August in Flight

Sincere apologies to all for being so tardy. Wait! ... to whom am I apologizing?? I thought I wrote this blog for myself, as a more un-intrusive alternative to the group e-mail (please stop those things, if you are still doing them...they are only warranted with regards to change of addresses and contact info...or if something/body is going to/has died), yet I find among the meager blogging community that I have associated myself with that consistency is important and people may come to rely on current updates and pictures.

So, to my three fans I apologize and harken to you the following...

Don't buy sliced deli cheese. It is tempting and comes in flavours you would not normally consider. But it is bad, it does not last and its flavour has been smeared across the deli slicer and sucked up by the plasticine wrap. You get nothing but heartache in your sandwich.



Go to Winnipeg in August! It kicks ass!

You can...

See Canadian Flags flutter in Canadian breezes!

Take pictures of your fishing rod after you get bored of not catching any fish!!

Play your banjo to exciting local crowds...

Get your picture taken!!

And enjoy the stunning miracle that occurs everytime the sun rises and sets on this God's country we call the Great Plains, the prairies, the Canadian midwest, or that area where Neil Young went to school.

Islendingadagurinn

Two Weekends ago, I attended the annual Icelandic festival in Gimli, Manitoba with my Mother, Aumma (Icelandic for Grandmother), and my Aunt and cousin. It was a really good chance to reach back through a couple of generations and feel some roots beneath our feet and a strong heritage behind our years.

A brief genealogical history of how I came to be zealously guarding lawn chairs along a major thoroughfare in the Icelandic capital of N. America with my cousin Ben:

My great-grandfather, Arinbjorn Sigurgeirsson Bardal, arrived in Canada in 1886. He began working as an undertaker and eventually established a funeral home (which is open to this day and bears the family name, although it is run by some jackass who bought it out). My Amma was the youngest daughter of 11 and grew up in Winnipeg. Somewhere between 1921 and 1975, I, her eldest and most brilliant grandson, was born. And there you have it, we're all up to speed.



Most cities in N. America celebrate their military heritages by enshrining old tanks with new coats of paint and lovely plaques. Manitoba, on the other hand, likes to put planes on poles. I think it has something to do with the fact the entire province, due to its near perfect geometric flatness, made for one giant airfield during the war(s).

So the parade (which was one of the highlights of the festival) was soon underway and my cousin Ben and my vigilence was paid off by the return of my Aumma, Mom and Aunt with coffee and cinnamon rolls.

Bag pipes and drummers... now that is an essential way to kick of a good parade!

More Bag pipers...always good to have'em around a parade...

And here is the Prime Minister of Iceland...well, his wife actually. He is sitting beside her, and that is my uncle Neil driving the car. Now, if your wondering about the Icelandic secret service...

Yeah, those vikings were a lot scarier in person. No grassy knolls out of the range of their spears!
Oh no! Shriners... nothing but trouble.

See, exactly what I was talking about! Those Khartum Komedians are always trying suck the dignity right out of these sombre events. Where are the bag pipers!!

ed. note - Shriners are wonderful people who do tremendous work for the community and contribute their time and compassion to many charitable endeavors.

...they also drive kick-ass vintage hot rods

Cleaning out the camera...

Although I've now been home for over 2 months now, I still keep coming across little remnants of my stay overseas. For example, I cannot, for the life of me, cross any sort of crosswalk or walkway or even parking lot road without checking for cars both ways, half a dozen times. Another less traumatizing example would be my camera which I "cleaned" out the other day. I guess cleaning out is an appropriate term as my card seems to get clogged up with musty old pictures that had little to do with any file folder I would normally dump them in. So, they've been sitting, collecting dust, in the corner.

Tell me of one Westerner who has visited Asia with a camera, and I'll guarantee they'll have taken at least a picture of a toilet. This is a squatter. Good for muscle tone I've been told. I used one for about a year when I first came to Korea in 2000. Since then, the number of Western toilets has increased.

There it is, home sweet home. A sure sign of available seating.

I had an old girlfriend who used to work in an East side Mario's in Niagara falls. She told me that after large parties of Asian tourists had passed through, they would have to go into the washrooms and wash the footprints off the toilet seats. Who is grossing out whom?

Speaking of gross, this is exactly what is looks like. This picture was actually taken by my girlfriend Amity, who ordered this in a restaurant in Fukuoka, Japan. We had nothing but the pictures in the menu to guide our choices and this looked pretty good on paper. It is seared, raw chicken.

This was taken from my window the day before I left. This is what I originally expected from Asia; children practicing martial arts on roof tops, monks meditating under ice cold waterfalls, scarred burly men beheading chickens in back alley kitchens. You know, like the movies...