Final morning here at the Renaissance and I'm treated to a dusting of snow. The New Town Central Park assumes a tiny frosted appearance. The flakes continue to fall as the city wakes up.
Last fall I decided to get a tattoo - not so much to express my individuality (as just about every other person has now done) but more to have the experience of getting needled as well as to see how having a permanent piece of portable art would make me feel. The problem was what to get. Tattoo shops are loaded with catalogs of both standard drawings and freelance work. The breadth of options is staggering if you only want something canned. My thoughts went in the other direction - I wanted something that meant something to me, characteristic of my life experience. So I thought about meaningful statements, written in Sanskrit or some other obscure language, or maybe something to do with a bicycle. Or maybe something Chinese. Or who knows, the only thing I did know was that I didn’t want a giant orange Japanese Koi wrapping around my biceps. One day it came to me. While wandering around Sevilla last year, we saw the same logo over and over, on anything that had to do with the m...
We had our traditional team dinner last night at 海之幸, Hai Zhi Xing or "Fortune of the Sea." It's a mile down the road from the hotel, and I am sure I have walked passed it a dozen times without a thought. As always, some of the jewels in life are overlooked and right before your eyes. This one certainly was. It turned out to be great. The walk takes about 45 minutes, not so much due to the distance as the fact that it can sometimes take 10 minutes to get across the streets. This happened a couple of times when our group fractured due to picture taking opportunities, but we made it intact, even beating our local hosts. We sat and enjoyed a couple of 1 liter Qingdao beers until they arrived. It was Japanese for a change with a bit of Korean and Chinese thrown in for color. The plates and the beer and the sake kept coming and of course much was left on the table. The spirit was great and we had lots of long conversation reprising our various adventures together, my favori...
We woke up to another rainy day this morning, so after breakfast rather than spend outside getting wet, we went to the Musée de la Civilisation de Québec, conveniently located directly across the street from our hotel. It’s housed in a modern stone and glass building, cleverly built to mimic the old Normandy-style buildings that surround it. Devoted to history of the province, there were two special exhibitions that made the visit quite worthwhile. We started with the Age of Discovery exhibit, jointly produced with the British Royal Museum of Natural History. Tons of examples of flora and fauna collected during the 18 th , 19 th and early 20 th century by European natural history scientists. Included was a 1 st edition copy of Darwin’s “Origin of the Species” and one of his original logbooks. Among the butterflies, fossils, skeletons and pressed botanicals were a Moa skeleton, a saber-toothed cat skeleton and an original Audubon plate. My favorite display was a stuffed Dodo,...
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