Archive for December, 2011
Week 52
Phnom Penh, Cambodia— Is it week 52 already? But there is still much to be done! The mural on the walls of the placid schoolroom which sits on the village church grounds. The timber stakes to be put into the ground, bamboo sticks to be sawed and hammered by hand to become a fenced border… Read More ›
Pensive in Phnom Penh
Phnom Penh, Cambodia — A varied day. We visited the genocide museum, Tuol Sleng, in the morning, and met one of the two remaining survivors of Pol Pot’s violent regime. To understand a country that is *still* recovering from the ravages of war, one must try to grasp what its people went through in recent… Read More ›
Cucumber-Cool in Cambodia
Phnom Penh, Cambodia — One thing I learned in the newsroom back in the day was to establish one’s dateline (the date and location of the story, placed at the top) when one is abroad, in the field. Coming to Cambodia soon after Christmas can be an iffy thing. Either I am unprepared for the… Read More ›
The Last Day of Christmas
Today is Christmas Day, the first day of Christmas. It’s my last day of Christmas. Tomorrow I head for Phnom Penh, Cambodia, and I won’t be back til 2012. That’s what I like about the transition between the old year and the new. The First Day sounds epic, longer than it really is, self-important, and at… Read More ›
Christmas 2011
Gift hunting during the Christmas season, I wandered into a baby store, in search of a toy or two. And no, the recipients were not necessarily under 2 or 20 years of age. At Christmastime, one has to be creative. For the legitimately-aged baby, I found Sophie, France’s best-selling giraffe teether-toy. Then, I found Amos… Read More ›
Top Posts of 2011
These are my top 12 posts of 2011. Chosen based on the number of hits, and words used in search engines, this list is arbitrary and hopefully, unbiased. But that is near impossible, for I have my favourites too. When they show up here I’ll tell you, and why. January : How to Cook the… Read More ›
Lessons in Love
First written: July 20th, 2011. How many times have you been in love? More than once, if that’s what the question implies. The question might also imply that such a simple question is best answered with the hindsight of 20/20 vision. The nature of adolescent love is such that when things don’t work out, one… Read More ›
Safari Adventure
The title of this post is a nostalgic nod to author Willard Price, whose adventure books for boys I read as a fourteen-year-old girl. The quotes here, though, are all from Karen Blixen’s now-classic work Out of Africa (1937). The geographical position and the height of the land combined to create a landscape that had… Read More ›
Out of Africa
Nairobi, Kenya — I have left the Serengeti and Kilimanjaro in Tanzania and have decided to highlight the opening line and other memorable lines from the 1985 film Out of Africa. It was narrated by Meryl Streep who played the heroine Karen Blixen: “I had a farm in Africa at the foot of the Ngong Hills. The… Read More ›
In Transit (Really)
Nairobi, Kenya — Who would have thought I’d end up spending one night in Nairobi and reach home with merely five days left to Christmas? We’d left Tanzania and were in transit in Nairobi heading out to Doha, Qatar, and then for the last flight home. To cut a long story short, we missed the connectioin… Read More ›
