A Squee from the Field: Why I Love my Job

By: | November 10, 2015

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Sometimes, while out on the job, I have to pinch myself and think, ‘hold on to this moment.’ Because the moments that make up my workday can be truly fabulous.

Here’s what last week’s pinch was for: I was squatting on the ground at the Bifengxia panda base in central China, on a cloudy but pleasantly warm October morning, snapping pictures of some of the 18 tiny panda cubs that were lurching around in the grass. How tempting to reach a hand into that panda pile, but I held back, as I hadn’t gotten permission to pet them. Instead, I put my chin down low to the ground to watch the cubs at their level. One of them pulled itself toward me, checking me out with wide eyes and squeaking for attention as it would to its mother. It was, indeed, a very good moment.

At times like that, I don’t even try to keep my own squishy-happy-heart sounds to myself. The latest term I’ve heard for this feeling and the noise that accompanies it is “squee” (thanks, Facebook), and on panda-kindergarten day I was squeeing all over the place. (Not as messy as it sounds.) In fact, I’d say it was totally within my job description, right then, to squee. Continue reading →

Guest Post: Science Fail

By: | November 9, 2015

6517253983_629eb83cb2_oWhen I was in 4th grade, my teacher gave everyone in class an ice cube. Our task, she said, was to keep it from melting for as long as possible. In a room full of 10 year olds, that task turned into a heated competition. But I wasn’t worried. I’d had a stroke of insight: I knew the ice cube needed to stay cold, and it just so happened there was a sink in the back of the classroom with a limitless supply of cold water.

So I ran back to the sink, held my ice cube under the cold running water … and … watched in horror as it melted away in a matter of minutes. In fact, my ice cube was the first to melt. Even the kid who had just left his on the desk in front of him outlasted me. Continue reading →

The Last Word

By: | November 7, 2015

Feet on a marker inscribed with the placenames along the Cotswold WayNovember 2 – 6, 2015

Our identities include our birth dates, says Sally. So what if you don’t have one?

Helen walked the Cotswold Way and entered the liminal state of all pilgrims.

How happy are clams, really, asks Cameron.

Guest Nicholas Suntzeff reminisces about the old tensions between Chile and Bolivia, and how losses are an important part of a nation’s story.

I visit Abu Dhabi and manage to fail in the most basic of tourist tasks: bird holding.

Image: Helen reaches the final acorn.

30 seconds in the UAE

By: | November 6, 2015

shutterstock falconI let the children have a go first and then reach out a recently hennaed hand, palm up, to accept the flannel armband from Mounir. The whole thing suddenly seems a little flimsy. Are birds supposed to wobble?

I’m a lot taller than those children, and my arm is accordingly further from the ground than the distance one would want a bird to fall. Do birds fall? Not generally, except as chicks from the nest, but this one is blindfolded, did I mention?

Because otherwise it would peck at my approaching hand with that beak I’ve just watched tearing through a plucked but still boned pigeon. Would a blindfolded falcon flap its wings if it lost its footing at dusk in the desert outside Abu Dhabi if there were a leather thingy covering its eyes?

Hang on, this isn’t a wobble, this is a lean. Those birdy legs are at an 80° angle to my arm, and the beak is correspondingly nearer to my shoulder, slash, head. Now it’s more like 75°. What’s happening, Mounir? This didn’t happen to the children. Get it off, I feel, but no, I think, I’ve been looking forward to this. Continue reading →

Guest Post: How the Bolivian Navy Became Landlocked

By: | November 5, 2015

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Cassandra wrote a post about the landlocked Bolivian navy in which she explained, in passing, that Bolivia once had a coast but lost it to Chile in the War of the Pacific.  One of the comments on that post, by guest poster Nick Suntzeff, was a post in itself and we thought you’d like to see it.

[Warning, my extended family is Chilean].

The 1880 War of the Pacific, which is essentially unknown here in the US, is still of vital interest in the Southern Cone. I think that a neutral version of the war would state that Bolivia imposed a tax on Chilean companies operating in Bolivia, in contradiction to a treaty between the countries. Chile protested, and Bolivia claimed that the dispute must be settled in Bolivian courts and not by international arbitration. Chile then claimed that the border treaty with Bolivia was therefore voided (a dubious claim), and sent troops to occupy Antofagasta. Unknown to Chile, Bolivia and Peru had signed a treaty in 1873 that the other country would come to its aid in case of war, bringing Peru into the fracas. Argentina was also in secret negotiation with Bolivia, being the eternal enemy of Chile, and while officially remaining neutral, did provide some scant aid to Bolivia and Peru. In return for not entering the war, Chile ceded the eastern part of Patagonia to Argentina.

With the occupation of Antofagasta by Chile, the war started, and I think to everyone’s surprise, including Chileans, Chile won the war. Peru and Bolivia were forced to sign a treaties (1904 and 1929) ceding land to Chile. The Chilean navy was trained by the the British Admiral Lord Cochrane which perhaps explains the victory, and to this day, all Chilean navy officers speak fluent English, wear British Admiralty uniforms, and secretly supported Britain in the Falklands War.

I lived in La Serena Chile for over 20 years, and the War of the Pacific, while known by all Chileans, had lost its primacy in their daily lives. In my city, there were reminders of the war – in one plaza are a series of rather treacly rococo statues stolen by the Chilean army from Lima and gifted to the city. Almost no one knows where they came from anymore, and they stand there, in uncomfortable corpulent alabaster poses from another century.

One local who did know where the statues came from joked to me that the statues were gifts from Peru when Chile “visited” – burned to the ground really – Lima during the war and gave the Peruvians the correct recipe for a pisco sour. Borders are important, but the history of pisco sours can even be more contentious in Chile and Peru. Never tell this joke in Lima.

Continue reading →

Clamming Up

By: | November 4, 2015

Clams_999I find myself thinking about the word ‘clam’ more often than is decent, at least without some thought. I call certain pairs of pants ‘clamdiggers’, even though I’ve never worn them to do such a thing. When I scrounge around to find dollar bills in pockets and drawers—and then these clams disappear quickly into other pockets and piggybanks—I really do feel like I’m shelling out. And this morning, watching a new reader engrossed in a book with a contented, close-lipped smile, the first thing that I thought was, he really is as happy as a clam.

So I thought I’d find out more about them, those shellfish that bear so much metaphorical weight. What if clams have grumpy days, too? Continue reading →

Walking in the Land in Between

By: | November 3, 2015
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The Cotswold escarpment, from the village of North Nibley.

I love walking.

This seems like such a silly thing to say, like “I love breathing.” We’re humans, you and me. Walking is our thing. Being bipedal makes us us. But walking is also an activity that I love. It takes me places, it shows me things, it gives me ideas, it calms my nerves. So I was pleased to discover that someone had written a whole book about it: Wanderlust: A History of Walking, by Rebecca Solnit, published in 2000.

In her chapter on Pilgrimage, Solnit mentions the idea of a liminal state. This is an in-between place, where you don’t have family responsibilities or rank; instead of your regular life, you are in a state of possibility. It comes from the Latin limin, threshold. When you’re a pilgrim, you have stepped out of the secular world, over the threshold into this other world.

Continue reading →

0/0/1969

By: | November 2, 2015

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I know a guy who doesn’t have a birthday. Andy* was born in the Moroccan desert. His parents were nomads. There were no smartphones in the 1960s and a nomadic tribe didn’t have much use for the Gregorian calendar. And when it came to recalling the exact day and month of Andy’s birth, there were higher priorities.

Twenty years later, planning to move to Switzerland, he needed a national ID. Thanks to some artifact of Moroccan bureaucracy, he found himself with a state-issued birth certificate that listed only a date – 1969, his best guess at the year of his birth.

When he arrived in Switzerland, he needed a driver’s license. Because of the mismatch between required fields and available data, the compromise was an ID with the birthdate 0/0/1969. Continue reading →