Quote for the day

My Google desktop started my day with this quote:

Mathematicians are like Frenchmen: whatever you say to them, they translate it into their own language, and forthwith it means something entirely different.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

It occurs to me that maybe we're all like Frenchmen that way

Surprises

So here we are in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, about as far from land as we've ever been. I'm lounging in our comfy little cabin, munching an apple and gazing out on a choppy, bouncy sea, when a bird flies by. A bird! And not just a seagull, which you don't see this far from land anyway, but a tiny olive and yellow warbler about half the size of a chickadee! It lands on our balcony, discovers an Azorean wasp that died there the day before, gobbles it down and hops under the divider to the next balcony.

In the dining room later that evening the steward gave me a little box of granola and the dining room manager came over to compare notes about birds - he has birds and fish back home in Indonesia. I'm hoping word will get around among the Indonesian members of the crew - most of the dining room and cabin stewards are Indonesian - and I'll hear if the little one shows up somewhere else on the ship.

We're skirting the edge of a tropical depression and had quite a rough, windy day yesterday, so I suppose the tiny little thing was blown like a feather from its regular migration route to our ship. I hope he can hang on until we get to Bermuda in 4 days.

Now we're cutting across the northern part of the Sargasso Sea, a calm, rainless vortex in the middle of the Atlantic. Another thing I've always wanted to see - another tick-mark for this trip. The weather is much better than yesterday, calm and sunny and very warm. Sailors have dreaded this area since the days of Columbus (or before - I'm reading a book called 1421 by Gavin Menzies, about the great Chinese expedition that explored the world between 1421 and 1423. They were here, of course, just like they were nearly everywhere else). One reason I'm glad we've got good strong diesel engines and don't have to rely on sails. Anyway, the surprise here is that there really is seaweed floating around. Not thick out here at the northern edge, but in streaks that look at first like some other ship (certainly not the Noordam, which works very hard at being environmentally friendly) has emptied its sewage tanks. But if you dare look more closely, it's just seaweed, the bladder sort that you see on rocks around Peggy's Cove and everywhere else. Kinda comforting, really, but surprising out here in a place that redefines nowhere for me.

While we're at it, there have been a lot more surprises on this voyage:

• Florence: how lovely it all is.
• Pisa: more than just the tower. The whole area around the cathedral is lovely. The cathederal, started in 1063, is my favourite.
• Monaco: all about money, but so clean.
• Barcelona: I knew Gaudi's Sagrada Familia church would be wonderful, and it was, but his other stuff made me laugh with delight too.
• Valencia: ladies making lace in the middle of a circle of needlework shops.
• Cadiz: it felt like home. Not spectacular, but familiar in a way that makes me wonder if my Spanish ancestors lived there.
• The Azores: green! and lovely, every inch. But too humid for me; I'd go moldy in a week. Pity. Otherwise I couldn't think of any place I'd rather live.
• Ron in formal dress. You really can clean that guy up. Just wait until I can post a picture or two!

So it's a fine trip so far. I just hope my little warbler turns up.

All at sea

What day is it today? Wednesday? It must be Cadiz.

We're on board the M.S. Noordam, the newest of the Holland America Line fleet, bound for New York. It's our first ocean cruise, and it's awesome. Of course our more experienced shipmates say this is the best ship they've ever seen, so maybe anything else would be an anticlimax. Anyway, it's pretty good.

Our original plan was to drop in on Rachel in England to celebrate her birthday and get a look at Yorkshire. And then Ron started thinking about alternative ways of getting home and discovered that there's a mass migration of liners from the Mediterranean to the Caribbean in the fall. So we flew to Rome, wandered around there for a couple of days, hopped a train for Civitavecchia, got onto the Noordam, and here we are.

We've had days in Livorno (= Florence and Pisa), Monaco, Barcelona and Valencia. After Cadiz we head out into the Atlantic towards the Azores. Couple of days there, then on to Bermuda and then New York.

The Mediterranean has been wonderful - but hot and steamy. Maybe I'm crazy, but I'm looking forward to the cooler Atlantic. I'm curious to see what my father spent his life in the Navy cruising around. But there's always the chance of a hurricane at this time of year - might be kinda exciting.

Anyway, here we are, and when I get home there's going to be such a flood of pictures hitting our Flickr page! Maybe I'd better ration myself to just a couple of dozen a day.

Home on the 15th. Look out for more then.

Looking back at Turkey

I'm writing this on September 11, a day when all of North America seems focussed on "our enemies" in the Middle East and the threat they pose to us. And I'm thinking back to our time in Turkey and wondering how what we experienced there makes sense in those terms.

We went to Turkey knowing some Turkish people and so with solid evidence that at least some Turkish Muslims are trustworthy, loving people. We went expecting to meet more like them, and we did. What would it have been like if we hadn't started with that belief? Who knows. I think we would have learned the truth quickly, but I suppose you get what you're expecting and perhaps we would have interpreted what we saw quite differently.

I've been spending some time wondering what we miss most about Turkey. Number one is our rooftop clothesline on a hot summer day - by the time the efficient and thorough European-style washer finished the second load, the first would be bone dry and bleached. In our Canmore condo the bylaws don't permit us to hang laundry out on the balcony. It looks messy, don't you know? To me, the lack of laundry on balconies looks like we're a nation of energy-hogs, or maybe prudes who are embarrassed to show our underwear in public.

We also miss the fresh fruit and vegetables, of course. Even though the supermarkets around here provide green beans and lettuce and artichokes and tomatoes year-round, there's no taste to them. The sense of luxury that comes from having Peruvian asparagus in September is diminished somewhat by the inability to tell exactly what kind of vegetabular matter you're eating. And now I'm conscious of how much it costs to bring that stuff to our little mountain town. No, I don't want to go back to the days of carrots, turnips and potatoes in the winter, but I really would like to eat vegetables that still remember what it was like to be attached to the vine.

The big thing I noticed about Turkey is how important it is to be connected to a community. Relationships are everything there. That's why a Turk feels naked without a cell phone or two. When our "Turkish daughter" Begum was travelling with us, she talked to her mother at least twice a day and checked in with each of her friends every day or so. One reason we had a good time in Turkey is that we were part of a family thanks to our Rotary-exchange parenting of their daughter a few years ago. Add to that our connections through the Anglican church in Izmir, and we were guaranteed to be safe and cared for.

Canadians are vagrants; footloose, rootless immigrants, we've learned to be self-sufficient and lonely. Turks don't do that, and I suspect that's true of other Middle-Easterners, too. Relationships are everything there.

That's a good thing for people like us who arrive with ready-made relationships. But it can have its down side, too. Other tourists we met were quite justifiably cautious when dealing with Turkish shopkeepers and merchants. Outsiders are fair game. I thank God that we ended up living in a close-knit neighbourhood where people were ready to take us in and accept us. We found we could trust our local vegetable-sellers, pharmacist, and others we dealt with in the three or four blocks around home. Outside that area we could pay twice as much and be treated with something that felt close to hostility or suspicion. Around home we were, as I overheard a neighbour telling a visitor, "Our foreigners." That felt okay.

It also felt okay to see the church working the way it should. Although the Anglican church in Izmir makes no attempt to win converts among the Turkish people (that's against the law in Turkey, and not the Anglican way anyway), it is open to visitors of all backgrounds and more visible than the other churches - surrounded by just a low wall with a gate that doesn't lock. As a result the congregation and the liturgy are half Turkish. And in that congregation you see people mixing who would stay far apart in the world outside: foreigners and Turks, gay men and straight, the unemployed and middle-class. People who have no relationship in the traditional Turkish way are drawn together in Christ. It feels like the sort of place a church should be. There's a reason for its existence, unlike many Canadian churches I can think of.

So what's this got to do with September 11? I think that disaster, and others that have happened since in Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon, England, and many other places around the world, have at least some roots in this basic difference between western and Middle-Eastern societies. Westerners value self-reliance; for Middle-Easterners relationship is everything. Outsiders are not to be trusted and are fair game. And we sense that mistrust, whether we know it or not, and return it along with fear.

Many years ago a Middle-Easterner we say we love and trust told us to love one another. In other words, relationships are everything. Maybe he was onto something there. I wonder if he had the answer to what's going on in the world today?

Fourth-generation war hits home

Well, not home exactly, thank God, but it feels pretty close.

Four young Canadian soldiers were killed Friday in Kandahar, and attacks on Canadians continue. Meanwhile, Israel and Hezbollah continue bashing each other. It's all very ugly. I feel anxious and frustrated, just not able to get a handle on it.

The other day I read an article - pointed out by someone on the Canadian Anglican mail list - that helped me make sense of this. The author, William S. Lind, describes four generations of warfare. The first three are what we'd call conventional warfare. Our armies understand waging war like that. But what's happening now is "fourth generation war" (4GW), something armies and governments can't handle. It's war waged by cultures, not states; war with informal non-governmental forces, not armies. The strength of these groups is their support among ordinary people. The warriors are the fathers and sons and brothers and uncles and cousins of the ordinary people they live among. That's the source of their power. And it takes more than conventional warfare tactics to break that power.

George W.'s biggest mistake after Sept. 11 was to declare "war on terror". That's something no one will ever be able to win. He might have called it a "struggle for peace" - that would have been closer to the truth, something that can be achieved. Struggle can lead to understanding and compromise, which is what we need.
The original intention behind Canada's mission in Afghanistan, I thought, was to help the people of Afghanistan get their lives together. Occasionally we hear of soldiers and other Canadians helping schools and health facilities; military leaders, we're told, have been working with local patriarchs to try to win their confidence and support (that's why translators working for the Canadians have been specially targetted). These are the sort of things that can help when you're involved in 4GW. They won't win the war but they can help bring peace.

Fourth-generation war can be ended only when we come to realize that "power over" someone else is useless and counter-productive. "Sharing with" is the only answer. And so the suffering and deaths of Canadians in Afghanistan, although tragic, might actually help in some strange way. They might help in the way tragedy has always helped, by arousing pity and terror in the hearts of onlookers. If the people these troops serve, the local Afghans, see foreign friends joining them in their suffering, if they feel pity for Canadian friends and terror for themselves caught in the web of violence, they might begin to work to change the hearts of their friends and relatives who are causing the suffering.

Fourth-generation war can't be won by force and violence. Peace can be achieved only through compassion and understanding. When will we ever learn?

Thai food in Canmore

Tonight we had dinner at the little Thai restaurant across the railroad tracks. It was delicious, at least as good as anything we've had in Toronto or Vancouver. And here we are in a small town in the mountains.

It didn't look promising at first. The waiter who seated us looked more German than Thai, and the other, older one definitely was German. But as it became obvious we were delighting in the food, the senior server explained how there came to be a Thai restaurant in the back of beyond.
Many years ago a businesswoman fled Laos and ended up working in a restaurant Grand Prairie. She was the dishwasher at first because she spoke no English. But one day the cook quit and she took over. Business boomed and she kept the job.

As she could afford it she brought more and more of her relatives to Canada. Eventually they moved to Calgary and bought their own restaurant. Seven of them shared a tiny apartment at first, but time passed and their hard work and determination paid off. They bought land and more restaurants that became known for their great food.

The place in Canmore is one of two owned by the neice of the original woman from Laos - her other is in Banff. And she ended up marrying a German man who was maitre d' at a posh hotel. So now, in his retirement, he's looking after her Canmore place, and the family is continuing to bring in cooks and other staff from southeast Asia.

I love stories like that - stories about people with talent who work hard and succeed. And I love the ethnic mix in this country, summed up in this Thai restaurant with its German host. This isn't the Canmore Ron grew up in, and it isn't the Canada we both knew when we were young. It's way better.

It's hard to believe the riches we're surrounded with here. Banff, with its summer festival of the arts, is 20 minutes away. We've been to a great concert there and a photography workshop. Monday we enjoyed a student concert in Canmore, and next week we see the Magic Flute in Banff. There's a folk festival in Canmore this weekend. We're discovering that there are opportunities to volunteer at the library and the museum. There's a decent choir we hope to join this fall. And there's a fantastic, friendly wool shop a short walk away from our condo.

I could learn to like this place. It's kinda nice staying home for a bit.

One more museum

Our first Saturday back in Canada we went to yet another museum, just to compare: the Museum of Civilization in Hull. We'd driven past it before, and I've always liked the way it looks - layers of limestone just like the cliffs in Ottawa - but we'd never been in it before.

My tolerance time for museums is about 2 hours. We were there for 3 hours before being kicked out at closing time. The exhibits are what I had been hoping for in Turkey and Greece and Egypt. There weren't acres of identical stuff that would only mean something to an expert. In the West Coast First Nations part they'd chosen the best items and displayed them in a context that gave some idea of their significance. On the Europeans in Canada floor you walked through the last 1000 years of Canadian history and felt like you were there. If the early parts are as accurate as the 20th-century displays (which made me feel like I'd slipped back into my childhood), they're good.

This is the best museum we've seen in the last year. Click on the title above to see something about it.