Week 3: Traveling into the New Year
I have not been able to publish this week’s note on time. This past week has been a tough one. I have had to take various modes of transport as I moved slowly from Canada to India.
We left Gull lake on the 1st and drove down to Calgary for a day, it was a 6 hour journey by car. We then took a flight to Vancouver and spent a couple of days there. The flight was about 2.5 hours long and we reached the airport in the afternoon and spent a couple of hours inside the airport waiting for the rain to pass. After two days in Vancouver, we took another flight to Delhi with a stopover in Taipei. The flight to Taipei was about 12 hours and the one to Delhi about 8 hours. After an evening in Delhi, we took a train across the country to Chennai, the train took 28 hours. It has been a difficult week. This past year has been one of traveling for me. Google very kindly made a list of places I have traveled this past year. I would really like to slow down.
Calgary day: We spent the one day in Calgary with our friend’s daughter. She is about 5 years old. We bought her a globe and push pins to mark all the places her family had visited and she seemed amused by this for a whole twenty minutes. We did other fun child-like things with her like grocery shopping, cooking, and playing Go. It was fascinating to watch her play Go. Since she is five, her attention span is short but it felt like she understood the game spatially and was concentrating on the patterns of color on the entire board. There have been some studies mainly from Korea, looking at cognitive function and the game of Go especially in children [1 ,2,3] but it would be interesting to see if there are some intuitive skills we unlearn as adults which makes children play the game differently. She won her game of Go, it also probably helped that she wasn't over thinking or intimidated by it.
Vancouver days: I spent the Weekend in Vancouver before taking the flight out. It was spent with a lot of coffee, a few long city walks, Ru Paul’s drag race and cooking கருவேப்பிலை சாதம். Over the weekend, I attempted ice skating for the first time ever, we walked about 20 kilometers around the city and Stanley park and the Seawall. It was uncharacteristically sunny and wonderful to be amongst the trees and the ocean and even the occasional flasher ( To elaborate; it was a nude beach and despite being unseasonably warm it was probably too cold for nude sunbathing and we ran into a man who was definitely not sunbathing and angling his privates toward our best viewing angles.)
Delhi Day: The 24 hours we spent in Delhi we mainly slept through and ate. We stayed with our friends family and they fed us a lot. We also went and had the best छोले-भटूरे in the whole world and took a E-Rickshaw ( it’s weird these things are not more common in other parts of India given how well they seem to work in Delhi, their low Total Cost of Ownership, and their obvious focus on the future of transportation and pollution), before getting on the train.
This next week will be spent with my family.
Books read in the past week
Convenience Store Woman — Sayaka Murata
