September walk near the river...

Len's photo testing a super lens

Following a Clove

This post comes from maefood.blogspot.com -- my other blog, but I realize it's about both food and travel so belongs here too.

Syzygium aromaticum, the clove plant

Cloves, peppercorns, cinnamon, ginger, cumin, nutmeg -- spices from the east -- once sold for enormous prices; possession and use of spices was a status symbol for medieval men and women who could afford them. From ancient times Europeans imported Asian spice via land and water. Prior to the fifteenth century Europeans had little or no idea of where these spices grew or what kind of plants and climates produced them.

"Spices as a link to Paradise, and the vision of Paradise as a real place somewhere in the East ... fascinated the medieval imagination," wrote Wolfgang Schivelbusch in Tastes of Paradise. "The exorbitant price of spices ... further enhanced this fascination." (p. 6)

Hendrik Cornelisz Vroom, Dutch Galleon, 1600-1630

During the fifteenth century, European voyagers took a more practical view of the spice trade. They sought new routes to the far east, hoping through conquest and discovery to control trade in spice and other goods, especially gold and silver. As the Spanish, Portuguese, and Dutch competed to monopolize the spice trade, there was a crossover point where spices were no longer the food of paradise, but became a mundane, though highly valuable, luxury commodity.

Columbus provided Spain with a vast new territory. Magellan showed a new way to get to the supplies of spice. Portuguese voyagers of that era, having found a route around Africa, explored Southeast Asia, discovering that cloves and pepper grew only in the Moluccas, or Spice Islands. Cinnamon trees grew more widely, including in Ceylon and the Philippines.

Magellan's Ship

By the mid-1500s, Spain had colonized the Caribbean, Mexico, and parts of South America. Vast quantities of silver from mines in Peru were being minted into pieces of eight -- the new money supply was already changing the economies of the Old World. They transported silver from the now-Spanish mines by ship to the isthmus of Panama, across to a Caribbean port, and then to Spain where they could, among other things, buy spices from the long-established spice trade.

Spain also wanted better access to the products of the far east, but the Dutch and Portuguese dominated trade routes for Southeast Asia, especially the Moluccas. Further, the Spanish settlements in the New World were full of newly-rich Spaniards who wanted the luxuries of East Asia.

Andrés de Urdaneta

In 1565 a navigator named Urdaneta achieved the goal of finding a reliable sailing route for trade from the far east to the colonies of Mexico. Westward winds had blown Magellan and others across the Pacific towards Asia. As hoped by the Spanish authorities who sent him, Urdaneta established a manageable eastward route. This crossing was long and difficult, as the winds from Asia to the Americas required ships to sail far to the north, arriving at the location of the current California town of Mendocino. Here, at the time, no Europeans had explored.

At Urdaneta's suggestion,  a regular shipping route was established between Manila, the Spanish colony in the far east, and Acapulco, which he considered the best port on Mexico's west coast. Large and very seaworthy Spanish galleons were  built to make the annual voyage. The Manila Galleon by William Lytle Schurz, first published 1939, documents the story of these galleons. They began their regular route across the Pacific shortly after Urdaneta's discovery and continued until early in the 19th century. In my story that follows, a small bag of cloves begins in the spice orchards of the Molucca islands, I have used details from Schurz's book, especially concentrating on the situation as it was in the early 1600s.

Imagine how, in the early 1600s, a clove tree in the Molucca Islands produced its crop of dried flower buds. Workers gathered these valuable spices -- which at that time grew nowhere but this obscure set of islands. Small sacks or bundles of cloves were packed in chests and put on small trading boats heading in several directions. Peppercorns and nutmeg along with the cloves probably gave an irresistible aroma to the inside of the sea chest, but it had to be shipped onwards; no treats for the workers!

Once the cloves were packed and laded, the boats delivered their cargo to Manila, then a trading port in the recently acquired Spanish colony of the Philippines, named for the Spanish King Philip. In the harbor also would have been junks from China and Formosa, as it was then called, bringing silks and Ming porcelains for the Spanish trade. Ming China made much use of the Spanish pieces of eight in their commerce, thanks to this trade. Other trading ships delivered cotton cloth from India and other goods from Ceylon, Siam, and Indo-China, as it was then called. Slaves, especially women, were another element of the cargo of the ship, as well as passengers with commercial or government business in the Spanish Empire.

Urdaneta's route had been established for an annual trade in order to consolidate the riches of the East and deliver them across the oceans. Spaniards posted to the new colony of Manila organized goods to be loaded on the scarce and much-desired space in the Galleons. Many individuals had the right to ship one or several chests of goods. The Chinese traders knew how to fill each chest so tightly that more silks could fit than anyone thought possible -- the chests were much heavier than those the Spaniards packed for themselves. And among these goods were the little packet of cloves that had been harvested in the Moluccas.

Spanish Galleon

The longest part of the voyage for the little packet of cloves was from Manila to Mexico. Though the ship's hold contained the most expensive of foodstuffs, spices, the sailors and passengers often came close to starvation -- scurvy affected them on almost every voyage. The authorities knew how much food was needed, but the merchants often arranged to replace the ship's supplies and backup equipment with more money-making cargo. Some ships were lost thanks to such behavior. English and Dutch pirates were also a threat to ships along the west coast of Mexico and Central America, though their interest was more focused on silver and other treasure than on spice.

Like Manila, Acapulco was a major transshipment port where the cargo from the galleons was redistributed and sent onward towards Panama, Mexico City, and eventually across the Caribbean to Spain. When the ship arrived, the first people to board were clandestine boatmen in the dead of night; they took the undeclared cargo that was forbidden or that was avoiding the customs agents. These agents were the next to board, and they checked each chest -- though they didn't look inside, and often the contents were more than declared.

After the officials did their work, they sent word to Mexico City: the ship could be unloaded, and trading was open. Merchants and traders quickly made their way to Acapulco for the huge fair that vastly increased the population of the otherwise rather dull and uneventful port. Traders from Peru offered silver, often outbidding the Mexican merchants.  Mixed-race local Acapulco residents did their best to participate in the buying and selling, then carrying their purchases onward to Puebla, Oxhaca, or mainly to Mexico City. Many of the dealers were purchasing goods to be sent onward to Spain. Mules carried the sea chests across Mexico to Vera Cruz and then onward across the Atlantic. Of course the ship had to return to Manila -- for the return voyage it was loaded with silver pieces of eight from the mines of Peru, chocolate from Mexico, and a small number of other commodities for the Eastern trade.

The Spaniards who ruled Mexico always wanted to buy their share of the rich cargo. Richer people wore the silks and jewels from China; poorer workers wore the plain cotton from India. Chinese dishes and vases decorated tables and homes of wealthy Spaniards. The little packet of cloves, along with many other spices, could have been purchased by one of the locals for consumption in Mexico. Spaniards in Mexico had quickly adopted the new flavors of the New World: allspice, chile peppers, chocolate, vanilla, and combinations of old and new emerged. The chocolate beverages of Aztec nobles tasted good with cinnamon. Medieval spice blends of pepper, cloves, and nutmeg went well with new world turkey. (For more on these influences, see Gran Cocina Latina by Maricel E. Presilla and "The Mexican Kitchen's Islamic Connection" by Rachel Lauden.)

Spice blending traditions had come to Spain with the Arab conquest, as they had come to Europe with Crusaders who tasted Arab food in Jerusalem. Now the spices were coming across the Pacific directly to the New World rather than through the Arab world that had always handled them on the way to European tables.

The legend of the nuns of Puebla who "invented" Mole Poblano, reflects the old-world traditions and new-world luxury, using both chocolate and old-world spice. Thoughtful food writers, such as Maricel E. Presilla in Gran Cocina Latina, however, give no credibility to the idea that these nuns invented the dish because they had nothing else to cook for a visiting bishop. The town of Puebla was definitely a consumer of luxury foods including spices from the East and the best their local sources could supply. Perhaps the little packet of cloves from the Galleon ended up in a convent where the nuns created a spice blend that reflected the traditions of Islamic Spain and Aztec nobility.

A particular group of Spanish inhabitants of Mexico were the New Christians; that is, descendants of Jews who had chosen conversion in 1492 instead of the other alternatives: exile from Spain or death. Persecuted unmercifully by the Inquisition, many of these eventually chose another type of exile in the New World, living as less and less well-informed secret Jews, and still watched carefully by Mexican immigrant inquisitors who looked for signs of reversion to their ancestral religion.

The cuisine of secret Jews in Mexico and Spain attempted to reflect as much of Jewish tradition as they could remember -- and as much as they could include without immediate arrest. A Drizzle of Honey: the Lives and Recipes of Spain's Secret Jews by David Gitlitz and Linda Davidson transforms Inquisition testimony about the guilty food choices of accused secret Jews into recipes that can be followed in a modern kitchen. I looked into this book for some possible food preparations in which the cloves that traveled from the Moluccas to Manila and across the Pacific might have ended up.

Alfajores, a small almond cookie, "are inescapably one of the Andalucian Islamic contributions to Iberian cuisine," writes Gitlitz." Sixteenth century alfajores (which differ from the modern version) were a popular treat among new-Christians in Mexico in the early seventeenth century." A dough of almonds, walnuts, sesame seeds, honey, bread crumbs and eggs was flavored with cinnamon and cloves; teaspon-sized balls of dough, optionally dusted with more cinnamon, were baked into chewy cookies. (p. 275-276)

Note: illustrations (except book cover) are from Wikimedia Commons

Duchamp revisited by the New Yorker

In today's online New Yorker: this cartoon about "Nude Descending a Staircase." If the toon is really new or quite recent, I'm amazed that the painting still has enough iconic value to talk to people (I can't find its date). Maybe Duchamp's first famous creation has become a natural subject for parody. Like my favorites "American Gothic," Botticelli's Venus, Whistler's Mother, "The Scream," and of course Mona Lisa.

As I've mentioned, I've always been fascinated by the perceived strangeness of "Nude Descending a Staircase," ever since my mother described how astounding it was. At the time, I wrote how it seemed to be a touchstone of the unfamiliarity with modern art of  her generation:

"Working through this personal history with Marcel Duchamp, I begin to wonder if my mother herself knew what the picture looked like -- after all, she was familiar with Picassos and Cezannes. I suspect that she visualized it as much nuder than it was. She always thought that her own acceptance and public permissiveness of nudity in great art was mysterious, as she wouldn't have accepted nudity in any other venue. I now know that "Nude Descending a Staircase" earned its reputation at the Armory Show in 1913, when my mother was three years old, but in her view it seemed more contemporary than that. She reflected the slow pace at which it became somehow mainstream."

Has the strangeness persisted?

Oh No, Margaret Atwood

Margaret Atwood books on my bookshelf:
I count 22 of them

I have now read Margaret Atwood's newest book, Madd Addam, published last week. I am painfully disappointed. I say this as a nearly lifelong Atwood fan. I own almost all her books, including this one, in hard cover because I can never wait for the paperbacks. I have even read her poetry -- and I never read poetry, generally.

Madd Addam is the third in a trilogy, which began with Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood. Though not exactly fantasy, Oryx and Crake is a work of great imagination and humor. Maybe sardonic humor -- it's about a dystopian very-near-future when bioscience has gotten out of hand and global warming and other disasters have completely overtaken humanity. In fact, humanity has nearly been wiped out by a crazed attack by one of the genius scientists. Almost all the life in the book consists of strange genetic modifications of beasts and near-humans, and one lonely surviving man. But it's not that sad because the imaginativeness is really charming. The Year of the Flood begins before the disaster, and introduces a few new survivors and their quirky stories. In both, Margaret Atwood's brilliant writing ability in this and her previous books always makes me want to read more and more.

Madd Addam seems to me to lack any new imaginative inventions. Basically, the beasts and near-humans are the same as they were in the earlier volumes, no new ideas. The human characters, too, are mainly leftover from the two earlier books in the trilogy; the narrative about one man, Zeb, is the best part, but rather diluted by what I see as the theoretical stuff about human messing around with the environment and genetic mods.

Some of the inventive ideas from the earlier books are used in a way that is repetitive and ultimately annoying. For example, the genetic near-humans have trouble understanding subtleties, so the humans have to tell them simplified made-up tales. In Oryx and Crake, these are very amusing, and subtly explore how myths are made. The trope becomes burdensome when repeated in nearly every chapter of Madd Addam. The myths of the group known as God's Gardeners were poetic in The Year of the Flood; there was deep irony in the efforts of these persecuted dissidents. To me it became kind of a formula in Madd Addam.

In my reading experience, I've always found that it's hard for an author to sustain a vivid fantasy through a number of sequels. J.K.Rowling did it well in Harry Potter. L.Frank Baum usually had a couple of new inventions to sustain the Oz series, though the hack writers that took over from him were pretty hopeless. Even Through the Looking Glass is a little more systematic and less spontaneous than Alice in Wonderland, I think, though both are excellent. More recent series such as the Hunger Games and Dark Materials trilogies have some of the same flaws of becoming repetitive and losing spontanaity.

My first experience with such a thing was when I was around 8 or 9 and read the sequel to my favorite book The Princess and the Goblin. It was so disappointing that I cried, because it wasn't as vividly magical, but I've never had the nerve to reread it so I can't say what really bothered me. I guess I won't cry for Margaret Atwood. I hope she writes a better book in the future.

Recent Mona Lisas

“Art Rules the Street” graffiti by the artist Tripel on Kent Avenue in New York.
From a collection of graffiti in the New York Times published last June. 

I love the distortion of the Mona Lisa face, which is also mirror-reversed. Having Einstein, Che, etc. in the picture adds to the sense of being all cliches, but calling it "Art Rules the Street" shows that art is not the only source of such visual cliches!

Image discovered for me by Miriam on google+

From The Museum of Bad Art, sent to me by Jens.

"From the slightly odd to the downright awful, the collection now receives hundreds of submissions from budding bad artists every month — but only the very worst are hung on the gallery's walls," according to the Daily News article about the Museum of Bad Art in Boston. Maybe I need one of their t-shirts with this image for my collection of Mona Lisa tees.

From the blog Spoon and Tamago: a haunted house at the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo

Summer is the time for haunted houses in Japan, as that's the time of their festival honoring the dead. About this haunted house: "The space was filled with replicas of famous paintings that were also part optical illusion. It was a really fun way to learn about art without all the museum rules and annoyances."

Sitka, Alaska

Sitka Waterfront

Sitka National Historical Park

On our last day in Alaska, we visited the Alaska Raptor center, the Sitka National Historical Park, and for a short time, the town itself. At the end, we had around 15 minutes inside the Russian Orthodox cathedral of Sitka. The historical park had made us aware of the history of the Russians during the 100 years or so before they sold Alaska to the US in 1867, which was lucky since there was no time to learn much about the cathedral, other than that this building replaced one that burned, along with much of the downtown, around 50 years ago. And that the icons, including one with a miraculous history, were mainly saved from the fire.

Russian Orthodox Cathedral, Downtown Sitka

Other than a very short walk in Juneau the first night of our trip this was the only time we experienced the tourist shops and many souvenir opportunities that are standard on most cruises. Some of the merchandise was appealing, including some of the carving in whale bone. We only bought a reproduction of a painting by one of the naturalists from the boat, who sells in a gallery in Sitka. She was there and signed it for us.

The only thing I ever read about Sitka before the trip was The Yiddish Policemen's Union by Michael Chabon. It's not about real Sitka, but about a counterfactual Sitka that was settled in the 1950s by Jews whose alternate reality had caused them to be barred from creating the state of Israel. A wonderful book -- but not really relevant.

John Muir's last trip to Alaska was in 1890. While his travels around a decade earlier had been in very rough conditions, by this time there were many tourists in purpose-built cruise ships of that era, and he traveled at least part of the time in much more comfortable conditions. Here is one day's journal entry from 1890 that I found especially charming:

July 7. Another fine day; scarce a cloud in the sky. The icebergs in the bay are miraged in the distance to look like the frontal wall of a great glacier. I am writing letters in anticipation of the next steamer, the Queen. 

She arrived about 2.30 P.M. with two hundred and thirty tourists. What a show they made with their ribbons and kodaks! All seemed happy and enthusiastic, though it was curious to see how promptly all of them ceased gazing when the dinner-bell rang, and how many turned from the great thundering crystal world of ice to look curiously at the Indians that came alongside to sell trinkets, and how our little camp and kitchen arrangements excited so many to loiter and waste their precious time prying into our poor hut.

Alaska Raptor Center: this bald eagle can't fly, but he's calm when faced with a crowd of tourists.
All today's photos are by Len.

Kayaking Here and There

Kayaking in Alaska: we were just behind the kayak in the photo.
An Alsaka brown bear (aka grizzly bear) is just visible at the left of the waterfall.
We didn't want to be the kayak closest to the bear.

On the Huron River this morning

We enjoyed kayaking so much in Alaska that we decided to try the Argo Cascades, an artificial rapids on the Huron River a few miles away from our house. After the cascades, which take around 10 minutes, it's smooth water down to Gallup Pond where one turns in the kayak and rides back to one's car in a van. Not like the inflatable zodiac-type boats that one rides from the ship to the shore off the National Geographic Sea Bird.

The kayaks are very different. Here they are just open, coated-styrofoam hulls that take on huge amounts of water but ride so high that it immediately drains out of holes in the bottom of the boat. The kayaks there are closed (though without a skirt), as the air temperature can be very cold and the water is always cold. Wet landings there require knee boots. Wet landings here require bare feet, keens, or tevas. No bears here either. Guaranteed.

Alaska Twilight

Sunset and twilight in the Alaskan summer take a long time, as the sun slowly makes its way around the horizon. Even at mid-day we noticed that the sun was quite low in the sky, and the moon, too rolls around not far from the horizon, thanks to the tilt of the planet.

After dinner on our first night on the ship we had some shore time in Juneau; as we walked away from the ship it was bathed in golden light.

National Geographic Sea Bird in Juneau harbor

On our second evening on the ship, the red and gold colors of the sky at nightfall lasted around an hour; during this time, several whales were coming up repeatedly near the ship. Every passenger with a camera took several photos of whales illuminated in the powerful colors of the sunset.

Whale in the sunset (Len's photos)

Another sunset was brief but dramatic:

One-burst sunset!

And our last night, though there was no sun visible, we enjoyed a long blue-grey evening with eerie fog banks lifting and dropping in front of the high banks of the Peril Strait.

Twilight in Peril Strait

From John Muir: 

"The most extravagantly colored of all the sunsets I have yet seen in Alaska was one I enjoyed on the voyage from Portland to Wrangell, when we were in the midst of one of the most thickly islanded parts of the Alexander Archipelago. The day had been showery, but late in the afternoon the clouds melted away from the west, all save a few that settled down in narrow level bars near the horizon. The evening was calm and the sunset colors came on gradually, increasing in extent and richness of tone by slow degrees as if requiring more time than usual to ripen. At a height of about thirty degrees there was a heavy cloud-bank, deeply reddened on its lower edge and the projecting parts of its face. Below this were three horizontal belts of purple edged with gold, while a vividly defined, spreading fan of flame streamed upward across the purple bars and faded in a feather edge of dull red. But beautiful and impressive as was this painting on the sky, the most novel and exciting effect was in the body of the atmosphere itself, which, laden with moisture, became one mass of color--a fine translucent purple haze in which the islands with softened outlines seemed to float, while a dense red ring lay around the base of each of them as a fitting border. The peaks, too, in the distance, and the snow-fields and glaciers and fleecy rolls of mist that lay in the hollows, were flushed with a deep, rosy alpenglow of ineffable loveliness. Everything near and far, even the ship, was comprehended in the glorious picture and the general color effect. The mission divines we had aboard seemed then to be truly divine as they gazed transfigured in the celestial glory. So also seemed our bluff, storm-fighting old captain, and his tarry sailors and all." (p. 17-18)

Glaciers

Endicott Arm approaching Dawes Glacier

In 1879, naturalist John Muir visited southeast Alaska, the first of three visits that he documented in his book Travels in Alaska (published posthumously in 1915). During our trip to the same region last week, I slowly read this work, savoring the lush and romantic quality of his descriptions of many things that remain unchanged in the last 120 years or so.

For example, here is a portion of one of his descriptions of a glacier:

Sea Bird's inflatable boat approaching Dawes Glacier

"Arriving opposite the mouth of its fiord, we steered straight inland between beautiful wooded shores, and the grand glacier came in sight in its granite valley, glowing in the early sunshine and extending a noble invitation to come and see. After we passed between the two mountain rocks that guard the gate of the fiord, the view that was unfolded fixed every eye in wondering admiration. No words can convey anything like an adequate conception of its sublime grandeur--the noble simplicity and fineness of the sculpture of the walls; their magnificent proportions; their cascades, gardens, and forest adornments; the placid fiord between them; the great white and blue ice wall, and the snow-laden mountains beyond. Still more impotent are words in telling the peculiar awe one experiences in entering these mansions of the icy North, notwithstanding it is only the natural effect of appreciable manifestations of the presence of God.

Dawes Glacier from a distance

"Standing in the gateway of this glorious temple, and regarding it only as a picture, its outlines may be easily traced, the water foreground of a pale-green color, a smooth mirror sheet sweeping back five or six miles like one of the lower reaches of a great river, bounded at the head by a beveled barrier wall of blueish-white ice four or five hundred feet high. A few snowy mountain-tops appear beyond it, and on either hand rise a series of majestic, pale-gray granite rocks from three to four thousand feet high, some of them thinly forested and striped with bushes and flowery grass on narrow shelves, especially about half way up, others severely sheer and bare and built together into walls like those of Yosemite, extending far beyond the ice barrier, one immense brow appearing beyond another with their bases buried in the glacier.

Margerie Glacier in Glacier Bay

This is a Yosemite Valley in process of formation, the modeling and sculpture of the walls nearly completed and well planted, but no groves as yet or gardens or meadows on the raw and unfinished bottom. It is as if the explorer, in entering the Merced Yosemite, should find the walls nearly in their present condition, trees and flowers in the warm nooks and along the sunny portions of the moraine-covered brows, but the bottom of the valley still covered with water and beds of gravel and mud, and the grand glacier that formed it slowly receding but still filling the upper half of the valley." (p. 26-27)

Dawes Glacier calving (Len's photo)

Last Evening in Alaska

From the Sea Bird at dusk, in the Peril Straits: a scene that reminds us of science fiction or fantasy illustrations.
Would we go through the fog bank and find ourselves in another dimension? Well, not this time.

Last night we ended our Alaska cruise with a passage through the Peril Straits towards Sitka. This morning, our Alaska stay wrapped up with an interesting bus tour of Sitka before we boarded our Alaska Airlines flight to Seattle. We are now in Seattle airport waiting for our continuing flight back home. I plan several more posts on both this blog and on my food blog to document what I saw and some of the Alaska history and cultural background that I learned during the week.

Bear we saw from our kayak

Tomorrow is the end of our trip. We'll be back in real internet contact some time monday...

Alaska

Blue icebergs floating down the fjord from a looming glacier... kayaks in a salmon stream with soaring eagles above it ... spruce and hemlock forests covered in moss... fresh fish for dinner every night... humpback whales lunging up next to the ship to take mouthfuls of krill ... a brown bear eating grass beside the water... lectures and guided hikes by expert naturalists ... reports of undersea life by a diver who goes down with a video camera ...

Alaska! We have seen snow-covered mountains and stands of trees bathed in golden afternoon sunshine. The seas one night were lit up by a vivid red sunset while whales were feeding. We walked through the little fishing town of Petersburg beneath grey clouds.  And this morning, our route towards the Icy Strait hides in deep white fog.

So far we find Alaska to be a fascinating place. I've found no time at all to share or document what we are seeing, but finally, we have purchased an internet card and to post this summary. Once I get home I'll have plenty of time to think about what we've been doing and learning, to select from our photos (already over 1000 in number), and to write about the experience.

Dawes Glacier

Humpback whale

Bald eagle

Seattle Art Museum

Yesterday we went to the Seattle Art Museum. The special exhibit there is "Future Beauty" about Japanese fashion designers, with around 100 amazing garments, including the work of Issey Miyake, Kenzo Takada, Rei Kawakubu, Yohji Yamamoto, Junya Watanabe, Jun Takahashi and others. From the museum webpage:

Whenever I see modern high fashion exhibited in an art museum, I'm always startled at how much it has in common with modern art, including the transgressive spirit of many recent artists. Because of its very different audience, though, it's often innovative in a somewhat different way. Also, of course, even the most outrageous of designs have to be clothing in some sense. The Japanese designers often play with fabrics or construction so that the model is swamped by stiff fabric that surrounds her in very un-clothing-like ways. I was also amused that the mannequins are proportioned much like Barbie dolls.

The comparison of the 1980s black and white garments of Kawakubu and Yamamoto to a work by the writer Tanizaki was one fascinating detail. Here are some of those black and white garments in the first room of the expo:

"Future Beauty" -- Seattle Art Museum

We also loved the rest of the museum, especially the African masks which I'll write about in the future.

Ferry Boat Ride

Seattle Harbor from the ferry boat Wenatchee this morning:
The Wenatchee, named for a tribe that lived in the region,  can hold 2500 passengers and around 200 cars.
We were probably far from passenger capacity, but near the max for cars.

Seattle skyline from the top passenger deck.
The ferry has no "front" or "back" -- just End 1 and End 2.
It loads alternately from each end, unloads at the other end (so the cars always go forward)
and then returns across the Sound in the opposite direction. I think all or most car ferries are similar.

Wake and skyline

Approaching Bainbridge Island harbor. The ride takes about 35 minutes on the
16,000 horsepower, 4-engine ferry.

Unloading the cars in Bainbridge, where we spent a few hours exploring the town,
visiting the historical museum, and having lunch.

Space Needle, Seattle

The Space Needle from the adjacent Chihuli Garden
Glass sculptures remarkably echo the forms and colors of the plants

Glass and lillies

Duchamp's Children

Artwork by Alice, or Barbie Barbue

Inspired by Spoon and Tamago.

Sunday Bike Ride

Some of us went this way, some of us came back by another route.

Len, Miriam, Evelyn, Alice, Mae by Argo Dam