As I am working towards my goals of reading a French and a Chinese book this year, I read a few articles on how to
study languages. (I hoped some reader would share their study tips in my last post but I guess this blog has so few readers no one answered. So I had to look for study ideas elsewhere.)

One article pointed out the difference between having a vague idea of studying some language and having more measurable goals as to what one wants to do with that language. I gave this a lot of thought.

Turns out I have definite ideas of what I want to do with the languages I am studying or want to study. Maybe I did need to write them out. Thus, for my future reference, here are the reasons for learning my target languages:

Romanian: to read one Romanian book every year, for ease in travelling and for less laborious reading. Basically, Romanian is a jokey and warm language that boosts my self-esteem; I just want to have more of it in my life.

Chinese: to read at least one Chinese book every year, for ease when travelling in Taiwan. I also want to read more comic books from Taiwan and Hong Kong. As well, I want to write more beautifully in Chinese, maybe hiring a tutor to help me with Chinese calligraphy. I want to write a lot of letters in Chinese to my friends in Taiwan.

Japanese: to read the occasional Japanese book or article on cultural topics that interest me (mostly onsens, food, games, arts, crafts and literature). To be able to understand my favourite Japanese tv shows and movies without subtitles. To be able to research new onsens for subsequent trips.

French: to read one French book every year and to read a few nineteenth and twentieth century novels or other books in the original. I also found French very useful when travelling in Tunisia, so I want to be able to use it in other Francophone African countries like Senegal and Rwanda. I want to read more French and Belgian comics. Of course there’s also the extensive travelling in France I want to do and possibly living there.

Spanish: so much great Spanish literature to read in the world! Plus, Spanish is just a fun language to speak. One of my goals is to spend the Mexican Days of the Dead in Oaxaca with a family there. Then there is a personal research project I want to do in South America.

Italian: for reading more Italian comic books, some literature and mostly for ease of travelling and of travel research. I also want to rent apartments there for month-long trips. It would be nice to have long conversations about Italy with my future neighbours.

German: because I want to live and work in Austria. I also want to read some German literature in the original language and I want to play boardgames in the original languages.

Russian: for speaking and some reading. I suspect there’s a whole world of cool, wacky children’s literature I need to read in Russian. I want to watch Cheburashka without making up my own dialogue (my Cheburashka DVD set only has Japanese subtitles).

Swedish: I want to read all of Tove Jansson’s books in the original language, as well as any biographies. Also, I want to travel to Sweden. Hopefully I’ll find more reasons to study Swedish once I start learning about the culture.

Inuktitut: mostly I want to learn to write in their cool alphabet. I don’t know any Inuit people, but it would be cool to try some out when I visit Iqaluit. Plus, I believe that one should speak the language of the country one is in. Canada has a lot of aboriginal languages yet all the annoying white people here snarl “Speak English!” to poor immigrants trying their best to speak English, when really English is not the original local language. Ideally, Halq’eméylem would be better for my needs but I like the Inuktitut alphabet so much.

Taiwanese: for speaking when I visit Taiwan. I also want to learn at least one Chinese dialect to see if it’s really a dialect or if it is a separate language. Plus, Taiwanese sounds so bad-ass.

Cantonese: to order dim sum in Richmond for starters. Also, to watch Hong Kong movies in the original, to chat more when I visit Hong Kong or when I meet grandmothers at friends’ houses here in Vancouver. Chinese grandparent types have lived through an amazing and dramatic century – they must have incredible stories.

Hungarian: like with Swedish, I hope that I’ll find more reasons to study when I start studying Hungarian. Mostly, I want to be able to have conversations when I travel to Romania and Hungary (Hungarians are such nice people), and especially to be able to do research on Romanian history.

Kinyarwanda: for travel when I go to Rwanda. I want to ask questions and be a good enough listener so I can understand the stories about life in Rwanda and the genocide. I bet too that there are some great etiquette lessons the Rwandans have, which, once I learn what they are, I’ll write about.

Amharic: also for travel. Plus, I want to learn the Ge’ez alphabet. Again, I want to be able to listen better to conversations and to meet the people who don’t just speak English. We’re also lucky in this part of Canada because we have a lot of Ethiopians. It would be nice to understand Ethiopian songs too. I can’t sing but I have a secret fantasy of going into an Ethiopian karaoke bar and wowing everyone. If there are karaoke bars for Ethiopians.

Arabic: mostly I want to conduct some history research in Syria. Maybe once I know a little Arabic, I would find some good literature to read in the original language.

Finnish: for ease of travelling and it is the language of the country where Tove Jansson was born and where she lived. Now that I have started studying it, it turns out Finnish is incredibly beautiful and melodic. No wonder they and their Baltic neighbours are such good singers. I want to trill like those Finns. There are also more and more Finnish comic books I am discovering that I want to read. Another reason I want to study it is because, like Hungarian and Estonian, it is not in the Indo-European language group.

Norwegian: I want to travel there. I also had a Norwegian penpal who sent me a book on his country and in the book it said that by law every library in the country must own a copy of every Norwegian book. With a government that supportive of Norwegian writers, they must have a few good ones. I want to read these authors in the original.

Dutch: I love travelling to the Netherlands and I loved Flanders. I want to chitchat more in Dutch/Flemish with the people there. I also want to research a WWI topic.

Estonian: because it’s another beautiful, trilling language. Mostly my goal is to learn from cover to cover the one Estonian textbook I started. I have no hope of speaking Estonian when I am not travelling there. But I can read and master this one book.

After much struggle, I finished reading Tim Krabbé’s The Rider, a 1978 book about one bike race. Not knowing what a col was, I blundered through the longest sports commentary essay ever. It was a well-written sports essay, but still not my thing.

I hate sports but I have to appreciate the literary approach here. Me, I was lauded by a high school teacher for my literary sports essays when, after sitting out a PE class, I turned in two sports essays instead of the required one. Mr. H. read my essays on downhill skiing (which I was actually good at, though I needed to use the poles for better form) and surfing (which I had never tried but achingly longed to do so), and then he grimly told me that I should consider becoming a writer. So, I appreciate a fellow good sports writer.

There are three passages I wanted to note and push across the table to the world. The first is:

Belgium’s cobblestone roads were, as some Amsterdam riders put it, ‘built by the Romans, who just dumped a bunch of rocks out of a helicopter.’

Ha, ha. Pretty good, huh? I love a good stereotype.

The second quote is this:

(For a surprisingly long time I kept thinking: the race at Zichem-Keiberg was a week ago today; the race at Zichem-Keiberg was three weeks ago; and, even as I am writing, it’s been no more than a month since the race at Zichem-Keiberg…)

I had no other people marked the distance in time from memorable events like I did. That is what I find so remarkable about that sentence.

Near here there is a bridge. In early 2010, maybe it was January 26, a car crashed into a truck, which crashed into a car that crashed into another car. In one of the cars was a 37-year-old man. He had a young son of about five. He probably had a wife too. His car caught on fire and he burned to death. I passed by a few hours after his death. The spot on which he died on the bridge was blackened. Every time I crossed that bridge and passed the scene of his death, I crossed myself and thought of this man. I think of his wife too and his son. Did she get married now? Does the son remember his dad? And then I calculate. How long it’s been since his death, since the wife stopped grieving, since I last thought of that man. It’s been two years and two months since he died.

Krabbé wrote his book in 1977 and the race at Zichem-Keiberg was in March 1975. Since I don’t go over that bridge anymore, I don’t think of that burned man every day anymore. That’s how one departs from sharp feelings, as they get whittled down.

The third passage is:

Because after the finish all the suffering turns to memories of pleasure, and the greater the suffering, the greater the pleasure.

I chose this quote because it rambles on as it illustrates the Portuguese proverb “What was hard to bear is sweet to remember.” That’s what I tell myself in times of suckiness. As time now spans into a third year away from a very bad year, I am not sure that that time is sweet yet. I’ll look back at this quote in a few years’ time and decide then.

Last year’s year in review blog post was fun and useful. I kept referring to it throughout the year, adding some new goals halfway through. (The new goals were in my paper diary, hence not here.) Thus, here is 2011 and challenges to myself for 2012.

The Bad

• My grandmother disappeared completely. Physically, she’s still around, but that’s it. Her voice has devolved to muttering, with only a few coherent words that make no sense in the context.
• My lovely little guinea pig Daciana, on the close of 2011, developed a growth on her back leg that will kill her this year. The vet cannot do anything. We do have a surgery date for amputation n January 11, but no one has confidence that she will survive until then. I, on the other hand, am hoping for a miracle.
• Last January, I found out I had to work full-time seven days a week in two museums. Though ultimately the result was excellent, the seven-month schedule was tough.
• Other miscellaneous, annoying things that are now past me. Hopefully from here on, my life calms down a bit.

The Good

• I got a new job! I was almost in my last job for six years and there are some great friends I made there. It’s time to move on to novel challenges. And boy do I get challenges with my new job. But my new coworkers are great and the challenges are exciting! In May, when things were very frustrating, I reviewed my life goals and added one: to become a curator in a municipal museum. At that time I hadn’t even started looking for a job. Who knew that in August I would get two offers on the same day within minutes of each other? Though I could only take on one job, I hope to eventually work with the other museum too as I much admire what they are doing as well. The lesson here: a ton of work and many achievements made mincemeat out of the naysayers who warned me against a career in the arts. It took me fourteen years to decide on a career and hone my skills but I am there!
• I also finished my diploma work. I am a little miffed for spending so much time and money on something that’s not another degree, though I should be thankful that the diploma did pave the way for my bout of upward mobility. I am now excited about the possibilities of taking a class in something fun. Will it be another dancing class? A sewing class? Or a German class? Probably all of them!
• I got to know my book club friends a little better this year and I have the semblance of a social life. We even went on a group trip to Seattle on Labour Day weekend for Bumbershoot. For many summer weekends as my work schedule relaxed, we also spent some relaxing weekends at A’s cabin on Howe Sound, looking at the fjord.
• Matt visited France properly in September. It’s been years since I took someone up the Metro stairs for their first view of the Arc de Triomphe and since I walked through the Louvre courtyard. Now I knew a thing or two about French history, so with each step I could almost see the blood on the sidewalks. As part of this trip, we also spent a snippet of time in Switzerland and Germany.
• Matt and I also went to Whistler for a weekend of tea, games and reading. Matt decided after work one day that we were going and minutes later we were in the car and off north.
• For our contests contest, R won, with about $1000 in prizes. I barely cracked $100 with my 3.5 prizes. One prize never even got sent to me. The .5 prize turned out to be a cosmetics scheme to squeeze me out of money for pricey facial stuff. (Don’t they know I have more face creams than I know what to do with?) Oh well. At least, I now own a toy bear that boasts of its insane loyalty to chocolate.
• I only read 38 books out of my goal of fifty. Who cares? I had fun and I am trying for fifty again this new year.
• My new niece Claire arrived in June and my new nephew Oscar arrived in August. I haven’t met them yet, but forces are working to arrange a meeting between us in 2012.

Now for my new goals for 2012:

• Edit those photos already!
• Paint that polar bear.
• Read those fifty books. One of those fifty has to be a Romanian book – probably the book written by the priest in my ancestral village. Another one of the books must be a French book: I am torn between reading that short Turgenev novella in French or The Little Prince. A third book must be one of my Chinese books. I have a number of kids’ stories from Taiwan, so that must be a start. This is the year when I get back into Mandarin. (I am even vowing to make it out to some Mandarin meetups.)
• Study German. I will take one class and read one textbook.
• Also on the language front, I want to read one Japanese textbook. I have dreams of continuing my studies in Finnish, Estonian and Dutch, but that’ll be a bonus, not a required challenge. However, I am very close to signing up for a Finnish class I found nearby.
• Go to Europe. It’ll probably be Germany this year. Though we haven’t decided if it’ll be a Hamburg or Berlin trip. Definitely not Bavaria.  (I want to visit Japan again in 2012; however, trips to Texas for family reasons will supplant Asia for another year.  If I can’t go this year, 2013 will be the year and Uzbekistan will be in 2014.)
• Loan more money through Kiva. I loaned $100 to a baker in Kinshasa as part of my vow to donate some money in thanks once I get a new job. Coming from a baker family, I was so happy to help out another baker, especially one in the Congo, a country I am getting more and more interested in.
• I barely worked on my own books this year. In fact, I am losing hope in myself for ever writing anything that matters. On the one hand, R’s advice to prospective writers was sad. On the other hand, an acquaintance called J disagreed with me when I said failed writers should just stop. I wonder if I’ve been just too tired to write with my hectic work and study schedules. I also wonder if I should not stop thinking about other goals and concentrate on my existing career. Then I remember that I have a five-year goal to move out of museum work. (Unless I miraculously get a job with weekends off. The problem with museum jobs is that I can’t be with family on the weekends. Though I love museums, Matt is irreplaceable.) I am not sure if I should include a writing goal anymore, so instead, here is this rambling hesitant paragraph of a semi-goal. Lyn, thank you for your support in this!
• Another goal is to make some new friends and acquaintances. Yes, I want to start going to the local Mandarin meetup and I still want to make a bit more of an effort to play boardgames more often. I want to write to more people I admire and let them know. I also want to do some more work-related networking, including some European networking, since I eventually want to move there.
• Figure out why this blog can’t do accent marks. I hate that all my Romanian words look garbled. Once I do this, I want to go through my previous posts and correct the garbled stuff.
• Write real letters to my penpal in Austria, my penpal in Norway and my friends in Taiwan. Maybe a good goal is twelve letters, one in each month?
• Miscellaneous cleaning and getting rid of old tasks. A lot of them are boring, so they are on Wunderlist. But I need to get them done.

How was 2011 for you, dear reader?

During the last three or four years, I have become a husk of a human. I merely survive because breathing and eating and sleeping are the easiest things to do. It seems like most of my inner life has worn away. I am numb to most things, even as I am content with the material trappings that have come with finally having stable employment. I even forgot the terrible things that happened to me years ago. It’s as if there was once this passionate, sad person and now-me, and we are separated by a large chasm. There is no way to get across this chasm though I can see former-me on the other side. There are some ribbons joining us. But the wind might blow away the ribbons, or the rains might whittle them down to strands of threads, which could break so easily.

The inventory of what’s lost are the heavily etched memories – again, I am separate from the person I was for my first thirty years – and the ability to do things. I look back at younger me, who went through a prolific cooking stage, a prolific drawing stage, a prolific reading bout and so on. The stages would last months or years and overlap one another. I can see why people liked me back then.

Now, I am lucky if I finish a book. That is the height of my achievements. I can no longer draw or paint. Cooking? I live on instant noodles if other people don’t feed me. I can still boil eggs but that is a passive endeavour. The water and the gas stove does most of the work. I am good at cleaning the house. I am good at my job. The latter might be the reason for this eradication of former-me. To be good at my job, I have to concentrate and work hard. One step in front of the other is what I have to tell myself every day as I face off against a thirty-page to-do list. Maybe the relentless pushing forward sapped everything else out of me.

The problem with living a surface existence is the lack of charisma. At the beginning of this year, a friend was listing everyone’s talents. “You are good at photography,” she said to my sister. “And I am good at writing.” When she came to me, she became confused. “You must be good at something,” she said. The subject changed and I never found out what my talents are obvious.

Earlier, Matt bought me a book about finding one’s strengths. Mine was finding information. Everything about this strength seems useless. At best, I have nothing to offer but linking A to B, linking outside information because there’s nothing I can bring of myself. At worst, I have a horrified feeling that this means I am a boring pedant who dominates conversations.

Since I like to solve problems, I came up with solutions to my mere survival. My favourite solution is to travel alone to tragic places. Suffering during said travel would also build some character and supply something of an inner life. I wonder too if I work too much. But how does one dismantle an apparatus that has taken so long to build?

2010 was (and is still, for a few more days) the Year of the Tiger in the Chinese Zodiac and hence my year. It comes every twelve years and good things happen to tigers during our year. 1998 treated me incredibly well. Thus, I had high hopes for 2010.

Alas, 2010 wasn’t quite a 1998. No spectacular pows! like 2009, yet there were a few pretty good parts.

My friend Ryan, a self-described right-wing kook (plus bike nut, video game curator and tech nerd) – he blogs at Wired Cola – has this great year-in-review idea. His 2009 review is here and 2008 is here. I like his posts. Letters to one’s future self are the best gift. I love reading my old diaries where hindsight makes me laugh at introductions to “nice” new friends or, on the positive side, “weirdo” acquaintances that blossomed pretty decent friends. It’s also amusing to re-read one’s anguish months or years later by which time it has shrunk to insignificance. Or, to relieve the especially awesome moments.

Now, enough rambling. My 2010 in review.

The Bad

1. My guinea pigs Chuy died, with Paco following him to the grave five days later.

2. Weird health problems have been plaguing me more and more – the usual insomnia is now augmented by frequent numbness in two fingers, happening since June 30. I also developed some bizarre new allergy to everything. Then I was bitten by some wussy spider that gave me no super powers, only a permanent scar. But this makes it many years since I caught a cold. (And, this point should really be a positive. I recently found out I am even more superhumanly healthy than I imagined. I can now take up all sorts of vices from smoking and binge drinking to a meth habit.)

3. My grandmother broke her hip. On the good side, her excellent, speedy treatment demonstrates that the much-maligned Canadian medical system is actually pretty good.

4. Some minor bad stuff that I can’t quite remember. There was something about getting a bunch of rejection letters, too. Oh well.

The Good

This I need to divide among my many goals. My life, you see, is compartmentalized into goals. I have about 18 languages on my to-learn list, a bunch of travelling, and a few weird life experiences to which I aspire.

Language Goals

1. I began learning Finnish! I suck at Finnish but I have decided my pseudonym, if I ever write a book, will be Finnish.

2. On the language front, I continue to dazzle with my Chinese even if I haven’t spoken Mandarin much in years. I know just enough to make smalltalk and possibly a brief conversation on Tang Dynasty poetry. Make that an exceedingly brief conversation.

3. I also picked up some Estonian, which I added that to my list of lifetime goals making my to-learn list go up to nineteen.

4. I began studying Russian.

5. I continued torturing the Dutch with my Dutch.

Travel Goals

1. I visited Russia! Finland! Estonia!

Finland especially was a treat – I have been a Tove Jansson fan since I was ten or so. I made a pilgrimage to her birthplace in Helsinki at midnight mere minutes after arriving in Finland. I saw her nudie sculpture at the main city park. I almost pressed my nose against the glass that protected her artwork – her own hand touched that paper! – at the Tampere Moominvalley Museum. I have since researched the location of Jansson’s house in the islands and next time I am in Finland, I will hire myself a boat and make my way to her home to pay homage.

Russia maintains an undercurrent of creepiness, with armed police, military men and miscellaneous thuggish-looking characters swarming the place. My favourite uniformed man was the Kazak (?) soldier exploring Peter the Great’s cabinet of curiosities with his mom.

Yet, Saint Petersburg is one of the great cities of the world. History at every corner. Bullets holes next to Dostoevsky sites near pre-Revolution prisons and the czars’ graves. Plus, a whole new world opened up to us that we never get to know here in North America: introductions to Armenia, Georgia, Azerbaijan. My two fellow travellers and I all vowed to return.

Estonia is where my friend T is from and, now that I know a little more about the Hanseatic League, one of the places that entrances me. We stayed there too short a time, but this makes all the better prepared when we go there again.

2. I also went back to Amsterdam on my own, to saturate myself with museums. A current obsession with the Dutch Golden Age was partly satisfied and I finally got to see Haarlem (which has adorable bats, an added bonus for a Transylvanian). I got to read all the text panels in the museums I went to, except a few at the Dutch Resistance Museum when I had to catch my train to Haarlem. I discovered the Jordaan neighbourhood, where I will be staying in future trips and where I slept near Rembrandt’s last home. From here, it will be a few years before I get to see the Netherlands again. Perhaps in 2014 or 2015, I will get to go again.

3. Closer to home, I travelled a bit around the Okanagan, having organized a big family trip to Osoyoos, Penticton and Kelowna. All of us are now in love with Osoyoos and Oliver. It’s good to have a close-by place that can be a fantasy home. Not one of my travel goal places but good enough for a weekend.

4. I also travelled with Matt to Whidbey Island (quietly depressed military suburb), Port Townsend (hippie paradise and heritage buildings full of a higher class of souvenirs), Sequim (crabs, drive-through zoo, lavender farms and a 1950s-mixed-with-Walmart town), Port Angeles (Victoria’s mirror with more crabs and an arrested Seattle feel), Hurricane Ridge in the Olympic National Park (murderous mountain goats, could-care-less deer, swarms of chipmunks, and a view over the uninhabited heart of the Olympic Peninsula), Forks (bad food, bitchy-looking Twilight fans that are probably high school bullies, and a fuck-you attitude to Twilight merchandise marketing) and Rialto Beach (a grey palette, the brutality of the mis-named Pacific Ocean in full evidence). We played card and board games when we weren’t exploring, drank wine and ate a lot of crab. I already want to take a convoy of friends there next year. Again, not a lifetime must, but full of charming memories that will delight for years to come.

5. There was another visit to Lubbock in the forecast, with side visits to El Paso (creepy – especially with murderous Juarez so close by), Carlsbad Caverns (an eerie stroll down into the bowels of the earth), Levelland and Morton (Matt said I can add it to my list now).

6. I add Uzbekistan and Yemen to my travel to-do list. Yemen will probably not be safe for a while (Sudan, which I tentatively added in 2008, still isn’t either). Uzbekistan looks almost ok. The places there to visit are Tashkent, Samarkand, Bukhara, Nukus, and, time permitting, the Ferghana Valley and Kokand. I am hoping for this to happen in 2013 or 2014.

Personal Stuff

1. We are not much of a family without guinea pigs. Matt and I adopted Penelope and Daciana from the SPCA. Pronounce Penelope the Spanish way. Pronounce Daciana the Romanian way: da-chee-ah-na. (Dacia was barbarian Romania, that the Romans attacked. It is also a Romanian car.) Slightly different personalities from Paco and Chuy. I also finally got to witness popcorning, the supreme example of guinea pig joy with Penelope and Daciana.

2. At work, I did phenomenally well, breaking all my previously held records. I also almost finished my mid-career professional diploma, completing all the classwork, and am one-step away from getting the sheet of paper that proves I can do my job.

3. Best of all, I spent a lot of time with my best friends, Matt, N, D, the Rs, X & D, R & M, R and my parents! Plus, I have some pretty good new friends I am looking forward to becoming even better friends with in 2011. (Some of you new friends really flatter me – I am honoured that you like me as much as you seem to. I like you back!) And I got to spend time with the Texan half of my family.

****

But a year-in-review also implies that I have expectations for the next year. Thus, here is what I foresee and what I hope for in 2011:

1. I travel to France. Haven’t been there since 1996, time to dust off my French, show off Paris and Strasbourg to Matt, and delve into the unknown wilds of Provence.

2. To get my scrap of paper that confirms my professional competencies, I will need to complete an internship that, when I calculated, means I must work seven full-time days a week for about seven months. This is where I will probably destroy my perfect health.

3. I read 50 books. I’ve done it before and it’s pretty easy if I doesn’t waste time by merely standing in supermarket line-ups or looking at screens. Most of the books will be about France, book club picks (as long as they aren’t chick lit), and assorted one-offs to satisfy any whims that demand attention.

4. I chip away at my own social history of hamsters book.

5. I spend more time with Matt, family and friends.

6. I play more boardgames. Matt made a list of all our games that I haven’t played yet. I vow to ace Vasco de Gama and Saint Petersburg. I may never be good at Agricola and I accept that. (Plus, I need to find someone who likes to play Alhambra.)

7. Paint that polar bear for N.

8. The Rs reminded me of a goal I flippantly suggested a few weeks ago: compete with R’s TLO to see who can enter – and win – the most contests, in a kind of non-nude version of Japan’s Nasubi. I am about 18 contests behind the TLO already. There may be a whole new blog devoted to this.

9. My wishful thinking aspirations for 2011: volunteer as a host for refugees coming to Canada, become a Big Sister, complete my to-read lists on plagues and Stalin, fix up this blog, learn to play the guitar, visit Greece with the Rs, and edit vacation photos.

So that’s it. Easy peasy. I’ll report back in a year.

Has anyone else noticed the proliferation of Venices?

The Venice of the north could be Amsterdam, Saint Petersburg, Bruges or, as I just found out, Haapsalu in Estonia. There’s even a Wikipedia page on all the Venices of the North. I have been to three out of these seventeen Venices:

• Amsterdam
• Birmingham
• Borås in Sweden
• Bornholm in Denmark
• Bourton-on-the-Water (also known as the Venice of the Cotswolds)
• Bruges
• Copenhagen
• Gdansk
• Giethoorn (also known as the Venice of the Netherlands)
• Haapsalu
• Hamburg
• Manchester
• Maryhill in Scotland
• Saint Petersburg
• Stockholm
• Trondheim
• Wroclaw (note to self: visit this place when you finally get to Poland)

Another page that inventoried the Venices adds Bydgoszcz from Poland to the list. Bydgoszcz’s Wikipedia page certainly has plenty of landscape photos with water to possibly merit its Venetian nickname. Dresden, the Florence of the Elbe, was also the Venice of the Elbe.

However, there are many other Venices around the world. In Africa, for example, there is Ganvie in Benin, called either the Venice of Africa or the Venice of West Africa. When I looked up Ganvie, I found references to other Venices of Africa: Zanzibar and, formerly, Cape Town. There’s also Mopti, the Venice of Mali, which has cleaned up some of its plastic bag choked waters with a recycling plant.

The Venices of the East also merit a Wikipedia page, with another seventeen contenders (so far I have been to Suzhou, Bangkok and Osaka). They are:

• Alapuzzha in Kerala
• Ayutthaya
• Bangkok
• Barisal City in Bangladesh (also called the Venice of Bengal)
• Basra (possibly the location of the Garden of Eden and sister cities with Venice)
• The Kampong Ayer neighbourhood of Brunei’s capital Bandar Seri Begawan, called the Venice of the East by a sixteenth century Venetian, Antonio Pigafetta
• Lijiang City in China
• Malacca in Malaysia
• Nan Madol
• Osaka (is sister cities with Hamburg and Saint Petersburg, two other Venices)
• Palembang in Indonesia (appropriately enough, Palembang’s sister cities are Den Haag and Venice – does Venice only ever sister city other Venices?)
• Srinagar in Kashmir (not sure if there are any sources that call it the Udaipur of Kashmir)
• Suzhou
• Tongli in China
• Udaipur (also known as the City of the Lakes and the Kashmir of Rajasthan, among other films Octopussy and Darjeeling Limited were filmed here)
• Wuzhen (near Suzhou)
• Zhouzhang (also near Suzhou)

Missing from the Wikipedia list is the Venice of Hong Kong, Tai O, or Da’ao in pinyin, on Lantau Island. Lantau is one of the really calm, pretty areas of Hong Kong as these photos attest.

Also missing from the list are other Japanese Venices. Nicknaming places seems like such a Japanese thing, I couldn’t imagine why there would only be Osaka. A quick search revealed the other Japanese Venices:

• Hiroshima
  Kagoshima,or the Naples of the Eastern World, is in fact sister cities with Naples
• Kurashiki in Okayama is not only gorgeous (check out its tourist site), it has its own specialty paper, peaches, a cotton industry, its local version of the pancake and now muscat wines!
• Matsue in Shimane Prefecture has a medieval castle (other castles like Gyoda Castle, Osaka Castle and Shuri Castle in Naha were rebuilt after their destruction in WWII)
• Otaru (Japan’s Venice of the North or the Wall Street of Hokkaido gets extra points for not just recreating a Venetian canal but also for being really into Venetian glass)
• Sakai, which also has kofun burial mounds and was famous for its samurai swords, competes with Osaka for the title
• Yanagawa down in Fukuoka has a walking tour map (PDF) for nitwits like me who didn’t learn Japanese, which includes the monument at a hand washing area (?), and a 1980s Studio Ghibli documentary, The Story of Yanagawa’s Canals, that has English subtitles.

In addition to these places, there’s another Venice of the East or South, depending on where your point of reference is: Tawi-Tawi in the Philippines (which also has a seaweed festival, more info on this area just off Malaysia’s coast here).

There are not many other Venices of the South. Zakynthos in Greece used to be one. Sete in France is also the Venice of Languedoc.

One of the so-called Venices of the South is Tarpon Springs on the west coast of Florida. Built around a Greek immigrant sponge industry, I am not really clear if this is merely a coastal town and not a city with canals and bridges like the original Venice. However, there is at least one photo of accurate gondolas in Tarpon Springs dated to 1927. Even cooler is that this photo comes from a gondola blogger called Greg Mohr who lives in California. The internet is awesome for that. I love living in a world where some dude thousands of miles from Italy can be an expert on gondolas and is making an online archival resource for the rest of us researching niche topics.

A better contender for the Venice of the South would be Nan Madol, which is on the list as a Venice of the East (and is also sometimes called the Venice of the Pacific). Nan Madol was a city of islands in Micronesia; the kingdom collapsed about 500 years ago leaving some photogenic ruins. Locals are wary of the place and superstition has it that you will die if you try to spend the night there.

On its own is Recife, the Venice of Brazil (sister cities with another two Venices, Amsterdam and Nantes – see below).

When it comes to the Venice of the West, there is Galway (blame Yeats for this), Nantes and San Antonio (also the Venice of America, the Venice of the Plains, the Venice of the Texas Plains, the Venice of the Southwest, and the Venice of the Drylands). Interestingly, it could be that San Antonio pushed for the Venice of Texas nickname when Waco threatened to take it in the 1890s. Speaking of the Venice of America, Fort Lauderdale and Venice, California also market themselves as the US Venice.

The Venice which became part of Los Angeles in 1925 was founded in 1905 and modelled on the original Venice, with even its own lagoon. Unfortunately Los Angeles paved most of the canals in 1929. The Venice Historical Society’s website sells postcards with what looks like the Doge’s Palace and plenty of gondolas.

So how many Venices are there? I counted 58. Are there any other Venices that need to go on the list?

Update: Oops. I forgot the real Venice. Make that 59.

Last month I found out that there was going to be a concert of Balkan brass music with four gypsy bands. I was pretty excited as this is a rare opportunity here to listen to this kind of music.

It was not to be. Not for me at least.

A few minutes after we took our seats, some middle-aged hippie woman came up to us and asked me if I was going to dance. “Because I have a few friends coming and they might want to sit where you are,” she explained.

Matt and I laughed and turned back to face the stage. The hippie then pulled out a kazoo and tested it out. Five minutes later, when her friends came, she explained that she brought, in addition to her kazoo, a pair of maracas and a shaker. She wanted to jam with the band. Maybe go outside and jam with the gypsy bands on the street. Maybe go into the downstairs bar and jam with the bands there.

Alas, she decided to stay put.

For the next thirty minutes, she shook those maracas inches from my ears along with each song the real band played. In tune, out of tune, she shook. And shook. And shook. And shook.

Other audience members began glancing backwards, with awkward smiles.

I sat seething, twiddling the flowers on the table, holding myself back from crushing them. Each time a new song started, maracas-and-kazoo hippie waited until the song got going and then began her maracas-shaking in my ear again.

My fantasies during the half an hour of suffering ranged from getting my revenge afterwards online to grabbing her maracas and hitting her on the head with them. At one point in my head-hitting fantasy, I tried to stop myself and put down the maracas – then relented, grabbed a chair and hit her with that instead.

When I could stand it no more, I got up to complain to the staff. I managed to almost walk away. Then I looked at her face and yelled, “You’re fucking annoying!”

Kazoo-and-maracas hippie looked at me in utter confusion.

Matt afterwards told me that he was fantasizing during her hijacking of the main concert too. Things like grabbing her maracas and tossing them onto the dance floor. Or crushing the maracas and spilling the beans all into the hippie’s face.

I fear I may have hurt her feelings. Weirdly, though, I feel better. Minimal guilt. Probably would have felt angry for years to come if I hadn’t blurted out my venom.

When I was sixteen, a teacher in social studies handed out to each of us a world map with country boundaries but no names. “Just to test out where you are in geography,” he said. “Take fifteen minutes and write the names of all the countries you know in the blank spaces.”

After fifteen minutes, I still needed more time. Some white trash chick sitting nearby looked over at my sheet of paper and said, “What? Did you memorize the map?”

“No, bitch, I simply listed the places I am going to visit while you rot here in your redneck pork palace.”

Well, it would have been really cool if I could have made that comeback when I was sixteen.

Since I have still not submitted my article anywhere (since July), I needed drastic measures. I looked up motivational websites to see how I can spur myself into action.

There was one about betting against yourself. You lost if you didn’t achieve your goal. If you lost, your bet would go towards helping a charity.

No good for me. If I achieved my goal, I’d feel guilty for not donating to a charity.

Last night, I promised Matt $1000 if I did not finally submit that article by December 22. He can do whatever he wants with the money if he gets it. He threatened me with spending it on strippers or leaving it on some sidewalk. I didn’t believe him. Now he’s decided to use it to get my nipples pierced.

I just need to tweak the damn article and write an effin’ cover letter. Thoughts of the Lubbock woman who had to remove her rings with pliers at airport security should do the trick.

Today another singer was buried.

Ionut* (pronounced “yo-noots”) was my grandmother’s canary. He came to live with her thirteen years ago and only left her during this last year, when she moved to a hospital, then one care home and then another. We brought her over to see her little roommate, but there were not so many words between them.

I once asked my grandmother why she didn’t get Ionut a little female canary to keep him company. Most birds are social: a canary in a cage with a good friend might make the cage more bearable. My grandmother shook her head. She explained that once a male canary has a mate, he stops singing. By denying Ionut the companionship of his own kind, he would never stop singing.

Sometime this morning, a family friend came over for a cup of coffee and, as a fellow caregiver for my grandmother, asked to listen to little Ionut sing again. My mom and our friend went into the parlour. There lay Ionut, at the bottom of the cage.

Whenever I saw Ionut, I felt bad for this poor lonely little canary. I discovered that, if I chirp, Ionut answered in his much sweeter singing voice. Ionut and I made up a game. We chirped back and forth at each other, sometimes chirping singly or sneaking out a second chirp quickly after the first one. I guess I had my last chirping game with him last week, when I was a little impatient, stopped playing and went to the kitchen, leaving Ionut chirping once or twice more to get my attention.

After work, I got a message from my sister across the country. At the end of her message, she remarked that Ionut died this morning. I wished we could have a funeral. I wished that I could have one last, good, long look at him. He moved so quickly when he was alive, I never had a chance to really study him.

But my parents are not the funeral types, especially not for pets. When my little handsome dogs died, one by one in 2003, there were no funerals nor even any last viewings. My mother said I was crazy to even have funerals for my hamsters. “You’ll have to take them out of my rose garden one day,” she told me.

I phoned them on my way to work to ask if they had still not thrown Ionut away. I was prepared with a sort of plan that perhaps I could whisk Ionut out of the trash can, take him home and bury him near Lucian.

My parents, in particular my father, when I asked, were horrified that I should think of them as people who simply throw away the corpses of friends. They said I will see what happened when I got to their house.

They found him a little plastic coffin, maybe a plastic box. “Like a glass coffin for a princess,” said my mother.

My dad built a gravemarker.

Ionut was laid to rest along the garden path, under a tree.

My mother worried that she would pass by him every day and think of him. She worried this would remind of her of her sadness.

But isn’t it better to remember the dead? To not let them drift off and be forgotten, as if their presence while here was of no worth? There’s so little meaning to our lives, and we atheists don’t have the fantasy of heaven to pamper our moods. There is no god to give life meaning, as hard as some people try to convince themselves – deep down, they know, otherwise they wouldn’t be so afraid to die when their time comes. If we remember our beloved dead, toss them a scrap of memory every now and then, we honour them and make their lives worthwhile.

* I would spell his name correctly if WordPress would let use accent markings. I was stupid for moving over from Blogger. WordPress sucks.