Toronto In A Day

Posted on December 2, 2012 by newenglandkiwi

In a practical sense we only had one day to see Toronto, so we settled for two things: the Royal Ontario Museum and the fifth-tallest tower in the world. (If we’d been two years earlier it would have been the tallest, but the Burj Khalifa and a few others all overtopped it in 2010.)

That does rather date some of their internal decoration scheme.

The most striking thing about the place, by far, was Lake Ontario. I have been to plenty of harbours in my life. None of them have been freshwater. Standing on a waterfront that smelled nothing like the sea was just plain weird. There were seagulls and ships and everything, but the smell was all wrong. It’s not the sort of thing you think about until you go there.

It was actually quite warm for the time of year, but the waterfront ice-rink was open - if deserted.

 The defining characteristic of the city as a whole – I’m beginning to find that big Western cities have a certain sameness to them, in a convergent way – was definitely the construction. It was everywhere, on the roads and in the subway stations and on building lots, cranes and bulldozers and safety-vested people any direction you turned in. That hasn’t been a defining feature of any city I’ve been in since 2008, when Singapore’s harbour skyline was a forest of cranes, before the financial crisis brought much of that sort of thing grinding to a halt. (Any city except perhaps Christchurch, but that’s a peculiar mix of construction and destruction, newness and heartache, which is quite unique unto itself.)

Perhaps it was all the construction that caused us to stumble unwittingly into the very thing (or one of them) we’d been trying to avoid by visiting Canada – Black Friday. Secure in the knowledge that Canada’s Thanksgiving was a whole month earlier and they didn’t do the Black Friday thing anyway, we decided at the last minute to pick Mike up some shoes for the restaurant that evening (his good work shoes had torn as we were packing, so he’d just brought sneakers.) I hadn’t even heard of the Toronto Eaton Centre, it not being my sort of tourist attraction, and I definitely couldn’t have told you where it was, so when I saw a shoe store that looked like it might have the sort of thing we were looking for (comfortable men’s black work shoes are much harder to find than it would seem at first glance) we wandered blithely in. I even remarked that we were lucky; it looked like there might be other shops behind it.

Needless to say, I was wrong about the Black Friday thing (or, to be more precise, out-of-date) and the enormous mall that revealed itself to us was as crowded as any Boxing Day sale I ever worked. We did eventually find shoes, but not before establishing that a) Canadians apparently have really terrible food court etiquette (if there are ten or fifteen people standing around with trays, continuing to take up tables while not eating or even having food in front of you is not polite) and that Salvation Army bellringers inspire me more to wistful dreams of violence than charity. See, when I heard about them, I figured it was a form of busking – playing carols on bells, or something, which can get tedious (ask me sometime about the kid who played two carols repetitively for two hours outside the store I worked in) but is usually fine. Instead, it turns out that they just ring little bells. Repetitively. Not as a “if you give us money we’ll stop for five minutes” scheme, either. That would at least be logical. Just endless, chiming bells.

Fortunately, after we escaped the mall, the Royal Ontario Museum was exactly the sort of museum I like to visit, which meant it had large wildlife collections and lots of dinosaurs. The part of me that is still five years old and really disappointed at Te Papa’s extreme lack of dinosaurs is gleefully pleased every time a museum has them.

Including a big sauropod skeleton in the foyer, which is basically the gold standard for dinosaur skeletons.

 Sadly I didn’t get a photo of their very nice mural of Crusaders Vs. Muslim Horsebowmen, nor am I quite certain of its relevance to a Canadian museum, but then again all the Roman statuary is pretty non-relevant to Canada specifically too and that was also pretty awesome.

We finished up the day by having dinner at the top of the CN Tower, because we had to eat dinner somewhere and why not? It fulfilled an apparently long-held goal of Mike’s by turning out to be a revolving restaurant, which I hadn’t known before booking it and probably would have given me second thoughts if I had (restaurants with views are bad enough; revolving ones seem almost to guarantee gruel) but it was actually a lot of fun. We got in early enough to get a seat right by the window and stayed long enough to go around one and a half times, trying to orient ourselves to Toronto’s geography and just making out lights on the other side of Lake Ontario. Even Mike accidentally ordering fish (note: Arctic char is a fish, in case you were wondering) didn’t spoil it. (He does like fish, he just wasn’t expecting fish.)

At the top of the tower. (The waiter was really good at taking photos. I guess they get a lot of practice.)

 I’m not quite sure about this statue in La Tour’s gift shop, though. Unless they were deliberately poking fun at stereotypes about Canada for the benefit of unsuspecting tourists, which…seems pretty likely, now I think about it.

It's a moose wearing a Mountie uniform. You see my point.

The real victory out of visiting Toronto, however: Mike has decided that my lack of obnoxiousness in the face of bilingualism on every sign (and my knowledge actually saving the day when the waitress accidentally set the portable credit card machine to French at dinner our first night) means he will graciously consent to visiting Quebec next year. Toronto, you were nice, but that I can’t wait for.

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Relative Size

Posted on November 26, 2012 by newenglandkiwi

For various reasons, this Thanksgiving we decided to celebrate the quintessential American holiday by going to Canada. These reasons had a lot more to do with both Mike and I having four days off in a row than anything intentionally ironic, but I’m always up for some unintentional irony. Plus, it seemed likely that traffic wouldn’t be too bad if we traveled on Thanksgiving Day itself, when everyone else in America who doesn’t work at Walmart was due to be sleeping off a food coma. (We got that one right, actually, although we did miscalculate about the ease of feeding ourselves on the road.)

You’d think that if we were going to Canada, we would go to Montreal, being as how it’s the closest large Canadian city to us. And you would be right, except that I speak passable French, and so does most of the population of Quebec, and it is Mike’s stated opinion that if we went to French-speaking Canada I would be obnoxious and speak French to them. The second part of this statement is probably true. We are in polite disagreement about the first. So instead, we went to Toronto. (My revenge was had when we turned on the TV and the first channel we landed on was in French.)

If you lay out a map of North America, Toronto and Massachusetts look reasonably close to each other. This is, in point of fact, a visual illusion which I blame largely on Texas. Toronto and Massachusetts are not close to each other.

Two hours into our trip. Buffalo was two hours from the end of it. Distances in miles, people. Miles.

When people talk about “small East Coast states”, they’re thinking of places like Rhode Island and Delaware, which are genuinely teeny. (Though Rhode Island is still large enough for some thought experiments.) The further south and west you go, the larger they get – and we were driving across the entirety of upstate New York. Again, contrary to popular expectation, there is a lot of upstate New York, at least if you’re measuring in units of land. Or cows.

Yeah, I know, no actual cows, but plenty of land.

I was weirdly excited about crossing the border, because I’d never crossed a land border before – I’ve been to a few countries, but in each situation either a) they were islands or b) I’d arrived and/or departed by train. (I have taken the Eurostar from England to France, but that’s certainly not a land border.) When you come from somewhere like New Zealand – where going overseas is a very literal term – the idea of one bit of land belonging to one country and one, contiguous bit to another is very…non-intuitive. In the event, it was pleasantly dull, which is exactly how I like my border crossings, but the sight of a toll-booth like thing officially demarcating two separate political entities was pretty much as bizarre as I’d expected it to be.

Seriously. Not even a river. Or a fortress. Or a wall. How am I supposed to believe in this as a border?

I admit to some curiosity as to how often this sign is actually needed. I'm guessing more often than the nice Canadian border people would like.

And so we entered the Other English-Speaking Country. When I get the rest of the photos sorted out, we can move on to my primary thesis re: Canada, namely, that it is Very Big (Arrogant Worms, 1997).

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Traditional Methods

Posted on November 14, 2012 by newenglandkiwi

Although we live in a highly wired-up household – rather more so since we got to the US and Mike began insisting that he needs one of every device “for work” – I have a longstanding fascination for the lowest level of technology at which a task can still be efficiently accomplished. This is one of the reasons I spent a whole morning a couple of weekends ago making pumpkin pie from scratch (the other part being my landlord giving me eight butternut pumpkins, which is a lot of pumpkin to do something with) and probably closely related to how much I’ve enjoyed taking up knitting over the last few months. It’s definitely neither cheaper nor quicker – nor always better-quality, as I stumble up the learning clothes – than buying any of the items I make, but it’s much, much more satisfying.

I will admit there were a few times during the pie-making process when I found myself recalling the low price of canned pumpkin regrefully.

But I think the sphere in which I most enjoy the low-tech solution is science. It’s true there are many things which are infinitely improved by the application of the latest and greatest devices – basically anything in the field of genetics and genomics is exponentially easier now than it was a generation ago – but that doesn’t mean everything is now shiny and electronic. (True fact that I try to impress upon anyone who gets ideas about the glamour of Doing Science: about 90% of microbiology is doing the dishes. Occasionally doing the dishes with hydrochloric acid, yes, but still doing the dishes.)

One of those minor but necessary tasks, in our lab, is adapting rubber stoppers to our purposes. We have a lot of glassware with rubber stoppers in the top – they do a good job of keeping what’s inside free of oxygen, once we’ve exchanged the atmosphere for something more congenial to our anaerobic organisms – but we still sometimes need to have things sticking down in (thinner stoppers that needles can penetrate, temperature and pH-measuring probes, etc.) Which means boring holes to suit. You can get machines to do this, along the lines of this beauty; our lab uses something a little less impressive.

Boring tools for rubber stoppers, plus sharpener.

All these really are are metal (brass) tubes with a handle one on end; at the other, they can be sharped with the cone-shaped tool to the left of the photograph above, by adjusting the edge you want sharpened to an angle against the blade. Hence brass; it dulls much more quickly than steel, but it can be sharpened again, too. Then you just select the size you want – appropriate to whatever’s going in it – and twist it into your stopper until it cuts through to the other side. Gardening gloves (we keep a lot of them around the lab for handling hot things) are definitely required. But damned if it doesn’t do a very neat job.

One bored hole. The somewhat haphazard arrangement of the holes in this particular stopper is mostly due to me failing to anticipate I'd need all of them.

There will come a point, I imagine, where these neat little tools will be too battered to be useful, and maybe not able to be replaced; like other things we have lying around the lab, they’ll be retired to the status of curiosity. And the graduate students of that day are certainly going to save themselves a lot of sweat. But I rather hope it’s not any day soon.

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On The Day

Posted on November 6, 2012 by newenglandkiwi

Obviously, Hurricane Sandy failed to blow us away. (We didn’t even lose power – it rated slightly more exciting than Irene, much less than various other natural disasters.) The man-made perfect storm that is the US Presidential Elections is, however, less avoidable, and today’s the day. I have friends coming over and a lot of alcohol stockpiled. It’s going to be a long night, either way.

The shenanigans surrounding Americans actually getting to the polls to cast their vote are many and varied – check out Charlie Pierce’s blog for the details on some of them – but Massachusetts is as far from being a swing state as you can get, dyed-in-the-wool blue ever since the Democrats and Republicans settled into their current political conformations, and voting here is a little less fraught. A few people in our department who voted early reported very long lines and parking spaces running out – my guess would be turnout fueled by Elizabeth Warren and her Senate campaign, she’s very popular in these college-town parts – but my friends didn’t go vote until mid-afternoon, when it seemed likely to have calmed down, so I tagged along to see how they did the voting thing around here, and maybe take some pictures. (Which is legal in Massachusetts, though not everywhere – and I made very sure to explain to everyone I spoke to that I was a foreign student interested in seeing American democracy at work.)

I'm told that it's usual for polling places to have a forest of signs right up until the legally-mandated boundary, but this one just had two lonely Warren signs and one for some local position no-one cares about.

 

The entrance to the schoolroom where voting was taking place was oddly obscure, but we found it eventually. (I think the lines earlier were long enough they didn't need lots of directions; it wasn't so by 3pm.)

 

Inside, the walls were lined with copies of the actual ballot paper for people to study as they waited - given the number of options, a sensible move, although most of the state and local ones were unopposed. (And this was a brief, two-page ballot - they can run up to seven or ten, with enough local positions and ballot questions/referenda.)

The line was relatively short, maybe ten or fifteen people – they were moving them through efficiently, which relieved my friend Kelley, born and taught to vote in Ohio. She’d brought three forms of ID, her voter registration letter, and an American flag, just in case. (Okay, one of the three.)

First you had to give your name and address...

 

Then everyone politely pretended they couldn't see each other while they voted...

...then you queued again to be crossed off the list as having voted, and feed your ballot to the vote-reading machine.

The vote-reading machine, up close. Talk about your black box.

It was all extremely civilised, polite, and friendly; after all the shouting and punditry and accusations of voter fraud and voter suppression and so on and so forth, it was a very positive experience to see people (middle-class white voters in a college town, admittedly) just getting on with casting their vote for their chosen candidates. Whoever they may be.

(Just, please, please, please don’t let it be Romney.)

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October Surprise

Posted on October 28, 2012 by newenglandkiwi

Two days ago, I was muttering imprecations about what I was going to do if I saw one more campaign ad for Elizabeth Warren or Scott Brown, a.k.a. the Only Political Game In Town in Western Massachusetts, let alone more news coverage. This, as a problem, has largely been solved by the advent of Hurricane Sandy. We’re far inland enough that we’re not directly in the line of the storm, but much more informed people than I  have emphasised repeatedly that the major problem with this storm is that hurricane- and tropical storm-force winds extend hundreds of kilometres from its centre, meaning that where it makes landfall (on the coast of New Jersey or the Delmarva* peninsula) is far less important than whether you’re within that range. And we’re well within that range. Then it’s going to park up over the Northeast for a day or two, prolonging the agony (and the possibility of damage.)

Yes. That's a fairly large area.

Urk.

You may remember that the last two years or so have brought us snowstorms, a tornado, a hurricane, and another, unseasonable, record-breaking snowstorm. (None of this, of course, has anything to do with climate change, or people would surely be talking about that. Which they are, quite deliberately and noticeably, not.)

The greatest impact for us is actually that Mike is currently doing contract work part of the week along the Connecticut coastline. This is not a good place to be for the next few days.

The Governor of Connecticut, not scaring the horses.

When he called to ask if it was OK for him to not go in this week, he was basically told he was a crazy person for thinking he needed to ask permission to not head directly into what was likely to be a disaster zone and that he was, in fact, officially forbidden to come down. So he’ll be staying in this week, then. Whether he works from home is highly dependent upon whether we lose power again, and for how long. We’re a little high for flooding to be an issue outside of the Connecticut River delivering a floodplain-engulfing deluge, but we’re only due a few inches of rain.

Wind, more of a problem.

To put this into context, they think that the lowest pressure at the centre of Sandy will be lower than the New England Hurricane of 1938. It’s not as unusual as you might think for the remnants of tropical storm systems to hit us up here, but over the years the Northeast’s population has grown – a lot – and there’s a lot more infrastructure to damage when a storm does arrive. Exactly how bad Sandy is – both locally and regionally – will be seen over the next couple of days, and I hope very much it’s been over-played by the media. But I think any ideas I had about having moved to a quiet and peaceful area of the world – weather-wise – are well and truly wiped out.

 

*I would call Delmarva a neologism, but apparently it’s been used in that region to describe the peninsula which largely comprises the state of Delaware, but also (you’ll be so surprised!) includes parts of Maryland and Virginia, since 1913. It just doesn’t see a lot of use outside the local area unless something like a hurricane is about to hit it.

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Lovecraft Country

Posted on October 22, 2012 by newenglandkiwi

It’s nearly impossible to overemphasize the importance of Hallowe’en in the American holiday calendar. I don’t know how it plays out in California or Mississippi or Florida – places where the days are longer and the trees greener in October than they are in New England – but here, it’s all corn mazes and haunted houses and haunted corn mazes, for really the whole of October. I think it’s something to do with the light. This collection of autumn paintings captures some of it. So does the picture below, only a week old, but still a memory now; the trees across the road have lost all their leaves.


Remember, New England – specifically rural Massachusetts, though not our part of it – is where Lovecraft chose to set his stories of eldritch horror (warning: that link has the eldritch power to make you lose at least a couple of hours of your life). This is lovely country during the autumn day, but the nights are getting longer and the trees more bare and our house is at least a century old and rather creakier than I’d like, in the dead of the night. In New England, in October, almost anything can lurk around the corner.

This was only emphasised when I went to hang out with Mike in Connecticut a couple of weeks ago and decided to entertain myself while he was at work (I had a long weekend, he didn’t) by going to a nearby zoo. This was Columbus Day, remember, three and a bit weeks before Hallowe’en. Everything seemed normal. Then I entered the greenhouse.

I had to stare for a few seconds before I worked out what was going on.

It got creepier.

Yeah. Just lying there among the tropical greenery. As you'd expect.

Now a bit disturbed – the place was, after all, swarming with fairly small children – I continued on. Most of the rest of the zoo appeared normal, in a depressing pre-1990s way; I had thought large cats in small cages went out sometime during my childhood. Apparently not.

I had never seen a big cat pace back and forth behind its cage bars before, and I didn't really need to.

I did like their emphasis on North and South American wildlife; this was the first time I’d seen a buffalo, or a bald eagle, or prairie dogs.

Magnificent and a bit wet.

In my brain, buffalo were sort of like cows. They are not much like cows in person. (Although they taste pretty much like cows.)

Prairie dogs are very cute, and like many cute things, carry bubonic plague. Just in case you were tempted to get too close.

Although I could have done without the discovery that Massachusetts is home to two-metre long snakes. Well, I’d rather snakes than poisonous spiders, but fewer snakes are better, in my opinion. (Especially when it comes time to defend my thesis.)

Would you be happy knowing this was probably living in your garage, eating mice? Yeah. I thought not.

I’d almost forgotten about the Greenhouse Of Creepiness. And then.

Featured in the New England Farmyard exhibit: heritage livestock breeds, free-range turkeys, and MAN-EATING SPIDERS.

Apparently they were very tidy man-eating spiders, though.

Burying their victims and everything. Right next to the heritage sheep.

I’ll be quite pleased once we get past Hallowe’en, I think. On the other hand, our local supermarket already has a Christmas display. In mid-October. In that light, the spiders don’t seem so bad.

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Very Serious Leaves

Posted on October 16, 2012 by newenglandkiwi

They take autumn very seriously in this part of the world. It’s rare to see a doorstep without a pumpkin, a bowl of chrysanthemums, or some multi-coloured corn on it between September and Thanksgiving. The glorious fall foliage isn’t just the ultimate cause of Tourist Season, it’s an unmissable signal that summer is behind us and snow is, potentially, coming soon.

The local news letting us know what our trees are looking like...

...and another channel's opinion.

Our landlord provided the requisite decorations. (And enough butternut pumpkins for me to make about ten pumpkin pies.)

Unfortunately, we haven’t seen much of the heights of fall in New England these last two years; in 2010 the summer had been too dry and leaves fell quickly without turning, and in 2011 it stayed warm and green right through the October Snowstorm, and then kept warm enough that any colorage was haphazard. Proper displays of autumn foliage, like the production of maple syrup, require the proper seasonal balance of warm days and cool nights, sending the signal to the trees to turn on the fireworks.

This year, the weather has been somewhat more seasonal, so last weekend we took the shiny new car and headed up to New Hampshire (to which, until that point, we’d never been) to see what a proper New England fall looks like. And it was pretty impressive.

I also noticed that New Hampshire has a neat little regional roadsign quirk; they indicate which state a highway belongs to by making the little white square around the number the shape of the state. That’s awesome.

Yes, that funny blob is the geographical shape of New Hampshire.

 

Their other cute quirk: being not even a bit subtle about selling fireworks to Massachusetts residents to, uh, use legally within New Hampshire.

And, since it’s also Politician Season, there were plenty of visible markers of people’s political affiliation, or at least who’d talked them into having lawn signs. They don’t seem to go for the fence-hogging billboards around here, just the dinky little ones on wires. Since Massachusetts will inevitably vote for the Democratic Presidential candidate – it was the only state that went Democrat in 1972, when Nixon swept every other – the big-name battle around here is Elizabeth Warren vs. Scott Brown, for the US Senate. This is possibly the only state in the country where an incumbent Republican senator is running an ad campaign that a) does not use the word Republican, anywhere, ever, and b) is predicated on the facts that he is pro-choice and Obama once said something nice to him. The Warren:Brown sign ratio is largely controlled by the rurality of the area, but my admittedly very biased eye seemed to detect more Warren signs around the place.

Being politically engaged in a country where you are legally prevented from doing anything about it is, what's the word, frustrating.

We’re hitting peak foliage in Western Massachusetts right now; Hallowe’en, in all its not-vaguely-pre-Christian-harvest-festival glory, marks the start of the snow watch and the run-up to winter. Assuming America doesn’t depress me into heavy drinking on November 6, I can hardly wait.

One of the many local pumpkin/fall/harvest related events we passed.

 

The early-blooming Jack O'Lantern.

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Misleadingly Named Vegetables

Posted on October 9, 2012 by newenglandkiwi

According to a recent survey, many young New Zealanders don’t even recognise common vegetables. I am a couple of years too old to be part of the surveyed population, but I would have asserted unhesitatingly, if asked, that I was familiar with all the vegetables commonly used in Western cuisine. This doesn’t mean I’m willing to cook all of them -  you will never see brussels sprouts in my kitchen unless someone has specially requested them, I’m participating in some strange cooking competition, or I’m under threat of violence – but I know what they are. Sometimes I even grow them. (The vagaries of Massachusetts summers are making those efforts variably successful, but I persevere.)

In fact, the capsicums are nearly the only thing that did grow well this year. At least something did.

I could even point out something like okra, if only because we looked at it in that botany class I took during undergraduate to pad out a few extra biology credits. Vegetable-wise, I’m good. And I wasn’t expecting to discover any new ones while we were living in America; new forms of junk food, yes. On that front I have not been disappointed. Bemused, stunned, and occasionally startled, yes, but not disappointed.

I never realised how many variations you could get on "deep-fried dough with sugar".

So when I set out to find a recipe for a really good salsa I’d had in several Mexican restaurants – known rather generically as “salsa verde” – I assumed it was going to involve green tomatoes, because, well, “regular” salsa used the red type and this one was green and that basically made sense. Of course, we all know where assumptions lead you.

Delicious, delicious tomatillos.

Salsa verde is, in fact, made primarily (i.e. almost entirely) out of tomatillos, which confusingly means “little tomatoes”. They are, in point of fact, not very closely related; tomatillos are closest to cape gooseberries, as you can probably tell from the papery husks. This did explain why salsa verde tasted so delicious. I was always a bit skeptical about the probability of green tomatoes tasting that good. It’s genuinely unlike anything else I’ve ever had; the sign at the locak supermarket describes them as tasting of “sour apples”, which isn’t totally inaccurate but undersells them, in my opinion. And pork cooked in salsa verde – which is how I originally encountered it – is pretty much the best thing ever. I’m already feeling depressed at the thought I might not be able to find tomatillos in New Zealand. (If anyone knows how I can, tell me!) Otherwise, I’ll just have to try growing them.

The thing is, I clearly need to pay more attention to what’s in food over here. It might keep surprising me.

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The Big E

Posted on September 27, 2012 by newenglandkiwi

It’s the time of year in America – the official beginning of autumn – when state and county fairs are held. These are basically the equivalent of a Kiwi A&P show, only on widely varying scales from the very local to the regional. Around here, the big deal is the Eastern States Exposition, known more commonly as the “Big E”, a regional-level fair – I don’t even know if the individual participatory states also have state fairs – for New England. It’s held on a purpose-build fairground about half an hour south of where I live, and has been for nearly a century. If you live in Western Massachusetts, the Big E is a big deal, a show-stopping traffic nightmare as what seems like half of New England converges on one fairly small area for two intense weeks of livestock shows, fairground rides, state pride, and deep-fried everything.

We hadn’t gone for the last two years due to either transportation or scheduling issues, but this year we were organised enough to be on the road with our friends by half-past eight. Even at that hour, the main carpark was nearly half-full; along the already traffic-jammed road leading to the fairgrounds, every local business and house was selling off their own carparks, driveways, and lawns as extra parking (astoundingly, at actually pretty reasonable prices – sometimes even cheaper than the official parking.)

The main attraction of the Big E is the Avenue of States, where, in the nineteen-twenties and thirties, each state involved – New Hampshire, Connecticut, Maine, Vermont, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island – built a miniature replica of their official State Houses in their capitals. Inside you can buy food and other items local to each state.

The Avenue of States.

The quality, I have to say, varied quite a bit. Rhode Island had lemonade and…actually, I can’t remember anything except the lemonade stand, and the very serious-looking state trooper who would only let the crowds in one segment at a time, for reasons unknown. Each state house at the fair is actually, I kid you not, legal territory of the state in question – a sort of official embassy, guarded by that state’s state troopers. The question of who would chase you if you mugged someone in the New Hampshire state house and then ran across the surrounding Massachusetts territory to hide out in Maine was left sadly unanswered.

Rhode Island state troopers, with car, guarding official Rhode Island state territory. (Wonder if it applies year-round, or just when the fair is on?)

New Hampshire and Vermont both ran on maple syrup in almost every possible version (maple fudge and candyfloss: very, very good.) Connecticut’s was an ode to marketing, from the plastic dinosaurs to the large LEGO stall. (Guys. It’s from Denmark. You’re not Denmark.) Massachusetts had…I was getting a bit hungry by that point, so mostly I remember there were lobster rolls and many apple products and a rather creepy mechanical cow.

New Hampshire, representing.

The fair also featured a number of more exotic attractions, like elephant and camel rides, and a number of stalls proclaiming that they held the World’s Biggest/Smallest Horse or The World’s Only Real Unicorn.

In retrospect, I kinda wished we'd stopped and had a ride on the elephant.

The best thing about all the "giant horse", "dwarf horse", "real unicorn", etc, stalls, was how deeply, deeply bored the ticket people looked.

In some of the larger buildings were the more traditional handcraft, agricultural, and livestock shows. The Big E is mostly popular in the surrounding areas for the rides-and-food part of the experience, but it became clear in the agricultural areas that it’s also a really important business event for pastoral farmers regionally, a chance to show, sell, and trade livestock, with some all the way from the West Coast. We stuck around for the shearing demonstration, out of some curiosity at how they did it Over Here, and heard the words “New Zealand” spoken more times in half an hour than we usually do here in a year. I did feel a bit sorry for the poor sheep, though; it was obviously confused as to why the guy was doing so much standing around and talking instead of getting it over with and letting her go eat.

You can't blame the sheep. This is usually over in under a minute, and it was being manhandled around up there for at least five or ten.

The real attraction of the place, though, at least for area locals who can come every year, is the food. You can get just about anything you’d like – I even saw kangaroo burgers being sold at one stall. I assume they were genuine. (I’ve had kangaroo, and quite liked it, but wasn’t in the mood for a burger right then.) If you wanted something healthy you were pretty well out of luck (apart from the apples) but there was nearly every sort of fried food you could ever want, and some you weren’t sure you did.

I'm told a "funnel cake" is a differently-shaped version of fried dough, which is, a bit disappointingly, exactly what it sounds like, only with lots and lots of icing sugar on top.

The lingering question I was left with, however, was what the deal was with spa pools. The Big E also sells huge quantities of *stuff*, from garages to mounted butterflies, and there must have been a place selling spa pools about every hundred metres. Do people come to the Big E to buy spa pools? Are they “in” this year? How did they get Michael Phelps’ name on them? I have no idea.

No, seriously, I counted. At least ten spa-pool places.

The organisation of the whole event, from parking to toilets (pretty close to enough of them, miraculously) was very good – except for the credit card and ATM facilities going down mid-afternoon. The burden on the local cell towers was apparently too great, what with the tens of thousands of people all in one very small area constantly losing and finding each other. Texts were taking up to half an hour to get through – to someone usually less than a kilometre away.

We eventually wound up the day about six in the evening, tired, in serious need of food involving vegetables, and un-prepared with insect repellant. (That’s a problem in our area right now, until the first hard frost.) But I think we’ll definitely be back next year – if only to see whether spa pools are still the hot thing.

 

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Size Occasionally Matters

Posted on September 20, 2012 by newenglandkiwi

One of the things that creeps up on you after a while living in America is the realization that the place is actually a lot more normal than its reputation would have you believe. In fact, the place in America most like the image of America I have been to is Las Vegas, which makes a sort of weird sense given that the whole point of Las Vegas is about making you see things that aren’t really there.

In particular, in terms of size – are some things bigger than they are in other countries? Sure. Food portions, for one. Cars. (To the extent that owning a small car is actively unsafe if you do a lot of highway driving, even if you’d prefer one.) But the architecture is mostly reasonably-sized.

Then you come across things like this:

We'll do scale later, but take it from me: this bridge is long. Very, very long.

This was in Astoria, Oregon, our port of origin for the Axial Volcano cruise. That bridge is six kilometres long. Most of it is barely above the surface of the river, which is why it’s harder to see off to the left of the picture.

Yes, that is pretty much the widest point on the whole river.

As far as I can tell, they basically measured the estuary of the Columbia River and put the bridge at the widest possible point, apparently on the premise that it would otherwise inconvenience people taking the scenic route down the West Coast. (There is a less-scenic but more sanely bridged interstate highway, about fifty kilometres inland, that actually carries most of the traffic, being as there is barely anything on the coastal bit of the West Coast between Seattle and San Francisco, or at least no large cities, and between Seattle and San Francisco is a long way.)

Then, of course, they remembered that massive freaking cargo ships use the Columbia River as a major port of entry and exit for all sorts of exports and imports from Asia – we saw a lot of ships carrying new cars in from Japan, others with logs bound outward – and had to hike one side of the bridge up high enough for them to fit under.

All the logs actually make it feel kinda like a New Zealand port city. Except for the "city" bit.

 

Remember the "scale" thing?

...well, here it is.

My one disappointment was that we didn’t drive over the bridge; you can get to and from Seattle from Astoria that way, but it’s a much, much longer drive. I bet the view is amazing.

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