Fear is the worst reason not to travel.

On March 26, 2016March 26, 2016 By StevenIn International Travel - Europe12 Comments

My employer is sending me to Europe for some meetings at the end of April, and I shared my excitement to Facebook after I received my booking confirmation. “Airfare for Germany: Booked. Bazinga!” Most of the comments were the usual sort. People want to know when and why I’m going. A while after the initial post, one of my old buddies said this:

“Are you sure you wanna travel there right now?”

My initial response was flippant- “Germany and Switzerland are fine. It’s not as if I have a business meeting in Syria.” The more I thought about it though, the more I wonder how many of my friends truly think that the world is that scary right now. This response, one of trepidation, is almost certainly because the Brussels bombings have been in the news for the last few days. Before that, it was Charlie Hebdo. Or the Boston bombing. Or any number of attacks in various places that seem like they should be safe. If you believe the news, everything is terrible and we’re all going to die any minute now.

If you watch the news in the US, it’s all fear, all the time. But that’s not the reality. It’s no more dangerous to go abroad right now in most of Europe than it is to walk alone at night in a major city in the US. Be aware of your surroundings. Travel with common sense about your personal security. And stop worrying about the statistical unlikelihood that you might meet a terrorist.

I’ve never felt uncomfortable or nervous anywhere I’ve been in Europe. In Germany, I worked side by side with Muslims and I never felt like they were doing anything more objectionable due to their faith than abstaining from the wonderful German beer that was all around us. Since 2011, I’ve traveled to more than two dozen countries. The only time I’ve ever felt uncomfortable was in Cairo, and that was mostly because of the terrible terrible drivers. And the pushy people along the Nile who want to sell you stuff.

Fear is the worst reason to stay at home. There are so many wonderful things to see out there, and if you let the news give you nightmares, you’ll miss all of it.

Have you ever felt nervous in an unfamiliar city?

Chinese New Year 2016

On March 22, 2016 By StevenIn Life At Home2 Comments

Amelie and I celebrated February 14th this year in the traditional way… with Chinese food and a dragon dance! The 28th Annual Chinese New Year Festival was observed on the 14th in a big festival at Miami Dade College.

We are currently in the Year of the Monkey, or the Red Fire Monkey. IUt runs from February 8th to January 27th, 2017. If you were born in 1944, 1956, 1968, 1980, 1992, 2004, or this year, you were born under the sign of the monkey.

These Buddhists make some really tasty buns.

I’m just saying… the food at this festival was awesome. I actually enjoyed it so much that I forgot to photograph most of it. Here’s some rolls.

…and some adorable candy.

Famous monkeys include Eleanor Roosevelt, Mick Jagger, Joan Crawford, Lyndon B. Johnson, Leonardo da Vinci, Celine Dion, Halle Berry, Will Smith, Hugh Jackman, Lucy Liu, Pope John Paul II, Bette Davis, Owen Wilson, Margaret Cho, Toni Braxton, Christina Aquilera, Jennifer Aniston, David Copperfield, Alicia Keys, George Lucas, Kylie Minogue, Julius Caesar, Tom Hanks, Diana Ross, Elizabeth Taylor, Venus Williams, and Yao Ming.

This guy may or may not be a monkey, but he’s certainly making one of my favorite festival treats. I hadn’t seen these anywhere since I left Germany. The very first time I saw them, I was in Prague, but they’re just as delicious here as there. Mmm, cinnamony!

The show started with the traditional Lion and Dragon Dance, performed by Wing Lung Tai Chi Kung Fu School. The dragon is being led by the monkey king, holding a sphere representing a pearl.

It is said that if a Lion looks at you during a dance, you will have good luck for the year.

The stage had a variety of other performances throghout the day. Here’s Soul of Shaolin from Shaolin Academy, a.k.a. kids with weapons.

There were some Taiko drums, courtesy of Matsuriza Taiko Drums. I do love Taiko.

I believe this was a Han folk dance, but I sort of lost my place in the program after the Taiko drumming, and this could also be the Miami Chinese Choral. I’m really not sure.

Have you ever been to a Chinese New Year festival?

A Place For My Stuff

On February 22, 2016 By StevenIn Life At Home8 Comments

I finally got around to viewing some of the commercials from this year’s Superbowl, and this one just left me feeling unsettled.

About five months after I got back to the US, I talked about the level of insanely overwhelming choice in grocery stores here. At the time, I was still shopping the way that I did in Germany- one or two canvas bags of food at a time.

Since then, I’ve expanded my shopping a little bit, but not very much. I still carry canvas bags into the grocery store, but sometimes I take plastic bags away with me also. My grocery habits are more expansive than they were while I lived in Germany, but they’re still nowhere near what they were before I lived overseas. I’ve actually taken photographs of every load of groceries I’ve purchased in the past sixteen months, so maybe I’ll come back to that in a future post.

Since I got back, I’ve gotten a car and an apartment and all the trappings of American life- I’ve purchased a television and a vacuum, a microwave and a toaster. I’ve populated my apartment with furniture, although a large percentage of that furniture came from Ikea.

Here’s the thing, though- I’ve never felt truly comfortable with simple accumulation. Those who have known me for years know that I had a slightly anti-stuff mindset even before I lived overseas. I’ve always gone through cycles of decluttering, and of getting rid of stuff. My aversion to just accumulating belongings is borderline pathological.

Perhaps that aversion is part of why the Rocket Mortgage commercial leaves such a terrible taste in my mouth. It’s more than that, though. This commercial represents everything that I think is wrong with America’s consumer-driven, greed-centric culture.

“Buy a house so you can fill it with more stuff so you can support the economy so more people can buy houses that they need to fill with stuff.” Lather, rinse, repeat.

Maybe I’m in the minority here, but that cycle of buying and buying and buying doesn’t make me feel good. Even without getting into the environmental effects of this cycle, or the politics of finance, it just feels skeevy somehow. Buying to support buying to support buying feels so pointless, and basing a business model on the idea that other people should spend their money that way… well that just seems evil to me.

What do you think, readers? Is there a Mr. Burns type behind this whole endeavor? Or am I just overthinking it?

First Folio and Video Game Art

On February 20, 2016February 20, 2016 By StevenIn Life At Home6 Comments

I’ve always been a big fan of William Shakespeare. Visiting the Globe Theater in London was a highlight of that trip. I like the bard so much that in the early 1990s, I had a costume party for his birthday with a “dress as your favorite Shakespearean character” theme. That’s me there on the right, dressed as Prospero from “The Tempest.” The costume started with a mustache to match the beard, but it kept falling off whenever I had something to drink.

Since I’m a fan of Shakespeare’s work, you can probably imagine how excited I was when Amelie told me that Florida International University’s Kendall campus is showing Shakespeare’s First Folio at the Frost Museum.

The Frost Museum is a four story exhibition hall with multiple exhibits going on at all times. This nifty globe is right in front, and from a distance, I thought for a moment that it might be one of the many versions of Sfera con Sfera that is out in the world.

Until February 27th, the fourth floor of the Frost museum is home to an original 1623 edition of the First Folio. This is a national traveling exhibition organized by the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC, to commemorate the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death. The book will be displayed in all 50 states, as well as Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia. When the book reaches Tulane University, New Orleans will reportedly celebrate with a jazz funeral for Shakespeare.

The First Folio was published seven years after Shakespeare’s death, and it contains 36 of the Bard’s plays. (The Frost museum website says that it contains eighteen plays. I’m curious about the discrepancy. Perhaps older printings of the First Folio didn’t have all 36?)

On exhibit, it is stored in a temperature (and probably humidity) controlled case. Photographs were allowed as long as you used no flash and as long as you didn’t actually touch the glass.

The book on display is opened to the “To be, or not to be” soliloquy from Hamlet. You can see it there, in the bottom-left part of this image. I am incredibly fond of the old spellings of things, like queftion and fleepe. However, that may just be because I need more fleepe.

While Shakespeare’s First Folio will be gone after February 27th, the Art of Video Games exhibit will be sticking around until mid-April. Organized by the Smithsonian American Art museum, this exhibit looks back at “the forty-year evolution of video games as an artistic medium, with a focus on striking visual effects and the creative use of new technologies.” Plus it shows a history of all the game consoles, from the Atari 2600 and Colecovision all the way up to modern gaming systems.

It was especially interesting to see this through Amelie’s eyes- she’s about five years younger than me, and she didn’t reach the US until the mid-80s, so her first video games were not quite the same as my first video games.

Of course this is where most of my favorite games lived during middle and high school- the Commodore 64. I had a C128, but I ran it in C64 mode almost all of the time. I was always a one-button-joystick sort of guy. I have an incredibly difficult time with the newfangled game systems that have two sticks, a directional pad, four buttons, and two triggers. Get off my lawn, you over-complicated controllers!

There were other nice exhibits in the Frost, but those two were the most interesting to me. I shall wrap up this post with a picture of Amelie playing Secret of Monkey Island. Those old adventure-quest games were fun, weren’t they?

Should you wish to see the First Folio or the Art of Video Games, know that the Frost Museum is free and open to the public. The address is 10975 SW 17th Street, Miami, FL 33199 and the hours are 10-5 Tuesday-Saturday, 12-5 Sunday, and closed Mondays and most holidays.

What was your first video game? What was your favorite?

Chapter Two.

On February 11, 2016February 11, 2016 By StevenIn Life At Home13 Comments

It’s been a little more than two months since my last post. I said that I wasn’t sure if I would come back, and that I had no plans to restart the blog. I’ve come to realize that was short-sighted.

I’ve missed writing, even though sometimes it feels like a chore and I don’t always have stuff to talk about. The thing is, when I do have stuff to talk about, I’m excited to write here. I missed you guys. And I do have stuff to talk about, even if it’s not as travel-filled as it used to be.

Just yesterday, I had a thing that made me want to blog. I went to the eye doctor for the first time in about four years. The last time I had my eyes examined was just before I moved to Germany in late 2011. Since that time, everything in that office has changed. The plaza was ripped up and new stores were built. The eye doctor’s place of business moved to a new office a few doors down, with a completely rebuilt floor plan. They added more doctors and added a bunch of recent optometry technology. My favorite piece of new tech is this digital camera that takes wide photographs of the inside of your eyes. This isn’t new technology, but it’s new to me, and it’s utterly fascinating. This is my left eye, as of Wednesday afternoon.

my-left-eye

The photograph shows the inside of my eye. You can see the optic cup, as well as the blood vessels running through my eye. The black slashes at the bottom edge are actually my eye-lashes. The whole thing looks a great deal like some sort of fantastic nebula, and I halfway expect Voyager to come swooshing by at any moment.

Pretty nifty, eh?

So: I’m back. I can’t sustain the frequency of posts that I used to run, but I’ll definitely write here whenever I want to share a neat photograph or talk about something that’s on my mind. Onward!

So, how have you all been?