A Visit to Cajun Country in Louisiana
I guess I might have mentioned a time or two that I read an author named James Lee Burke. I remember the very first book I read – A Morning For Flamingos. I remember where I found it – the US Forces library on Lindsay Air Station. I remember it was late winter in Germany, the time when you think Spring will never come, that it will be grim and grey and cold for the rest of your life. I sought escape, which Mysteries/Detective novels provide, but I never expected poetry. From the very first page of A Morning for Flamingos, I was spellbound. While his novels have some horrific violence in them, and his detective Dave Robicheaux is a recovering alcoholic with some seriously self-destructive issues, you can sort of skim through the bad parts; there will be more poetry soon.
He is one of the few authors I will buy in hard cover.
I’ve been waiting. I wanted to see New Iberia, but I had to find a time when all the universal factors would line up – AdventureMan would be in the same country as me, the weather would be cool enough that travel would be enjoyable, and there was a low likelihood of running into a lot of tourists. The stars aligned, and off we went, a mere five hours away, to Cajun Louisiana.
We drove to New Orleans, first, visiting the welcome station to pick up brochures and figure out what we wanted to see and where we wanted to stay.
The welcome center was clean and well stocked, lots of bathrooms available for the visitors, lots of visitors, and ladies behind the counters full of first hand information about where we should go, where we should eat and where we might stay.
I have a thing about bridges. I had an accident on a bridge once, and I’m still a little nervous about bridges. This is the kind of bridge I hate:
This southernmost part of Louisiana is lowland, and there are bridges everywhere. Some of them are bridges like I have never seen anywhere else:
We arrived in the middle of the sugar cane harvest. I didn’t know what fields of sugar cane looked like; now I do:
There were big huge carts full of cane, all going to be processed on the same day they were cut:
All this time we were looking at sugar cane, we were getting hungrier and hungrier, but it was Sunday, and a lot of places were already closed, if they had been open at all. We finally found a restaurant in New Iberia, Pelicans, where I shocked my husband by ordering the vegetable plate – but it was all deep fried vegetables; asparagus, green beans, broccoli and carrots. He had a BBQ sandwich.
I think we were the only tourists in the place. The bar was full; the restaurant was empty, except for us.
We wanted to find someplace really fun to stay, full of character, and I had been looking at some cabins in Breaux Bridge. When we got ready to check them out, we discovered that the people who ran it were gone! There was a phone number, which we called, and the very kind owner called back and told us to go take a look, and which cabins were available.
You know, things just aren’t the way they used to be. I remember my Mom and Dad’s house, the first one they bought. The closet in the Master bedroom was only about 4 feet by 3 feet deep, with one bar and with a shelf. People had fewer clothes then, even in Alaska, where they also had heavy coats and ski pants and stuff. Bathrooms were small, only what was necessary, not like the spa-bathrooms people want now (me included.)
These cabins were cute. They were built right out over the bayou, and you could fish off your own balcony, each cabin separate and free standing. The place was clean. It was also really small, with small beds and small bathrooms. I don’t have asthma, but there was a musty smell, and I was worried I wouldn’t be able to breathe. We also like a good mattress, so we can sleep well. I looked at AdventureMan, who was looking at me. We were both on the same track; we couldn’t stay there. I called the lady back. “The cabins are really nice,” I said, “But we’re old and have allergies. We can’t stay here.” My husband was looking at me in a mixture of horror and hysteria. As we got in the car, his shoulders were shaking. He put a quiver in his voice (my voice did NOT quiver) and started saying “We’re o-o-o-o-ld, and we . . .” We were both rolling with laughter. I just didn’t know what else to say. We used to stay in places like this, but now we put a higher value on sleep.
We headed for a tried and true Marriott – actually, two of them – in Lafayette, only to discover that there was an oil and gas conference starting this week and there were NO rooms at the Marriott. We headed back toward New Iberia and settled into a Hampton Inn – nice, clean, roomy, and no character, we could have been in Seattle or Pennsylvania, but we could breathe.
Babies and Bilingualism
Fascinating article from The New York Times on babies and language development:
Hearing Bilingual: How Babies Sort Out Language
By PERRI KLASS, M.D.
Published: October 10, 2011
Once, experts feared that young children exposed to more than one language would suffer “language confusion,” which might delay their speech development. Today, parents often are urged to capitalize on that early knack for acquiring language. Upscale schools market themselves with promises of deep immersion in Spanish — or Mandarin — for everyone, starting in kindergarten or even before.
Yet while many parents recognize the utility of a second language, families bringing up children in non-English-speaking households, or trying to juggle two languages at home, are often desperate for information. And while the study of bilingual development has refuted those early fears about confusion and delay, there aren’t many research-based guidelines about the very early years and the best strategies for producing a happily bilingual child.
But there is more and more research to draw on, reaching back to infancy and even to the womb. As the relatively new science of bilingualism pushes back to the origins of speech and language, scientists are teasing out the earliest differences between brains exposed to one language and brains exposed to two.
Researchers have found ways to analyze infant behavior — where babies turn their gazes, how long they pay attention — to help figure out infant perceptions of sounds and words and languages, of what is familiar and what is unfamiliar to them. Now, analyzing the neurologic activity of babies’ brains as they hear language, and then comparing those early responses with the words that those children learn as they get older, is helping explain not just how the early brain listens to language, but how listening shapes the early brain.
Recently, researchers at the University of Washington used measures of electrical brain responses to compare so-called monolingual infants, from homes in which one language was spoken, to bilingual infants exposed to two languages. Of course, since the subjects of the study, adorable in their infant-size EEG caps, ranged from 6 months to 12 months of age, they weren’t producing many words in any language.
Still, the researchers found that at 6 months, the monolingual infants could discriminate between phonetic sounds, whether they were uttered in the language they were used to hearing or in another language not spoken in their homes. By 10 to 12 months, however, monolingual babies were no longer detecting sounds in the second language, only in the language they usually heard.
The researchers suggested that this represents a process of “neural commitment,” in which the infant brain wires itself to understand one language and its sounds.
In contrast, the bilingual infants followed a different developmental trajectory. At 6 to 9 months, they did not detect differences in phonetic sounds in either language, but when they were older — 10 to 12 months — they were able to discriminate sounds in both.
“What the study demonstrates is that the variability in bilingual babies’ experience keeps them open,” said Dr. Patricia Kuhl, co-director of the Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences at the University of Washington and one of the authors of the study. “They do not show the perceptual narrowing as soon as monolingual babies do. It’s another piece of evidence that what you experience shapes the brain.”
The learning of language — and the effects on the brain of the language we hear — may begin even earlier than 6 months of age.
Janet Werker, a professor of psychology at the University of British Columbia, studies how babies perceive language and how that shapes their learning. Even in the womb, she said, babies are exposed to the rhythms and sounds of language, and newborns have been shown to prefer languages rhythmically similar to the one they’ve heard during fetal development.
In one recent study, Dr. Werker and her collaborators showed that babies born to bilingual mothers not only prefer both of those languages over others — but are also able to register that the two languages are different.
In addition to this ability to use rhythmic sound to discriminate between languages, Dr. Werker has studied other strategies that infants use as they grow, showing how their brains use different kinds of perception to learn languages, and also to keep them separate.
In a study of older infants shown silent videotapes of adults speaking, 4-month-olds could distinguish different languages visually by watching mouth and facial motions and responded with interest when the language changed. By 8 months, though, the monolingual infants were no longer responding to the difference in languages in these silent movies, while the bilingual infants continued to be engaged.
“For a baby who’s growing up bilingual, it’s like, ‘Hey, this is important information,’ ” Dr. Werker said.
Over the past decade, Ellen Bialystok, a distinguished research professor of psychology at York University in Toronto, has shown that bilingual children develop crucial skills in addition to their double vocabularies, learning different ways to solve logic problems or to handle multitasking, skills that are often considered part of the brain’s so-called executive function.
These higher-level cognitive abilities are localized to the frontal and prefrontal cortex in the brain. “Overwhelmingly, children who are bilingual from early on have precocious development of executive function,” Dr. Bialystok said.
Dr. Kuhl calls bilingual babies “more cognitively flexible” than monolingual infants. Her research group is examining infant brains with an even newer imaging device, magnetoencephalography, or MEG, which combines an M.R.I. scan with a recording of magnetic field changes as the brain transmits information.
Dr. Kuhl describes the device as looking like a “hair dryer from Mars,” and she hopes that it will help explore the question of why babies learn language from people, but not from screens.
Previous research by her group showed that exposing English-language infants in Seattle to someone speaking to them in Mandarin helped those babies preserve the ability to discriminate Chinese language sounds, but when the same “dose” of Mandarin was delivered by a television program or an audiotape, the babies learned nothing.
“This special mapping that babies seem to do with language happens in a social setting,” Dr. Kuhl said. “They need to be face to face, interacting with other people. The brain is turned on in a unique way.”
“How Was Your Day?”
We were all standing in line, a very long line, at Pensacola’s Greek Festival at The Annunciation Greek Orthodox Church when my son asked how our day was. (AdventureMan and the Happy Baby were off exploring.)
“Oh, it was GREAT!” I enthused. “Time passes so much faster when you’re retired and you spend your time having fun!”
“So what did you do?” he asked.
“Oh! We went to water aerobics, and stopped by the bank to cash a check so we would have money for the weekend. Then your Dad vacuumed so I can mop the floors tomorrow, while I cleaned upstairs, dusted, did the bathrooms, etc. At lunch we went to Chow Time, and drove down here to check out parking, and then I had a quilting meeting this afternoon, and then we met you!”
As I finished, their faces were somewhere between blank and confused . . . and I realized my idea of fun was a relative thing.
Here is what is fun. Fun is getting to CHOOSE when you vacuum or mop the floors, or wipe down the blinds, or clean the bathrooms. Fun is having the time to do it even on a weekday, not having to scramble on Sundays to get it all done, like we used to. Fun is not having gobs of money, but having enough that we can go to the bank and take some out when we need it for the weekend. Fun is meeting up with our son and his wife and our grandson because our schedule isn’t full with business meetings, and working late at the office. Fun is having groups we belong to because we really want to.
The truth is, in many ways, we are busier than we ever have been, but it is busy-ness of our own choosing.
Fun is even babysitting your grandson when he gets sick, just because you can, or helping carry him around a big festival, taking turns, so everyone gets to eat. It’s fun because we can, and because this is what we have chosen.
EnviroGirl and I picked up the dinners while AdventureMan and L&O Man scouted for seats in the tent so we could sit and eat dinner – moussaka, chicken, lamb, all kinds of specialities. There was also a very long dessert line – this festival is all about the food, and the music and dancing. I’ve taken some photos for you, but once we had the food, I didn’t get a chance to get any more photos. We only had to stand in line about thirty minutes; although there is a huge crowd, there is also a system, and they get people in and through the serving lines very efficiently.
“The Circle of Death”
Every now and then, AdventureMan and I are talking about life issues, and I will say something about it all being a part of the Circle of Life, and he, ever the cynic, will say “That’s another way of saying The Circle of Death.” It makes me laugh when he says it, but it sort of illustrates a difference in the way we think. I anticipate a happy outcome – and for the most part, I may go through some unhappiness, but the outcome is generally happy. AdventureMan anticipates the worst outcome, and is always happily suprised when things come out well. 🙂
Today, I don’t know how he is going to handle the circle.
His first chrysalllis was set around last Saturday, i.e. a fat caterpillar crawled off the milkweed where he had been born and had feasted a couple weeks. He became a bright, shiny green drop, but you could sort of see where his feet used to be, and you could watch things happening inside, like wings starting to form.
We don’t know where some of the catarpillars went. We know there were six or seven, and maybe some of them crawled off to cryssalize somewhere else. The second chrysallis was malformed; we knew it wasn’t going to turn into a butterfly. Maybe it was a normal defect, maybe a bird had pecked it or a wasp had laid an egg inside.
Yesterday, we watched the third caterpillar who had attached. Just an hour and a half after this photo was taken, he turned into that bright green container that the first had turned into.
As I was fixing dinner, I could swear I saw the first chrysallis moving, and I thought it was hatching, but AM thinks I was just imagining something, and that might be.
Today, both the deformed chrysallis and the two perfect chrysallis are gone. I saw a small bird on the wheelbarrow yesterday, and it might be that the birds like to feast on the chrysallis.
Poor AdventureMan. His babies got run over by the circle of death. (I prefer to think that the first one hatched into a Monarch butterfly, but it is unlikely that is what happened to the other two, so this time, this one rare occasion, AdventureMan may be right . . . )
Hemingway’s on Pensacola Beach
“How about Peg Leg Pete’s?” I asked, as we were contemplating where to eat lunch.
“We haven’t eaten at Hemingway’s for a while,” he responded, “let’s go back there.”
I had to grin. There is so much that goes into where a person chooses to eat, and I suspect my husband is yearning, on some deep level, for some exotic taste of the life we left behind. Hemingway’s is built like a lodge, could be a hunting lodge in Montana or a hunting lodge in Africa, you know, a lot of wood, open construction, heavy wood beams in a high gently peaked roof, a vast balcony (like where you could have a Samburu Sunset and watch game wandering in to the watering hole)
Hemingway’s it was. As we waited for our meals to arrive, we tried to figure out when the last time we had eaten there had been, and we think it was back . . . more than five years ago, when our son was getting married. We had flown into town a week early to have time to get adjusted to local time and to arrange for a rehearsal dinner. We flew in, had a weekend with our son and his bride-to-be, including a meal at Hemingway’s, and then we headed up the coast to make our arrangements, and to get out of their hair during an exceptionally busy and stressful pre-wedding week.
I love that Hemingway’s has some really good special menus for lunch; AdventureMan had the Hurricane Shrimp and I had the Salmon Caesar. We started with the onion straws, but there was so much, we barely touched them. They were the thin little onions, so each tiny little ring was a lot of crisp batter and fat, and not a lot of onion. A little tasty, but not a lot. Most of the taste was in the Ranch Dressing type dip that accompanied them. I’d skip them next time.
I made a mistake; there was a Caesar salad with something and there was a spinach salad with salmon, so I asked for a Salmon Caesar and he said “Oh! Yes, we can do that, just put it on Caesar instead of the spinach.” I like that flexibility, and I found their Caesar salad very tasty; not bland.
AdventureMan really enjoyed his Hurricane Shrimp and particularly loved the way they were skewered, so that on the grill, you can flip them without shrimp slipping off.
At the end, we succumbed to sharing a rum brownie, very delicious. I wish I could say we didn’t finish it, but we did leave most of the whipped cream behind. 😉
All in all, a nice meal in a great atmosphere. Service was attentive without being too intrusive. We will probably go back soon and take our son and his wife. 🙂
Pumpkin Patch Frenzy
We’ve had the most wonderful Saturday. You’d think we’d be sleeping in, but we surprised ourselves – awake and happy at seven in the morning, out the door by eight. Our second stop was the Pumpkin Patch, an annual arts event featuring glass pumpkins.
“Why pumpkins?” you might ask. It’s pumpkin season. Pumpkins are traditional for Halloween. These are beautiful, made of glass, nice for a Fall seasonal decoration in your house. It’s an arts fest, held in the Belmont Arts and Cultural Center. (If you look closely, you can see 5 Sisters Blues Cafe across the street.)
BIG mistake. No parking spots, so AM let me off to fight the crowds while he looked for a parking spot. There had been a huge line; none left as I get close to the door, but inside, it is a frenzy and it is a turgid stream of people. Many are carrying boxes and people are grabbing at pumpkins, beautiful glass pumpkins of all colors, but I knew I wanted a big orange pumpkin. I only found one orange pumpkin, a small pumpkin, but I never did see a big pumpkin, so this one will have to do.
You cannot imagine; this was not a nice crowd. This was a mob, this was the worst shopping crowd I have ever been in, and I have been in some frenzied shopping crowds in my life. This one was rude and pushy and many of the pushiest were also very vulgar, and used vulgar language as they tried to push others out of their way.
I went straight to the “pay with cash or check” line, which moved fairly quickly. At one point, a guy called for anyone paying by check, and I could do either so I got in that line figuring it to be faster. I was at the end of the line, and the very last guy at the “pay with cash” table said “if you can pay with cash, I can take you here, now.” I said “YES!” and whipped our my cash and was out in a flash.
I’m going to have to find another strategy for finding a large orange pumpkin. I’m not going to that Pumpkin Patch Sale again.
Here is my little orange pumpkin:
And here it is, with the little green pumpkin I bought last year, on my beautiful green Damascus tablecloth in the dining room:
Harlan Coben: Long Lost
This totally light weight mystery was just right for a beach read. It was light on motivation, light on character description, light on substance – it was a very fluffy mystery.
Long lost love calls and says “come to Paris; I need you” and doltish hero heads off. Confusing plotting calls for some irrational police interaction, some unknown bogeymen, and a truly thin story line.
You can read it in about an hour, though, or stretched out between beach activities, it might be good for a weekend. Not only lightweight, but forgettable.
Weekend At the Beach
We didn’t go far – just out to the beach, Pensacola Beach, for a weekend. It was so much fun. It rained our entire drive to the beach, LOL all twenty minutes it took to get there:
But it started clearing, and with all the clouds, the sunset was spectacular:
We all have such a good time together. We took a drive out to Fort Pickens and I saw so many butterflies!
We had to watch THE game later in the day, which the Happy Baby calls “buttball,” LLOOLLL!
Here he is at breakfast with his BaBa:
It was a beautiful day, with another beautiful sunset:
AdventureMan asked me if I wanted a house overlooking the Gulf. I said ‘no, it would never be so interesting as Kuwait.’ In Florida, I think I would want a house up high over a bayou, where there are birds and wildlife. High enough to not flood when there is a hurricane or a storm surge. . . It still was a thrill to spend a couple days high above the beach, and watch the sun set. 🙂
It’s funny the things that make a marriage succeed. It’s the little things. We both wanted to go to Barnes and Nobles because the 2012 calendars are out and we like to have calendars we love to look out through the year. You can take a chance on waiting until New Year’s week, and sometimes you get a cool calendar at 50% off, but mostly the one you really wanted is already gone gone gone, woe woe woe.
Besides that, we always like to get what we want, then the other one hides it until Christmas. By then, we’ve forgotten what we picked out, so it is a really good surprise. 😉
I told AM that I was going to have to have a chocolate fix and he said he would have to have a chocolate fix, too. We decided we could share an Oreo cake:
It was a fun idea, but it didn’t taste as good as it looked. We didn’t even finish it, it just wasn’t that great.
Uyen Nichole Duong: Mimi and Her Mirror
I must be on a streak. I really wanted to like this main character, Mi Chou (Mimi) but I found her obsessive, impulsive, overly emotional, self-absorbed and boastful. Her strongest relationship in the book is with her three way mirror. She specifically claims not to be narcissistic, and I think the story tells us otherwise.
The book is supposed to be fictional, and I truly hope some parts are fictional, but the strengths of the book lie in the ‘coming to America’ experience, which she captures well. She has a strong eye for ironies, hypocrisies and cultural differences. Her beginnings are vague, as is often the case when an immigrant goes through the shell-shock of being cut off from their own culture and grafted into another. I believe the author drew strongly on her own experiences to write this part of the book, and to me, it is the strongest part.
Mi Chau and her family leave Viet Nam during the great evacuation, and are given a spot on the planes that should have gone to someone else. Her entire family, mother, father, sister and brother all escape together, leaving behind a beloved grandmother who refuses to leave. Their entry into the US goes smoothly. They are the first wave of Vietnamese, the lucky ones. They have support, they have jobs. They have lost their own world, and they struggle. All this is part of the normal immigrant experience.
Neither is it abnormal that the children thrive through their struggles, and achieve excellent eduations. What is distracting to me in the book is how Mimi bases her self worth first on her academic excellence, and later in life on what she owns, and on her status. She has accomplished so much, she owns high-status symbols, but she is miserable and her life is empty.
Is it because of her experience as she evacuates out of Vietnam? Is it a character defect? There are no meaningful relationships in her life, she lives an empty and soulless existence, focusing on work and accomplishment and status symbols. Her major problem, as I see it, is an unwillingness to connect, to step out of herself and see through other’s eyes.
It’s an interesting book. There are, in my opinion, better books about the Vietnamese coming-to-America experience, and one is Anne Fadiman’s The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down about immigrant Hmong, which is rich in cultural teachings, rich in relationships, and I still remember details more than ten years after I first read it. It is only available in Kindle format now, through Amazon, although they may have a used copy from time to time. Way better book than Mimi.
Emergency Message for U.S Citizens: Demonstration Notice 14-2011
Emergency Message for U.S Citizens � Demonstration Notice 14-2011
September 20, 2011
Please circulate the following message without additions or omissions
immediately to all U.S. citizens within your area of responsibility.
An anti-corruption demonstration is planned for the early evening hours at
Determination Square on Wednesday, September 21 in downtown Kuwait City. An
increased police and security presence is expected in and around the capital.
There are also reports of possible demonstrations in support of Bidoon rights on
Wednesday, September 21 in the cities of Jahra, Al-Sulaibyah and Al-Ahmadi. An
increased police and security presence is also expected in these areas.
Spontaneous and planned demonstrations take place in Kuwait from time to time in
response to world events or local developments.
At times, even demonstrations intended to be peaceful can turn confrontational and possibly escalate into violence. Do not let curiosity get the best of you; avoid the areas of demonstrations and exercise caution if within the vicinity of any large gatherings. Please stay current with media coverage of local events, be aware of your surroundings, and practice personal security awareness at all times.
For the latest security information, U.S. citizens living and traveling abroad
should regularly monitor the Department of State’s Bureau of Consular Affairs
Internet website, where the current Worldwide Caution, Travel Warnings, Travel
Alerts, as well as the Country Specific Information for Kuwait can be found.
Up-to-date information on security can also be obtained by calling
1-888-407-4747 toll-free in the United States and Canada or, for callers outside
the United States and Canada, a regular toll line at 1-202-501-4444. These
numbers are available from 8:00 a.m. to 8:00 p.m. Eastern Time, Monday through
Friday (except U.S. federal holidays). You can also download our free Smart
Traveler App for travel information at your fingertips and follow us on Twitter
and the Bureau of Consular Affairs page on Facebook as well.
The U.S. Embassy is located at Al-Masjid Al-Aqsa Street, Block 6, Plot 14,
Bayan, Kuwait. If you are a U.S. citizen in need of emergency assistance in
Kuwait, you may reach the U.S. Embassy by calling +965-2259-1001 and requesting
the duty officer.
U.S. citizens living or traveling in Kuwait are encouraged to enroll in the
Department�s Smart Traveler Enrollment Program (STEP) so that they can obtain
updated information on travel and security. U.S. citizens without internet
access may enroll directly with the nearest U.S. Embassy or Consulate. By
enrolling, U.S. citizens make it easier for the Embassy or Consulate to contact
them in case of emergency. For additional information, please refer to “A Safe
Trip Abroad”.
This message may be accessed on the Embassy website, http://kuwait.usembassy.gov
Please note that the Consular Section is closed for U.S. and most local
holidays. The current holiday schedule for 2011 is posted on
http://kuwait.usembassy.gov/holidays.html
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