Category Archives: Travel

Family, Travel

All Visas All the Time

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Lughnasa                                                  Waxing Harvest Moon

Visas.  All visas all the time.  Got a fluttery batch of e-mails and phone messages, all received after Travisa’s office’s had closed.  OMG.  We won’t get the documents to you in time.  OMG. Solved by reminding them that we sail on Oct. 16th, not Sept. 16th.  Oh.  All better now.

Mark and Saudi Arabia.  A police clearance popped up as a new piece of paper.  How to get it?  Lots of opinions.  FBI background check?  BCI state level clearance.  Will this torpedo the application?  Looked like it for awhile, then a phone, again, to Travisa in D.C.

A local police clearance?  Plenty good enough.  Mark now has a Good Neighbor certificate from the Anoka County Sheriff stating that he has committed no crime since he got here.  Good to know.

In in the interim Mark had discovered that the Saudi Embassy closed this week to celebrate Eid, the end of Ramadan.  But. Travisa again.  Nope.  We can get it done in time.  Send us the material by Friday and we’ll get it done.

A series of this’s and that’s, frustrating, but not impossible.

International travel, all fun, all the time.

Politics, Travel, US History, World History

Brother and Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants

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Lughnasa                                                                         New Harvest Moon

Took Mark over to Walmart where he shopped for work clothes, slacks and button down shirts.  He bought 5 of each, a set for each day of the week.  Here’s the weirdness.  Bangladeshis made the clothing.  They came, most likely, by container ship to California, then by truck to a Walmart regional distribution center.  At some point, again on a truck, these shirts and pants completed their journey to Coon Rapids, Minnesota.

Mark walked in and bought them.  He now has them here in Andover.  In less than a month he will pack up those same new clothes and carry them, via plane, to Saudi Arabia.  If he takes them on a subsequent trip to Southeast Asia, they will have traveled around the world plus a little.  Strange.

There is an interesting counter argument to local boy Thomas Friedman (grew up in St. Louis Park) and his flat earth model of globalization.  It suggests that the world has actually grown more local, with only a tiny percentage of the world’s population ever leaving their home country and a large percentage of those who stay in their home country rarely or never leave their own locale.  Globalization, in this view, is a veneer of corporate profit taking spread over the world, a sort of cheap plywood globe on top of which the elite travel by jet, work in several different time zones and consider themselves transnationals.  Under this veneer toil the sweatshop workers who make the elite’s transnational world possible.

The world they make possible though, as in all times, lies as far from them as the earth lies from the sun.  No Bangladeshi textile worker could ever hope to duplicate the trip the slacks he or she made have already taken.  Never.  The vast majority of Chinese who work in export related manufacturing could never follow their products to America or Europe or even to Shanghai or Beijing.  Travel to any region of the world where globalization functions to shift resources or cheaply made goods to developed markets.  There you will find sugar cane workers or miners or electronics assemblers or athletic shoe makers paid poorly so that we might buy cheaply.

Attacking this kind of global disparity seems to be a job for trade unionists, but they’ve not been up to the task.  Not sure how you push against it with any success.

When the whole thing crashes though, that cheap plywood globe will make a hell of a skateboard park.

 

Family, Travel

Pulling Hair

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Lughnasa                                                                 Waning Honey Extraction Moon

Over to Carlson Toyota this morning.  Why?  To have Kate sign over the Tundra to me, as a gift.  The purpose?  Avoid sales tax on the title transfer.  My name alone is on the Rav4, for no particular reason except that’s how we did it that day.  Her’s alone was on the Tundra.  We used the Tundra as a trade-in.  QED.  Right?  Enough to make me pull out my hair and shout.

I’m a little short of equilibrium as we try to get Mark through the visa process for his job in Saudi Arabia.  A routine physical turned up an abnormality.  That means seeing a specialist.  Seeing a specialist means costs and delays.  The visa itself takes time to process and he needs to be over there by September 14th.  Time is getting short.  A lot of juggling here and there.  Kate’s called in favors to move the process along.

At this rate and given my starting point I’ll have no hair left by the first week of September.

Family, Health, Travel

Drawing Blood

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Lughnasa                                                                           Waning Honey Extraction Moon

Took Mark in for a counseling session at 8 am and then over to Allina for lab work.  He said the phlebotomist kept putting on more tubes to collect blood. “I’m woozy,” he said, as he drank a cup of hot chocolate.  After this, a fasting blood draw, we went to IHOP and had breakfast.

He’s been here a while and I’ve gotten used to having him around, but this job in Saudi Arabia is a strong next step for him, a chance to reassert himself as both a teacher and a world traveler.  His anxiety about it is normal, new job, new town, new people, new culture, but those are also all the things that make this an exciting opportunity.

Easy for me to say, of course, I’ll be home here in Andover.  Still.

 

Family, Travel

Those New Job Jitters

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Lughnasa                                                               Full Honey Extraction Moon

Mark has a new job in Ha’il, Saudi Arabia.  He will teach English as a foreign language, as he did so well at AUA in Bangkok for twelve years.  He worked hard over the last five months to recollect himself, to figure out next steps then find a job.  This last he’d focused on hard the last couple of weeks and it got results.

Kate and I are both happy for him.  He’s “wired” right now, still shifting his mentality from unemployed to suddenly employed and about to undertake a journey from Minnesota, which has begun to slide toward fall and Saudi Arabia, where seasons are much different.

His word and Mary’s, who’s worked with educational programing in Bahrain, for the culture there is austere, at least from a Western or Southeast Asian perspective.  By austere they mean at least the prohibition on alcohol, unveiled women, internet censorship and the overwhelming presence of Islam and not just any Islam, but an Islam markedly influence by the Wahabi sect, spawn of Islamic extremists like bin Laden.  Also no movies and sharia justice.

Mark has a German friend who attended a public execution, held on Friday right after prayers.  He found himself shoved to the front of the crowd to experience the scimitar facilitated beheading.

This will also mean a change for us, a move back into Kate’s retirement, leaning into that more as Mark’s saga here, at least for now, comes to an end.

Travel

Please Let Me In

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Lughnasa                                                              Waxing Honey Extraction Moon

Mark went to a hospitality industry job fair in St. Louis Park.  I took him, then went on out to Minnetonka Travel in Wayzata.  I picked these folks almost at random to help with the cruise, but I gotta say, they’re pretty damn good.

Today we set up the processing for our Brazilian visas.  The visa process has taken almost the same effort as booking the entire cruise.  When I first learned that each visa would cost $160, I had sticker shock.  This was what we would have to pay to get off the ship in Rio and then take a taxi directly to the airport.  $320 for passage from one form of transportation to another.  Of course, this is not the intent of the Brazilians.  They just want reciprocity for the way the US treats their citizens coming here.

Still, for us, whose 37 day cruise ends in Rio, it creates this very expensive transfer with no additional benefit.  So, we changed our minds and added two days in Rio after our cruise.  At least we’ll see a little bit of Brazil for our money.

Our travel agent has been to Rio and says it’s a beautiful, vibrant city, but also very dangerous.  I’m a bit dubious about how others see foreign cities since I’ve been many places considered dangerous and never had a problem, even so it’s foolish to ignore advice from someone who’s been on the ground there.  She recommends staying in the Ipanema Beach area, a redolent name for this of who grew up in the 60’s.  We’ll go to Sugarloaf and a Mardi Gras themed evening.  Which, Lori, the travel agent, said, “All the men will enjoy.”

The visa is the last difficult piece of business necessary to make this cruise happen.  The rest, checking out clothes, buying new luggage, deciding what books to take along (on the Kindle) do not require new skills.

Aging, Garden, Great Wheel, Great Work, Travel

Senescence

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Lughnasa                                                    Waxing Honey Extraction Moon

Walked in the garden alone.  Yep, it’s an old time spiritual, much loved in the churches of my youth.  It also describes my morning turn among our vegetables and in our orchard.

The garlic has come out already.  The potatoes have a while yet to go.  The beans have gone from green bean material to soup beans, waiting now for the pods to dry on the vine.  A few onions remain, as for the tomatoes, there are a lot of possibilities, but as the weather cools, will they ripen?  In the orchard we’ve had more productivity than any year so far, a few cherries, lots of currants, many dropped plums, but a few now maturing on the tree.  The apples, in their plastic sandwich bags, have begun to swell on the honeycrisp tree, but on the other, a green apple, they’re not a lot bigger than when the bags went on in July.  Our blueberries came and disappeared into the mouths of birds.

The wild grape harvest looks like it will be a big one this year.  These vines are everywhere on our property, but the ones that produce the most fruit hang in dense layers over the northern fence that fronts our orchard.  Picking the wild grapes usually marks the end of the gardening year here at Artemis Hives and Gardens, at least the food gardening.

The fall flowers of course begin to bloom then, the asters, the mums, the monkshod, the clematis.  It’s also the time to plant bulbs, tulips and daffodils, lilies and croci. It is, too, the time that the garlic bulbs harvested in July, yield up cloves from the largest bulbs for planting.  I like planting the garlic in late August, early September.  Garlic is a counter culture crop, sown in the fall and harvested mid-summer.

Senescence has fascinated me for a long time.  Earlier in my life the process of degradation that rotted wood, turned leaves into humus and prepared more soil got my attention.  An early interest, I suppose, in the great chain of being (note the lower case here, less Scholastic, more Great Wheel).   Now I’ve noticed another key aspect of senescence; it is the time of harvest.  Yes, in the plant world, the dying of the plant’s above earth body follows or is in step with the giving of its fruit.  That is, aging produces

This is also the time when gardening begins to wane in interest for me.  My energies now turn to novels, research for tours at the MIA, preparing for the fall issue selection process at the Sierra Club and the upcoming legislative session.

Now, too, the cruise, which begins in October, looms closer and the loose ends for it need to be tidied.  The Brazilian visa.  New luggage.  Check the clothes.  Rent a tux. (yes.  I’m gonna do it.  3 formal nights a week on the cruise.  i’ll pretend it’s halloween every one of those nights.  i’ll be some seriously weird expatriate Muscovite on the run from Putin’s secret police.  something like that.)

Asia, GeekWorld, Travel, Writing

Ancientrails in Exile

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Ancientrails in exile (I crashed my own website.  Geez.  Wrote this while it was down.  Thanks againn to Bill S. who undid whatever I did.)

August 7th, 2011  5:05pm

Lughnasa                                                   Waxing Honey Extraction Moon

Got a passport photo for my Brazilian visa.  Looks like a booking photo.  You can’t smile during these sessions.  Why?  Facial recognition software struggles with recognizing faces anyhow and anything that distorts the face makes their task even harder.  A great article in Wired talks about this problem and argues that the solution (if we want one) lies in the work of the caricaturist, who emphasizes the unique aspects of a person’s face.  This is the way our brain recognizes faces, but is very difficult for algorithms to master.

Now.  If you’re a terrorist, please don’t smile for your passport photo because we may not be able to recognize you.  Gives you confidence, doesn’t it?

Last night I made an attempt to increase my computer literacy by upgrading my WordPress software on my own.  Note to self.  Don’t do that again.  The result has been a database connection error.  As near as I can tell, I’ve succeeded in taking down my own website.

Mark and I have been rereading the Go handbook.  It’s a bit confusing, at least to me, but we’re going to get to playing anyhow.  This is a sophisticated, yet simple seeming game.

On to Tai Chi tonight.  I feel like I’ve made real progress over the last week.  Slow.  But progress.

 

August 7, 2011 10:30 pm

Lughnasa                                                 Waning Honey Extraction Moon

We learned a new move tonight.  The instructor, Cheryl, said I had the basics of it after our first independent practice.  “Gotta be a first time.” I told her.

It felt good to get something other than correction.  It’s been a tough slog so far, but I’m gradually pulling myself into the physical world, uniting mind and body.  At some point I want to learn the Taoist thought behind it all.  But not quite yet.

Not having ancientrails to post in feels pretty weird to me.  I miss the familiarity of it.  Posting on the blog remains one of the more steady tasks I have in my life.  Fortunately, I don’t need the program to keep writing.

 

 

August 8  2011   1:55 pm

Ancientrails is still down though the error message has changed.  That must mean Bill Schmidt, good friend and cybermage, has made some progress.

China scolded the US for “gigantic military spending and bloated social programs.”  That roused a patriotic wait just a minute reaction.  On several levels.  The military spending is high, but it has been high for some time as the US, the current and still reigning world hegemon, has many enemies and self-interest spread over the globe.  No matter what those of us who prefer peace or other foreign governments like China might want, the military spending reflects our status as the only ever global hegemon.

Bloated social programs.  Only if you’re not poor, old, disabled, a veteran or a person who wants at least some security in old age.  Bloated is the wrong word, a Chinese mimicry of our own Tea Party.  How ironic is that?  The Chinese Communist Party lining up alongside the Michelle Bachmanns and Ron Pauls of American politics.

Do they need reform?  Oh, yes.  Will it happen anytime soon?  I hope so, even though the result might negatively affect Kate and me.

What the Chinese could have scolded us for, what would have bit harder than hackneyed bumper sticker critiques, would have been questions about our love of democracy.  Democracy as it exists in this country today no longer solves problems.  It creates them.  Why does the nation of Madison, Monroe, Adams, Jefferson and Hamilton find itself broken down into the politics of faction?  Military spending and misshapen social programs are the not cause, they are the symptom of a nation no longer able to make its own form of government work.

Now, there’s a critique.

 

Family, Health, Travel

Friday Journal

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Lughnasa                                                            Waxing Honey Extraction Moon

Got excited during the Graphic Design class and ordered Adobe Creative Suite 5.0.  It’s cheaper since it’s behind the latest iteration 5.5.  I’ll be able to do my own eBooks, website, manipulate photos.  It’s more software than I need, but I like to have the best tools when I’m ready to use them.

Mark has had a callback from Target Warehouse and a potential position in Saudi Arabia.  The Saudi Arabia position would be cosh, he says.  After living in Bangkok, Mark has a lot of English slang from British expats.  He’s excited.  This working at looking for a job seems to be working for him.

Took the last bits of the truck back to its now lifeless body.  We kept the old tail gate, hitch and bumper removed when we added the Tommy lift.

Kate and I spent lunch yesterday and the time after in a darkened Osaka, choosing shore excursions for our cruise.  I haven’t run the totals yet, but I imagine when we add in dog boarding and the two additional days in Rio we’ll have a heft sum in addition to the cost of the cruise.  All part of the deal.  We still need to get our extra passport photos and start the Brazil visa process.

Finally got back to the aerobics yesterday.  Slept better.  The clay intensive and family reunion threw me off schedule.  Getting back up one step at a time.  First, aerobics.  Then, resistance.  Meanwhile practicing Tai Chi.

Aging, Asia, Family, Health, Travel

Sunday, Sunday

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Mid-Summer                                                                            Full Honey Flow Moon

More fun with the alarm system.  Back and forth with ADT.  On the phone, pushing buttons.  Still the chirping.  Service call.

Business meeting.  Scheduling a Denver trip for sometime in September.  Looking at buying some more mulch for the vegetable garden.

Practice tai-chi.  Sand and varnish for coat number three six honey supers.  They need to go on tomorrow morning.  Mark put foundations in the frames today, so we’re ready to go.

Out to tai-chi.  I’m still the slow student in class, but I’m learning.  Slowly.  A challenge for this guy to connect body and mind, but a challenge worth keeping after.