Beloved Birkenstocks

Birkenstocks are my absolute favourite brand of shoes in the world. I got my first pair of Birkenstocks (they were sandals) the summer of 1997 when I was 13. My mom had been wearing them for as long as I can remember so I'm not sure why I waited until I was 13 to get my first pair but I fell in love then and haven't looked back. I've gone through so many different pairs of sandals. Last spring, I went to buy some new ones and decided to try out a new style.

This is the new style

I'm so glad I did as I love these new ones and I received tons of compliments on them :) My old ones (of which I had several pairs) looked like this

 

 and while these ones are great, I prefer the new style. It was funny because when my mom and I went to buy them (we go to this shoe store called Dorfer Shoes on Dupont St in Toronto which is owned by a mom and daughter (I think) and which has very odd opening and closing hours. The daughter especially likes to talk but she's very nice) we asked her if it was a new style. The woman (the daughter) told us that people kept asking that but no they had been around for a long time. Odd, because I had never noticed them before in all my years of buying Birks.

My biggest problem with Birkenstocks is that I wear out the soles (despite the fact that I love walking, I sometimes drag my heels when I walk which causes me to wear down the heel part of whichever shoes I happen to be wearing), which are made of cork. I wear them out so badly I get holes in the cork and then they are unwearable. It's possible to get your shoes re-soled but you have to time it exactly right. There comes a moment when it's impossible to re-sole them and then you have to wait for the holes to happen and then you have to go buy another pair.

My very favourite kind of Birkenstocks (although it's really really hard to have a favourite as a I love them all) are the clogs. On my fifteenth birthday, way back in January 1999, my mom gave me my very first pair of navy blue suede clogs and I practically lived in them for the rest of high school. Navy blue is my favourite colour. And I love slip on shoes. And they just look great with everything. I went through 2 other pairs until age 26.  Then, much to my dismay, I discovered sometime around age 24 or 25 that Birkenstock (the company) had stopped manufacturing navy blue clogs. You could get them in brown and black and even red I think (and various shades of brown as well) but no more navy blue. I was crushed. I contemplated getting a different colour but my heart wasn't in it and so for a while I was clogless. Then, in May 2010, I went to Japan on a trip with my parents. Near the beginning of our trip we went to Hiroshima and we came across a Birkenstock store. We went in, and much to my delight they had navy blue clogs! I was so glad I hadn't decided to buy a different colour pair. These ones aren't exactly the same as the pairs I had before because the soles are white, not brown. I don't really know why they're white, and I don't know if navy blue is popular in Japan and that's why Birkenstock Japan decided to keep making navy blue ones. And the salespeople didn't speak English and I don't speak Japanese so I wasn't able to ask these questions. I was just so grateful and happy to find the shoes I wanted. I think the sales people could tell. I was smiling so hard and they seemed happy for me.

Here they are! Japanese Birkenstock Navy Blue Clogs

Here is their white sole

My second biggest problem with Birkenstocks is the way the selection in Canada is way worse than in the US. Dorfer Shoes gets the catalogues for both Canada and the US and the US gets so many more Birkenstock varieties. Dorfer often orders the shoes directly from Germany but it's annoying sometimes to have to go through the store and wait for the shoes to come from Germany when if I were in the US I could just order them directly from the Birkenstock USA website. The woman from the store says the US gets more varieties because it is just a bigger country but it's still annoying. I also hate the way Birkenstock has discontinued two of my favourite pairs (the navy blue clogs and see below for the other discontinued line). I don't get why! Navy blue is such a classic colour and I don't get why they would discontinue it. Even though I was thrilled to buy the navy clogs in Hiroshima, I haven't been able to enjoy them as much as I would have liked. I am scared to wear them for fear of wearing them out and missing that magical window of re-soling. I know that's silly but I can't help it. In the almost three years since I've bought them, I've probably only worn them outside a handful of times and instead have worn them as inside winter shoes the past few years. But even then I don't wear them that often. It's sad. They are my favourite shoes (although I have to admit I prefer the non-white sole) and I really should wear them more!

Sometime in 2009, my mom bought a pair of these Birkenstocks.

I liked them so much I decided to buy a pair myself in the spring of 2010. I love them!! I think of them as my Birkenstock running shoes. They look good with a variety of things, are super comfortable and are really practical - and normally I hate tying shoe laces! But I love these shoes. Unfortunately, I found out last spring that Birkenstock discontinued the line. So I just hope I never wear them out. They have a rubber sole as opposed to a cork one like other Birkenstock shoes so that's a bonus for not wearing them out.

 Then there are my black "London" (that's their official name - all Birkenstock shoes have names (I think) many named after cities but the only name I can remember is "London") Birks. Although I actually don't have a pair right now. My last pair was so worn out and old I threw it out in the fall and have yet to buy a new pair. I love these shoes though!!!! And I will definitely buy a new pair maybe over the summer so that I'll be all ready to wear them in the fall. The first few months I was in Paris in 2007 I didn't have any with me because I was between pairs. My parents came to visit in April and I asked my mom to bring me a new pair. I was so happy she did and proceeded to wear them almost every day. I'd been wearing an assortment of other shoes (and some boots) in Paris until then - which were mostly good but sometimes hurt my feet - and I was so happy to be back in my wonderful black Birks. I have two other stories surrounding these shoes: the History graduate department advisor/coordinator at UT Austin, M., complimented me on these very shoes multiple times and I always encouraged her to get her own pair. Finally, I saw her one day and she was wearing her own pair! Yay! Another time, several years ago now, my mom had a party at our house for someone from her work. It was quite crowded at our house and everyone's shoes were strewn around the front hallway. My dad actually had to leave early to go his own work event and I was driving him downtown. I put on these very shoes and a guest at the party came up to me and said "I think you're wearing my shoes." I told him I didn't think so but then we discovered that he had actually worn the exact same shoes to the party. I was wearing my own pair (we located his) but it was funny.

The London

This guy I knew in grad school, G., once spoke sort of disparagingly about this prof who I TAed for (and really really liked) commenting on how he always showed up to teach in jeans and birkenstocks. That comment made me think of this US political ad I saw once (made by a Republican of course) attacking Birkenstock wearing liberals in Vermont. I always find comments like that very funny because a) I'd be happy to be considered a Birkenstock wearing liberal professor :) and b) because I don't really understand how Birkenstocks became a dirty word for right wing people.

While google-imaging around for pictures for this post, I found this:

It's funny but it also makes me think that Birks are way less non-mainstream these days. I remember feeling so cool when I was 15 because I was the only person I knew with those navy blue blogs, but then more and more people from my high school started wearing Birks (luckily no one picked navy blue :) ) and I didn't like it. And sure enough I see them all over now. I also no longer (happily I have matured) feel annoyed that others wear them. In fact, I really like seeing fellow Birkenstock wearers around. I know their feet must be so comfortable.  I am pretty much 100% sure they will always be my favourite type of shoe and I look forward to many more pairs to come. 

Where life's a mountain not a beach

When I was a little kid, my brother went on a ski trip with his school to Kimberley and Fernie in BC and he brought me back this t-shirt with a picture of a mountain and it said "Where life's a mountain not a beach." Ever since I was a kid and we used to go to out west to Whistler or Lake Louise over March break I have always loved ski towns. I liked skiing all morning, sometimes into early afternoon and then coming in for lunch. My dad would make toasted peanut butter sandwiches, or toasted ham and cheese sandwiches (always on whole wheat bread) or we'd have soup. Somehow all those things always tasted better when we ate them on ski trips. I like how ski towns are called villages (or at least at Whistler and Mont Tremblant they are) and how they are full of people who are on vacation and usually seem very happy. There's a familiarity and a similarity to these types of places that I've noticed not just at Whistler and Tremblant but in Moab, Utah and Lake Tahoe too. I always wonder what it would be like to live in one of those places year round. To have this vacation land be your every day land. Every time I've been on an island/beach vacation I've wondered that too. I know normal life exists on those places but I think I'd find it difficult to go about my normal life when the beach and all that it promises - swimming, reading, relaxing, tanning - is so close.

Since 1997 when my parents got their condo in Mont Tremblant I have been there countless times, and I absolutely always love going there. Even though I haven't skied in over 10 years, I still love going to Tremblant in the winter. It's very pretty with all the snow, I like seeing all the skiiers, you can go skating and walking in the snow is fun. Best of all, I love the feeling of being warm inside and seeing all the snow outside. I always feel really safe and happy. I also love going to Tremblant in the summer - it's green and warm. I like looking at the lake and I always feel so relaxed.

This is the outside of the condo complex 

For all the happiness I've felt in ski towns, there is something very sad about a ski/vacation town with no one in it. A large part of those feelings of safety and happiness, I'm realizing, must come from feeling like other people are there feeling the exact same positive things as I am. I've been to Tremblant twice around the end of the first week of May (so around the 8/9/10th of May) and it's a really depressing time there! Don't go! S. and I went there for two nights in May 2010 and it rained - really hard - the whole time. Aside from going to the nearly deserted village to eat at Catherine's Crepes, we stayed inside and watched movies all day. That part was fun but being there when no one else was wasn't.  C. and I went last May in the middle of the week - a Wednesday - to benefit from this spa deal that the Scandinavian Spa was having on Tuesdays and Wednesdays during May and June. The Tremblant village was absolutely dead. Weirdly, many of the restaurants had 'closed for renovations' signs in their windows but there was no sign of renovations actually taking place. It was like this village wide joke that we didn't get. We ate at the one place that was open  - this Mexican restaurant - and we were the only ones in the restaurant.

Evidently the period between when the ski season ends and Victoria Day weekend when the summer season starts is the off season when Tremblant pretty much shuts down and there are very few tourists. D., his brother A., sister-in-law V., their daughter C., and I went to Tremblant the last weekend of October this past year and it was also a weird in-between time as the Fall season ends on Thanksgiving weekend and the ski season doesn't start until American thanksgiving. Almost all of the leaves had fallen too so we didn't get to enjoy the fall foliage. There were still a fair number of tourists around though, definitely better than May, and there were other people staying at the condo complex so it felt much better than going in early May. 

Another downside of ski towns is that food (and probably clothes and other things people shop for) are often ridiculously overpriced/expensive. However, the food is often really good in those places so people, like me, still go out to eat. Or at least the food is really good at Tremblant. I love Catherine's Crepes and this Italian place that I know the location of but not the name. And of course Tremblant has beaver tails! Beaver tails are the best! I always get Killaloe Sunrise which is a beaver tail with the usual cinnamon sugar mix plus lemon juice. So delicious! Even though you can get beaver tails in other places now (like the Toronto Zoo!), I like them the best in Mont Tremblant.

A Beavertail

Another highlight of Tremblant which I promised I'd talk about in my last blog post is the amazing swimming pool there called Aqua Club La Source. It is a very fun swimming pool which is big and has lots of balls and noodles you can play with/on. There is also a tarzan rope and one deep area you can jump into. The rest of the pool doesn't have a real deep end though - it goes to maybe 5'4 or so because I can stand there - which isn't good. But I just love that swimming pool! I've gone so many times and I always have a fun time. The last few times with D. have been especially fun because we've played catch and swum around and done more actual swimming.  La Source also has an outdoor hot tub and a steam room. I could write another post about steam rooms. They are amazing. This one is very very hot. It feels amazing. If you go to Tremblant, go to this pool! It's very fun!

So many windows! It's great!

Finally, I need to end this post by talking about one of my favourite things about Tremblant - the Cabriolet!! (Another reason Tremblant is sad in the off season (and the October off-season too): the Cabriolet doesn't run.) The Cabriolet is this gondola that goes really fast and is meant to transport skiiers from the bottom of the village up to where they get the chairlifts and big gondolas to the top of the mountain to ski. It's free and so much fun to ride! When I used to go to Tremblant with A., E. and L. back when I was 14 and 15 we used to ride the Cabriolet up and down multiple times. So fun!

The fabulous Cabriolet!

In closing, ski towns are lots of fun! I like going only so often though because then I appreciate them all the more. Going back to the title of this post though, it's so hard for me to say whether life's a mountain or a beach. For longer vacations (5 days or more, ideally a week or 8 days) I would undoubtedly choose a beach vacation. But I prefer ski towns for weekends just because you can pop in, relax, and pop out and feel great. With beach holidays, I always want to be there longer but with ski town weekends, though I would also like to stay longer a weekend is enough.

Outdoor hot tub at the Scandinavian Spa...so relaxing!

Swimming Studies

 

I recently finished the book Swimming Studies by Leanne Shapton (on (and lent to me by) R.'s recommendation). I recommend it to you as well. It's mostly a memoir, but I say mostly because it is quite different from other memoirs I have read. It's much more a series of vignettes about Shapton's time as a competitive swimmer (she twice made it to the Canadian Olympic Trials (1988 and 1992) but never to the Olympics) and some on her life post-swimming. There is no clear chronological narrative and sometimes she would give only a few details about something that I really wish she had written pages about, like her relationship with her husband and why she was living in London for several months, and more about her mom and this comment her mom made at her wedding. That said, one of my favourite parts of the book is the section where she includes photographs of her bathing suits and writes little blurbs about them like she where she wore it, where she got it, etc. Shapton is primarily a visual artist - she paints, is an illustrator, and used to be the art director for various newspapers - and that came out in her book too, especially in her section near the end where she included paintings/sketches of many swimming pools she has swum in. It made me think of all the swimming pools I've swum in. So for the rest of this post, I am going to use Swimming Studies as my inspiration and talk about my own favourite pools, and bathing suits.

Last June, A. came to visit me in Montreal. His visit was short but we had a fabulous Friday evening and all day Saturday together. On Saturday morning we hiked up to the top of the mountain. In the afternoon, A. kindly invited D., K. and I to spend the afternoon at the rooftop pool of his hotel. It was probably my favourite day of the summer and one of my most favourite days ever. We all had such a great time just tanning and swimming. It was so sunny and hot and the view from the rooftop was really nice. The pool was just a normal rectangle shape but very blue and I just felt super happy and super relaxed. Hmmm I guess this is less about that pool being my favourite pool and more about that day being my favourite day. But it did involve a pool so I thought it fit here. Here is a picture. It doesn't do the pool justice but it gives the general idea.

I've been in countless other hotel pools but most of them blur together for me. I was impressed with Shapton's memory when it comes to hotel pools. She describes in detail the art deco swimming pool in the Chateau Laurier Hotel in Ottawa and now I really want to swim in it!! Next time I go to Ottawa I'll either have to stay at the Chateau Laurier or try to sneak into the pool :)

Chateau Laurier in Ottawa Swimming Pool

Berkeley had nice swimming pools, which I wish now I had taken more advantage of. L. and I went swimming a few times in the Strawberry Canyon (I love that name!) pool. The few times I was there it was just about fun swimming - no one was doing lengths and it was really packed. It's located in Strawberry Canyon which is this green canyon behind the stadium and has a really nice green lawn where you can lie out both before and after swimming. Right on campus is the Hearst Pool, which is gorgeous. It has tiles and statues and looks more like some ancient Greek or Roman pool. It's grand and fancy. (See picture below). I only went swimming there once but in retrospect, I should have taken advantage of the year round nice weather and gone swimming outside more.

Hearst Pool, UC Berkelely

So much of Shapton's book was about her relationship to swimming and swimming has always been a sport with which I had a particular relationship. I learned to swim really young and was on the swim team at my elementary school, placing either first or second in the 25 metres breaststroke at the city finals in grades 4, 5 and 6. I was fast at swimming and I loved it. But then I got older, went through puberty and wasn't as fast. In elementary school I had always been distinguished for my speed in breaststroke but in high school, I was friends with 3 other girls on the team (which, by the way, anyone could join... no try outs) L., H. and L. Funnily enough, H., L. and I all had the same best stroke: breaststroke and we seemed to go back and forth in terms of who was fastest. But it wasn't like when I was 10, 11 and 12 and was always the fastest at my school. Even in high school, while on some level I must have liked swim team, I don't remember liking it that much and I think I barely went in to practice or meets in my last year. When I left Toronto for Berkelely, I rarely went swimming. I could probably count on my two hands the number of times I went swimming while in Berkelely (even though the pools were so nice & memorable). It wasn't until the summer of 2008 that all that changed.

I decided then, to take up swimming. For two weeks during August 2008, I would swim 100 "lengths" (more like widths because the pool is small) in my backyard pool. When I got back to Austin, I was determined to swim on a regular basis. And I did! For the next 8 months I swam 2-3 times per week, in the early morning usually getting into the pool around 7 or 7:15 am. There were never that many people there at that time and quite often I would have a lane to myself. I got really into it and really enjoyed going. I was steadily increasing the number of lengths I could do and I really enjoyed being in the water. I mostly swam in the indoor pool, and I'll always love it just because I was happy swimming there. The UT Austin gym also had a really nice outdoor pool which I would swim in sometimes too. But almost always it was the indoor pool. I'd always have such a sense of accomplishment on my walk home from the pool. Sadly, I didn't really continue swimming once I left Austin. I tried to go a few times at the pool at Hart House in Toronto but it was always so crowded and I didn't get a good feeling from the pool. So I stopped. In Montreal I never started - not sure why. Partly because the thought of going outside in the winter with wet hair is so unappealing and partly because I am into step more and only have so much time. But I do hope to take up swimming again eventually. I just need to find the right pool. 

I have also always loved backyard pools. Something about having a swimming pool in your own backyard is so cool. I love the pool in my backyard and which I had a picture to put on this post. I like how it has a slope to the deep end and doesn't just quickly drop off. I have lots of great memories of swimming in it, especially with A., E. and L. in high school. I need to swim in it more though! Reading Shapton's book I wish I had more favourite pool memories or that I could clearly point to a specific pool and describe so many of its features and say this is my favourite pool. (Although one of my very favourite swimming pools is in Mont Tremblant, but since my next post is going to be about Tremblant I'll mention the pool there.)  I've swum in hundreds of pools probably starting with my swimming lessons as a little kid, and I wish I could remember some of them more.

Now moving on to bathing suits. All of my bathing suits (except the one Speedo I have for "serious" (ie. lengths) swimming) are from J Crew. I got my first J Crew Bathing Suit in the summer of 2004 (a pink with white polka dots one piece that ties at the neck) which I still wear today. I most distinctly remember wearing it on the beach in Vina del Mar in Chile when L. and I took the bus there from Santiago one Sunday in February 2005. Whenever I wear it now, I feel like I could be one of those vintage pin-up girls. If I were in a calendar, I'd want to be the month of either January or April or May or June or July. Unfortunately, that bathing suit is at my house in Toronto so I don't have a picture of it. About two years ago, I got another one piece from J Crew. This one has a paisley print and makes me feel a bit like Marilyn Monroe. It can either be worn strapless or with a thin band that goes around the neck. I really like it and have gotten lots of compliments. I wore it last June at A.'s hotel's rooftop pool.

I have three J Crew bikinis. The first is a simple black one I ordered in February 2005 and which my mom delivered to me when she came to visit me in Santiago in May of that year. I wanted a black bikini because I think black is a classic colour and because I think black bikinis look good. There is a picture of my mom standing on a beach in Barbados when she was about 30 or 31 wearing a black bikini which I first saw as a little kid. I would sometimes try on that bikini and always thought black was the way to go. I've worn this black one so much it's starting to get thin and I'm probably going to have to stop wearing it soon but I just love it.

My next J Crew bikini purchase was a bright blue bandeau that can be worn with or without thin strap that goes around neck. I liked this one a lot more when I first bought it in 2009 than I do now, but it's still very nice and I should wear it more.

Finally, in 2010 I bought a purple bikini that also ties at the neck and which I really like. I love the colour. My most memorable time wearing it is in the pool and steam room at the La Source Aqua Club in Mont Tremblant. I love steam rooms and it was funny to leave the steam room and see that my purple bikini top looked as if I had been swimming but really it was just wet from the steam. 

In writing this I realize I do have quite the bathing suit collection. I am sorry the bathing suit pictures aren't better - Shapton had hers on a model which looked better. But alas, this was fun to write and put together and I hope you enjoyed reading/looking at it.

From Swimming Studies

It's the end of the world as we know it

Even though I was 99.9% sure that the Mayan Apocalypse wasn't going to happen, I was still a bit anxious for December 21st to come and go this year. I knew the world was going to still be there on the morning of the 22nd, but I just wanted to get to that point. I remember the summer I was 9, some other kid at a summer day camp I was attending told me that the world was going to end the next day at 3 pm. It was so specific, which made it even scarier, and perhaps explains why I was quick to believe him. Or maybe I was just gullible. Regardless, I kept thinking about it the next day, which was a Saturday. But then my mom took me to a movie at the Capitol Movie Theatre on Yonge Street near our house (which is now an event theatre that hosts weddings & other fancy events). I don't remember what movie we saw but I know that it engrossed me enough to completely forget about the imminent end of the world. When we left the Capitol and started walking home, I realized it was past 3 pm and the world was still there, seemingly the same as always. I felt great relief.

From the ages of 14 to about 19, Armageddon was my favourite movie. From ages 14- to maybe 16 I even had a Ben Affleck poster on my wall which I purchased at the Rogers video store on Yonge Street just north of Davisville station. L. had told me about it (she had one too) and where to buy it so one day after school I got off the subway a stop early, bought the poster and that night went to sleep with Ben Affleck staring down at me. When I was 14/15 I was obsessed with Gwyneth Paltrow and Ben Affleck (who dated for a while! my Hollywood dream match at the time) and I wonder if it's because I liked them so much back in 1998/1999 and am now really embarrassed about it that I don't particularly like either of them now.

Ben Affleck and Gwyneth Paltrow

It wasn't this exact poster but somewhat similar.

 Although it's probably not my favourite movie anymore, I still love Armageddon. I just watched a few clips of it on youtube (the final 8 minutes and the scene where Bruce Willis tells Liv Tyler he's staying behind on the asteroid) and I cried. Every time I have watched it, I've cried. I think Liv Tyler is really beautiful and I think she and Ben Affleck made a good couple. I particularly like the scenes where they show people around the world coping with the fact that the world is going to end (I remember they show Paris/the Eiffel Tower) and then celebrating at the end when the world doesn't end. That connection with the rest of the world - at quite possibly the end of the world - always seemed really important.

I find end of the world scenarios generally pretty terrifying. I worry sometimes about what would happen if something awful happened - be it a natural disaster, an asteroid from outer space, or a hostile government take over/beginning of a terrible dictatorship - and what I would do. I feel certain the first thing that would happen if the world were in chaos would be that the internet would be shut down and there'd be no phone service and I wouldn't know what to do if that happened. I'd mostly just want to be at my house in Toronto, but what if I couldn't get there? K. jokes that she'd take her dad's guns and go live in the woods in BC. That sounds like a good plan for her but so implausible for me. I just hope I never have to confront these things.

Last January, a few days after my birthday, D. and I watched the movie Melancholia. Big spoiler alert coming up in case you still want to watch it and want to be surprised. I found it quite disturbing and while I would recommend it, it's not a movie I want to see again. I kept thinking about it for quite a while after I saw it and the ending just haunted me. In the movie a planet called Melancholia is on course to collide with the earth. Charlotte Gainsbourg, her husband Kiefer Sutherland, her sister Kirsten Dunst and her son are all at her large, somewhat isolated castle like house in the countryside somewhere. Kiefer Sutherland is an amateur astronomer and spends a good part of the movie trying to convince his wife and son that Melancholia will definitely not hit the earth. When it becomes clear that he was wrong and that Melancholia is going to hit the earth, he takes poison and kills himself. He doesn't bother saying goodbye to his wife or son and his wife finds him dead in the barn with their horses. What most struck - and disturbed - me was their isolation. It seemed like the 4 (and then 3) of them were the only people left on earth. They never turned on the TV or listened to the radio or tried to connect with anyone else. Kirsten Dunst - who is really depressed throughout the movie - was the most accepting of the world ending. Charlotte Gainsbourg, when she first realized the end was imminent and that her husband was dead - grabbed her kid and tried to drive into town but then realized it was futile and gave up, returning to their isolated fortress. I knew that in the face of the world ending I'd react a lot like her and her panic really scared me.

Looking at Melancholia

In the end, the three of them just sat outside in a circle and talked and waited for Melancholia to hit the earth. Even though I know they are very different movies, I kept thinking about how Armageddon showed all those scenes of the world being united in fear and hope. Here, we never saw how the rest of the world was handling this. Their isolation at the end affected me so much. It just seemed so bleak and frightening. If the world were to end I would much rather be in a city and near other people, than out there alone.

On The Other Side

 
I read this memoir a few years ago called The Sisters Antipodes by a woman named Jane Alison. Jane was born in Canberra, Australia but spent most of her childhood living in different parts of the world because her dad was a diplomat. At some point when she was under 10, her family (mom, dad, older sister, Jane) were back in Australia and became really good friends with an American family whose dad was also a diplomat (mom, dad, two daughters). The parents ended up switching partners, and the daughters ended up losing dads as Jane and her sister moved to the US with their new stepfather and their mom, and the two other girls stayed in Australia with their mom and Jane's dad. Read it - it's really good! (The amount of similarities between the families are very strange. Both women/moms end up getting pregnant again and both had sons born within a few days of each other.) But why this whole story is related to this post is because Jane returns to Australia a couple of different times during the book and she always talks about the plane rides and drawing maps of the voyages and trying to cross off all the time zones she was travelling through on the back of the Qantas napkin. I loved those parts of the book. I wish I had my copy of the book here (it's in Toronto) to give the exact quote but she wrote this line I just loved about always wishing she knew or could tell the exact moment the plane crossed the equator, so that she could know when she was back on the other side.

It wasn't until I was in Santiago that I realized the word (and country) "Ecuador" means equator in Spanish. C. visited Ecuador once and told me how the equator passes right through the country. She even went to a place where you can stand with one foot on one side of the equator and one foot of the other. So cool! It's like when you can stand on a state/province line and have your feet in two different places at once. A long time ago when we were at school together, N. told me how in Basel, Switzerland, France, Germany and Switzerland all meet. He showed me a picture of himself standing in the exact spot the three countries meet. When I did my exchange to France in the winter/spring of 1999, my dad came to visit me at one point and we went to Switzerland. At N.'s recommendation I made us visit Basel and I also have a picture of me (wish I remembered where it is) of me standing at the place where the three countries meet.  Going back to Ecuador, I really want to visit the country, and specifically the equator one day.

In Paris, I knew this guy named P. who was from Bogotá. His sister J. came to visit during the summer and I hung out with them both a few times. I was telling them how much I loved the long long days and she told me that in Bogotá, because it's so close to the equator, it gets dark around 6 pm (give or take) the whole year. She said the dark would make her tired, and that sometimes she'd go to bed at 6:30 pm and sleep 12 hours until it got light again the next morning. It was so interesting to me that for her, being in Paris in May, June and July was not only an adjustment for the language, etc. etc. but also for the long long days when she was used to darkness by early evening. Having long days in the summer and short days in the winter is so engrained in my mind I don't think I could ever get used to the length of day and night being more or less the same the whole year through.

I like how Jane Alison called the Northern Hemisphere "the other side." It does sort of seem like the two hemispheres are other sides. At the end of our semester in Santiago, Chile, C. and I took a 2 week long trip to Argentina, with a 3 day side trip to Uruguay. While in Montevideo, we went to this museum about an Uruguyan artist named Joaquín Torres García. In the gift shop there was this amazing poster (see picture below this paragraph) of an upside down (to me, but not to some people from South America) map of South America. You can't see it in this picture but there was a quote on the map that said "nuestro norte es el sur" (our north is the south). I've always liked that because it shifts the accepted centres of power and says that just because people in the Northern Hemisphere believe something does not mean those in the Southern Hemisphere necessarily believe it too.

I have new found affection for the Southern Hemisphere. I think my dislike of Chile in 2005 caused me to not like the Southern Hemisphere in general that much, mostly because I pretty much only knew Chile in the Southern Hemisphere and because June was such a dark, cold and awful month in Santiago, so different from June in the Northern Hemisphere. But now I like the Southern Hemisphere so much more. I've realized that just because I don't like Chile, I love Argentina (especially Buenos Aires) and it is also in the Southern Hemisphere. I've been there in its winter (July) and I still loved it. I also really liked New Zealand and it is also 'on the other side.' I'm glad to discover the great things about the Southern Hemisphere. I think it's so fascinating that the globe does have these two sides that are opposites of each other. And I still really want to go to Ecuador (and Bogotá, and look below in Uganda too!) and see the middle.

Stickers for Everyone!

I was a great sticker collector as a kid. I had multiple sticker albums, their whereabouts I wish I knew now. It would be so fun to find them, and to see how much (or how little) stickers have changed between now and then. I don’t remember them that well but I do know that I liked to organize them by fuzzy stickers and shiny stickers. I think I liked the fuzzies better, which is interesting because now I think I prefer shinies. I used to bring my sticker albums to school and would sometimes make trades with friends.

From about aged 10 through age 23, I used stickers occasionally, but definitely not regularly. Then, one day in the fall of 2007 I was in a Target in Austin and saw some Disney Princess stickers and knew I just had to buy them. Thus my love of stickers was reignited. To my delight, I discovered in the early spring of 2010 that the Sandylion sticker company had a factory store in Markham, Ontario a two minute drive (almost directly across the street) from the Seneca campus in Markham where I worked. On the day of my students’ final in April, I went to Seneca early so that I could go to the Sandylion store. Almost three years later I feel in some ways that I have barely made a dent in the stickers I bought that day. Well, that’s not totally true. I bought some Princess Tiana stickers which I used up pretty quickly and a few other Disney stickers but those ones were in sheets. I made the mistake of buying entire rolls of stickers (though to be fair that was what was for sale) and those take a long time to get through.

I’m not surprised I bought so many that day though since I am always on the look out for stickers. The Japanese make awesome stickers, which is not surprising since as I wrote about before, Tokyo has the best stationery store I have ever seen. That store had lots of cool stickers including some of a Japanese version of Snow White and the Seven Dwarves (which I of course bought.) In retrospect, I should have bought more stickers but it had been less than a month since I had gone to the Sandylion factory store and so I knew I really didn’t need that many more. In June 2011, I went to New York City to hang out primarily with L. and J. The first day I was there though, I spent a really fun day with N. (who was in town for the week) doing lots of things including going to this Japanese stationery/book store and buying stickers. I bought two packs of stickers – one exclusively of panda bears (really cute!) and the other a mixture of animals. Even though I am not a huge animal lover in real life, I love animal stickers. They are so cute! I have some fuzzy green frog ones I bought at the Sandylion store that I really like too.
 

In addition to animal stickers, I also like flower stickers, especially roses. Fruit stickers are really great, especially strawberry stickers. I even stuck one on my laptop. I also have lots of heart stickers which I really enjoy too. Then of course, the most ubiquitous stickers in my current collection (no more albums for me; now they stay on their sheets or rolls until I use them) are Disney Princesses. I have both sheets with only one princess – like Snow White stickers (which will include the dwarves and the prince), Ariel stickers (which always include Flounder but actually, interestingly, never include Prince Eric) – and sheets with all the princesses.  

Prince Eric

What I have come to appreciate over the past five years in which I have continually been buying and using stickers is that stickers are absolutely not just for kids. One time when I was at Central Market in Austin, the cashier’s nametag was all decorated with stickers. I told her I really liked it and she told me that she had had to decorate her nametag cause she didn’t know what else to do with her stickers! So while stickers are definitely liked by adults and kids, I think adults have a harder time finding use for their stickers. I almost exclusively use my stickers to decorate envelopes (and occasionally postcards although I’ll usually only just put one or max two) when I send letters. I like to think that the post people find my envelopes very cheerful. I love decorating envelopes and lots of people I’ve sent sticker covered mail too have told me how much they like them. Just looking through my current sticker collection always makes very cheerful. If you haven’t used stickers in a while, go buy some. I feel confident they will add some cheer to your life too.

Christmas Decoration Ennui

As a little girl I was always so so excited for Christmas. Like most kids, I remember having difficulty falling asleep on Christmas Eve and waking up super early on Christmas morning. I loved going down the stairs to the living room where my mom had laid out all my presents. Over the past maybe 10 even 15 years, I’ve gotten less and less into Christmas. I still like it in a general way – because it’s a break, because I usually go on a holiday somewhere warm (I remember when I was little always finding it so odd that the hotels we’d visit in the Caribbean would have Christmas trees. Warm tropical weather and Christmas trees just did not go together in my mind. All the Christmas carols about winter wonderlands had permanently ingrained in my mind the idea that Christmas trees belong in cold snowy environs), because Christmas lights are very pretty – and particularly I love seeing my aunt and uncle who drive to Toronto from Annapolis just before Christmas every year. My mom also makes the most delicious and amazing linzer torte (using her secret Hungarian recipe) every year. But to be honest, I don’t have any desire to participate in Christmas decorations, trees, etc. 

I actually feel guilty for not liking Christmas more because it is important to my mom, and because in a lot of ways it’s a very nice holiday. But at the same time, I feel no attachment to trees or decorations. Over the month of December, it seemed every store or restaurant I visited in Montreal had put up Christmas decorations. D. and I were eating at Burger de Ville (such good burgers! And vanilla milkshakes! If you’re in Montreal and like those things, go there! And thanks to H. for the recommendation!) recently and as we were putting on our coats to leave, I noticed with surprise that there were Christmas decorations. I remarked on this to D. and he replied along the lines of “what do you expect?/of course they do! It’s almost Christmas!” Not only was D. right, but I had to admit that the decorations were a nice touch. I think I have to accept that I am someone who has zero desire to put up Christmas decorations, yet enjoys admiring them.

To people who love Christmas what I am about to say probably sounds awful, but while I think Christmas trees are very pretty (especially with coloured lights and lots of ornaments) I don’t think I would mind if I didn’t have one. Maybe it’s just that right now I haven’t had to actually face a Christmas without a tree because my parents always get one. Hmmm, maybe I should take back my earlier statement. Maybe I would mind if we didn’t have one. When I eventually have my own house, then I will get a tree but for now, I am content with just occasionally seeing the tree and noting its prettiness without giving it much more thought. 

I’m the same with Halloween. No desire to put up decorations or dress up and I can’t remember the last time I was involved with carving a pumpkin. Although I do still distinctly remember and actually kind of like the smell and feel of pumpkin seeds being pulled out of the pumpkin. It’s not that I don’t like holidays or celebrating – I love Valentine’s Day because I love hearts, the colours pink and red, and heart shaped cookies with pink icing. I also love birthdays! I want to celebrate my own and all my friends’ birthdays every year. So I am into holidays, I’m just not into putting up decorations.

Regardless of my opinions on trees and decorations, I agree that the December holiday season is a wonderful time of year. Whether you are into Christmas decorations or not (or even celebrate Christmas), I hope you have a very happy holiday season!