Three More Weeks In Nova Scotia

We managed to squeeze in another long visit in Nova Scotia this summer. As I've written previously, our goal is to help our kids connect with their family and their roots. We spent almost all our time hangout out with our extended family this time, and the visit included a family wedding on one side and an anniversary party on the other. Now that they are older, we also wanted to give them a sense of the history of the region, so we made a side trip to Cape Breton to visit the Alexander Graham Bell museum in Baddeck and the Fortress of Louisbourg.

Solomon Gundy at Magnolia's Grill in Lunenburg - their scallops were the best I have ever tasted.

A beautiful day at Martinique Beach

Sunset reflected on a distant thunderhead at Lawrencetown Beach

The view of a glassy Bay of Fundy from my grandparents' house in Port Greville

Cape Split at low tide from the beach at Port Greville, with the help of a zoom lens

Five Islands Lighthouse Park

Five Islands at low tide and sunset. Glooscap threw these clumps of mud at Beaver.

A Cheticamp table mat in our cottage in Baddeck.

Twist, cross, twist, cross. Learning bobbin lacemaking at the Fortress of Louisbourg.

One of several period kitchen gardens at the Fortress.

Learning to trout fish at a local lake

Ferry ride across Halifax Harbour to have coffee with a friend

Supper at the Old Orchard Inn after a long day of visiting family

One last walk at Lawrencetown Beach

Three Weeks In The Maritimes

My family recently went for a visit to Nova Scotia to spend time with our extended family.
Our primary goal was to let the kids connect with their family and develop a feeling of Nova Scotia as a second home - 
and for me to see my grandmothers, and my sister who was visiting during our stay.
So naturally, most of our time was spent hanging out with our family,
but we also managed to fit in a lot of time playing on beaches,
tall ship viewing and a harbour cruise on a ketch,
a humpback whale watching tour, and a short side trip to Prince Edward Island.
We even squeezed in some grown-up time for brunch dates (just me and hubby!) 
and a handful of visits with dear old friends.

Let it wash over you. Conrad's Beach, NS.

Titanic model in the pond at the Halifax Public Gardens. Did you know about Halifax's connection to the tragedy?
Of course we also had to find the bench under the weeping willow, and have some Oxford blueberry ice cream.

Parade of Sail, Tall Ships 2012, viewed from the Nova Scotia Hospital grounds. Peacemaker (barquentine).

HMS Bounty, Gazela, and Amistad turning between Georges Island and McNabs Island (in the background).

HMS Bounty replica. Georges Island is in the background.

Amistad replica (topsail schooner) in a cloud of gunpowder smoke from her cannon. It was loud!

The enormous USCGC Eagle (barque).
Notice the Clock Tower and Citadel Hill behind downtown Halifax.

Tide's out, on Brier Island, NS, just before our whale watching tour. Brier Island sits at the mouth of the Bay of Fundy, a three hour drive and two short ferry rides from Halifax. We also visited an antique shop, a gift shop, a restaurant, a rug hooking studio, and walked the trail to Seal Cove while we were on Brier Island.

Humpback whale diving, photo by Joanne Merriam (my sister), from her blog post describing the whale watching tour. I didn't get any photos myself (too seasick), but WOW. We saw 8 adults and 2 very playful calves, lots of seabirds, and at one point witnessed a pod of Atlantic white-sided dolphins wake-riding - and one of the mother humpbacks vocalizing in annoyance to tell them to buzz off.

Balancing Rock (columnar basalt), Long Island, NS. We walked this steep trail with lots of stairs on our way back to Digby for a late supper (the most delicious scallop chowder ever, in my case).

Conrad's Beach (again), NS.

 Playing in the vast tidal flats at Scots Bay, NS. Photo by Peter Merriam.
This gives you a sense of how far out the water goes at low tide on the Bay of Fundy. 

 Martinique Beach, NS. Photo by Peter Merriam.

We drove to Prince Edward Island over the Confederation Bridge, which has turned the former ferry town of Borden into 'Gateway Village' and reduced the ferry service to a tourist curiosity. As we crossed the bridge, I joked that I was disappointed that they've not yet built a giant statue of Anne about to smash her slate over Gilbert's head. The Island is  ridiculously pretty, with its patchwork of farm fields and sea views and saltbox architecture,
but it was Green Gables that we had come to see (I have a nine-year-old daughter.).

The Lake Of Shining Waters, MacNeill's Pond boardwalk trail at Cavendish Beach, PEI.

 

Red sandstone cliffs, Cavendish, PEI.

Early 20th century pantry inside Green Gables. 

Green Gables is the former home of cousins of Lucy Maude Montgomery, and the inspiration for the Cuthbert farm where Anne Shirley is adopted. Parks Canada have the house set up inside to approximate what it would have looked like in the book (there's even a dress with puffed sleeves hanging in the closet of Anne's room), and outside there are walking paths along Lovers' Lane (which really does have a Babbling Brook), and through the Haunted Wood to the foundation of the house where Montgomery actually lived with her grandparents. 

The gorgeous wind turbine array outside Amherst, NS near the border with New Brunswick.
And an accidental self-portrait.

Instead of driving straight back to Halifax from PEI, we took the long (long!) way along the Parrsboro shore, through River Hebert (where my mother-in-law grew up) then over Cap d'Or to Port Greville where my Dad grew up, then through Parrsboro back to the main highway. This is the view of the Bay of Fundy from my grandparents' front yard.

Back in Metro, we took the kids for a harbour cruise on the Mar II, a two-masted ketch built in the fifties. This is one of the winches near the rear mast, with a chromed internal mechanism reminiscent of a three-speed bicycle's rear hub.

There was enough wind that once we were clear of the docks, the captain was able to cut the motor and operate entirely under sail. This 'pirate cruise' was also very child-friendly, with a crew member in costume whose job was to entertain kids below deck with stickers and stories. A group of kids (including mine) were recruited to help hoist the big sail on the rear mast, and afterward they all got to take a turn holding the helm for photos.

Three weeks is enough time to fool yourself into thinking you can fit lots more into your schedule, especially if you are planning to need another vacation after your vacation. My mental list for the trip had included visits to the local bike shops and harbourfront bike rental place, time roaming through antique shops and art galleries, meals at some favourite restaurants, and time at the archives working on my family tree. We had lined up a long list of rainy-day activities in museums that we never had a chance to use. However, we decided to take it easy and spend our summer the way we would if we lived in Nova Scotia, and recreated some of our childhood memories for the kids.
In the end, it was family, friends, and the sea that called us home, 
and we're very happy with how much we were able to share with our children. 

Slow in Japan: The Sloth Club

The Sloth Club logo, via their e-commerce site.

As I prepare for my trip to Japan (it's less than a month away now!), I've been reading a lot of blogs from there, and I ran across an absolute gem in Slow Japan. It's the English-language blog of The Sloth Club, a not-for-profit group formed in Tokyo in 1999 to promote the slow movement, sustainable living, a local living economy, and fair trade. The scope of their projects is impressively broad and ambitious for a group who say they strive to 'become the sloth'. Their members have organized many workshops with invited speakers (which seem to be usually promoted solely through their Japanese-language website and blog), participated in peace and antinuclear activism, organize voluntary blackouts to promote a slower lifestyle, published guidelines for slow business (essentially following the triple-bottom-line approach) and slow cafes, promoted conservation through the Hachidori Project, created a brilliant alternative currency system and a "Slow Business School", led slow-travel tours to other countries, promoted straw-bale building through a Slow Design study group, and created an intentional community called Yukkuri-mura in rural Fukuoka prefecture where participants live a han-nou han-x (half-agricultural, half-anything) lifestyle. Their Cafe Slow organic restaurant provides a community centre where some events are held, in addition to selling organic, green, and fair-trade products and books written by members of the Sloth Club. Recent events held by the club have included a conversation-cafe-style series on creating a slower post-3/11 world.

I absolutely LOVE this image they used to promote a recent orientation event for new volunteers.

I think it's magnificent that they've used sloths - instead of the usual snails and turtles - as their symbol of sustainable and slow living, especially given their fair-trade and conservation-project ties with Ecuador:

“The aim is to emulate some of the basic behaviors of the sloth,” in particular its “low-energy, cyclical, symbiotic and non-violent lifestyle.”

Sloth Club members at the 2010 Earth Day celebration in Yoyogi Park, Tokyo. Via.

Namake (alternative currency), via.
Some of their Slow Business articles also mention alternative currency called "zen", a nice wordplay on the yen.

Sloth Club member at a peace demonstration, via

The Hachidori Project logo uses the story of the hummingbird who carried a drop of water
to try to keep the forest from burning as a symbol to promote sustainable lifestyle choices. Via.

Sloth Club members at a huge anti-nuclear rally in Tokyo on 11 April 2011, via their Japanese-language blog.

via the SlowPhoto blog of a Sloth Club organizer - I think she's saying she took the photo in Jordan, but I can't be sure.

The Sloth Club's work has been profiled in Treehugger, 350.org's It's Getting Hot In Here blog, Kyoto Journal, New Colonist, and Metropolis - but none of those articles are recent, and their work is spread across several websites of varying translation quality, so I thought it might be helpful to have a recent synopsis of their activities in a single blog post. 

Inspiring stuff! I can't wait to check out Cafe Slow while I'm in Tokyo.

Why I'm Still Travelling To Japan

via QuakeBook Blog

Since the horrific earthquake and tsunami of 11/3/11, my twitter followers have indulged me as I retweeted news from Japan - and little else. I've followed the rapidly-changing situation very closely, primarily thanks to tweets from English-speaking bloggers and reporters in Japan linking to key articles (see my Twitter list of them), and live-streaming broadcasts of English-language Japanese news (primarily NHK). The contrast between their common-sense approach and the sensationalism (even alarmism) of reports in the North American press has been astonishing. (It makes me seriously question the calibre of the other everyday information we get.)


A few friends and family members have asked if we have cancelled our trip yet. No, we haven't, and we have decided we won't, unless the situation dramatically changes. Here's why:


1. We are not travelling to the areas hardest hit by the tragedy. The farthest north our itinerary takes us is Tokyo, which is no longer experiencing rolling blackouts or supply-chain-related food shortages. The more southerly cities of Kyoto and Hiroshima felt the quake, but were able to carry on with everyday life as usual, and have not experienced blackouts (they're actually on a separate grid from the north). Most business travellers have been advised to reschedule their trips to Tokyo for the end of April, so our mid-to-late-May trip should be fine. Our advisor at JTB Canada has indicated that we may experience some minor inconveniences (such as changes to train schedules), but nothing compared to the inconvenience of changing all our plans.


2. The situation at the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear reactors has stabilized, although the news from the nuclear power plant continues to be troubling. Since we were not travelling within the 30km (Japanese) / 80km (for US residents) evacuated zone, and foodstuffs and water in Japan are tightly regulated, I doubt we could be exposed to fission products in quantities sufficient to endanger our health. (If I want to worry about mutagens in my food and my everyday environment, I can think of lots of more likely culprits, starting with the new-car-smell that's offgassing from the rental vehicle I'm driving while my own car is repaired. Also, I worked with isotopes for years as a medical researcher, and probably got way more rads from P-32 spills by a certain sloppy grad student than I possibly could on this trip.)


3. Spooked by the incredibly sensationalist reports, tourists have been cancelling trips to Japan in droves. This means that those who are dependent on tourism for their livelihoods and living in completely unaffected parts of the country will be needlessly subjected to hardship.


For what it's worth, we did come up with a Plan B (to postpone our trip for an extra few months) and Plan C (to postpone until next year, and travel to London and Paris this year instead, since we'd be able to plan that on fairly short notice). We are grateful that we probably won't have to use those backup plans.


I'm heartbroken for the communities of the northeastern prefectures and awed by the resilience of their citizens - see QuakeBook Blog for some inspiring stories and an amazing fundraiser. Please also press the "Blog 4 Japan" button in the sidebar to see how else you can help.

Traveling to Japan (and Wabi-Sabi's Relationship to the Slow Movement)

My husband and I have just started planning a two-week visit to Japan, as our gift to each other for our 40th birthdays. It's our first international trip together, since living thousands of miles from our extended family means that almost all our travel budget goes toward trips home to Nova Scotia.

The route our tour will take is roughly outlined in pink. 

Of course, fifteen days is far too little time to truly immerse yourself in a culture as different from ours as Japan's, but it will have to do. As our starting point, we've chosen a whirlwind tour (mostly by train) from the experts at Japan Travel Bureau that will give us some time at each stopping point to explore the things that interest us most. It obviously won't be a textbook slow-travel trip, but we hope to incorporate elements of the slow-travel approach into it, by using our flexible time to learn about regional history, crafts and foods, and experiencing at least a couple of days of the trip as a typical Tokyoite might (We are going during mid-May, after the national holidays in early May are over, so that should help.).  I'm excited to observe an existing bicycle culture and widespread public transit use, and interested to see how else (or even if) Japan is moving toward sustainability in other areas. Witnessing the cultural juxtaposition of Fast & Slow and the small-space living innovations that you see so prominently in huge cities like Tokyo will be amazing. 

We'll be spending 4 days in Tokyo; 1 day admiring the area around Mount Fuji; 1 day each in hot spring resort town Hakone, Takayama with its unchanged Edo-period streetscapes, and feudal town Kanazawa; 2 days in Kyoto, where the handicraft centre is definitely on my list; 1 day each in Nagasaki and Hiroshima; then finishing up with an extra day in Tokyo. (Our flying days make the total 15 days.) We hope to wedge in daytrips to Nagoya to visit a friend from grad school, to the peony garden at Tsukuba, and to the Ghibli Museum and the Sayama Forest (to say we're fans of animator Hayao Miyazaki would be an understatement).

(One friend has joked with me that a tightly-scheduled tour is how the typical Japanese tourist sees their own country. Having witnessed the hordes of bus-tour travellers in the Canadian Rockies and on Prince Edward Island, she may have a point.)

Planning the trip also has me thinking about wabi-sabi and its relationship to the Slow movement. To my mind, the best primer for a Western audience that I've read on the Japanese concepts of wabi & sabi and their application to homes and lifestyle is Robyn Briggs-Lawrence's The Wabi-Sabi House. It's a richly satisfying read, and has had a huge influence on my thinking. As I wrote when I reviewed it,

The concept of wabi includes harmony, balance, simplicity, and humility; sabi translates literally as "the bloom of time". Taken together, the words describe the beauty of everyday, functional objects that we cherish because they are well-used, patinated, handmade, and tied to memories. It's living in the moment, modestly and authentically.

Of course, this is a vast oversimplification of a way of life that's difficult to explain in few words. It also leaves out the huge influences of seasonal rhythms, local availability, resource scarcity, and population pressures in a closed society that shaped the philosophy, not to mention the spiritual influence of Zen Buddhism. 

Seasonal. Local. Handcrafted. Can you see why I connect wabi-sabi with the Slow movement? So naturally, one of my goals during the trip is to deepen my understanding of wabi-sabi.

By the time of my trip, Briggs-Lawrence's followup book Simply Imperfect will have been released in North America (You know what's on my wish list.). I'm also, after reading others' reviews, aching to read The Unknown Craftsman - one of the few other books in English about the topic that hasn't been singled out as a cliched cultural mishmash by knowledgeable reviewers, in large part because it is translated from the essays of a Japanese expert. 

I'm also currently reading Just Enough: Lessons in Living Green From Traditional Japan by architect Azby Brown, in which he explores late-Edo-period Japan as a model sustainable society and looks at technologies and strategies that can be adapted for modern use, many of which are no longer used in modern Japan. It's a densely written cultural history, with brilliant hand-drawn illustrations. I'll be on the watch for examples of what I've read in that book, too.

Also on my to-read list, besides the usual travel guides: Dave Barry Does Japan, at hubby's insistence; Will Ferguson's Hitching Rides With Buddha; and Lafcadio Hearn's 1896 collection of Japanese folklore Kokoro. 

So, for readers who have lived or travelled in Japan: Can you think of anything I should add to my reading list? Is there anything we should try to experience (or anything we should avoid)?

Everyone else: can you think of more ways to slow down a whirlwind tour?

Slow Travel: Bicycle-Friendly Hotels

Via

We're crowd-sourcing a list of hotels and hostels that rent bicycles as an amenity for their guests over at Loop-Frame Love, a vintage bicycle blog where I am a coauthor. Why mention it here?

Well, Slow Travel is all about engaging with the local culture, trying local foods, and checking out local independently-owned shops and galleries in the less-touristy areas of your destination - and walking and cycling are a wonderful way to get a feeling for the place you're visiting and what makes it unique. Slow Travel is about connecting with the place you're visiting in a more meaningful, mindful way, rather than flying in and rushing around for 36 sleep-deprived hours to see all the sights before you must catch the flight home.

My favourite memories of a visit to New Orleans aren't of the tourist traps in the French Quarter and the fake Mardi Gras parades thrown for the benefit of conference attendees, but a day spent meandering through the residential neighborhoods and indie shopping districts along Magazine Street, and an evening in a soul-food bistro recommended by one of the shopkeepers I met. Before that day, I felt like a visitor; after that day, I felt like a guest.

If you're new to the idea of Slow Travel, I recommend the excellent Jorg & Olif blog's "So, How Do You Travel Slowly?" - it's an excellent primer on ways to plan your vacation with slow principles in mind.