Eleanor Glewwe's Blog, page 2

More Traditional Song and Dance

At the beginning of this semester, I made a big push to get a new Georgian-language linguistics experiment off the ground in time for a specific event: the Georgian vocal ensemble Zedashe‘s visit to Minneapolis. I had previously attended workshops and other events with Zedashe in the Twin Cities in 2013 and 2015. I learned that Zedashe would be returning to Minnesota over spring break: I was having lunch at Baba’s Hummus with a high school friend during a snowstorm, and a high school classmate o...

Minnesota State Fair 2024

This post is very late…but I made it to the Minnesota State Fair this year! I hadn’t been since before the pandemic, and I’m not actually sure which year I last visited. Could it have been 2016, another consequential election year? The way Grinnell’s academic calendar works generally prevents me from going to the fair, but this year we started later than usual, so I squeezed in a quick visit between our return from the Boundary Waters and the start of classes. Now that my parents live in St. Pau...

The Boundary Waters 2024

Late this summer, my family went camping in the Boundary Waters again. I last blogged about the Boundary Waters in 2021, but we actually went in 2022 too (I just didn’t get around to writing a whole post about it). Two years ago, we paddled down Hog Creek to Perent Lake; it was our second time there. This August, we explored a new lake: Snowbank Lake.

We set out from the Twin Cities one week before my fall semester began, and we would be away for four nights, so it was really right up against t...

Translation State and Yoke of Stars

As we hurtle toward the beginning of the new school year, I want to say a little bit about two books I read this summer (not the only two!).

The first is Translation State by Ann Leckie. I have now read all of Ann Leckie’s novels, which feels like an accomplishment. (Not that there are that many, but it’s rare that I can say that of an author!) Translation State is set in the same universe as Provenance and the trilogy that began with Ancillary Justice, and maybe all of these books are considere...

Japan, Part V

You can read Parts I, II, III, and IV first, if you like!

From Ryūzu Falls, we took the Tobu Bus back to our hotel, and not long after, we crossed the street to the Lake Chūzenji cruising ship station. Our Nikko passes, which gave us unlimited rides on the Tobu Buses, also included rides on the boat that made several stops around the lake every hour. We wanted to take advantage of that, and the last boat of the day from our stop left at 3:30pm. The boat was a simple white double-decker ferry w...

Japan, Part IV

Part I, Part II, and Part III are available to read!

On Tuesday morning in Kyoto, we breakfasted on savory pastries (like a cross between a pizza and a danish) from Le bac à sable. Then we walked to Murin-an, a Meiji-era garden not far from our lodgings. It was the meeting place suggested by one of my father’s former students who now lives in Kyoto. She invited us to join her there with her husband. Murin-an regulates the number of visitors to prevent overcrowding. When we arrived, we took off o...

Japan, Part III

You can read Part I and Part II too!

Are these Japan posts way too long? Probably, but they’re also one of my personal records of the trip, so I’m just going to keep writing them the way I feel like writing them!

On Saturday, we returned to Ueno Park to go to the zoo. One of the major draws of the Ueno Zoo is the giant pandas. The guidebooks had warned that there were typically long lines to see the pandas, and soon after we entered the zoo we saw a sign about a 50-minute wait. But we were commi...

Japan, Part II

Read Part I here!

From Wednesday onward, until we left Tokyo, we bought breakfast pastries at a pâtisserie called Johan. It was very close by; I could see it from our hotel room window. Every morning, a couple of us would head over, pick up a tray and tongs, and make a selection from their offerings. There were mini croissants, pains au chocolat, curry buns, hot dog buns, a babka-like chocolate bread (the Ginza chocolate bread, apparently), fruit danishes, and more. On our second visit (my first...

Japan, Part I

Earlier this year, my parents invited my brother and me to join them on a two-week trip to Japan in the second half of June. It was my first trip to Asia, let alone to Japan. The closest I’d been to Asia before this summer was Istanbul. The parents of one of my high school friends had gone to Japan a few months earlier, and they lent us a bunch of their guidebooks and other materials, including a copy of Japanese for Dummies, a book of kanji with translations in English and Romanian (but no Japa...

Nghi Vo at Prairie Lights

Last month the organizer of the speculative fiction book club I belong to mentioned in one of her reminder e-mails that the author Nghi Vo had an upcoming appearance at Prairie Lights Books in Iowa City. We had read her novel The Chosen and the Beautiful last year (in fact, did I nominate it…? I definitely voted for it!). Nghi Vo’s reading was on a Sunday right after finals week, so I decided it would make a nice outing to celebrate the end of the semester (and the successful conclusion of my jo...