Lanzarote

I can't say that i would ever have had a notion to visit the Canary Islands if i didn't know someone who lived there. Having said that I am glad that I had the excuse as the one Canary island that i visited, Lanzarote, was fascinating and strangely beautiful. Form substantially by Lava flows throughout the last several thousand years, the island has a rugged, brittle surface to it. Most people cling to the edges and enjoy the crystal clear aquamarine waters and the volcanic sand beaches. But if you take the time to venture inland you see the artistry that a river of fire can leave in its wake. There are giant lava bubbles just below the surface of the whole island. Huge caverns of air creating elaborate and often colourful rock formations. Thanks to the genious of Lanzarote's most famous artist , Cesar Manrique, aswell as the islands most unappreciated artist, Jesus Soto (Elana would want me to mention Soto!) these lava bubbles have been transformed into restaurants and concert halls, art galleries and homes. These artisits sought to integrate Nature, art and architecture so that the natural beauty of the place was accessible, but more than this, was a part of everyday life. Cesar Manrique's own house was the perfect example of this. Built on top of a lava field containing 5 lava bubbles, the structure moves and flows in, around, through, on top of the caves and the landscape and the house meld into one integrated being. i cannot speak for the other Canaries, but this one is certainly worth a visit.

Old friends

Dont you just love the kind of friends who are like an old pair of shoes. You may not have worn them for a while but they feel comfortable straight away!

Shooter

For fans of Happy Gilmore, look who i bumped into in New York!

The whitest girl on the planet visits the Bronx

Remember that song they used to sing on Sesame Street 'One of these things is not like the other one, one of these things just doesn't belong'? Well that was what was going through my head yesterday as I caught a subway into the Bronx Borough of New York. Tom, who I am staying with, works as a Maths Consultant for about 10 schools located in the Bronx and he had invited me to come with him and visit a school. On the ride there I became increasingly aware that I was the palest skinned, blondest person in our subway car. This became even more obvious as we left the subway and walked down Fordham Rd, the main Strret of the Bronx. I was conscius of how I looked, how I walked and how I spoke. I was accuetely aware that I had stepped out of my comfort zone. Once we got to school and made it through the metal detectors I was signed in and introduced around. Staff members were very friendly and welcoming and were happy to have me visit their classes. Inside these classes I witnessed some of the best teaching I have seen in my career. Great practictioners who have created fantastic learning environments for their students and believe me the students are rising to meet the high expectations being set. One of the campuses of the school I visited was called 'The West Bronx Academy for the Future'. What a great name for a school!
When I finally left the school and walked (by myself) back up Fordham Rd to the subway station I did not feel as awkward or out of place. I moved beyond my own sense of strangeness and instead saw this as the community of those children, the Community that they will grow up in, the community that they will help to shape in the future. Suddenly it didn't seem so foreign any more.

Interesting MoMA installation

There was an interesting installation at the MoMA which involved an artist drawing directly onto one of the walls of the museum. The result was some pretty interesting socio-political graffitti. Here's a sample. More photos on the 'my photos' page.

MoMA

This afternoon was magical. I spent it in the company of Van Gogh, Monet, Matisse, Kandinsky, Klimt and Picasso at the Museum of Modern Art. Up until now my favorite gallery in the world was the Musee d'Orsay in Paris but the MoMA has certainly equalled it in my mind. It is hard to express exactly what it feels like to stand in the same room as Vincent's 'Starry Night', or Monet's 'Water Lillies'. These paintings that have somehow been part of my soul for so long, standing before them and seeing the contours and the texture and the size of them, it's like walking around in heaven.

Let's Go Yankees!

Yankee Stadium has got to be one of the great sporting venues of the world and despite all of the nay-sayers I really enjoyed my first baseball game. I think I would really get into it if I lived in New York. Unfortunately the Yankees lost the night I went but I got to see the A-Rod, Alex Rodriguez bat, and I saw bases loaded a couple of times and a home run (by the other team, to win them the game!) I have decided that Johnny Damon is my favorite player!

Central Park

I spent a beautiful Monday afternoon wandering around Central Park. I had planned to only spend an hour or so there and then go on to do other things. The park persuaded me to stay longer and I'm glad I did. Here are a few photos from my wanderings. If you want to see more, click on the 'my photos' link on the right.

New York

New York is intoxicating. It is so loud and busy and crammed with people and vehicles moving in every possible direction at every possible moment. But here's the unexpected bit. New York is full of beauty and warmth. The architecture has been thoughtfully crafted and built to endure the tests of time. City planners have taken the time to create green leafy spaces in amoungst the skyscrapers so that you can often forget you're in one of the biggest urban centres in the world. It has that 'centre of the universe' feeling to it, the sort of feeling I have only ever experienced in London. But unlike London which leans toward the more serious tones of life, New York has a casualness to it, a sense of welcome and safety that I wasn't expecting. I finished my first day in New York with a visit to the top of the Empire State Building to see new York by night. It was so peaceful up there, so quiet and calm and incredifbly beautiful.

Waterfall birthday

I celebrated my 33rd birthday with a visit to one of the wonders of the world - Niagra Falls. The falls themselves were genuinely breathtaking and I can only imagaine what spiritual significance they must have had to the original inhabitants of that land. I also wonder about the experience of the Europeans exploring the area for the first time, perhaps sailing down the Niagra River as the roar of the falls became clearer and louder. I imagaine the phrase 'backpaddle' may have been used! The only disappointing thing about the experience was the township that has grown around the falls. Imagine if you will every possible tacky kind of sideshow experience and you will have the main street of Niagra Falls, ON. It's the complete opposite of the beautiful nature experience the Falls should be. Why is it we humans feel compelled to ruin what is a perfectly beautiful landscape?

Finnian

I have been visiting friends Jason and Sarah in Toronto for the past week. It's such a tresure to have friends around the world who you just feel at home with. The visit was made even more special because I got to meet their beautiful son Finn. He's way too charming for his own good and is just a little bundle of wonderful. I know that the next time I see him he will be much bigger and he wont remember this visit, but I certainly will.

Finished

I have finished my research. Hooray! I wok up this morning and thought to myself "Today I dont have to ask anyone anything about Education! Today I dont have to introduce myself and explain where I come from and explain how what people are doing in this place relates to what I do. Today I dont have to convince anyone to share something of themselves so that I can learn from them." Dont get me wrong. The last 5 weeks of reasearch have been amazing. I have been to some remarkable places and met great people who have actually been very generous in what they have shared with me. I feel lucky because along the way I have made new friends. But tonight I am sleeping in the house of old friends. Friends who know me and have been part of my story for a while now. I am with people who know something of what my life was like prior to coming overseas and who know the right questions to ask. And when I go to bed I can read my book without thinking that I should be reading this academic paper or that historical account. And tomorrow when I wake up I will be on holidays.

Canada

I'm in Canada now. I spent a long day travelling from Alaska to Vancouver and stayed only about 4 days in British Columbia. That definitely was not long enough as it is a really beautiful area. The drive from Vancouver up to the Okanagan Valley was a real treat and at times we were driving above the tree tops.
Edmonton has been less pictoresque but the friendliness of the people here has more than made up for it. I have had some great days visiting schools and reservations and meeting people from many of the different First Nations, Metis and Inuit groups here in Western Canada.
My research finishes at the end of this week and the hoiday begins. Yay!

Leaving Alaska

Alaska is an improbable place. It is vast and rugged and cold. It has unreachable mountains and frozen seas, rivers and lakes. It has a capital city which cannot be reached by road - only by air or sea. It has a temperature swing of 150 degrees (F). But still there is life here. There is amazing wild life such as I may never see again. There is a remarkable history of the first inhabitants of this place, the Inupiaqs, the Athabascans, the Yupiaq, the Aluets, and all of the other groups that make up the 20 language groups of Alaska. They showed repect and love of the land and trusted that they would be given what they needed to survive the cold hard winters. And survive them they did developing along the way an amazing collection of stories and knowledge about the cylce of life in the frozen North. Then there are those who live there now. The 'outsiders' who most often come from somewhere else but have grown to love their new home and have undertaken great feats of engineering to make the hard to reach places easier to reach. They are the ones who thought to build a tunnel directly through a mountain that takes 10 minutes to drive through. They are the ones who have built bridges so that traintracks and roads could be laid. They are the ones who have seen to the development of airports and shopping centres and oil pipelines to ensure economic 'progress' in Alaska. Rightly or wrongly they too have their place in this place.
I dont know that I could live here. It is too 'other' for me. The mountains are too high and everything is too white. The seasons are too stark and the differential between day and night, light and dark, summer and winter is too much for me to want to adjust to.
I'm sure that people would say the same about where I live. Maybe that's why I understand why, improbable a place as it is, people yearn for Alaska and call it home.

Wildlife

Spent my last two days in Alaska on the Kenai Penninsula. A very differnt landscape and atmsphere there than it was in the interior. The mountains are even bigger, and I didn't think that was possible. They are majestic and awe inspiring and somehow beyond the realms of my imagination.
Once I arrived in Seward, the seaside town that was my base for the two days, the highlight was a Whale and wildlife boat cruise around Resurrection Bay. We saw a pair of Humpback whales aswell as sea otters, sea lions, bald eagles, mountain goats and all manner of sea birds. It beggars belief how they al manage to survive in that environment during the bleak winters. I think the whales have the right idea. They spend the winter in Hawaii and the summer in Alaska!
I was literally surorunded by absolute beauty for the length of the cruise and it was almost overwhelming - almost!

Howard

I just got back from Howard's camp. I had to walk on water to get there! Howard Luke is an Athabaskan man who lives up river from Fairbanks about 10 miles. His camp is cut off from the mainland by the Chena river which freezes over in the winter. You can walk the half mile across the river to get to his camp when the ice is thick, or in the summer you can get across there in a boat. There's a flag you can raise at the landing to show Howard you want to come over and visit and he will come over in his boat to pick you up. Traversing the river today was touch and go as the weather is getting warmer and the ice is breaking up. Howard is a highly respected Senior Elder of the local community. One of the local schools has been named after him. He has written his own book telling his life story of growing up in the Athabaskan way and he still lives a traditional life of hunting and fishing in his camp where he lives by himself. He is a modern traditional man. He knows how to hunt moose, smoke fish, trap beaver and build a sweat lodge. He also has two snow machines, a solar powered cell phone and an outboard motor boat. He was kind enough to show me around his camp and tell me a bit about his life growing up in Alaska. What a great morning and how cool to have walked across a frozen river.

Lines of desire

Apparantly those little well trodden paths that shorten the distance between A and B are called "Lines of Desire". Instead of following the designated footpath or road, people see where they want to get to and make their own way in that direction in the most direct way possible. As the snow has been melting here I have seen the evidence of lots of desire lines. Sometimes I feel like my journey through life is like a line of desire. It's as if there are these well established paths that most of the people in the world seem to be on, but my desire is leading me somewhere else. I can see where I want to go and am having to tread my own path to get there.

Different landscape, same themes

Here in Alaska my focus is on learning about a group called the Alaskan Native Knowledge Network and the work they are doing to create 'place-based' learning where what students do in school grows out of the community they come from. It has already been an amazing few days of talking to new colleagues about their journey so far, their successes, their struggles and the things that keep them going. So many conversations have included genuine acknowledgement of just how similar our two contexts are. Strange to think that two places, two peoples so far apart geographically could be so similar in so many ways. But then if you think about it, it's not so strange. Native Alaskans and Indigenous Central Australians both live in harsh environements where surivival id difficult and you depend on your family, your community to look after you. In both cases contact with Europeans has led to disease, death, missions, loss of culture and language. In both cases the people have had to fight to regain control over their traditional lands - the core of their being and sense of self. In both cases knowledge is passed on through the telling of stories and the experiential learning gained through hands on activities such as hunting. All of this just makes me feel at home here, and feel a sense of kinship with the people I have met so far. Their ways are familiar to me.

Athabaskan creation story

A train through Alaska

There are no words to describe how beautiful the journey from Anchorage to Fairbanks was. I will simply offer you some photos and suggest that you click on the 'my photos' link on the side to see even more.

Anchorage

Anchorage is a town built on extraction of things. On every street corner of downtown is a fur trader, a jade shop or an ivory shop. The presence of the trans Alaskan Oil pipeline is ubiquitous. If you aren't involved in extracting something then you likely work in the tourist industry. Strangely the month I have decided to visit is the inbetween seasons. Tourists dont really start coming to Alaska until May. The first cruise ship arrives on the 13th of May. A visit to the Alaskan Mueum of Art and History details the strong links with Siberia and Russia. The West Coast of Alaska is less than 3 miles from Russia and once upon a time a land bride existed conecting the two lands. It is thought that all of the Americas were originally populated via this bridge. In a typically non-indigenous approach to land, the Russians who had a controlling trade interest in Alaska decided to sell Alaska to the United States for 7.2 million dollars. Staggering!
The day I spent wandering the quiet streets, locals were excited because the local Hot Dog stand had ventured out for the first time this year. His arrival seemed to officially mark the start of the thaw, the start of Spring. No less than 4 people suggested I should try on eof his hot dogs. have to admit, they were good.

Out of my element

I was nervous all day yesterday. I was finally going to Alaska. I had been talking about it for a long time and it always sounded so exotic as the name escaped my mouth. Alaska....For resaons known only to United Airlines, I had to fly from Seattle through Denver to get to Anchorage. That would sort of be like flying from Sydney to Alice Springs to get to Melbourne! So a journey that could have taken me about two hours took the whole day. Never mind. I dont mind airports and being in transit gives me space to read and write to people and email. But sitting for a few hours in Denver airport as the snow fell outside and flight after flight was delayed gave me time to think about my destination - Alaska. It gave me pause to think that if it was cold here in Denver then it was going to be even colder in Anchorage, and colder still in Fairbanks where I will spend 2 weeks. I started to worry that it would be so cold it might actually hurt. What if the whole experience, instead of being exotic and wonderful was just a painful epic of frozen nose hair and numb toes? And as we taxied out in our plane and they de-iced the wings with something that looked decidedly environmentally unfriendly, I thought 'Oh my God, there's a possiblilty that the wings could freeze and we could crash!' I NEVER have those thoughts when I fly. I'm a good flyer. Then miraculously we took off, didn't crash and in fact made it safely all the way to Anchorage. I realised at some point during the flight that the reason I was so nervous all of a sudden was that snow and cold are really not my element. In fact if you consider that the desert is my element then Alaska is about as far away from my element as I can get. Then I realised another crucial thing, people in the Northern hemisphere live like this all the time. They live in this cold, and much colder. They have to de-ice planes on a regular basis. They live and work and drive and go shopping in snow for half the year. And what do you know, I arrived in Anchorage, walked outside to catch a taxi and my nose hair did not, in fact, freeze. It was cold but the taxi driver was celebrating the fact they had had 5 consecutive days without snow fall. Alaskans are celebrating the arrival of Spring. I needn't worry.

Northern Exposure

Those of you who know me well will know how much I love the TV show Northern Exposure. Imagine then my excitement when given the chance to 'visit' Cicely, Alaska?! The show was filmed in small town outside of Seattle caled Roslyn. My friends Kyrie and Nate were kind enough to take me to visit and I was so excited I was literally skipping down the main street. The fantastic thing is that the makers of the show basically used the street scape as it existed so most of the buildings are still there - The Brick, Ruth Anne's store, Joel's office and the Roslyn Cafe mural. I went into Joel's office, which is now a giftstore for all things Northern Exposure, and in some strange twist of something the store owner was watching Crocodle Dundee!

Still like the desert

I am missing the desert. I miss the space and the stillness and the quiet. I feel closed in and crowded and deafened by the city. I sat in a park today near the hospital, telling myself I was doing some reading for my course, but in reality most of the time I was just sitting. For the first time in a while I carved out a little patch of grass and enjoyed the grass and the sky and the wind. But unfortunately even in the lovely gardens of East Melbourne, the city eventually reinforces it's presence upon you and the cars and ambulances and helicoptors break your reverie.
I met a man recently and was immediately attracted to him. There's nothing immediately obvious about why I would be attracted to him. I haven't exchanged more than 20 words with him. I think it is his quiet that I find appealing. He seems still and uncluttered. He feels like the desert. The desert that has been my constant companion for so many years.
I wonder if I will ever feel that same sense of longing for the city?