As the shelter-in-place draws on and on, I am going through waves of excessive energy and the urge to stay busy and make things, followed by periods of near paralysis, glued to a video game for a few days or a week. I think I enjoy both, and each is kind of a re-charge from the other. The past 2 weeks have been a huge up-swing in energy and making things. While this week is much more sedate, which allows me time to actually sit and sift through a million photos and write about things. I’m not usually prone to such differences in mood, but I think the news and…
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My love for cooking
One of my favorite hobbies has always been cooking. As a small, nerdy child, I loved watching the cooking shows on the Discovery Channel (because the Food Network had not yet been born and not yet been killed by “personality” chefs, but that’s another topic). My favorite to watch was Graham Kerr on Discovery. My local public television channel had a cooking show from Louisiana, starring Justin Wilson. As a human who has never mastered sleeping, I would wake up at 6 a.m. on the weekends and watch Mr. Wizard and my cooking shows. Which, now that I think about it, are pretty much the same thing. Science and cooking.…
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Saint Petersburg Day 3
Hermitage Museum I began the day at the Hermitage museum, a former palace turned art museum. Art museums are not really my favorite things, but I make do. I like learning about art, but going to a museum in Saint Petersburg and learning about Italian Rennaissance paintings is kind of nonsensical. However, the museum itself, another former palace, is amazing. It’s beautiful and the walls and ceilings and floors are all covered in ornate paintings and carvings and stone inlay. The museum itself is way more fun to look at than the paintings. Why spend my morning elbowing tourists out of the way to look at a 12-inch tall Raphael…
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Hutong District and Cooking Class
Facing the day Today was my second full day in Beijing, and I had such awesome adventures! My tour guide, Mr. Slackerson, said yesterday that today it would be too cold for the rickshaw drivers in the morning, so we should go to them in the afternoon. The itinerary was to have lunch at 11:30, go do a rickshaw tour of the Hutong alleys, then a tea ceremony, then visiting Shichahai Lake. After yesterday, I had little faith in his ability to actually arrange the tea ceremony that I had requested, so I got up this morning and hoofed it over to a fancy tea parlor. Let me back that…
