Francesca Forrest's Blog, page 68

Dog with a message

Because Bogotá is pretty close to the Equator (though up very high in the mountains, so it's very cool), there's almost no twilight. It goes from day to night almost as fast as the scene at the bridge near the start of Spirited Away, like someone waved a wand and now it's nighttime. Sunset was at about 6 pm, and at 5 pm the streets were filled with buses and taxis and motorbikes--everyone going home. And the sidewalks were filled with pedestrians. On our second evening there, we stepped out a...

street art

It's hard to know where to begin with experiences of Bogotá, so I'm going to just launch right in with street art. It was everywhere. We passed this mural every day:



Any surface could have something beautiful painted on it:



There was ordinary tagging, too, of course, plus quickly scrawled political messages, like this one, on the headquarters of the newspaper El Tiempo (Without democratization of the media there is no peace!):



We were eager to go on the Bogotá graffiti tour , which is held twice...

Back from Bogotá, Colombia

It was a wonderful, wonderful trip--in just ten days I made some friends that it had me practically in tears to leave. It was so wonderful that this morning (we got in at 10 pm last night and weren't back at our house until 2 am), I put on my jeans from the trip because they still have the smell of Hotel Casa de la Vega, where we stayed, and I want to stay wrapped up in that. We brought home a big brick of panela (condensated cane juice), and I'll see about making agua panela this morning, li...

Duolingo stories

My desktop calendar is reminding that tomorrow we set off for Colombia. Thank you, desktop calendar, but I don't think I could forget that fact.

I'm nearly all ready. Just a few more tasks. But I took a break just now to practice Spanish with Duolingo Stories. (Interestingly, it turns out that one of the founders of Duolingo is from Guatemala. There's tense-making episode of the Duolingo Spanish podcast in which he describes how his family dealt with the kidnapping of his aunt.)

The Duolingo Sp...

Briarley, by Aster Glenn Gray

Briarley retells the story of Beauty and the Beast, imagining what might happen if Beauty’s father was man enough not to let his daughter sacrifice herself for him. Instead, he stays in her place.

In this retelling, it’s World War II, and the father is a parson who’s also a veteran of the Great War, and the beast takes the form of a dragon.

You know this is going to be a different type of retelling by the parson’s initial reaction to the dragon’s dilemma:

“The curse says you must learn to love...

upcoming trip

I'm under the gun with work right now, but I have an adventure to look forward to: Wakanomori and I enjoyed the landscapes of La Niña and Lady: La Vendedora de Rosas so much that were traveling to Colombia on May 23, returning very late on June 2. Oh boy! Time to test out two-years-and-a-bit of Duolingo Spanish! But hey, when I very-first traveled to Japan, that's about how much Japanese I had, and I had considerably less Tetun when I went to East Timor. Anyway, I have an ice breaker, a quest...

guess who did a lot of chopping wood?

I took my car to the mechanic's yesterday, all dressed in my running gear, because I planned to run a back route back to my house. The mechanic's dad drove up just as I was about to set off and offered me a ride home--he's such a gent; he's given me a ride home in the past. I told him no, this time I was going to get my exercise, but we chatted for a few minutes anyway. The mechanic is about my age (maybe slightly younger... everyone who is about my age is actually slightly younger), and his...

give us this day

our daily dandelion



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Semiosis, by Sue Burke

I read Semiosis because, like Children of Time, it promised to deal with alien intelligences—and it did: several, in fact. But where it really spoke to the other book, where I sense a zeitgeist thing maybe going on, was in how it raised and dealt with the questions of violence and free will. Lest that makes it sound too much like a philosophy or ethics treatise, let me quickly add that it’s also absorbing, imaginative, occasionally horrific, and occasionally hilarious. It kept me hooked even...

machetes, words, orangutans

I tuned into an episode of The Moth Radio hour about halfway through a segment called "The Hat," by Omar Musa, a Malaysian-Australian author, rapper, and poet. The things he said about machetes and words stuck with me enough that I want to share them--those things, and an almost fable-like story of his father, which comes in the middle.

First, the machetes. At one point, as a teenager, Omar goes to visit his grandparents in Borneo, and they go to some family land, and his grandfather has to cu...