893 Days...Tim Harvey Arrives Home

I blogged previously about Tim Harvey's amazing journey from Vancouver to Vancouver by zero-emission means. After 893 days, he finally cycled into Vancouver, completing his two and a half year adventure around the world.
If you can't wait until his book about the journey is published next year, you can catch up with tales from his inspiring trip on his website. Congratulations Tim!

One Word Meme

Taken from the wonderful blogger Hilaire.

You can only type one word. No explanations.

1. Yourself: Absorbent

2. Your boyfriend/girlfriend: Imaginary

3. Your hair: Ponytail

4. Your mother: Brilliant

5. Your Father: Gentleman

6. Your Favorite Item: MacBook

7. Your dream last night: Airport

8. Your Favorite drink: Blanc

9. Your Dream Car: Jaguar

10. The room you are in: Bright

11. Your Ex: Unspoken

12. Your fear: Loss

13. What you want to be in 10 years: Connected

14. Who you hung out with last night: Bryn

15. What You're Not: Uninvolved

16. Muffins: Lettieri

17: One of Your Wish List Items: Cambodia

18: Time: Considered

19. The Last Thing You Did: Sneezed

20. What You Are Wearing: Exhaustion

21. Your Favorite Weather: Crisp

22. Your Favorite Book: Dalloway

23. The Last Thing You Ate: Croissant

24. Your Life: Unbelievable

25. Your Mood: Centered

26. Your best friend(s): Hilarity

27. What are you thinking about right now: Thesis

28. Your car: Unnecessary

29. What are you doing at the moment: Procrastinating

30. Your summer: Purpose

31. Your relationship status: Irrelevant

32. What is on your tv: Blair

33. What is the weather like: Windy

34. When is the last time you laughed: Yesterday (And I'm breaking the rule here. With ferocity and tears.)

Death, Style & Champagne Cocktails

My beloved five year old iBook died on Wednesday. Everyone has told me that I should expect one computer crisis during the tenure of my PhD. Oh god, I hope that this is it. I am obsessive about backing up my work, so I didn't lose anything of importance, but most of my notes about the film chapter I'm currently writing correspond to the digital clock on my laptop DVD player. So I have had to spend hours fast forwarding and rewinding DVD's on my television to find specific scenes over the past few days. Tiresome. But...I have purchased the new, gorgeous MacBook. Refusing to buy one with a UK plug, I have to wait for my Canadian laptop to be Fed Exed to me, so it should be a few more days until it arrives.

One of the best things in my life right now is Friday Night Club. FNC consists of me and three fabulous girlfriends who go out together most Friday nights and lose ourselves in cocktails, bottles of expensive wine, great Thai food and endless gossip and celebrity conjecture. (We are very sad about Reese. We are thrilled for Britney.) This past Friday was particularly welcome for my computer-induced bad mood and I discovered that throwing back £15 champagne cocktails at the Savoy will cure anything.

And the best part of my weekend after FNC is the Sunday Times Style Magazine. I'm sorry - the latest couture and high street fashion, beauty tips, snarky gossip, interior design gorgeousness, delicious recipes, wine advice, and horoscopes all in one place? Serious love. And even better when like this morning, as I'm still lying in bed debating the pros and cons of getting up, a friend texts to tell me I'll love a specific article in Style. I got up.

Photographs from the Middle East

Here are the best of my Dubai photos. You'll notice four distinct areas that we visited - they even seem to have different colour hues and tones in the photographs. The opulence and wealth of the Jumeriah Beach end of Dubai where the Burj Al Arab is located and the over-the-top spectacle of the Mall of the Emirates contrasted with the traditional Arabic feel of the spice souq and the sparse beauty of the desert.

The New Rothko Room

Yesterday I spent much of the afternoon in the Tate Modern, checking out the renovated galleries. I was a little worried about how they would deal with the Rothko room, but the new home for these paintings is absolutely brilliant. When I was a Masters student at Kings College London in 2000, the Rothko room was my refuge. I would often visit the gallery about twenty minutes before it closed and head straight for the Rothkos where I could sit alone and in silence between the huge canvases.


The new room is smaller, which is originally the size of space Rothko intended for these works, and the walls are painted the perfect complimentary light grey hue. Now the paintings seem to ooze out of the walls and if you sit there long enough, the paint seems to ooze out of the canvas as well. In this wonderful article about the new room by John Banville, he describes this effect as the colours seeping "up through the canvas like new blood through a bandage in which old blood has already dried. The violence of these images is hardly tolerable." Yet, I could sit in this room for hours - losing myself in these paintings or having the paintings disappear into me.

Buy a Diamond, Get a Free Pepsi!

As noted in the last post, my five days in Dubai were mind blowing. I've travelled to a lot of places around the world, and I think Dubai is possibly the most unique city of the bunch. The mix of traditional Arabian life next to staggering wealth and more skyscraper construction sites than I have ever seen, a huge desert still inhabited by Bedouin next to a gorgeous turquoise ocean and a bustling sea port.

Some highlights were visiting the Spice Souq, a safari out into the desert, haggling over prices for the cheapest designer bags that made me wish I had brought a bigger suitcase, lunch on a pier several hundred metres into the Persian Gulf with stunning views of the Burj Al Arab, and the infamous Gold Souq.

The Gold Souq was something else - we went at night and hundreds of stores selling pearls, diamonds, and every kind of gold you can think of that is weighed right in front of you was on offer. Indian brides were shopping for wedding and dowry jewellery, women clothed in the niqab were buying handfuls of diamonds, and little me was bargaining over a simple, yet gorgeous, white gold and diamond ring. When we eventually agreed to a price (ridiculously cheap...just amazing) the storekeeper insisted on finding me a pepsi. Not entirely sure why...because I was North American and he assumed I would want a pepsi? But it turned into this complete farce as he was yelling at his colleague to find me a pepsi, which I didn't even want, but have now actually brought all the way back to London. It turned into the slogan of the evening (photo above): Buy a Diamond, Get a Free Pepsi!

The desert safari was spectacular. We went dune bashing, which generally would not be my thing, but turned out to be a blast. We went to a camel souq where I met the little fellow below, and later in the evening I rode one. I also smoked a sheesha, but that's another story.

Back From Dubai

Utterly exhausted and still in awe of a mind blowing trip. More tales from the Middle East and photos when I recover from the 3am departure time of last night's long flight.

A Voyage Round My Father

During the summer I had wanted to see A Voyage Round My Father, which was playing at one of my favourite theatres - the Donmar Warehouse. However, the run was completely sold out and I left London disappointed. As luck (and demand) would have it, the play transferred with the same cast to the West End and I was able to see a performance last night.

The play is essentially John Mortimer's autobiographical account of his relationship with his cantankerous father, played by one of the remaining British stage legends I had yet to see - Sir Derek Jacobi. The Times review summed it up quite well by describing the play as a touching confession of posthumous love. The play itself was sporadically brilliant (but what is consistently brilliant, really?) and had some killer lines in it. But the best part of the evening was watching Derek Jacobi who was breathtakingly good. I actually feel honoured to have seen him perform and I don't say that very often.

My Fulham First

Last night I went to my very first Premiership football match. I have adopted Fulham as my local team. It was either Fulham or Chelsea, and I opted for the underdog. This harkens back to the late 80's when I started going to Vancouver Canucks games and they couldn't win a thing. The shock of a win induced an unbelievable euphoria - like last night as we won 2-1.

Some small observations: the pitch is much smaller in reality than it is on television; the smell of the freshly cut grass was wonderful (and then rudely interrupted by the scent of cooking sausages being prepared for half time); and apart from one particularly crass and unmistakable refrain, I cannot comprehend football chants. But admittedly, the best part of the evening was discovering that the Fulham mascot is....a badger. Those of you who know about my well-established badger obsession will understand (and probably wonder at) my excitement.

Things I Currently Love v.2

• Listening to Toronto Maple Leafs games on my computer as I'm falling asleep. Even lying in bed, I thrust my fist into the air every time they score.

• How I shocked the bejesus out of a woman on the tube today. Standing on the platform, I said: You're from BC. She stared at me: How on earth did you know that? I explained that when she opened she wallet to retrieve her ticket, I had seen her BC drivers license. In the hot, teeming tube station, we smiled at each other with the secret knowledge that we were both from the most beautiful place on this planet.

• That Arthur, my new aloe vera plant purchased yesterday, came with instructions that said: In winter, reduce watering to nil. It's like a kill-proof plant.

• The look on my father's I-just-got-off-a-ten-hour-flight face when I surprised him at the Heathrow Express this afternoon. If I can't visit home, the next best thing is home visiting me.

Thanksgiving and Thanks for BitTorrent

• This week I experienced my last first-day-of-school. I used to love this day - new teachers, new classes, seeing friends again, new resolutions. But now I'm just kind of tired. Sure, I enjoyed the school supply shopping, but after 23 first-days-of-school (Montessori through PhD) I'm just about done now. I had my schedule for this year's work approved by my supervisor and to see the actual end in sight is an enormous relief.

• I'm flying to Toronto tomorrow for Thanksgiving weekend. I'm looking forward to seeing friends and sleeping in my big queen-sized bed and drinking real filter coffee, but what am I the most excited about? The beginning of the hockey season and the baseball playoffs which are now in full swing.

• I acquired a reader's pass to the British Library and have been working there over the past couple of weeks. Imagine a huge room full of at least 200 desks, each one a large size, with comfortable chair and individual light....and a little signal light that flashes when the books you have ordered are ready to be collected. And the best part - even a sneeze will induce looks of death from the silent masses. You really could hear a pin drop in there and I love it.

• I have been faithfully downloading the American tv that I can't get over here. Hello Amazing Race. Hello Grey's Anatomy. While it will be nice to watch these shows in real time when I'm in Toronto over the next few days, there is something comforting about crawling into bed with my laptop, turning off the light and having a flickering screen of illegal images send me to sleep.

Kandinsky at the Tate

Yesterday I went to see Kandinsky: The Path to Abstraction at the Tate Modern. I'll tell you what was abstracting - me, after dealing with the enormous crowd in the gallery. I went with the same friend who toured the Hermitage with me, and it wasn't exactly the same treatment.

I wasn't particularly enthused about the show, but this may have been partly due to the mistake of going to an exhibit on a Sunday afternoon and partly that I'm not hugely fond of Kandinsky's work. (Though I will say that, as per usual, the Tate Modern did a fantastic job of acquiring such an enormous volume and wide range of works.) It isn't that I don't get what Kandinsky was trying to do with abstraction, but it eliminates a lot of the individuality of each painting for me. Then again, this theory should purport that I feel the same about Rothko's work, but I don't. My friend perhaps said it best: (As we both stared at a painting in front of us), "God, that's the perfect visualization of how I feel when I'm nauseated."

A few years ago, I had to buy a card for someone important to me at really short notice. I dashed into a corner store and had to pick something that didn't have flowers or a cheesy greeting on it. The only banal, yet colourful one that fit this category was a Kandinsky print. I found myself walking around the exhibit yesterday thinking more about this person than about the paintings on the wall. What does this say about Kandinsky? What does this say about me?