Another blog to follow

So I'm making up another blog for the Mars Simulation. You can find it here:

http://martianadventures.wordpress.com/

This is mostly so randoms from the internet can read it, but not follow up on all the other family and friend stuff on this blog. I know, it's all public, a persistent person can find it all anyways, but I don't need to hand it to them on a silver platter. They can at least do a Google search or two first.

And so, for the next 8 months, check out the other blog.

Mission Commander Mars?!?!!

So nearly a year ago now, I found out about an analog Mars mission in Hawaii. On the day of the deadline. And then promptly spent 2.5 hours of my work day creating a research proposal and applying. After an aptitude test, Skype interview, and 6 day backpacking and leadership training course, not only am I going to fake Mars, but I get to command the mission! Woot! Who knew I could lead something like this? Apparently everyone except me. So we'll see how it goes.

The camping trip was most excellent. The weather was great. We never hiked more than 6 miles per day. The route was beautiful, the people were fun, and it was exciting to take people who'd never been backpacking out before and seeing them come into their own.

Some photos from the course:

And then, since I was in Wyoming, I convinced a few friends from California to come out and visit Yellowstone with me for a bit of a long weekend after the course was over. When in Rome. Photos from Yellowstone:

But seriously, thank you to all my camping buddies who, it turns out, were exemplary examples of proper expedition behaviour. I owe my ability in planning adventures in a large part to you. So shout out to Mat, Oleg, and the Girl Scouts - Neil and Jason. Thanks for being awesome guys!

Cottage Time!

I just had a glorious two weeks up at the family cottage. I haven't been up, except for May 2-4 opening weekend, in probably about 8 years. It was fantastic! I went up on a Saturday with Nat, Little, and Little's friend Darius. Bob and Old E met us up there. The first 3 days were glorious dock weather, and the next 3 were stormy. There was a great lightning storm one night, and the next was a great fishing night. Here's a shot of the Big One that Bob caught, with Nat's help on the net, and which Bob, Darius' dad and I all ate later that night :)

Bob and Nat headed back to Waterloo on Thursday morning, dropping me in Baysville to do some work on the start-up company at the library. After that, I walked the 9km back to the cottage. Then Saturday I did it all again so that I could go to a renewable energy co-op meeting at the senior centre, walking both ways this time. So training for Wyoming is a check! The Saturday night, Paul had me over to his place for dinner with Mrs. Prince, and it was a lovely evening with great conversation.

Mom came up to the cottage Sunday with Honey. We had a nice, relaxing time. Here's a couple good photos of Honey on the dock. She had quite an impressive rock collection this year!

The weather was great. We saw some people surfing. On Lake of Bays. Yes. There's a surf shop at the end of our street now. It's funny, but works, turns out.

Writing Style

I've finally settled into my basement room properly. Thanks to Mary and Bryce, I now have a bed! And I cleared the junk off the little desk I bought, and have properly set up my laptop. And got a chair.

One of the things with moving is that you discover some gems that you've had in storage for ages. Now and then I get these writing fits, where I decide I want to write a travel book, or a book of short stories, or a great novel, based loosely on a bunch of the adventures I've been on. Then I start going through my old writing, invariably starting with the Leatherback Turtle story from Ghana, and then get pulled into reading all those adventures again, and no writing happens at all (I found some of my Ghana stuff, that's where this all started today).

For those of you who didn't know me back in undergrad and before, I sent out a roughly weekly e-mail from my time in Ghana. Those e-mails are great. Michelle printed them all off and gave them to me as a booklet when I got back, which was fantastic since I sent all those e-mails from my old uni account which is now long gone. Anyways, reading through them again I noticed my writing style was quite different back then - much more colourful, more entertaining and humourous than most of the stuff I've written since. Maybe the PhD strangled all the fun out of my writing, or maybe California impaired my sense of humour. At any rate, those old e-mails are waaaaay better than anything that's turned up on this blog in the past year. It was also a tough year, though, so maybe that had something to do with it too.

Anywho. I think I'll be doing mass e-mails from Fake Mars again. Two reasons: e-mail is slightly more personal and less public than Facebook or blogging. So if I have a rant about a living situation, I can vent without (hopefully) hurting anyone's feelings on Fake Mars. Second reason: I think I just have a better writing style when I'm writing to a person than to a blog or journal. Not sure why. I think the blog tends more towards my journal writings, which on re-read are like bad fan fiction, and the mass e-mails read more like Bridget Jones' Diary.

Oh, by the way, I am short-listed to be a fake astronaut, living in a habitat on Hawaii for 8 months! I'm pretty pumped about this. I'm doing an outdoor leadership school thing in Wyoming in September as a prep, so will start e-mailing after that. Stay posted!

Waterloo Region Air Show

Jim had 4 spare tickets to the air show that he couldn't use, so he gave them to me and I got to take Big, Little and Danny out to see cool fighter planes and such this past weekend. Here's Little with the Sharkinator, which is what I assume this plane is called:

And another with the Thunder Pig:

Is It Love Or Toxic Radiation?

Baby it's both, but who cares! Check out what came in the mail today! Thanks Mary!

In other news, I really need to find the battery charger for my proper camera.

Nephew's make any day a good one

This is a bit late, but wanted to share. After a particularly disgruntling day, I went over to Bob & Nat's to borrow a copy of "The Giver". Little was just getting ready for bed, but hopped out, and we played a bit, and I gave him some coins from Europe which he added to his coin collection. As I was leaving, he called down the stairs "Dr. Mars, I hope you have a GREAT day tomorrow!" Thank you Liam, I hope you have a great day too! "Mommy, I hope you have a GREAT day tomorrow too!"

Thanks Liam!

EuroVision!!!!!!!!

EuroVision was amazing! So much glitter! So much fluoro! So much wind machine! Love it!

So photos are here. I'll put some good ones up as we go. Also, we made it on to the SBS coverage of the event. You can see us here - Craig and Sarah mostly, but you can see all of us very rapidly at the very start.

Ok, so let's get down to business! I'll walk you through our personal ratings of some of this year's contest.

POLAND!
Poland nearly won our internal voting contest. If it wasn't for the fact that Austria put in a fabulous bearded lady, they should have walked away with the top spot, in our opinion. Traditional dress! Cleavage! Native language! More cleavage! Churning butter on stage! And a decent song. This is what EuroVision is all about!

AUSTRIA
Austria's Conchita Wurst did win - both the internal vote, and all of EuroVision. Bearded drag queen, epic dramatic ballad. Wind machine!!! Fire! You just can't beat this- it's the stuff of EuroVision legend.

ARMENIA
Sarah: depressed zombie vampire and then his caffeine kicked in, upbeat part of song saves it a bit. deadpan expression, grew on me
Craig: Aram MP3', seriously? Some off key shockers. HUGE turnaround with the dubstep break. But he's still off key. Flames shooting out of the floor - taken into consideration.

Russia and Ukraine were about even in the rankings. The Guardian was interviewing people as they were leaving the first semi-final, trying to find some sort of political tension angle for a story. No one was biting. Ukrainian answer: Oh, you know, we're friends. We're happy Russia made it through - they have a good entry, and we're happy for them. Russian answer: You know, it's all about the music. Ukraine's entry was really great - we're glad to see them do so well. And so, without further ado:

UKRAINE
Me: Tick-tock - hamster wheel one. Faster again! Woot! Wind right from the start. 
Craig: Spinning wheel. YES! This is better. 'kiss me till I drop'. Split on that dress is pretty scandalous.
Sarah: spinning wheel?? good dance beat finally, wind machine. Dude on a hamster wheel!! interesting key change, sounds a bit eastern european despite english, catchy chorus, tick tock
Fatemeh:  nice movement

RUSSIA
Craig: twins bonus.Song not that memorable.
Sarah: twins, more fog machine, random transparent bars, on a seesaw. light show galore, sounds a bit abbaish
Me: Even more liberal use of fog machine. Twins, see-saw. Wind machine! Sun and lighting, solid
song with a bit of a key change attempt at the end.
Fatemeh: Symmetric!

There were two boy bands. The first was BELARUS, with Cheesecake. They can't really dance, and the song is kinda terrible. The other was DENMARK, with Cliche Love Song. THEY knew enough to make fun of themselves a bit! And they can dance, had a chick, and like every ethnic background they could scrounge together. Good effort Denmark.

The NETHERLANDS, SWEDEN, and a few others finished well, but because they put in people with good voices and decent songs. Not fair! More fire! More sparkles! More wind machine!!!

Honorable mention to AUSTRALIA for their first performance! They were the most well represented country at the second semi-final, hands down. We were watching the finals on Saturday, just on tv, and there were a LOT of jokes and references pointed to China. Maybe all the Chinese international students in Oz have taken a love of EuroVision back to China with them? At any rate, Craig said he's going to be upset if China gets an official entry before Australia.

Ok, will sign off with my favourite photo of the night, a Jedward-inspired air-jump high-five, in full fluoro!

Whirlwind European Visiting Trek Stop #4: Nijmegen

My friends Kim and Martijn are in Nijmegen, Netherlands, along with their daughter Myca. You may recall, Myca was my illegal immigrant baby-sitting charge when I was unemployed in Cali for a few months. I had Myca when she was 10-14 weeks old a few times a week. She is MUCH bigger now! We had a fun day at the park my last day there, feeding the ducks and playing on the slides:

At the start of my trip, Kim met me at the station then we left Myca with Martijn and she showed me a bit of the city. I got to try out the local raw fish delicacy, and then we sat outside at a beer garden and did a tasting of the local brews.

Had some good chats. She's finding it socially different being at the uni in Nijmegen than it was back in California. Now that she's a Prof (or essentially a prof), she can't really just hang out with the PhD students and post-docs. The other profs and staff have their own families and friends and lives, and their extended family is all back on the west of the country. So they spend a lot of time traveling on weekends, and feel a bit isolated in Nijmegen still. It takes time. It's how I felt at first in California, before I met Carolina, and then all the Stanford people. So she'll figure it out, but she was also very glad to see me, and that was nice.

Other fun things we did: 25 km hike on Sunday. Watching some WWII movie in the evening (it was the "Day to Honour the War Dead"), and Monday had a number of parties scheduled since it was Liberation Day - the day they got rid of the Nazis after WWII. I hadn't thought of having a big party, with bands and festivities, to mark the end of a war before, but I guess it does make sense. If you're country had been over-run by Nazis for years, you'd be pretty happy when they were gotten rid of, and celebrations would indeed be in order. I'm glad to live in Canada.

So it was an excellent trip to visit Kim and Martijn and Myca. Next was a quick stop in Aachen again, before.... EuroVision!

Decompression Stop: Antwerp

I love Monica and Antoine, and their children are beautiful, but after a week at their place I needed some 'me' time. And so before I moved on to Stop #4 and another potential screaming kidlet, I took a one-night decompression stop for myself along the way, in Antwerp.

As this was a last minute decision, I had some trouble finding a hostel on a Friday night. Hostels dot com said that everything was booked. But they also said that for Paris, and after e-mailing the hostel there directly, I found a spot. So assuming the site was just broken, I e-mailed a likely-looking hostel, jumped on a train, and went to Antwerp.

Antwerp is amazing. I really like train stations, and this was one of the best I've seen. Directly outside the station is the city zoo on one side of the square, and Chinatown on the other.

 
The city was less impressive as I walked to the hostel, however. I guess it was garbage day, so all along the way the streets were lined with huge bags of trash, some of which had ripped, and all of which smelled. When I arrived at the hostel, it turned out that all the rooms were booked, except for a double that was expensive. And they couldn't let me on to the WiFi, so directed me to a pub/cafe around the corner where I could access the internet and figure things out.

From here, the luck changed and things got great. I ordered a delicious ginger tea, hopped on-line and started looking for accommodation. The bar tender brought me the tea, and we started up some small talk. I said I was only in town for one night, and my hostel plan had fallen through, so was just trying to figure out where to stay. He looked at me, thought for a few seconds, then said "You look like a nice person. Do you want to just stay with us?". I thought for a few seconds, looked at him, and said "You also seem like a nice person. Sure." So that was taken care of. He also plans events in the city, and said I was in luck. The night I was in Antwerp was one of three nights in the year when all the private art galleries are free and open to the public. Then he pulled out a flyer, circled the good galleries for me, and suggested I rent a bike for the 24 hours I was in the city. So I did. And it was most excellent!

The art galleries were amazing. Also free wine and cheese events at most of them. I particularly enjoyed one with interesting photos of famous artists and musicians. Another that caught my attention was all watercolours, like this:

That's actually the cleanest photo I could put up. They all had sexual under-tones/over-tones. Including this one. But it was interesting, and there was a narrative you could kind of follow, and I liked the style. As far as modern art goes, not terrible.

The fellow and his boyfriend went to some massive CD release/art opening thing which I was invited to, but I was too tired. They got home around 7am - I was feeling too old for that kind of a night. I got up and went to the Exotic Market in the morning - basically a regular market, only you can get awesome Greek and Moroccan food as well - then had coffee with Bert (bar tender) back at the house before leaving for the train station around noon.

We had a bit of a conversation about random acts of trust like this, and politeness, and travel. I guess after I left the bar to adventure around town, he'd offered the gallery advice to a couple of other tourists that had come in. In general, he was excited about the increase of tourists to the area. I think it was a predominantly Turkish or Moroccan area, that's been morphing into hipster, so it's a bit off the beaten path. Anyways, once he gave them an inch they wanted to take a yard - they started demanding information from him, how to do things, where to go - he had to back waaaaay off, as he was at work, and shake them somehow. He said he would never offer to have them stay at his place had they been in need of help - they were so demanding. I told him about my other random house-stays, when I was taken in in Fiji, and when we reciprocated and offered our place in Sydney to some random German tourists I met at a beach. I guess you get a sense after a while of what type of person is ok, and what isn't, and generally you can recognize each other, and things work out.

Anyways, that was my Antwerp adventure! The city was really amazing. I highly recommend checking it out should you be in the neighbourhood some day.

Whirlwind European Visiting Trek Stop #3: Brussels

My friends Monica and Antoine and their two little kidlets were the attraction for Brussels. They were excited to have me, both for the visit, and for the added help with the kids. Carolina is 2.5 years old, and David is 3 months. It's quite the handfull- there were many days where the kids traded off crying in the mornings and the evenings, and I gave myself a one-day decompression stop in Antwerp after this one. But I love kids, and David is a charmer, super happy, and so he fell to me for a good portion of the days, which was amazingly awesome.

Part of the excitement for the visit was the chance for Monica and Antoine to cook all sorts of delicious traditional French and Belgian meals for me. It was amazing. Antoine has an actual crepe-making flat-iron thingy, and made delicious savoury crepes for dessert one night:

Another night feature honey-glazed duck filets, with potatoes fried in duck fat on the side. Again, amazingly delicious!

During the days, Carolina was in day care, so Monica and I wandered about the city, did a bit of sight seeing, and hung out in a number of comic book shops. Also went for lunch at this excellent little restaurant that was basically the Cultural Exchange version of all restaurants. Mmmm!

Thursday ended up being a holiday (labour day, I think), and so Antoine didn't have to work. We drove up to the Netherlands, had lunch in a very cute little town, and then went to the beach. The weather later in the afternoon wasn't fantastic, but it was cool to have the beach to ourselves. Turns out it wasn't a holiday in the Netherlands, hence the low traffic. And super touristy photo as proof of our day trip:

Monica and I had a really good catch-up too. She's a great person to just talk about general life stuff with. Her current debate is whether to move to California for a job at the moment. She and Antoine have good jobs that they like in Europe, and life here is pretty good for them. Raising kids in America is tough, compared to Europe, due to headaches about school districts, health care, and the general American indifference to appropriate work-life balance (not enough holidays, long working hours, and generally discouraging working from home). The job would be a good opportunity, but it's debatable whether the personal sacrifices are worth it. I'm trying to figure out a bunch of life things too at the moment, and it was good chatting with Monica.

Whirlwind European Visiting Trek Stop #2: Heidelberg

I highly recommend staying Chez Annette and Tobias to all my Cali friends when you come to visit Europe. They were most excellent hosts!

Champagne on our hike up the Philosopher's Way, and a Cali-style bbq with more delicious meat than we could eat. Also got in some mountain biking, hipster coffee, beer gardens, and old university sights. And some games! And chocolates! It was great catching up with Annette and Tobias. We should all move to Europe :-)

Whirlwind European Visiting Trek Stop #1: Hamburg

After the cycling adventures, I headed off to Hamburg while Yael headed down to Malta with Andy and his mom. In Hamburg I stayed with Karolin and Christian. Karolin's a friend from Australia who was there on exchange my first year there. We went on many excellent adventures there, and I've visited her in Europe before and gone on some excellent adventures with her there as well.

Karolin is just over 8 months pregnant at the moment, but still managed to get out and do a bit of sight seeing with me. We took a ferry around the harbour one day, so we could see the city without doing much walking. Hamburg is much greener than I expected! Many many parks, with rivers and canals all over the city. There's even a beach (although a man-made one, but looks quite nice). Check it out:

We also went to see "The Grand Budapest Hotel" in the evening. I find it awkward talking to German's about WWII, often, and it was interesting to see a movie with such heavy WWII ties in Germany. The theatre was actually in the Jewish quarter of Hamburg, and Chris was pointing out things for me. Like where the synagogue used to stand, there's now an open square with the outlines of the old synagogue foundations and walls tiled in a different colour stone. And also all the houses have small brass plates in front of them with the names of the people who'd lived in the houses and were taken off to concentration camps. Some houses had 5 or 6 plates in front of them. So it was interesting to see a film about the lead-up to WWII in a place where the events the movie was based on actually happened.

It has been 6 years since I'd last seen Karolin and Christian, and so 6 years since being in Europe, and it feels a very long time. Hopefully it won't be 6 years before I see them again.

Denmark Cycling Adventure

Gah. Sorry this post is so late. I started it a week ago, but I think I put too many photos in it, so it kept crashing every time I opened it. I just deleted it and am starting over. For photos, check out this link.

So. Yael and I flew up to Craig and Sarah's. Crashed at their place on the first night, then the next day went to the shops for food, rented the bikes in Copenhagen, and hopped on the train, heading to Esbjerg, on the very west coast of Denmark. We arrived in Esbjerg, cycled around a bit in the rain, finally checked into a hotel, and had a good dinner and good night's sleep in beds.

Day 1

The fellow we rented the bikes from told us about an island you can take the ferry to from Esbjerg where you can go to the beach, look for amber, and have a nice cycle around, so we did that in the morning. It was a cool little island. You could drive and cycle along the beach, the sand was packed so hard, and it was quite beautiful. Back to the mainland, and we cycled for another 25 km or so, finally finding a camp spot for the night pretty much when our bodies (mostly our asses) refused to carry us any further. It was an amazing campground. Just one sight, at a local fishing hole, surrounded by trees, with a large supply of cut wood, and fire pit, grill, stools, and flat ground for the tents. Also access to running water and a toilet closer to the fish pond. It. Was. Amazing.

Day 2

We cycled through forest, fields, and finally dunes, making it to the southern point of a fjord. A very long and very beautiful day, again cycling until our knees (and asses) couldn't take it any more. Sarah miraculously caught sight of our campsite in the distance. When cooking dinner that night, we discovered that German camp stoves and Swedish fuel canisters are not compatible, so Craig had the brilliant idea of jerry-rigging the canister by shoving a small wooden "spacer" into it to help hold the valve open. We also devise a two-tier soup can cooking method, and managed to cook the rice and the lentils at the same time. Here's a shot of Yael cooking, expecting the set-up to explode and blind her at any moment, and wondering why the hell I'm taking a photo of this most brilliantly MacGyver-ed situation.

Day 3

Cycling up the fjord peninsula. I guess I'd never really thought about what Denmark looks like, but if I'd had to imagine something, it wouldn't have looked like this:

This day was amazing, and would have been even more amazing with mountain bikes and without drag chutes camping packs, but there's never anything quite perfect in life, so this is probably as close as it gets. Also, all of these days we managed to stop in small towns for beers and ice cream and fries in the middle of the day, so also nice.

We stopped at another most excellent campground in the evening, where we had our own little out-building with a kitchen and dining room in which to cook up dinner and breakfast.

Day 4

From our last campground to the train back, there was only about 22 km (we averaged close to 50 km per day, so 22 seemed too short). So we left our packs at the campground and had a thoroughly-enjoyable side-trip without packs to the village of "No". There were many puns made, and some tresspassing on private farms, as well as pushing our bikes through forests, but was also a really fun and beautiful little trip.

Then we cycled back to the train station, checked back into the hotel, and went our for some excellent pub food at an Irish-type pub called Dronning Louise. I highly recommend it. Burgers were great. Lamb shank was great. Steak was great. Had the local sports on. Brought round shots to everyone in the pub when Esbjerg scored a goal against Copenhagen. A very good end to the trip.

One last photo, to end it off:

One Last Charlemagne Post, I Swear

Before heading off on the cycling trip, I did a tour of the old Aachen catherdral, the Dom. Turns out, it was built by Charlemagne! Or at least the first part of it was. And he had a throne there, where many European monarchs were crowned over the years, and was made out of stone from the temple of Jerusalem. Check it out:

There were also beautiful mosaics all over. A small but beautiful and interesting church.

All Kaiser Karl, All the Time!

I was hanging out at Yandy's, working on the start-up idea, and all of a sudden I saw a flash of red move past the window. I was like, "Is that... Charlemagne??" Yep! Check out this dashing fellow:

Andy and I walked by that huge installation later in the day to see if we could spot where the missing Karl was from, and there was a lady behind us explaining the installation to some visitors, and she said "Can you believe it - two of these guys have already been stolen!". Hahahahahaha!

Here are some more Kaiser Karls, in cookie format this time:

Last one to have a Kaiser Karl in their shop window is a loser!

Aachen

Hallo! I arrived at Yael and Andy's on Friday night. Charmed travel update - my flight was supposed to be Toronto-Frankfurt-Paris (yes, this is ridiculous, but whatever). Fortunately, we were delayed in Toronto for 4 hours, I missed the Paris connection, and Luftansa gave me a free train ticket from Frankfurt to Aachen instead. Win!

Saturday we were out and about shopping, prepping for some birthday parties, and our bike trip in Denmark. Some highlights from around Aachen:

 This was outside one of those dangerously awesome but expensive knitting stores that are everywhere now.

Also, it turns out that Charlemagne was from Aachen, set up the city as the base of his empire, and it's the 1200 year anniversary of his death. So it's all Charlemagne, all the time here this year. Here's a few hundred Charlemagnes outside the Dom, kind of terra-cotta warrior style:

Yesterday we hiked up to the Dreilandes-point, or something. It's the point where Germany, Netherlands and Belgium all meet, and it's about a 2 hour walk from where Yael and Andy live, mostly through rather nice countryside. Along the way we saw these concrete pyramid thingies, which are anti-tank barriers that the Germans put up all along their border in the lead-up to WWII. They're still all in place, for the most part, because it would be just too hard to remove them all.

And here are Yael and I at the Dreilandes-point! I am actually standing in all three countries at once.

This also happens to be the highest point in the Netherlands (327 m, I think it says. Not quite a mountain...).