbs: if the carpool lane goes that far, it’s the suburbs.
30 August 2009
Over four days on a sailing ship, I made hundreds of attempts at getting artistic shots of sails, rigging, etc.
About three of them might conceivably be worth looking at:
Click to embiggen (and then the shots will not be out of focus. I have thumbnails set to be very compact, and therefore fuzzy, so that posting pix doesn’t slow the entire page load to a crawl, cause I hate that). The first one is definitely my favorite, and is currently the wallpaper on my phone—the third is possibly too cluttered.
I would probably have a slightly higher success rate if I aimed for quality over quantity.
22 August 2009
In my secret garden cottage:
spring blossoms
13 August 2009
Incidentally, I have the same skirt in turquoise-on-turquoise, but that’s harder to match up. Also, turquoise is my favorite color. Partially because I don’t really have to pick a single color.
While googling for a picture of the standard mix-and-match “17 outfits with six pieces!” for comparison, I came across this page. I especially enjoyed the description of the Magic Square.
12 August 2009
They Let You Take Pictures. With Flash.
Posted by Dance under Empire, Pictures, Research, Travel1 Comment
If you are a historian, the sugar museum in Maui is a bit Meh.* The section on the material culture of the plantation workers is the best part, and they look to be doing excellent work with tracking down family and oral histories and hosting reunions of the various plantation camps. The 10-minute video is a good glimpse into the industrial nature of sugar (though that is better represented by the billowing smokestacks just across the way), and they do a nice job of not being a commercial for sugar despite being owned by the big sugar company (but, since I grew up singing the “C&H! Pure cane sugar….that’s the one!” jingle, and was standing in the heart of its production, they probably didn’t need to).
sugar cane
But, if you are a bookseller (or perchance the daughter of one), and you follow the signs that says BOOKS around four or five corners and over a mile or so of muddy road to the Friends of the Library store, you also get a nice little tour of the backside of the sugar mill, and even better, good views of a number of the remaining plantation buildings. And can wander around taking photos while your mother peruses books.
If I understood right, the plantation workers lived in long buildings subdivided into small cabins.
Not such a great shot, but I like the old plantation church next to the massive mechanical bits of the sugar mill.
The Maui Historical Society does not let you take pictures inside at all, and I found it rather more satisfying overall.
Both museums carefully tread the balance between the problems of colonialism and plantations and the fact that much of their money comes (I assume) from the descendants of colonizers and the owners of plantations. Although, I read in the local news that the sugar industry employs about 800 people on Maui. Three minutes of googling was not enough to tell me how many contracted laborers the sugar industry brought from the Philippines, Puerto Rico, Japan, China, Azores (“Portuguese”), Russia, Spain, US, and the rest of the Pacific, but I bet it was a WAY larger proportion of the population than 800 is today.
*Like the rest of us, I scorn the right-wing for seeing Hawaii as exotic. But I can’t tell you how many times I said “I’ll be back in the States mid-August” and even after consciously pushing myself through that, I still find that I am in my “pumping money into a developing economy” attitude about spending locally and paying for things like local historical museums.
