A Song in the Trees

And we had a great time! In fact, I kept thinking near the end that I should have booked one more day, and then remembering that I originally had. (Our first flight was very delayed due to mechanical issues, which broke what I thought was a fairly safely long connection, so we landed in Sofia in the middle of the night instead of the morning as planned.)

( Cut for length and pictures )

Bonus mini-reviews for the two movies I watched on the plane home:
The first was If Only I Could Hibernate, a Mongolian film about a prideful teenage boy trying to care for himself and two of his siblings when their mom leaves them in the city over the winter and gradually becoming more desperate but unwilling to let on to that. I enjoyed it, especially seeing a culture I don't know much about and the contrast of traditions and modern (and more Western in some ways) city living, but I thought it was just okay as a film. The story just ends, and there's a bit that - and this is probably some amount of cultural difference speaking - fell extremely flat for me. One of the neighbors helping the kids exhorts him to love his mom, and soon after, he somewhat comes around on her. The same mom who leaves a teenager and two elementary schoolers to live alone on child welfare during winter while promising to send money that never reaches them because of some excuse or another, even when their electricity gets shut off due to non-payment.

The other was Tsugaru Lacquer Girl, which is not earth-shatteringly original in its central arc (girl wants to do the traditional thing as dad's heir, dad says no because she's a girl [even though she is already spending hours a day doing the thing], in the end dad accepts and supports her being good at the thing) but which I very much enjoyed in execution. There's lots of loving shots of lacquer work with great ASMR. A nice bonus for me was that her brother is gay, and the film touches on how even with acceptance (which they don't have at first) and the baby steps taking place to recognize same-sex couples in their city, Japan is just not a place where he and his fiance feel like they can live at the moment. I also really liked how the main actress played her character's body language and how she expresses her growing confidence. There's a scene that was almost disturbing to me when her brother brings his boyfriend home for the first time, and the main character acts more like a shy waitress than his sister, bringing drinks for the others with her eyes down and hiding in the corner with her tray, but in a similar scene at the end of the film, she suddenly sits at the table and asks for a drink herself.

So these past few weeks have been very busy for me. I'll try to write up some of it later, but I went to a wedding in Pepin, WI (which has cemented my dislike of weddings despite being one of the better ones I've been to), then a day and a half later was off to visit my workplace in person/see my parents, and then two days after that I left for Skamerica.

My mom and I both had some adventures in transit. My bus got delayed over an hour (and I got a voucher for it that I may or may not be able to use because I rarely take long-distance busses) because Greyhound demanded that the bus we were on needed to go elsewhere, so they had to bring us another bus for the driver to drive? It was very strange and didn't make much sense. But an older lady came over to ask me what was going on since she and her husband were from Japan and weren't sure they were understanding what was going on - they were pleasantly surprised to hear me speak Japanese back at them! Alas, my ability to speak Japanese is very rusty since I have nobody here to practice with (need to figure out a solution for that) but they were nice and I helped them get their own vouchers at the end of the trip and explained how they worked.

Our first night, we endeavored to see if we could reasonably walk from our hotel to the skating venue. Unfortunately, while there is an open country club/golf course between us, there's also a brook, so the direct walk is out, and on the other side is a divided freeway with no pedestrian crossing anywhere nearby, because this is America and who needs to walk anywhere?

On Thursday, we walked around downtown Norwood a bit - it has painted parking barriers, approximately one hair and/or nail salon for every ten people, and the most ostentatious town hall I've ever seen - before we went to the MFA. I wanted to see the Life photographs exhibit, so we went there first. I enjoyed it for the most part as they do have some very striking photos and context around how the stories were chosen, created, and presented, and the changing cultural context of those photos, such as how that sailor kissing a woman on the streets is now being interrogated as potential sexual assault. But there was one part that a) came off as more pretentious than meaningful b) chose to put glowing white text on a pure black background, which set off my astigmatism something fierce to the point where I could barely read it (and that seems ironic considering that the MFA is self-consciously patting itself on the back about inclusivity everywhere in the museum). They also stuck a bit about their portrayal of the Holocaust versus that of other news media right at the very very end of the exhibit in a place where it didn't fit in well.

After that, we grabbed a snack and then went to the portion we most wanted to see, the Asian art. My mom knows a lot about it, so it's fun to walk through an exhibit like this with her because she can explain more about the Buddha depictions and the techniques than the placards, which she sometimes had Opinions about. ("It's not a 'votive tablet', it's a tsa-tsa!") I accidentally walked past several examples of famous pottery techniques without appreciating them properly, and she made sure to drag me back to make sure I knew exactly what I should be looking at 😅

I wanted to see the textiles after that - it turns out that they no longer have a coherent textile collection on display :( However, when we were asking about it, the map volunteer turned out to be a pottery geek herself, so she was very interested to talk with my mom for a few minutes. And she also suggested we look at the American collection as they have some examples of textiles from various native cultures. There was some lovely beadwork that I was happy to admire. When we were finished with that, we were feeling tired, so we returned to the hotel.

And yesterday was our first day of Skate America! We left very early to get dinner and then walked over to the rink. I accidentally picked really good seats, although the arena is fairly small, so any seats would be good. I guessed correctly that our corner is near the kiss-and-cry and on the judges' side, but we also turned out to be thirty feet from the media platform, so a lot of people gathered at our corner to see Johnny and Tara. I also accidentally got us the closest seats to the ice on that side; I assumed the closer seats were sold out, but they're closed due to camera equipment and being the area where the skaters get on! So we can see quite a lot. I'm very happy with where we are. The sound in the arena is a bit loud, but not to the point where I needed earplugs, and it was nice and toasty.

( Small cut for competition talk )

Been busy finishing a fellowship application, but now it is in and all I have to do is wait to hear if they will give me money or not. I'm not terribly hopeful, both because I heard there are a lot of people applying and because my advisor thinks they tend to fund people doing a different kind of work than I am, but he did say that it was a strong application. Also got some useful things figured out on the work front.

My new skates are comfortable and look great (I got them in black)... except I can't skate in them for more than ten minutes at a time because they just kill my arches. Like, ten minutes until 'I have to get off the ice now or I will not get off on my feet' levels of pain. I have been told that to some extent this is normal, but it is discouraging to pay that much for skates and to have so much pain in them, and because the more I wear them, the less I like wearing my old skates to practice in. A lot of people apparently have trouble with the stock insoles, so I might try the brand that everyone recommends; for tomorrow I'm just going to try the insoles from my old skates to see if it makes any difference. In my lesson yesterday, I was spinning much better, at least, and my coach seemed pleased with my baby waltz hop.

The amazake-making experiment was a great success :) It's so good, especially hot, and so easy to make. I will have to order more koji. It turns out that using brown rice works fine, but if you stick it in a blender after cooking and before fermenting, the fermentation goes much more quickly. Going to try making plain old koji + water amazake with the little bit that I have left, too.

Last weekend, Z and I went to Boston to visit some old friends of his. While we were there, we also went to the Harvard natural history museum, mostly to look at the gorgeous glass flowers:

They had so many delicate little parts and looked so realistically worn by the elements that we just kept staring at them and wondering how they were made. They were so beautiful.

We also went to the aquarium. It's always cool to see underwater creatures, and this was no exception. Plus I got to pet rays and sea stars and a horseshoe crab :D (Z declined to reach his hand in.) My only complaint was the huge amount of 'hey did you know that global warming is destroying everything and it is up to YOU yes you to fix the world'. It was absolutely everywhere. I get that the message needs to be out there and not everybody is as inundated with it as someone like me is... but it was still very depressing to walk by the tenth plaque about it in less than two hours.

But anyway, they had adorable penguins (we got to see them being fed), lovely sea jellies, lots of pretty fishes, a huge central tank with all kinds of animals including rescued sea turtles, sea horses and sea dragons including ones that were the size of your fingernail, an octopus that is apparently partially contained by astroturf because they can't climb it, and some handsome sea lions:

(This one was posing like that the whole ten minutes we were out there. I think maybe it likes the attention.)

This sea star was crawling on its rock. I've never seen one actually moving before. They look very strange.