fake vegetables

There is a planet very similar to earth.  There is life on this planet, and the life resembles the life on earth: there are plants and animals and fungi (or whatever), trees and monkeys and Venus Fly traps.  One exception is that the equivalent of humans, instead of having evolved from monkeys, evolved from some motile branch of the plant kingdom.   Normally these plants eat insects and small animals and other plants, but some of the plant-humans refuse to eat vegetables, consciously choosing to only subsist on meat.  Some even refuse to eat vegetable by-products, for ethical reasons.  In order to satisfy their cultural tastes for vegetables, however, they sometimes produce fake vegetables, made purely out of processed animal.

Florida

I live in Florida now!   It’s warm, green and rainy.

Biannual blog post

Wow the last time I posted on this thing was in November.  I’m doing a really good job of keeping a travel/life journal.  It’s not like I didn’t have any material to blog about.  There were plenty of things that were at least as interesting as the Africa tidbits below, including about my european-codeine-bus tour. But I left all my pictures from Europe in an internet cafe in Barcelona, so it seemed kind of pointless to write a picture blog about it, and who wants to blog about their job.  Which leads to what I’ve been doing since november ‘07:

I spent most of the past year in portland hanging out with John, Jessie, Amarina, Chriss and working at a programming job downtown.  This job wasn’t all that profitable or exciting but I supposed it provided me with good experience, or something – I guess I had to learn how to program.  

Then, about two months ago, I hastily moved myself out of John’s house in Portland and left to Idaho, and then a few weeks after that I left for Mexico with Dianna (where I am currently).  Hopefully I will post a blog in a few hours about Mexico that has some pictures.   hasta más tarde.

speed king

joe began the game with a modest, “i am so great.  g-r-8.”

“oh!  what the hell?  you can’t do that?  you have to lay them down one at a time.  or it’s cheating, kind of…” joe explained like a whining child when russ threatened his crown.

to congratulate russ on winning joe said, “oh shit.  i don’t like this game.  it’s stupid.”

Dogon Country

We set out for Dogon country on a bus that was particularly bad. Every time the engine died it was necessary for 5 or 10 of the passengers to get off the bus and push start it back to life, and then run and jump back on before it sped away. And considering that busses stop every hundred meters in Mali it made for a long trip. Our destination was Mopti, the nearest city to the Dogon tribes.

The Dogon are famous for several things. Firstly, they are the tribe in africa that builds their houses on cliffs. Secondly, “The Dogon people are a tribal people living in Africa who were reported as having certain traditional astronomical knowledge about Sirius that would normally be considered impossible without the use of telescopes.” Although this supposed knowledge has been disputed.

Arriving in Mopti, an ancient city built in the middle of a giant rice swamp, our first order of business was to find a guide to take us from the city of Mopti, to the native land where the Dogon people reside. In Dogon country the indigenous population speaks an array of languages so varied that they can’t even communicate from tribe to tribe, so it’s necessary to have a local along with you. This of course means getting ripped by an African whose made it his career to hustle French people.

After a lot of bad noise, Dianna had to fire our first guide, and we replaced him with someone who seemed slightly less shifty, and who could prove that he had access a working vehicle to transport us into Dogon-land.

Within 10 miles of the start we had to stop at a Poste De Controle, which is just a place where cops block the road with metal barrels and you have to bribe them to let you pass. I tried to take a picture of the Post De Controle but our guide warned me against it.

A few miles down the road we ran in to another problem. The only bridge leading to the Dogon had collapsed the week before:

So we had to drive the MB sedan accross the river:

After 25 miles of driving across road that I would never attempt to drive without a 4WD with a good suspension, we arrived at a Dogon village situated on the top the Bandiagara Escarpment, which is a geological cliff dropping off about 500 meters. We slept on the roof of a mud house build at the edge of the cliff. We awoke to this in the morning:

The next day consisted of hiking through crevasses to the bottom of the cliff. Half way down we visited our second Dogon village:

This village was organized in to three parts: Christian, Muslim and Animist. Animists are the original religion of the Dogon culture, followed by Muslims, who dominated the region since the 12th century, and then the Christians, who have had missionaries in Mali for fifty years or so.

Once we had descended the cliff, we hiked for a mile or so to view the impossible dwellings of the ancient Dogon people. They built their houses into seemingly inaccessible nooks in the sides of the cliff. Of the two hundred kilometers of the escarpment, many sub-tribes found their homes, among them were a group of Pygmies. Here is a picture of one of their houses:

The hike back up the cliff provided some good photoshots:

First Impressions of Mali

Here is a long overdue Blog about Africa. I have a few more about Africa planned, and a few about Europe that will include a lot of pictures…

Having never traveled outside North America I was excited and apprehensive to travel to Africa. And in fact, after arrival, I went through about a week of shock as I came to grasp my surroundings. Life there is about as far from the western world as possible. It is frustrating and depressing to witness such poverty, and for the first few days I felt as if I was witnessing something ugly and unnecesary. But witnessing squalor and living in it are two different things. After a short amount of time your surroundings cease to be shocking and just become something you deal with, which doesn’t make it any less difficult or uncomfortable. I was malnourished and starving the entire time, parasitic, protein deficient – in the village it was a rare occasion to eat meat, and when we did it was the tiniest of portions. The animals that we ate were themselves starving. Walking down the muddy road you would see cattle and sheep that looked like miniature caricatures of themselves, with stunted growth from being underfed. A chicken, followed by a herd of chicks would rummage daily through the piles of discarded waste that lined the streets to find food. So a half ounce of meat with dinner is a desparetely needed part of your diet, at least for people who don’t have a stash of protein bars in their hut.

After some of the initial shock wore off, I was able to step back appreciate the culture I was surrounded by. A culture where lifelong social ties bound an intricate and ancient society, which is somewhat preserved from the rest of the world. A slow daily life afforded by the lack of western technology allows for a social depth rarely seen in modern America, and this is both enviable and regrettable. It means that people have the time to enjoy their lives and their family on a daily basis, but it means that some of your family will die of malaria.

Here are some pictures depicting everyday life in Ouelessebougou:

By the main road, close to the market.

Women in the Mosque.

A good pic of the Samake compound, Mai’i and Momuso.

Getting water from the well via bucket tied to rope.

The requisite shot of me with a bunch of African children… The kids who live in the compound.

More to come…