The Itinerant Linguist

Saving the Turtles with Gumbo Limbo

2018-09-03T10:32:00.001-04:00

My nephew (the most adorable child in the world, although I may be a bit biased, as he's my nephew) turned one this weekend, so I've been in Florida to visit my sister and her family for his birthday party. Apparently, its a tradition in Jamaica (where my brother-in-law was born) for the father to smash cake into his kid's face on their first birthday (just the first birthday, not any of the rest of them). I rather think that my nephew would have ended up with cake all over his face anyway, as he's not the neatest eater (nor is any child of that age), but it was still funny to watch my brother-in-law shove cake into his face and then my sister try to clean him up as best she could in a sprinkler. I have got pictures of this, but I won't be posting any per my sister's request.

The next day, after everyone had a chance to rest up a bit (we were all knackered after the party), my sisters and I took my nephew to a sea turtle rescue place called Gumbo Limbo in Boca Raton. Technically it's the Gumbo Limbo Nature Center, but they're best known for the sea turtle rescue and rehabilitation.

Right outside, there are several stone turtles of varying species that you can pose with for photos. They were a bit sandy and wet when we were there because of the on and off stormy weather that we'd been having since I arrived, so we had the turtles to ourselves (after we wiped them down).

The outdoor area (which was most of the place) was closed at first due to lightning strikes in the area, so the entry building was rather crowded. There were quite a few kids there, several playing with interactive exhibits and one crying in Spanish to his parents about wanting to see butterflies. We headed to the gift shop for something to do, which ended up being a good thing, because my sister found a book she wanted for my nephew (about a narwhal who loved music but was actually rather bad at it and was therefore jealous of the other sea creatures, at least until he learnt to find something that he could be good at - conducting everyone else in an orchestra).

Shortly afterwards, they announced that the lightning strikes were no longer a threat and that we were free to explore the rest of the nature centre. So we headed outside and then down a path to an area with several tanks, each with a turtle in it. Each one had been injured (mostly by fishing nets) and then rescued and rehabilitated by Gumbo Limbo. They had names, usually with some kind of theme (there was Violet of the flowers theme, and Buckbeak and Crookshanks of the Harry Potter theme) and signs describing what their injuries had been, how they were recovering, and when they could be expected to be released back into the ocean. There's one turtle who has actually been a repeat customer of Gumbo Limbo - she apparently likes to hang round the pier and therefore keeps getting caught in fishing nets. She's been at the centre three or four times already, although she'd been re-released to the ocean by the time I visited.

The employees were incredibly knowledgeable and really cared about the work they were doing. We spoke with one next to a tank of baby turtles that hadn't made it out of their nest and would have died if the centre hadn't rescued them. He told us all about the plans for releasing them into the wild as soon as they were strong enough to survive on their own. I thought it was wonderful that they were able to rescue so many, as the number of baby turtles that makes it to the ocean is generally very small.

They had the baby turtles separated into different sections of the tank based on how strong they were and how well they were eating, so that the stronger ones wouldn't take food at the expense of their weaker siblings. There was even a little white one, although we were told that it was leucistic, not albino, as the turtle hadn't got red eyes. Leucism involves reduced pigmentation, usually with normal pigmentation in the eyes, while albinism is a complete absence of pigmentation and red eyes.

While Gumbo Limbo is best known for its work with turtle rehabilitation, the centre has also got a boardwalk through the woods (palm trees and other tropical plants), aquariums filled with fish and other sea creatures (including sting rays, which my sister and her family have a mild obsession with - my nephew was particularly taken with them), and the butterfly garden that the child had been crying about when we'd first arrived.

There weren't actually many butterflies out when we were there - a few monarch butterflies and one bright yellow one - and the ones we did see were flying around so that I couldn't get a good picture of any of them. I can imagine that it's lovely when more butterflies are out. It didn't take long to walk round the entire place (which was good, as my nephew as due for a nap shortly after we left), but I could easily have taken much longer with the turtles that were recovering and awaiting release.

The nature centre seeks out turtles in need of help, takes them in, and then releases them back to the wild when they're ready. You can actually adopt a turtle if you'd like to help the conservation efforts - ($50.00 for a turtle and $25.00 for a hatchling) and all proceeds go towards conservation and rehabilitation. I see online all the time news reports of turtles who get injured from straws and plastic rings from fizzy drinks, not to mention the fishing nets that injured most of the turtles at Gumbo Limbo, so it was really nice to see what was being done to help them. Since so much of the modern world harms other creatures, including the turtles, it's important to do everything we can to protect them.

What Not to Forget When You Travel

2018-08-23T09:56:00.000-04:00

Packing for a trip can be tricky. You have to decide what you need and make sure you don't forget anything. I have a checklist saved on my phone that I go through every time I travel so I can make sure I don't forget the essentials.

However, the essentials may be fewer than you'd think. My list of absolute essentials consists of:

Passport
Wallet
Phone
Kindle
Camera/GoPro
Chromebook

And that's about it.

My full to-pack list is obviously much larger than that, but those are the things that I consider to be irreplaceable. I can't just get myself a new passport when I arrive, but if I've somehow forgot to pack any socks at all, I can run to a shop and buy some. Most of what's on my absolute essentials list are there because they're prohibitively expensive to replace or because I can't replace what's on them easily (like my contacts on my phone).

If I forget shampoo, the hotel will have it. If I forget to change money, I can use my credit card or an ATM when I arrive (even if there is a small fee). If I forget clothes, or my phone charger, there are shops there that would be happy to sell me whatever I forgot. Of course, anything I had to buy while there would come out of my souvenir budget, and so far that's been good enough incentive to not forget anything I couldn't do without.

Your list of absolute essentials for a trip may differ from mine, but I find it helpful (and much less stressful to) to have a shorter list of the things I absolutely have to keep mental track of and then a much longer list of everything else I need to pack that I don't need to worry about so much. It definitely helps me start out a trip on a better note!

Sound Like a Native Speaker

2018-08-22T10:45:00.002-04:00

An important part of learning a language is the pronunciation. If you aren't pronouncing the words correctly, speakers of the language won't be able to understand you, which rather defeats the purpose of learning the language.

Some, like Gabriel Wyner of FluentForever to be the very first thing that you ought to learn, even before starting to learn vocabulary. Personally, I like to learn the pronunciation alongside some initial vocabulary, just so I've got something to try to pronounce, rather than just memorising letters and sounds. I've found that actually using a language is the best way to remember it and improve it in all aspects of language learning, including pronunciation. However, Wyner's point that if you learn to pronounce a language incorrectly, then you have to learn the same thing again and having two pronunciations in your head can be confusing is definitely valid - it's best to just learn everything the right way from the beginning.

The best way to learn proper pronunciation is to listen to native speakers. And since moving to a country where your target language is spoken or enrolling in an immersion course aren't always options (and television and music too difficult to understand yet), I've found that the best resource for learning proper pronunciation of a new language is Forvo.

Forvo is a free-to-use site that provides a collection of recordings of words in a language spoken aloud by native speakers. There are both single words and phrases, so if you want to know how a specific thing is pronounced, Forvo is a fantastic resource. The site even tells you where the speaker is from, so if you're learning French, for example, you can see which ones were from France and which from Canada. It doesn't get more specific than that, so if there's a dialect or accent difference between, say, north and south Japan, recordings in both would be labelled the same way, but the pronunciation is still that of a native speaker of the language, which is more than you might have on your own.

If you want to download the files (which I do, so I can load them into flashcards that I make with Anki - more about that later), you will have to create an account, but again, it's free. I've found Forvo to be a fantastic learning resource, especially for languages that don't have the most phonetic of pronunciations (French) or for languages that have sounds that don't exist in English (Korean). It's also nice to hear how a native speaker might break normal pronunciation rules or on which words a native speaker would enunciate less. Plus, it ties learning pronunciation to learning words, so there's context for the sounds you're learning.

The Importance of Neat Handwriting

2018-08-21T12:03:00.000-04:00

When I was learning Japanese at university, my sensei taught us that handwriting was very important in Japan. If you had messy handwriting, she said, people would assume that you would have similar lack of care in other areas of life and that you might not be the sort of person they'd want to date or hire. It's not like in English where if you write illegibly, people may just assume you're a doctor.

Every character has a proper stroke order, however, and following that exactly helps with making your handwriting neater and my sensei insisted that Japanese people could absolutely tell if you'd used the wrong stroke order, even if it otherwise looked correct to you.

Really, neat handwriting does make communication easier. It meant my professor could read my writing and properly mark my exams. It meant being able to read Japanese more easily once I moved there. If the entire point of writing is communication, then prizing neatness makes sense. Except in calligraphy, where I can't read much of the cursive - but that's more an art form anyway.

Calligraphy is beautiful, and in the future may actually be the only time people actually write out kanji anymore. Thanks to modern technology, many Japanese people don't have as much need to write kanji, instead reading, texting, and typing it.

Forgetting the kanji isn't something that happens only to foreigners. If you think about it, when was the last time you actually wrote anything in English? It's just not something people spend as much time doing because they can just e-mail or text it instead.

This does make learning Japanese a lot easier for foreigners. Learning to recognise and read kanji takes a lot less time than learning them well enough to write them from memory, so you can become functionally literate in Japanese much more quickly. When you type in Japanese, so long as you know the reading of the word, your phone or computer will provide you with a list of kanji to choose from - you only have to be able to recognise them.

Many Japanese learners can cut out writing kanji from their studies altogether and can get on in Japan just fine most of the time. Thanks to the prevalence of texting, even if you're living in Japan, it can be considered more advanced study rather than an immediate need. Although if you are living in Japan, you may find that there is some need for being able to write in Japanese, such as addressing envelopes at the post office.

Panda Quest

2018-08-20T11:32:00.000-04:00

My boyfriend and I are on a quest. The goal is simple - to see pandas. Until we can take a trip to China to see the Panda Kindergarten at the Chengdu Panda Base, we'll have to settle for seeing as many at zoos as we can.

The Ueno Zoo in Tokyo had pandas when I was there, but my time living in Japan predated my interest in pandas, so I never made the time to see them. Because I missed out on the Tokyo pandas, we've been trying to make up for it by seeing all of the ones we can. Since we currently live in North America, that's where we've started.

Last year, my boyfriend and I went to Washington, D.C. and, naturally, at the top of our itinerary was the National Zoo, to see the pandas. The National Zoo actually has got a fantastic panda cam and I'd been watching it when Bei Bei, the then-cub was born. By the time I visited, the tiny baby panda that I'd seen learn to walk and climb trees was as big as his mother.

The entire zoo was lovely - it was entirely free, the only charge was if you wanted to purchase a map, which we did - the zoo is not so confusing that you can't get round without one, but it was nice to have and the proceeds went to support the zoo.

This wasn't my first time seeing pandas in person - I saw them first in San Diego, but I'm never going to complain about seeing more. They're adorable and I'm so glad that they're finally off the endangered species list. They're still vulnerable, but that downgrade from endangered is thanks to all of the hard work and time put in by people who truly care about them. Hopefully we'll see a return of pandas to the wild someday as well.

I promise there are pandas in the photo with me - they're in the shade, trying to escape as much of the early autumn heat as they can.

Learning to Read (in Japanese)

2018-08-15T18:30:00.001-04:00

Japanese is my fifth language, so I'm no stranger to learning a language. Japanese is, however, the first language I'd learnt that had a different writing system from English. In French, Spanish, and German, it was just a matter of adding accents, cedillas, and umlauts when needed, and there were perhaps a few different letters, like ch, ll, and ñ in Spanish, but nothing wildly different from English.

Japanese does occasionally use Roman letters (called romaji), which all Japanese people do learn, although it's mostly used for typing on a computer (you type in romaji and the computer changes this to kana/kanji). But mostly, it's used for the benefit of those who don't speak Japanese - you'll see it on signs in train stations and on streets, and in Japanese-English dictionaries and Japanese textbooks. Most Japanese people don't really use it except for stylistic reasons.

If you're wanting to learn Japanese, it would thus benefit you to learn the kana and kanji instead, unless you're planning to only speak Japanese and never read or write it. But really, it's worth it. Most decent Japanese text books will stop providing romaji after the first chapter or two so you don't grow dependent on it.

In my own Japanese course, I notised when trying to learn hiragana that my eyes were drawn to the romaji, because they were more familiar to me, until the textbook stopped providing them and I was forced to learn the kana or fail my class. If the romaji had continued to be provided, most likely it would have actually hindered my learning of Japanese. As it is now, I can read Japanese faster and more fluently in kana and kanji than I can in romaji.

Learning Japanese writing can look intimidating. To start, you've got the kana (hiragana and katakana) - two syllabaries (one character per syllable, rather than one per sound like in an alphabet), which means that not only have you got more characters, but also you have to figure out which to use when. The hiragana are used for grammatical functions in a sentence and for any native Japanese words that haven't got kanji, while the katakana are used for loan words and for emphasis. They're actually rather easy to learn - there are loads of apps and YouTube videos out there that will teach you both of those and they should only take a week or so of studying before you're reasonably comfortable with them.

The kanji are where Japanese gets difficult. These are the Chinese logographic characters and there are thousands of them. As of 2010, there are 2,136 regular usage kanji - these are the ones that students are expected to know before leaving school and that are allowed to appear in publications like books and newspapers without furigana (the hiragana reading) printed next to (or above) it. There are many more than that, but you won't see them quite as often and you'll have the reading provided to help you out. But still, 2,136 is a lot of characters to learn just to read a newspaper.

I'm not trying to be discouraging - honestly, I've found learning kanji to be rather fun, even while it's been challenging. There even more videos and websites and apps for learning kanji than there are for kana, as well as many suggested learning methods. I'll get into those later on - I'm still figuring out which method works best for me as well.

A Trip to the Past

2018-08-11T16:07:00.001-04:00

My boyfriend's company holds a summer picnic every year at a different location round the city. A few years ago it was at the art museum. This year, it was at Connor Prairie, a historical village set in the 1800s that uses preserved buildings from an actual family that used to live there.

Personally, I preferred Colonial Williamsburg, as I felt that Connor Prairie was more meant for children. There were loads of educational activities - there wasn't just a loom, there was also a smaller version for kids to try out, for example. So, while that may make it a bit less interesting for adults, it's absolutely fantastic if you have children.

There's a whole section on the American Civil War where you can see how the soldiers lived and details about some of the battles. There was also information on local Native Americans and their relations with the settlers, namely the Connor family. I did like that Connor Prairie focused so much on the one specific family - it was a different perspective from other similar places that focused on more general history.

The part I actually liked the best was the barn, where they had animals that you could pet. I'd never touched a sheep or a goat before and now I've pet both. They had a week-old lamb out with its mum as well. I was surprised by how soft the wool on the sheep was, given that pure wool products tend to be rather itchy.

Overall, it was a fun day, but I don't know that I'd feel the need to go again, at least not without a child with me. Perhaps when my nephew is a bit older I can bring him here.

Save the Galaxy

2018-08-02T18:05:00.000-04:00

A few weeks ago, my boyfriend and I tracked down a Star Wars Battle Pod. The reviews of the game were good and since I'm a fan of anything Star Wars, we thought we'd give it a go. It's an arcade game, so unless you've got a lot of money to spare, you might want to find it at an arcade. In the UK, this is mostly at Tenpin and Hollywood Bowl, and in the US and Canada, it's at Dave & Buster's.

It's actually an enclosed pod, which is nice, since you can immerse yourself in it more. My boyfriend and I swapped off playing each level - he's better than I am at arcade-style games, so he had a higher score than me on most, but I beat the Takodana level when he didn't, so I was rather proud of that accomplishment. The battles are all famous ones from the films - Battle of Yavin, Battle of Hoth, Battle of Endor, Battle of Takodana, so while you do participate in destroying both Death Stars, there's still a lot of variety.

There's a bonus level at the end called Vader's Revenge that isn't really part of the storyline, because it takes place after the destruction of the first Death Star - you play as Vader and you're trying to prevent the Rebels from taking a piece from the Death Star's remains and you destroy the Millennium Falcon in the process. I couldn't beat that level, but my boyfriend got a top score on it. Perhaps I just subconsciously couldn't bring myself to destroy the Falcon?

The game is on a rail system, so there isn't any freedom to explore the level, but that's rather to be expected of an arcade game. And since you're participating in very specific events that take place in a small area of space (or atmosphere, depending), it makes sense for it to be set up that way as well. I thought the game was a lot of fun - it's exciting and fast-paced and you get to participate in some of the most important events in the Star Wars franchise. At least, of the ones that appear in the films.

New Accents

2018-07-22T00:49:00.003-04:00

Just a month after Meghan Markle became the Duchess of Sussex upon marrying Prince Harry, already it's making the news that she seems to be adopting a British accent. I did watch the clip and she hasn't - she's just got a slightly British cadence to her speech, but her pronunciation still sounds American to me.

It's always fascinated me how some people can be really good with accents and others not at all. My best friend is on one end of that spectrum - she lived in New Zealand for six years and has no hint of a Kiwi accent, although she does now use a lot of New Zealand English. On the opposite end of that spectrum, two of my friends from the UK moved to Florida in secondary school and within six months had completely lost their British accents, although they still retained a lot of British English words and phrases for a long time.

So I think it would be completely understandable if the Duchess of Sussex did develop a British accent - she lives in the UK now and is surrounded by mostly British people. It would only be natural for her to pick up the accent. Some people pick up accents quickly, without even meaning to. And really, I don't think there's anything wrong with just wanting to, either, whether that's to fit in or just for fun.

I can pick up a new accent just by visiting a place for a week or so. My brain just wants to imitate what it's hearing - pronunciation is also usually the first thing I pick up when learning a new language for this reason. My grammar and vocabulary will be terrible, but I will sound really good speaking it. My brain just wants to imitate what I'm hearing around me. Sometimes this gets absorbed into my already rather hotch-potch idiolect and sometimes it's temporary.

Bustle has a really nice article (here) about 'wandering accents' and what they mean. Apparently imitating someone's accent is an act of empathy and just means that you want to understand and be understood. And apparently you pick up accents more easily and learn languages better if you're a musician - well, that explains a lot. Thank you mum and dad for violin, piano, and singing lessons when I was a kid.

There is a downside, however - sometimes people think you're mocking them or will mock you for it (like people did to Madonna when she moved to the UK). I often feel really self-conscious about it for this reason and will really only speak normally (well, normally for me, at least) around my boyfriend and my best friend. Usually I'll try to be more aware of how I'm speaking so at least I don't do it by accident. I began speaking more precisely when I taught English in Japan, so that my lower-level students could understand me more easily. Thus, any accent I speak in tends to be a bit over-enunciated, including my 'native' one.

This actually results in me sometimes being asked where I'm from, even in my home country. Oddly, most people who ask me this most often think I'm from Russia, although I have no idea why. I've never even been there and I've done the Ancestry DNA thing - I have no Russian heritage, either. Although I was pleased to discover that I'm a lot more Celtic than I had thought. Perhaps I should learn Welsh or Irish next, then?

Strawberry Festival

2018-07-13T17:37:00.003-04:00

My boyfriend and I have been trying to go to a local strawberry festival for years. We would hear about it or see signs for it a few weeks after it had happened and would say that we'd try to make it next year, but then the same thing would happen. So this year, finally, we were able to go. I was rather disappointed, however.

I had been expecting an actual festival, with a variety of vendors, selling strawberries, strawberry jam, preserves, pie, etc. Instead, it was a single tent where members of a local church were making strawberry shortcake. So, less a festival and more a fundraiser.

The strawberry shortcake was good, but honestly it wasn't any better than what my boyfriend could have made at home (although to be fair, he is an excellent cook, so it may still be above average strawberry shortcake). Especially since we had to go home for a while to ride out a sudden downpour and then head back out and try again later in the day. A lot of effort and expectations for somewhat expensive strawberry shortcake.

Well, if we're able to go the festival next year, at least I'll know and won't be anticipating lots of strawberry everything, and I'll just be ready for a good strawberry shortcake. Since it was hot and humid outside after the rain, it was refreshing, although it did make me very thirsty.

Learning a Language for Travel

2018-07-02T12:54:00.001-04:00

With English now such a global language, should you bother learning a language for travel? My answer to this question is always 'yes, absolutely', but I love languages (I speak six, although I'm only truly fluent in English) and learning them, so I may be a bit biased. Sometimes it's just not possible to learn an entire language for a week-long trip. But while learning the local language may not be necessary to have a great trip, it can make things a lot more fun.

Some of my favourite experiences travelling have only occurred because I spoke the language. I lived in Japan for several years after university and got to meet some wonderful people there that I never would have been able to talk to without knowing Japanese. The train conductor in Nikko who was so excited to have foreigners on his train that he wanted to take a picture with us. The elderly couple hiking a mountain with their cat in a sling who helped us find our way back to the path we needed. Another elderly couple out hiking who gave use cookies because we were foreign and had travelled all this way to visit their country. The Hiroshima bombing survivor who wrote the memorial poem on a monument that we'd been admiring and who told us stories about the war and about not being able to use English terms in baseball. Only that last conversation had any English at all and that was because I was translating for my mum and aunt.

I've since moved back home and now go with my boyfriend on big international trips - big because of the length and the number of places we visit, not because of how war away we go. Some of our 'big' trips have been rather close to home. Our last trip was to Scandinavia (with a quick day trip to Tallinn). Since there wasn't going to be any way that I could learn Finnish, Estonian, Swedish, and Norwegian all before the trip, this ended up being the first time in my life I'd been to another country without knowing its language first.

I was able to pick up a few words here and there as we travelled, but for the most part had to use exclusively English. Fortunately, nearly everyone everywhere we went spoke excellent English and when they didn't, the interaction didn't really require much speaking (such as buying my new favourite skagen sandwich at a convenience store). This experience really just made me want to learn all four languages more - if I hear a language a lot, I want to learn it so I can understand it. I ended up learning Japanese at university because a friend got me started watching anime. I started teaching myself Korean for similar reasons (Korean dramas) even before I met my boyfriend (whose parents were both born in South Korea).

Now that I've got personal experience with both options, I think I still prefer making sure I know at least some of the language beforehand. Sure, it's easier to rely on English, since so many people speak it across the world, but I find it to be a courtesy to at least try to speak the local language, even if it's only a few phrases. It feels wrong to me to go somewhere else and then make them accommodate me and my inability to speak their language. Even just trying to read a phrase from a guide book can go along way towards people appreciating your efforts, even if they have to speak English with you anyway.

Tree Planting

2018-07-02T12:23:00.000-04:00

My boyfriend ordered five trees to plant in our yard months ago - two Chinese chestnuts, a chestnut, and two persimmons - and because it had been too cold to plant, they sat in buckets in the middle of our kitchen floor for most of spring since they'd arrived.

We finally got to plant them in May. I'd not planted trees before, so it was definitely an interesting experience. There's a lot more to it than what they show you in tree-planting ceremonies.

That tree is already technically planted - they're just adding a bit of soil on top. You don't see the meticulous measurements that you have to take to make sure the tree will have enough room for its roots as it grows (for the trees we planted, we're talking 30-40 feet). You don't see the digging of the holes, the mixing up of soil and coconut coir, then the actual planting and pouring all the soil back in. It took us a few hours to get all five of them done, but it was very satisfying at the end to see our little saplings properly rooted in our back garden.

It'll take a while for them to grow big enough to produce anything, but our garden is already nice for having more trees in it. They're already visibly taller than when we planted them.

Spring Tulips

2018-06-11T12:46:00.001-04:00

Now that the weather has finally turned warmer and it's spring in more than just name only, I went with my mum to the Holland Tulip Festival in Holland, Michigan. Of course, it was a gloomy day, with cloudy skies threatening rain, but I thought this was fine - I like the rain, it wasn't too hot, and I didn't get sunburnt. And it didn't actually end up raining, so it all worked out in the end.

Holland, as its name implies, was founded by Dutch Americans (in 1847) who emigrated from the Netherlands fleeing poor economic conditions and seeking religious freedom. Today, there's still a large population of people with Dutch ancestry and the town celebrates that heritage every year with the Tulip Festival and other Dutch-themed attractions that bring in loads of tourists.

It was rather appropriate that I was with my mum, as it was actually Mother's Day in the US the day we went. It was lovely to have the day to spend with her. Since we don't live in the same place, having that kind of mother/daughter time isn't possible as often as I would like.

Obviously the main thing I wanted to see was the tulips. The city has tulips planted all over, so you can see them any time when they're blooming. They line the streets and there's a park in the centre of town where there are loads of different colours and varieties planted all in the same place.

The flowers were lovely. I don't know a lot about them, so their names didn't mean anything to me, but it was nice seeing all of the different kinds. While we were eating lunch (traditional Dutch food, including croquettes, which I'd tried before in Japan, but had never known their origin), there was a speaker talking about how to properly care for the flowers. My mum has much more of a green thumb than I do (I tend to kill plants - except my lucky bamboo, which I've actually managed to keep alive so far), so it was more practical information for her, but still interesting to listen to. I never knew so much went in to caring for plants (probably why I am not good with them).

Tulips weren't the only part of the festival. There were stalls selling Dutch food and souvenirs, a windmill park, a Dutch village (for children), and a parade. People dressed up in traditional Dutch costume, including wooden shoes. There was even a band performing in the parade that marched in clogs.

Now I need to go to the Netherlands. My mum's been there with my dad, but I've not been yet. The Netherlands is actually my first stop on a trip with my boyfriend this autumn, but since the tulips are a spring flower we won't be able to see them in Europe, so it was nice that I still got to see them this year with my mum, a little bit closer to home.

Birthday Cake

2018-06-01T10:20:00.000-04:00

Normally, my boyfriend makes me a cake from scratch for my birthday, but since this year we're both trying to eat healthier and in past years, we've ended up with so much leftover cake that we were eating it for weeks, we decided that this year we'd just do single slices.

We decided to visit the Cake Bake Shop in Broad Ripple, since it's won awards at the Cake & Bake Show in Earl's Court, London, been featured on the Food Network, and on Oprah's O List. Even though the cake slices are rather expensive, we thought we'd give it a try.

The shop itself was surprisingly thoroughly decorated. I've been in plenty of bakeries round the world and they're generally a counter and a glass case and maybe posters or paint to a theme, but nothing like this. There was stuff everywhere. Flowers, china, chandeliers, and it was all very, very pink. There were photos on the wall by the door of all of the celebrities who had eaten there, including Matt Damon and Josh Gad. It was rather posh and I felt a bit under-dressed in my jeans. Even the umbrellas in the outdoor seating area had pink flowers.

Of course, I had to try the chocolate cake that won at the Cake & Bake Show, which is now named Gwendolyn's Famous Earl's Court Chocolate Cake, after the venue. I'm not normally the biggest chocolate cake fan - I often find it to be a bit too rich - but I couldn't come all the way to the Cake Back Shop and not have the one that won. My boyfriend wanted to try the Oprah's 'O' List Mint Chocolate Chip Cake, but they were out, so he had the lemon cake instead. No fancy name for that one - it's just called Lemon Cake.

Personally, I preferred the lemon cake over the award-winning chocolate one, but I always prefer fruit-flavoured cake over chocolate. My requested birthday cake every year is strawberry with cream cheese icing. The chocolate cake I ordered was delicious to be sure, but I'm not the best judge of chocolate cake quality - it was very rich and even though I drank an entire glass of milk I still felt very thirsty afterwards, but the cake slice was so big that I was too full to really drink anything more, so it was a bit uncomfortable for a while. I ought to have eaten less and saved the rest for later.

If we go again, I'd like to try either the Raspberry Champagne Cake or the Carrot Cake - and hopefully my boyfriend would get to try the mint chocolate chip that he'd wanted.

Wookiees and Droids

2018-05-20T09:45:00.001-04:00

A few weeks ago, I attended Indianapolis Comic Con, my first-ever con. I'd heard a lot about conventions from my best friend, who's been going to them (and telling me all about them) for the past ten years. Considering how much nerdy fun they are, I can't believe it took me so long to go. There were panels with celebrities (and I actually know who they are!), booths selling all kinds of things from nerdy stuff to my favourite books, comic books, action figures, and more. Plus, there were people dressed up in costume. Some people have to travel a long way for a con, so I was lucky that I live in the same city as this one.

I was most impressed by this Wookiee costume - at first I thought it was Tarrful, but then I watched Revenge of the Sith again and now I'm not so sure. Either way, he's not Chewbacca. His beard is too long and is the wrong colour for Chewbacca. I know the names of all the obscure Star Wars characters, but recognising them in person is another matter, apparently.

I saw Jedi, Ahsoka Tano, Hera Syndulla, Bastila Shan (couldn't get a good picture of her, unfortunately, as we were in a rather quickly moving queue for the James and Oliver Phelps panel), Bob Ross Deadpool, and an actual moving and beeping R2-D2.

One of the coolest parts was getting to meet Timothy Zahn. He wrote the original Legends' Thrawn trilogy and the Hand of Thrawn duology (some of my favourite Star Wars books) and is still writing Grand Admiral Thrawn books for Disney's canon. I got Vision of the Future signed (I had to pick just one - I couldn't bring all five books with me, sadly). I also bought the new Thrawn book in hard-cover and he signed that as well and was willing to take a picture with me.

Grand Admiral Thrawn is my favourite Star Wars villain, so I was happy to see him brought into the canon and even show up in Star Wars Rebels. It was cool to meet the author who wrote Thrawn. I was a bit nervous, because my last meeting with a favourite author (Terry Pratchett) had resulted in him asking me 'you have got a name, I presume?'. It wasn't really that awful - he was just joking with me because I hadn't heard him properly when he'd asked me my name and had responded with 'what?'. The meeting with Timothy Zahn went a bit more smoothly, at least.

I attended two panels while I was there - one with Sean Astin and then later James and Oliver Phelps. Sean talked a lot about New Zealand and how much he loved the country, which was cool, since I went there a few years ago and made it into a rather nerdy trip and saw all of the Lord of the Rings film locations. James and Oliver were asked a lot of odd questions about twin magic and whether or not they could read each other's minds, but they were good sports about it. I can imagine that would get rather annoying after a while.

At the James and Oliver Phelps panel (which we chose to go to over a Villains Who Suck panel - too bad they were at the same time, because that would have been interesting), we saw a bloke cosplaying as Prince Robot IV from Saga. I wanted to get a picture of him, but by the time I was close enough to, he'd taken his TV off so he could watch the panel. Sadly, I didn't see him again after that.

I was rather proud of myself that I didn't spend all of my money - I bought the books and a necklace and that was about it. My boyfriend bought several comic books (I looked, but they hadn't got the ones that I wanted), since he's been collecting different covers of the Saga comics. All in all, a productive, fun day and I would definitely go again.

May the Fourth Be with You

2018-05-04T08:32:00.001-04:00

Today is Star Wars day and I know a lot of people think Star Wars Day and the whole 'may the fourth be with you' thing is rather silly, but I like it. I enjoy a good pun, it's fun, and it's a great excuse to go to an arcade and play Star Wars Battlepod or to have a Star Wars film marathon, if you can decide how you're going to watch them.

Personally, I prefer to watch them in chronological order (in-universe, not release date) and I don't skip The Phantom Menace like many do. Obviously the Prequels aren't fantastic films (I hate sand, anyone?), but I don't dislike watching them. They're still reasonably entertaining and Darth Maul is cool. The lightsaber duels are fun to watch and they still tell an important part of the Star Wars story. And then if I watch them first, I can get them out of the way and move on to Rogue One and the Original Trilogy. Soon I'm not really going to be able to have a marathon so much as a gradual re-watch of everything - at least then I can include Clone Wars and Rebels and the new show coming out next year about the Resistance that's meant to be in a sort of anime style.

Anyway, whether you like Star Wars Day (or the Revenge of the 'Fifth' the next day) or not, it's now officially celebrated by Disney and has been since they bought the rights to Star Wars. They have events at Disneyland and Disney World and everything. Really, I think Revenge of the Sixth is a bit closer to Revenge of the Sith than the Fifth is, but it doesn't really matter for me - my support goes to the Jedi over the Sith every time.

So, Happy Star Wars Day everyone. May the Fourth be with you!

Sakura Matsuri

2018-04-22T12:52:00.002-04:00

So, I used to live in Japan. After university, I didn't know yet what I wanted to do with my life, and I'd been studying Japanese, so I decided that moving to Tokyo to teach English was a great plan. And it was - I met my best friend there, got to experience living in a new country, discovered a love of language and linguistics, and more (trust me, I'll be writing about Japan quite often).

Every year in Japan, the major sign of spring is when the cherry blossom trees bloom. The blossoms are only there for a few weeks before they fall, so the entire country goes rather mad over them. Desserts become cherry blossom-flavoured, everyone does hanami (literally 'flower-viewing', but this involves picnicking with food and lots of alcohol under the cherry blossom trees).

I never actually did hanami when I was in Japan and felt like I missed out. It doesn't seem like a lot, to have skipped picknicking under some trees, but it's such a big deal in Japan I rather regret having not. Of course, I didn't miss seeing the trees themselves - they're everywhere and are impossible to miss. And the sakura-flavoured ice cream is surprisingly good.

The cherry blossom trees are rather symbolic of the ephemeral nature of life - their beauty and transience is associated with mortality - a sort of 'all things pass' idea that's rather intrinsic to a lot of Japanese culture. The song in the video below is even entitled 'Sakura' (the Japanese word for the cherry blossoms).

So, cherry blossoms are a big deal. When I was there, I rather thought that sure, they were pretty, but did they really justify the huge fuss? The weather channel in Japan even provides a forecast on the cherry blossom front, just like you'd report on a cold front coming in, telling people when to expect the blossoms in their area. At the time, perhaps I didn't quite understand how important they were to Japan, but now that I've left Japan, I really miss them.

My boyfriend knew this and tracked down some trees in our city and took me to see them as a surprise. They weren't blooming yet that first time we went, so, naturally, we went back two more weeks in a row to catch them in full bloom. It was rainy and still a bit chilly, but the cherry blossoms were blooming and were beautiful. Our trees are much younger than most of those in Japan and so didn't blanket the entire river like they would have in Tokyo, but they were as beautiful as I remembered and brought back a lot of memories of great times in Japan.

I said I'm not the biggest fan of surprises, but not the way my boyfriend does it. He does find the most wonderful things to surprise me with. We live in Indianapolis (I've lived a little bit of everywhere, though, so expect a variety of spellings and wordings from me) and it was the last place I would have expected to find cherry blossom trees. But here they are in White River State Park along the riverbank.

Next year, if it's warmer, I'd like to try to do hanami (except without the sake - I'm not a drinker) with him. We can bring a blanket and food and sit under the trees and can bring bento and dango to eat and enjoy the transient beauty of the trees. It won't be quite the same, as there won't be the crowds that there are in Tokyo, but I certainly won't mind having them all to myself with my awesome boyfriend.

Panda Surprise

2018-04-07T22:26:00.000-04:00

If you'd asked me a few years ago what my favourite animal was, I definitely wouldn't have said pandas. Obviously I knew about them, mostly about how they were endangered, but I hadn't really thought too much about them beyond that. At least I hadn't until I met my boyfriend, whose favourite animals are dogs (he's year of the dog and so feels an affinity) and pandas.

It didn't take much for him to convert me - a few YouTube videos of baby pandas acting adorable and I was hooked. I was actually the one to discover iPanda, the YouTube account with a 24-hour live panda cam directly into the Chengdu Panda Base in China and almost daily videos of pandas (usually the babies!). It's been a nightly ritual of ours for several years now to watch a few panda videos before going to sleep.

This morning, he told me that he had something he wanted to do today, but wanted it to be a surprise for me. I'm not the biggest fan of surprises, so normally I would have pushed for more details, but he really wanted to surprise me with this one, so I decided to let him.

And it was definitely worth the wait! It turns out he'd booked tickets to the new IMAX film Pandas (narrated by Kristen Bell) in 3D. I couldn't have asked for a better surprise. It was so sweet of him and we both thought it was adorable. The baby pandas are just so cute.

I loved the film - it's not the first panda documentary I've seen at the IMAX. The first one had talked about releasing pandas back into the wild but had been focusing on pandas who had more recent connections to the wild, such as at least one parent who had been captured wild. This new documentary focused on ways to get completely domesticated pandas to learn the natural instincts on their own that would have been taught by their parents if they had been born in the wild and the special panda cub, Chen Chen, chosen to be the first for the project.

It was wonderful to see that there was a long-term plan to not only increase the numbers of wild pandas but to also expand their habitat, since a lot of it had been damaged or destroyed by humans. They're no longer considered endangered, thanks to the efforts of the Chengdu Research Base and others around both China and the rest of the world, but they're still threatened, especially in the wild, so it was really heartwarming to see all of the efforts of people who really care about these adorable bears.

If surprising me with a panda film wasn't enough, my boyfriend had also found out that we have yoshino cherry trees in our city. We went to see them, but they weren't blooming yet. We could see the buds, though, so we'll try again next weekend when they're (hopefully) in full bloom and I'll write more about them and why they mean so much to me then.