Olympics Envy

Well you have all heard me complaining enough about not being in London for the Olympics so I will can it with the whining and just post all the pics Keith is sending me and pretend like I am there!!! (which will be an exercise in making stuff up as well since Keith is not so good with the details):

Day 1: swimming!
Day 2: water polo!
Day 3: beach volleyball!

 I'm not sure I enjoy those "art" structures in the Olympic Park. One looks like a roller coaster and the other looks like a scrapyard. But at least they've found a way to make those penis logos look cute (what a feat!):

Here's a little interview I did with Keith on his experience so far (via the low budget medium of gmail chat)
me:volleyball good? the pics are amazing!

  i'm gonig to blog them

  here's an interview for the blog:

  what's been your favourite sport so far?

 Keith: hmmm

  let me thin

 me: ok i go loo while you think

  be back in 5 mins

 Keith: the swimming probably

  ok

7:01 PM though the atmosphere and the venue of the volleyball was really cool

7:05 PM me: ah that answers the next question

  what is your favourite venue?

7:08 PM Keith: indeed it does

7:09 PM the swimming was fairly hot, but it was very sunny and and I think the temporary structure was a bit of a greenhouse

  once they opened the vents at the back it was fine

  the waterpolo was boiling though - not sure why they didnt' open the vents for that

7:10 PM apparently the waterpolo is copmletely temporary

7:11 PM which is pretty insane as it has a 25m pool in it

7:12 PM me: so your fav is the beach volleyball venue?

  did it rain today?

 Keith: yeah, the backdrop was awesome

  nope

  at least not when we were there

  it as mostly very sunny

7:13 PM me: nice!

 wow, so the most detail Keith has given me so far on his Olympic experience is about ventiliation of venues.

And a complaint about the Canadian Olympic coverage (cuz what would a post from me be without a complaint or two? or five?) I really wish CTV's Brian Williams would stop saying "here in downtown London" whenever they do their pan of Westminster. There is no such thing as downtown London.
   

An Evening Well Spent

I'm very new at being a full-time aunt, rather than a twice-a-year-I'll-take-you-for-icecream-every-day aunt. It's summer holidays so my niece and nephew have spent a few nights sleeping over at my parents' house this week. Too bad I've been working 11 days straight and getting home dead tired!

Tonight however, I got off at 6 and was able to spend the whole evening with them. My nephew was right away on the ipad games all night, and unfortunately rather than wrestle it from him and having two of them to deal with (which 100% of the time leads to bickering, pinching, fighting, and toys breaking) I just let him do what he enjoys while I drew pictures with my niece. Things were going fine and dandy when we were drawing animals, mine were very cartoony but nothing to be ashamed of. But then Kaylie insisted we draw pictures of each other. So we did, and both spent ages trying to perfect it, and while what she produced, I'll keep forever, what I produced, I suspect will go straight into the fireplace when her mom gets her hands on it:

The funniest part was when Kaylie said to me "Is it ok if I draw your freckles so it looks more like you?" Sure Kaylie, sure they are freckles. Not age spots on my poorly-taken-care-of-skin. Not at all.

Then she drew a picture of her brother. The likeness is uncanny:

Oh no! I've forgotten my sister's rule on not having her kids' pictures on the internet! I better make some alterations:

Terracotta soldiers

Working 8 days in a row means that there’s not a lot of exciting news to share. However I it does mean that I have been walking the same route from the skytrain to the office everyday, and I have been passing a particular painted terracotta soldier for a month now. I have noticed painted terracotta soldiers all over the city – I have no idea what they are for, but I would guess that the travelling terracotta artifacts that China has put on exchange with museums all over the world must have visited Vancouver at some point and the city must have heralded the event with its own set of painted terra cotta soldiers and decided they liked them so darn much they’d plop them all over the city.

I myself did not see the Terracotta soldiers when they came to the British Museum a few years back, because I’d seen them already, strangely, in Malta. Keith and I were there on holiday (our first holiday together as a couple!) over Easter 2007 and we had massively failed in accounting for the fact that Malta is a fairly Catholic country and therefore over Easter there was nada open. The heritage museum (quite tiny, much like the entire country) was open though and they were hosting the travelling Terracotta soldiers! I was beyond excited because I’d always wanted to see them, and if there’s one place in China I’d like to travel to (and probably the only place, except MAYBE Beijing for the Great Wall and the Forbidden City), it’s Xian for the Terracotta soldiers. I love archaeology – I’m not very knowledgeable about it or anything, but something about digging up long lost treasures from a lost time really captures my imagination (I guess it does for everyone else as well and hence all those Indiana Jones movies - that fourth one with the crystal skull was horrible). That’s why I would count the Acropolis at Athens as a top travelling experience (despite the rest of Athens seeming to be a bit of a sh*thole), and am still gutted that I haven’t made it to the Giza pyramids or Valley of the Kings in Egypt yet (but I will, I swear I will!).

Anyways as usual I digress.  So this one terracotta soldier I keep passing, I had noticed had lots of animals on it. But today I finally noticed the giant rat on the leg:

And I thought – ew! Why would you choose a rat to paint? They are gross! Then I realized… that they are all the animals from the Chinese zodiac! Of course, my sign, the monkey, features prominently, because that’s how COOL I am. Monkeys are the best. Only elephants beat them in cool-ness  but elephants are not part of the Chinese zodiac.  Here’s the back of the statue so you can see all of the animals.

Seeing the Chinese zodiac animals reminded me how this year is year of the Dragon, and a lot of crazy Chinese people (which is most Chinese people) have been gunning for a baby this year because that would make their baby a dragon baby. Dragons are considered very good luck and are associated with celebration – at all Chinese weddings the head table / stage is usually decorated with a dragon and a phoenix (representing a groom and a bride, respectively). We are one superstitious race.  Besides my new niece Eloisa, I know three dragon babies imminently arriving this year – Taryn will have to renege her Saffa culture for a millisecond and celebrate her dragon baby when little baby Selvon arrives in August. Gasp, and Karen has been struggling to agree on a baby name with her hubby – how about Dragonball???

p.s. i can't figure out what the animal on his front right leg is. is that a komodo dragon or something, because the artist felt a need to use real animals and dragons aren't real???

Pottery Painting

Depite having no creativity whatsoever, I love pottery painting. It was what I made all my friends do on my hen do, along with afternoon tea. It was a very civilized affair.

One of the first things that my sister organised for her and my niece and nephew to do was to go pottery painting. Initially it was just going to be a girl thing, but Ethan insisted that he wanted to participate, only to finish in 10 minutes while the girls were still umming and awwing about what paint colours to choose.

My niece Kaylie painted a box, even though her parents say she already has about a dozen boxes in her room for her odds and sods. I painted a dish, even though I have about a dozen dishes that I painted at pottery painting. This dish has the express purpose of being Keith's junk dish, as he likes to fish everything out of his pockets when he gets home and toss them on a desk. Putting them in a dish makes the desk look so much tidier!!

Here is my masterpiece, and a picture of my niece and I painting (censored as my sister has a weird thing about her kids' photos being online - I also put a lightning bolt across my sister's face for extra measure)

The colours come out much darker after they've been fired in the kiln, so it's always a surprise what it ends up looking like. Can't wait to pick it up next Sunday!

I've already picked out what I'll paint next - a ladle rester dish thingie. Then a mug with a slot at the bottom for biscuits. Then some chip and dip platter/bowls. This place is going to suck up all my money.

National Portrait Gallery

Last weekday of moseying around London on my own.

Today it is beautiful and sunny in London, but I chose to go to the National Portrait Gallery instead of read in the park. I've always wanted to go to the National Portrait Gallery but hadn't ever made it there. Yesterday I went to Trafalgar Square with the intention of going to it but ended up spending an hour in the National Gallery instead.

National Portrait Gallery = portrait paintings
National Gallery = any painting

One receives a thumbs up from me and one does not. You might ask - is there really a difference? And in my opinion there is a BIG difference.

To me, the national gallery is about art. The paintings there are by famous artists, but only interesting to those who actually appreciate art and art history. Due to a strike yesterday, over half the rooms in the National Gallery were closed. So the biggest deal thing that I saw was a painting by somebody somebody (see, already forgot) of Diana and Callisto. Diana is the goddess of the hunt (Artemis in Greek mythology, which I prefer) and her posse of maidens were all supposed to be virgins, but one of them (Callisto) was seduced by Jupiter (Zeus) and knocked up. The painting is about the moment that the handmaidens and Diana all realize she is pregnant and kick her out of their little club. I like Greek mythology and I was still like, whatever. The National Gallery does not get a thumbs up. It doesn't necessarily get a thumbs DOWN, I'm just not interested because I don't get art.

The National Portrait Gallery, on the other hand, to me is about history. Who are the important people that got painted, how did they want themselves depicted, what era of their life does the painting come from, etc. etc. I only had time today to walk through the Tudor period (Henry VII, Henry VIII, and Elizabeth I) through to the Hanovers (The Georges), spanning the 15th to 19th century. And to me, this was extremely interesting because it was like a historical gossip magazine. This dude got overthrown by that dude. This exiled king's grandson then led a army to try to reclaim the throne. This advisor to the King was executed when a Catholic monarch came to power, etc etc. It wasn't just kings queens and dukes either. There were galleries of poets, explorers, inventors, etc. I got to see the portrait of Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley, which I actually recognised from my English literature textbooks, except these were the real portraits that are hundreds of years old. Cool!

But the cutest anecdote of the day comes from the Gallery staff giving a talk to a class of schoolchildren around 10 years old. She was telling the children that when Henry VIII wanted to divorce Catherine of Aragon, it angered her father, who was the King of Spain at that point. She asked them, "Who else do you think it upset? Do anyone of you remember? Someone from Rome?"

And one little boy immediately answered enthusiastically: "Julius Caesar??"

Cute.