Since leaving America August 2006, I have traveled to sixteen countries. A great deal has happened. This site is to share my thoughts, photos, music, writings, travel experiences, and developing political/social commentary with you. I hope you find it interesting and informative.
Maybe it’s cultural bias, but I usually don’t associate the countries of southeast Asia, all of which I’ve personally visited — Thailand, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, and Myanmar — with “cutting edge” or “high-tech” art.
Our recent visit to Chiang Mai, Thailand certainly proved me wrong. Masumi and I discovered one of the most spectacular art museums I’ve ever encountered ... the Illusion Art Museum.
First, consider the animated Mona Lisa video encountered in the lobby of the museum.
That was nothing compared to the unique and mind-boggling interactive works inside. Feast your eyes on these!
After that spectacular experience, exiting the main room we ended up here. Looks like a pen and ink drawing of a café, eh?
Nope. It’s a real café!
There are many exceptional things to see and do in Chiang Mai. If you visit there, the Illusion Art Museum should be high on your list.
[ This originated at the author''s personal website . . . https://jdrachel.com ]
I continue to be amazed at the level of education here in Japan. While test scores are falling in the West, those here and in China continue to rise.
Most concern about academic performance focuses on math and reading ability, but since my wife, Masumi, is a music teacher, I get to take a close look at music education. Schools here consider music an important part of overall development, realization of full human potential. I’m always astonished at what Masumi gets her students to do, culminating in a concert each year, attended by proud parents. Though she teaches 2nd through 6th grade, the musical pieces the kids master are by any stretch not simple.
It starts as soon as the kids arrive at school. Kindergarten is two years here, for four and five year olds. The following videos are from a school in Tokyo. We’ll start with a performance by five-year-old Kindergarteners.
Pretty amazing, eh? If that didn’t blow your mind, here are FOUR-YEAR-OLD kindergarteners from the same school.
Finally, here are students at all levels, Kindergarten through 6th grade of the same elementary school, performing an excerpt from Beethoven’s 9th Symphony.
Kids love to be challenged. A big part of confidence and self-esteem comes from improvement and a real sense of accomplishment. I wonder if kids in the West are over-pampered and their egos shielded from the horrors of failure, at the expense of ever attempting and achieving excellence. Just a thought that occurs to me when I see what’s happening the public education in America.
Masumi and I love to travel and have been many places around the world. To name them: Germany, Netherlands, France, Luxembourg, Switzerland, Italy, Slovenia, Austria, Russia, Estonia, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, USA, Thailand, Malaysia, Vietnam, India, Hong Kong, and South Korea. And of course, we’ve gone from one end of Japan to the other, Hokkaido to Okinawa and much in between.
But for four years, until this summer, we couldn’t travel internationally. Covid lockdowns and related travel obstacles put our wanderlust on hold. Our last trip was to Chiang Mai, Thailand, end of December 2019/beginning of January 2020. Now, with the fear porn of the “pandemic” at least temporarily suspended — I say that because I see their ramping it up again now targeting a return of many Covid restrictions in October — we boarded a plane late July and returned to Chiang Mai, I guess to pick up where we left off.
The trip was only eight days but it was action-packed and full of pleasant surprises. Maybe it was the rebound of being “let out of the cage” that created the perfect mindset, or maybe it truly was spectacular. Whatever the case, we both agreed that this was one of our best vacations ever!
To get things off to a unique start, the day after we arrived, we went to a Thai cooking school. We really lucked out and got the best instructor/stand-up comedian of the lot. That’s our class in the photo at the top and our instructor is the lady with the yellow apron bottom left. A lot was packed into six hours of hands-on learning the secrets of Thailand’s exotic, delicious, if sometimes way-too-spicy cuisine.
The school van picked us up at our guest house early in the morning. First stop: a local market to . . . well, I guess to shop.
Next we arrived at the school, and Masumi immediately made a new friend.
Our next stop was the garden, where they grew herbs and spices, mushrooms and marijuana. Yes, marijuana, which any user will tell you makes everything taste great! This is interesting. Since we last visited Thailand, marijuana has been legalized and we saw dispensaries all over the city. They’re in such abundance, they may eventually surpass massage parlors in ubiquity. Now I assume these new enterprises are meant to service the thousands of tourists, as well as local stoners. What was truly astonishing is that in eight days, glancing in the shop windows as we strolled by, I never saw a single customer in these shiny new stores. Not one! Not sure what to think, other than there are going to be a lot of these ganja shops filing for bankruptcy in the very near future.
Anyway, back to the herb and spice garden. Our teacher took us on a tour, we pinched various spice plants, rolled their leaves between our thumb and fingers, smelled them, occasionally tasted them. Not much else to say about it. I guess it was a bit of an epiphany for yours truly that herbs did not magically appear on the shelf of a supermarket in bottles with fancy labels on them, stamped with an expiration date.
Now it was time to get down to business. I’ll spare you the minute details. Suffice it to say that Masumi was a model student, but I was designated class clown for my ability to mangle simple, easily-comprehended directions, managing to do just the wrong thing, or the right thing at the wrong time. Nevertheless, somehow, by the grace of the food gods, perhaps purely by accident, I produced some rather delicious cuisine . . . if I can claim some bragging rights here.
The final phase of our instruction, though it actually seemed out of order, was the preparation of pepper, both green and red, which seem to find their way into the preponderance of cuisine in this unique and colorful country. I mean hot pepper, not ordinary pepper. Use of this caustic substance is fairly common in the East. In South Korea, they serve dishes which could start a forest fire in Antarctica. India is another country that comes to mind when I think of pepper, and its wicked step-sister, curry. We learned how to grind into a lethal paste this venomous herb, which I think it God’s way of giving us a preview of Hell.
I was able to capture briefly how funny, energetic, enthusiastic, and entertaining our teacher was for this entire educational experience. Here it is. What a hoot!
So there you have it. An unforgettable six hours learning to make inedible food — just kidding! Our final dishes weren’t that spicy. At least we didn’t have to call an ambulance.
Without wanting to sound like a broken record, living in an agricultural region — and this could be anywhere in the world — is still an adventure for me, with fresh epiphanies and surprises a regular occurrence. Watching the cycle of plant, grow, harvest puts life on a unique timeline. I love it!
We live in the middle of farm fields. Most of what is being grown appears to be rice and soybeans, which are called kuromame [ 黒豆 ] i.e. black beans. Tambasasayama is famous across Japan for its black beans and the streets are packed with tourists at harvest time.
Little did I know that Hyogo Prefecture — the equivalent to a state or province — is among the top producers in a host of other agricultural products. As you can see from the mapping above, the abundance is astonishing. For the record, these are at the top of the list for all of Japan:
#1 Crab #1 Black Soybeans #1 Sake Rice #1 Shirasu, Ikanago #2 Onions #2 Red Beans #2 Seaweed Paper #2 Octopus
I continue to be amazed at the level of education here in Japan. While test scores are falling in the West, those here and in China continue to rise.
Most concern about academic performance focuses on math and reading ability, but since my wife, Masumi, is a music teacher, I get to take a close look at music education. Schools here consider music an important part of overall development, realization of full human potential. I’m always astonished at what Masumi gets her students to do, culminating in a concert each year, attended by proud parents. Though she teaches 2nd through 6th grade, the musical pieces the kids master are by any stretch not simple.
It starts as soon as the kids arrive at school. Kindergarten is two years here, for four and five year olds. The following videos are from a school in Tokyo. We’ll start with a performance by five-year-old Kindergarteners.
Pretty amazing, eh? If that didn’t blow your mind, here are FOUR-YEAR-OLD kindergarteners from the same school.