Another Vacation from Our Vacation

Day 102 - We were looking at the calendar and figuring out how much winter we have left. Actually, I mean we were figuring out how many days until our trip back to Vancouver through Hong Kong.

We found that we have enough time to take a little trip near the end of this month and into April. It wasn't really designed to be a scouting journey for a future winter, but I suppose it could end up being so. We saw online that it'd be easy to fly from Siem Reap to Bangkok. We plan to spend twelve nights in Pattaya. Life here is quiet. A getaway will make for a noisy, crowded contrast to the subsequent remaining week and a half in Siem Reap. Our winter will finish at the end of the Khmer New Year.

Jay and I have visited Thailand on a number of different occasions, but I was unsure when we visited Pattaya's beach. My self-sleuthing indicates our one and only visit was in April of 1991. During an earlier part of the trip, we saw Bangkok and Chang Mai. An old colleague, Don Richardson suggested we visit right after flight restrictions were ending for the first 'Gulf War'. Pattaya was not as big a city 27 years ago. (There was quite a bit less of me too.) I found personal proof of these facts on YouTube.

Nothing Remains the Same

I sent the link for a larger version of yesterday's blog photo to an ex-colleague who is in Bahrain now. Actually, he's been there since the time I took that photo, making it neigh onto twenty years. In retrospect, I probably had a better life in the UAE, but Bahrain still remains dearer to my heart. I always said the people there were nicer due to the fact they were poorer. Don did send along this comment when I asked if the Adhari Hotel was still there.

Yes it is there along with 88 other hotels, half of them in the new Juffair. The area around Adhari is real run down and trashy nowadays.

You would not recognize Bahrain. High rises all over the island. Your old building there is dwarfed by other, bigger buildings beside and behind. There's not a sqaure inch of empty land any where in Juffair AND the area has doubled in size.

There are several 20, 30 and 40 story towers in downtown Manama, and in the Seef District, there are even more with a 75 story building being planned. Juffair looks like Diplomat area but 5 times the size. Not a place to park anymore and the road to the base is busier than Exhibition Road was; supermarkets, every chain restaurant, coffee shop and pizza place you can think of and some you can't.

All the roundabouts all over Bahrain are being done away with and flyovers are being built in their place. No more roundabouts at all in Manama and they are putting flyovers in at the Manama end of the Sitra Causeway, which will tie in with the new causeway. Also Isa Town, Salmabad and A'ali roundabouts are gone. BTW, they are building a causeway to Qatar.

There's a whole new city being built off the southern tip and a new series of islands were created east of the southern end of Muharraq and already they are built up and all the villas and condos (were talking thousands of 'em) are being sold from 200,000 to 1,000,000 dollars. There are about 25 condos in the Manama, Juffair, Hoora areas built and most of the apartments are sold, starting at $100,000. Just beside Pearl (Lulu) Roundabout, there are three 25-floor towers all sold out. Prices started at $250,000. There are several new universities with entire campuses dotted over the island, too, and 4 or five huge new private hospitals. Dubai might be where it's at, but Bahrain isn't far behind considering its size and resources.

Reorganizing References

This is another day where I'm talking more about function than form. I am not really adding new content today, but I did spend a little bit of time organizing what had already landed here in the past.

I'm more convinced than ever that blogging tools are the only way I can work on this on-going project of scribbling about my life. I didn't use blogger.com's labels until recently. The task of going back through nearly 1700 entries to categorize them seemed simply out of the question.

Yet, the promise of pulling together the randomness of over 200 weeks of continuous daily entries seemed far too great to ignore. I fiddled with adding some new labels to old entries and found a short cut method. Getting most of this junk organized is still going to take months, especially if I devote a few minutes to the task just now and again. The news is I've started.

So, select one of the pictures above to find a majority of entries dealing with this topic or time. They may have been written years apart but will show up on the same page. How's that for organizing after the fact?

Freeing Other Media

There can be a blush of excitement after scanning an old photo. One realizes that the actual paper artifact has been granted an entirely new digital life. It cannot fade further. Multiple copies can exist. It can even be easily passed around via email or a web page. I most recently added a blog entry along these lines a month ago.

Similarly, after languishing on 8mm video tape in a drawer for sixteen years, I helped this video capture from Thailand make its escape. That country was a common vacation destination for colleagues in the Gulf. In fact, we went up to visit another teacher, Mr. Don Richardson. This particular clip was made in old Chaing Mai. We were on break when living in Bahrain. Later that summer, I finished my work there and took up teaching duties in Dubai.

This grainy, 2 1/2-minute clip does not accurately show the environment. It does, however, show personal events that until recently were difficult to access and impossible to share.

It's About Time

I got an email from a former colleague this week. It was good to hear from him. I met Don when he first came to work in Bahrain in 1990. He still teaches there. I value his friendship but he does suffer from a few delusions. One point is how he feels he is managing to beat the ravages of time. Maybe the honest and accurate view in the mirror is being clouded by failing vision. Another point involves the calculation of the same subject ... time. Although he is sixty he still maintains he's middle aged. For gads sake, how many of us are still on this earth at the age of one hundred and twenty?

This segues into another look at the topic of time. This afternoon my class will have a midterm exam. This is the fourth one I've given in 2006. In my nearly nine years of teaching at BCIT, I've never taught as many intensive classes back-to-back. During previous years, I've generally taught a few classes in the BCIT International program too. Those courses have fewer hours per week spread out over a much longer period of time. I'd say there are advantages and disadvantages to each schedule.

Being Creative or a Historian?

As a follow up to yesterday's entry, I rolled another three tapes through an old 8mm analog camcorder and onto my hard disk via a capture card. I selected a trio of tapes from 1991. It was a spring vacation from Bahrain. We first flew into Sri Lanka and spent a few days with the family; subsequently, we went on to Thailand. We, of course, landed in Bangkok. Next, we made our way up to Changmai. We met colleague Don Richardson there. We also made it south to see both Pattaya and Phuket.

It was interesting pulling up these images on my computer and television screens. Although a far cry from HDTV, they are more than sufficient to bring back forgotten memories. Movement and sound add a lot. Why doesn't my present digital camcorder ever leave the drawer, I wonder? I couldn't help but notice how much thinner I was fifteen years ago. Jay's the same size, he just had a lot of hair then. Small conversations were interesting. For example, I mentioned to a tourist that we were beginning to notice the black clouds from the Kuwaiti oil fires, down on our little island of residence. Those were the days of Gulf War I.

Getting this information burnt to DVDs is a long and boring process. It becomes so much more accessible when it is the new format though. I didn't even want to cut out the long sequences we shot when we were new to shooting video. With the remote that comes with the DVD player, it is very easy to rush through boring patches at 16X or greater.

The creative side of me thought about using editing software to remove mistakes and add music and transitions. Yet the archivist in me contends that capturing exactly what was on the tapes is a purer rendition of history.

Consulting Fees Waived

Here's an email I got:

Hi,
I'm planning a trip to Las Vegas. Where have you stayed? I want to be in the thick of things and max the experience.

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Dennis Sylvester Hurd (Google Mail)
to Don 8:32 am

Hi, absolutely anything on 'the strip' is just fine. In fact
we've not even been since they finished the Skytrain connecting
everything. You'll wear out a pair of shoes anyway. The fun is
walking through all the casinos and looking at everything. Most
hotels are consistently priced .. for example the Sahara or
Stratosphere are cheapest but farthest away. The new Wynn is
close to them but its prices trump even the Bellagio or
the Mandalay Bay. When I am talking about cheap .. depending ..
on the season and days of the week .. I'm talking like $30 only!

We've stayed at Circus Circus but be aware they have crowds
that can have kids in tow. Vegas is now a 'family' destination.
We stayed at the Boardwalk, but it's currently being replaced
with a new building.

www.vegas.com

Ask about any property ... and I can comment.

==Dennis

Free Trip to Lake Louise

I found myself constantly defaulting to a quick and dirty little graphics editor called MS Photo Editor that shipped with Office 95. Although I'm currently running Office 2003, I kept the program on my computer. For some reason, even my old MS Picture It! had become uncooperative after I installed more RAM.

Hell, I thought, images are important to me. So, I ran out and bought MS Digital Image Pro 10. I think a new version is imminent as they're offering a $60 mail-in rebate through BestBuy. The software surely makes photo manipulation easy. Give me a recent photograph, Don, and I can save you thousands on 'procedures'. The interactive demo started with a face photo and I learned to ...

• get rid of red eye
• remove wrinkles
• fix a double chin
• whiten yellowed teeth.

I wanted to give the friends above a gift. So I've decided on a virtual trip to Lake Louise, AB. Even though they haven't visted there yet, I can print up an entire set of vacation pictures for them.

From Way Back When

When speaking of preservation, this photograph probably isn't the best example. Although not spotless, it does an adequate job of reminding me that seven years have passed. Jiwan must've taken it. Don was visiting on his second summer trip to Vancovuer. We were on the roof of Tim's former apartment so the sun is setting over English Bay. We would've moved out of our New Westminster rental to a newly-purchased strata the prevous summer. This must've been taken in the summer of 1999.

Not a Software Patch

Don, thanks for the get-well message. Does this look familiar to you? What if it were still stitched to a light-blue, short-sleeved shirt? Use the slide bar to view the bottom half.

Don and the Little Red Audi

There are certain days when nothing inspires me. On these occasions I have to search around for something to blog about. After all, the promise to enter something each and every day must be fulfilled! This means, however, that I have to occasionally scrape the bottom of the proverbial barrel.



Oh, that is NOT a comment on this photo. In a subdirectory somewhere on my 'D:' drive, I found Don. I worked in the island country of Bahrain from January 1989 to July 1991. Don Richardson joined the staff when I was there. He's still there and one of the very select few; he is an ex-colleague with whom I still keep in touch! Thank goodness for MS Messenger and my contact name of DennisSylvesterHurd@hotmail.com.

He recently bought this Audi. Has it been a year, already? It surely looks like a fun ride. I wouldn't mind trying it out by racing up the Coquihalla Highway. I guess that's a silly wish considering the car's on the opposite side of the earth.

Waist Management

I had a message in response to yesterday's letter to my father. Although there were a number of differences between 1986 and the present time, it commented on the size of my waistline. Thanks for your two cents, Don! I thought I'd try to see what I looked like when I wore size-34 pants. Here's a scanned image from Taif at the same time as that letter:

Messaging About Messaging

Can you send text messages internationally on your mobile phone, and if you can, are they cheap or expensive?

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My cell is not a full featured service. I have a 'pay as you go' and only use it for emergency (to have in truck in winter) and for student contact. I don't really know.

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No matter.

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Many of my students have photo phones that play mp3 files and can practically mow the lawn. It all seems silly to me.

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Yeh, my students and friends have mobiles that do everything except make toast. I'd like to have a photo phone and one so that I could text message.

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Too cumbersome for me.

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I used to ba able to text message from my computer and it was free but now they charge. I would pay but it's only available to ------- Mobile Plus service and most of my friends don't have Mobile Plus.

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You need something like a Blackberry.

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I've heard about the Blackberry, but too expensive and technology more than I need or could handle. Text messaging is possible from even the cheapest phones.

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Okay, but keying in is way too slow.

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The Philipinos here are real adept at it. Most of the world except North America do lots of it. In Thailand even, everybody is always text messaging.

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Why not just talk?

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The Philipinos I used to work with text messaged all the time to the Philipines, back and forth all day long. Each texted message only costs 50 fils - 12 cents from here. My friend is in Dubai. If I call his mobile, it is a long distance call for him to receive it.

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Still seems like a stop gap measure, til we use messenger on wireless net devices.

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Or if some one is away from the mobile or can't answer it, instead of just seeing a number of someone who called they can read a message when they get a chance. It's actually real handy.

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Yeah, all right. I will take your word for it.

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i thnk U wll B 2 bsy 2 gt bck 2 me so i snd u a txt mssg. This is the way my students are starting to write.

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I think how most people use cell phones is also stupid and they are always chatting and never saying anything. Too bad more people don't know where the off switch is.

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But like when I'm at work or out in the cinema, somebody can send me a txt mssg and I can read it in the cinema without the phone ringing or when I get back to my office. It would be great if they put answering machines in mobiles, but it seems txt mssging has precluded that.

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Voice messaging is available on my cell. If I switch it .. it informs me .. but I turn that off too. If I can't answer then, I don't want to have to 'catch up' later.

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I agree. Most mobile calls are useless, but then on the other hand, i was a the gym yesrterday and then went to the car wash and supernarket. By the time I got home and checked my message machine, it was too late to go to the cinemas with my friend Richard. If I had had a mobile with me, I would have not gone to the car wash and supermarket and met him at the cinema.

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Very few businesses require such immediate, in-one's-face connections ... almost no ordinary people should.

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Most don't but the example I just gave was one of those times when a mobile would have been handy.

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No wonder half the world is on medication. People complain about stress .. then think of all sorts of ways to invite it into their lives! Good conversation ... dinner is ready now though.

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Bye.

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Birthday Balloons?

Honestly, the world is so much smaller than the first time I went overseas. Communication is so much easier and cheaper. There used to be a feeling of being elsewhere when it took several weeks for a letter to travel home. That meant it was an entire month for a round-trip message.

Now, people can live permanently in a virtual-halfway zone between two locations. I'm not exactly sure what this means for countries who accept immigrants. It used to be certain that a new comer was giving up the old life and was forced to embrace a new one. Now the dynamics are different. There are certainly advantages to these developments too. Jay's sister had a birthday last week. Rather than a mere phone message, Jay 'right-clicked,' ordered up a birthday cake, and had it delivered right to her house on the other side of the globe.

Sri Lanka Food - at Kapruka

If you can type in your credit card number nowadays, you can give almost anything to anyone anywhere. Relatives and families from away can provide so much more than just a cake!

Luxury Ballooning in Sri Lanka

Okay, that's what I want for my birthday!

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I Love Those Who Agree: Now Don Responds

And the result is, not only are we in touch at the click of a mouse button, but the world is becoming so similar. One can be away from home by several thousand miles and and a few continents, and still go to a cinema complex, watch "Mystic River", eat at KFC or Mickey D's, smoke Marlboro lights (or not), stop in at the local cold store and pick up a box of Oreo cookies and low fat milk to have on my Post Raisin Bran in the morning. Come in at mid-night, turn on a 29 inch TV and watch Will & Grace or Jay Leno, take a shower with Dial soap, and go to sleep on Martha Stewart K-Mart sheets. Am I in Vermont, Thailand, Bahrain or Sri Lanka?

A far cry from my Peace Corps days in a small village in Senegal.

A Green Thumb?

I recently bought another houseplant at Walmart for $1.69.

I don't know why I like green things growing in the house. Maybe, I developed a desire for indoor green when living in the Middle East. Or could it be genetics? When I was small my mother made a big deal by inviting relatives to the house and loading up the Kodak Instamatic when she managed to cajole a night-blooming cereus to flower. Jay, however, grew up in a jungle and is not terribly impressed by my efforts.


I don't think I'd call it a special gift, but it does take me many months
to kill most plants. For example, the large one in this photo was a
house-warming present from guest, Don Richardson. He bought it during
his visit to Canada which was more than five years ago!

Geographical Mosaic

Our foreign correspondent, Don, offered this response to yesterday's blog entry.

(Isn't the phrase newspaper correspondent rather old-fashioned? In my mind, it conjures up an image of a smoke-filled, wood-paneled bar with an unshaven journalist in a trench coat sipping on a 'straight-up' whiskey from a dirty glass.)

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Interesting map. I keep forgetting a.) that Vancouver Island is so big and b.) that so much of it is below the border. It appears that it would be a relatively short boat/ferry ride directly south to the US and not such a long drive to Seattle or Olympia. I have no idea of the geography of that area.

I also just found out there is an island just off the coast of Newfoundland that is French. And then Bermuda is still British. And I'm never sure of the status of the Virgin Islands, Puerto Rico and Guam. And there are other Caribbean Islands that belong to the British and French and there's one part of which belongs to the British, one part to the French and one part to the Netherlands, each using that country's currency and flying that country's flag and speaking the appropriate language. And what about Belize (formerly British Honduras, I think) tucked somewhere on the Mexican/Central American peninsula? And the island of Hispanola occupied half by Haiti, formerly French and the Dominican Republic, Spanish.

History, politics and geography obviously played a part in these mosaics. If we think that geo-politics and economics of today is a power play, what they must have been in the 19th century.

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'Spe....cial En....glish' and Other Silly Things

On January 5, I mentioned VOA's special English and included a 14-minute audio report from their Internet site. Here's a response from Don, a friend, reader of this blog, and current contributor ...

Hi, I've been meaning to write about the 'spe....cial En....glish', but hadn't gotten around to it.

When I was in my (Peace Corps) village in Senegal, all the contact I had with the outside world was my little transistor radio. Amazingly, it picked up VoA. Most of the time I didn't bother as I was caught up in village life, like saving babies from dying, trying experimental gardens and digging latrines, but every once in a while, I would turn it on. The VoA programs in 'Spe...cial En....glish' would come on and I could listen for about 5 minutes before it drove me crazy. That was before I was an English teacher, but I used to wonder if anybody as a second language English speaker could make out of what was being read. The vocabulary and grammar level were not brought down to a level they would be able to understand, and if they had that good a command of English, those listeners wouldn't need special English. However, over the years, I have come across people who did listen to those broadcasts and enjoyed them.

Another phenomenon that always amazed me, (probably not as a boy, but later) was the Indian and Cowboy movies wherein the Indians spoke pidgin English but seemed to have an unbelievable vocabulary and knew all the irregular past tense verbs and past participles, relative clauses, present perfect and could pronounce all words correctly but still hadn't mastered simple verb 'to be' or the difference between subject, object and possessive pronouns. On the other hand, as a teacher in the Arab world, that doesn't seem so far fetched. If you can find them, watch some of the old westerns in which the Indians actually had conversations with the white man. And, by the way, who were those early ESL teachers teaching the Indians? Even the most out-of-the-way tribes seemed to speak English. It's not like they lived among the white man and 'acquired' it naturally.

Of course there are so many other aspects of the Indian and cowboy movies that are far fetched, too. The towns were always so well laid out and neat. The women all wore stylish clothes, modern hair-styles and walked around carrying parasols, the homes had over-stuffed furniture and lovely tie back curtains, and, no matter how long they had been on the trail, the cowboys were always clean-shaven. And if there was ever a dance, no sweat stains under their arms. I've been to Texas and I know, in the summer you can't even sit outside without the sweat trickling down, much less dance a square dance. And Oklahoma or Kansas are as hot. And those general stores were better stocked than my local cold store.

But nearly all historical portrayals are unrealistic, be they the old West or colonial America, the South of the Civil War or Merry Old England. Those people couldn't all have had perfect teeth, flawless complexions and gorgeous hair. In fact, the opposite is more historically accurate.

Check out a wonderfully realistic film of the 70s "McCabe and Mrs. Miller" with Warren Beatty and Julie Christie. It's about life in a gold-rush town in the Pacific northwest. And a poignant love story, as well. One of my all-time favorite films.

All the News that Fits ...

Last night, I had one of those 'wow' moments. You know, those rare times when a whole new world opens up because one's learned of a new technology? Oh, gads .. if you're a self-described news junkie .. then have I got a revelation for you!

RSS = Really Simple Syndication

Don, we shared information about the Google News. It is a completely automated news page that's created without human editors. It is possible for them to get hundreds of news media updates every few minutes because of a software framework called RSS (XML).

RSS has grown in importance, in part, because of the preponderance of blogging. It is a way of sharing items between web sites and programs. Running in real time on regular web servers, updates can occur constantly. The concepts are quite complex, but the program is fairly simple. I just downloaded an RSS News Reader (Aggregator) called NewsDesk. It comes with a few dozen publications set up. (There are thousands, no probably tens of thousands, of 'feeds'.)

Just a headline and a few lines from the net publication appear within the reader. However, the person can then click on the headline in order to load the page. Hundreds of thousands of people no longer slog their way through a multitude of pages on popular news sites. They now save time by going after only the content they're interested in. (It means that writers will have to pay close attention to creating good headlines.)

Any site that bothers to put up an RSS feed can be subscribed to. There are even work-arounds that provide RSS features to web sites that don't provide one.

The Final Say

Don has the final say on this topic by adding:

"I might add that one of the reasons we drive such long distances so readily is also a result of our cheap gasoline. Here is a link to a website I found comparing gasoline prices in USA and the rest of the world.

World Gasoline Prices - 01/03 [LINK EXPIRED]

As usual, I don't think N. Americans, both Canadian and US varieties, appreciate how inexpensive things are for us and the standard of living we enjoy."

Cultural Differences: Road Trips

Here's a picture taken last year from the Glacier Highway (37A) in BC.
We were on a road trip just for pleasure. This scene is around a 1500KM
(900 miles) north of New Westminster. The highway heads to the cities
of Stewart, BC and Hyder, AK. The Alaskan panhandle juts down taking
more than one third of British Columbia's coastline.


Don, a regular reader and contributor, sent the following in response to Monday's entry:

"A travel gene is an interesting premise. I think it's more like we emanated from folks who started out travelling and we just grew up as a nation of travellers. It's sort of, "Well, we've come this far; what's a few hundred miles."

20 odd years ago, I stopped in Brighton, England to visit a couple I had known in Iran (I was on my way home from 'the Revolution', but they had fortuitously left 6 months earlier). I enquired about a couple who had been our friends and asked if they had seen them. They replied in astonishment, "Lord no. They live in Wales." That would have been a several hour trip (less than a day) on the train, so it was out of the question! Just this past summer I had a British colleague who was going to be in Eastbourne, further west on the south coast of England. I suggested that, if I got to Brighton, I might come and visit him. He replied, "But that would be at least 3 hours by train." As if that would be too long a trip.

I think the Continental Europeans are a little less intimidated by distance, but just yesterday I asked my Alsatian friends about driving from Strasbourg to Amsterdam. They both said, "I suppose you could do it, but it would take EIGHT hours." They have lived in Strasbourg for 20+ years and have never done it nor would consider doing it.

I think long distance driving is a North American and, in particular, a US thing. I don't know if Canadians do it. Think of all the 'Snow Birds' who drive south in the fall and back in the spring. And a lot of the long distance travellers, with or with gigantic Winnebagoes, are senior citizens, who in most any other country would not venture more than a few miles from home at that age.

In 1985, my 70-year-old mother and I, armed only with a AAA map, reservations at several Holiday Inns and tickets to the Grand Ole Oprey, started out from Bradford and ended up in Greenville, Mississippi a week later, spent a week there and then another week driving back to Bradford a different route.

We just look at driving distance in a different way partly because the US is so big and partly because we've always done it on relatively good roads and in fairly comfortable cars with lots of inexpensive road-side accommodation and cheap and convenient restaurants. And travelling long distance didn't require border crossings, a passport, changing money or hassles with a language. And very often, the places along the way or the destination was populated with old friends or extended family.

By the way, whatever happened to Howard Johnson's, the first franchised restaurant and motel chain which would have seemed to have been in perfect position to capitalize on today's travel oriented society. They've all but disappeared."