In the past, I’ve read British books and not known the relevant money-related vocabulary. This sign, spotted at the museum of the Reserve Bank of New Zealand, should help!
Money words
The Northern Explorer train trip & Wellington
Over the course of something like 11 hours, The Northern Explorer train took us through beautiful scenery from Auckland to Wellington.
Below are 11 photos from the train and 76 photos from Wellington (mostly taken in the botanic garden).
Continue reading The Northern Explorer train trip & Wellington
Brass bird sculpture from Waiheke Island
This bird sculpture was made by Paora Toi-Te-Rangiuaia, a Maori artist whose shop I wandered into on Waiheke Island. He is a jeweler and self-trained sculptor who uses traditional Maori symbols and subjects, and is fascinated with bird and feather forms, which he has reproduced in stone, wood, and various metals. I’m proud to have been able to bring this little bird home with me.
Here’s a photo of a real wax-eye or silver-eye bird, the kind the sculpture was modeled on, taken by someone good at bird photos:
Waiheke Island & Waiheke Ferry trip
My husband and I stayed overnight in the airport hotel in Sydney at the beginning of our Australia/New Zealand holiday. Then we moved on and met his parents in a hotel in Auckland. We didn’t really do anything in Auckland except take a daytrip to Waiheke Island.
Below are 12 photos from our visit to Waiheke Island, where I admired the flowers, tasted some local wine, and bought a small brass bird sculpture.
Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets (2017)
Watching Valerian and the Movie with the Ridiculously Long Harry Potter–esque Title was a strange experience. I can’t say I liked it overall.
I think what grated most was the absurd idealization of the beautiful, innocent, peaceful aliens. They’re harder to relate to than gods or robots! In religions across the world, supernatural beings (with the notable exception of Cthulhu) always have some human behavioral characteristics that help us understand, admire, and/or emulate them. In Asimov’s science fiction stories about robots, even the robots are more complicated (and thus more interesting) than these aliens, because even with only a scant handful of unbreakable rules to follow, conflict is inevitable.
Yes, the innocents are aliens, so we could imagine that they have a society infinitely freer of conflict than any we’ve ever come across, but there’s really no point putting them in a human story if they are impossible to identify with. Nevertheless, not only are they in this story, they are the story. If it’s not possible to care about them, then why would anybody want to watch this movie?
Well, Valerian contains a lot of surprising, inventive, and beautiful, uh, stuff. As this guardian review puts it:
Valerian has the courage of its fearsome convictions, and if you’re willing to overlook things like acting, plot, characterization, dialogue, character arcs, pacing, structure and leads, as many science fiction die-hards are willing to do, then Valerian is a nifty spectacle that excels as eye-candy even if it comes up short in every other respect.
In other words, maybe it’s cult-classic material, albeit not for my particular kind of cult.
https://itunes.apple.com/us/movie/valerian-and-the-city-of-a-thousand-planets/id1254728550
More opinions below, with SPOILERS.
Continue reading Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets (2017)
The Social Cancer (Noli Me Tangere) by José Rizal
I love books. I love languages. I built welovetranslations.com. You can read this post on that site!
I posted some background information and opinions on The Social Cancer (Noli Me Tangere) in my Backlist books post on Asian Books Blog.
Below are some quotes from the book and explanations for why I chose them.
Continue reading The Social Cancer (Noli Me Tangere) by José Rizal
Thor: Ragnarok (2017)
I saw Thor: Ragnarok. It was lots of fun, even if I could see some of the jokes coming a mile away.
https://itunes.apple.com/us/movie/thor-ragnarok/id1298386140
National Gallery Singapore
My husband and I visited the National Gallery.
We went through DBS Singapore Galleries 1, 2, and 3 on Level 2. We saw the Chief Justice’s Chamber and Office, as well as UOB Southeast Asia Galleries 1, 2 and 3 on Level 3. We’ll have to go back another time and see galleries 4 to 15 and the Wu Guanzhong Gallery.
I especially liked:
- a portrait of Hugh Charles Clifford, Governor of the Straits Settlements
- this weird nativity scene by Richard Walker
- this sciencey chair illusion
- seeing Singapore’s declaration of independence
- this massive painting of animals fleeing a forest fire
- having the chance to see a portrait of José Rizal, author of Noli Me Tangere
After visiting the gallery, my husband and I crossed Anderson Bridge, where this photo was taken, and got drinks at Starbucks at the Fullerton Waterboat House.
Calvin and Hobbes in Translation
I love books. I love languages. I built welovetranslations.com. You can read this post on that site!
This collection of translations of Bill Watterson’s The Revenge of the Baby- Sat probably got started when I went to Italy in 2002 and chanced upon a copy of the Italian translation.
Undoubtedly I bought the Portuguese one in Portugal in 2004 and the German one in Germany in 2008. My husband fetched me the French one from France at some point or other, having somehow determined that the contents were the same even though the cover was different. A neighbor kindly brought back the Chinese version for me when she went to visit family in Beijing recently.
Seeing Calvin’s words in other languages that use the Roman alphabet is one thing; seeing them in Chinese characters is quite strange.
Below are images of the six different book covers: French, Italian, Portuguese, German, English, and Chinese.
There are translations available in other languages, including Spanish (ISBN 9786075271170), Dutch (ISBN 97890542562), and Czech (ISBN 9788074490798), as well…
Coco (2017)
I thought I disliked Olaf the snowman because he falls apart all the time, but I didn’t dislike Miguel’s skeleton ancestors in Coco when they fell apart (over and over again) in the oddly godless land of the dead, so it must be something else about Olaf that rubs me the wrong way. Sadly, the creators of Frozen made him the central character in the animated short Olaf’s Frozen Adventure, which played before Coco.
Coco was totally worth the wait, however. The storytelling was crystal clear, emotional, and well-structured, with appropriate foreshadowing, lots of call-backs, and some stunning visuals. I couldn’t believe that a couple of adults next to me in the theater found it hard to stay awake; I found it hard not to cry.
Coco is the story of Miguel, the youngest in a long line of Mexican shoemakers. Coco is Miguel’s ancient great-grandmother. Coco and her mother were abandoned by an aspiring music man, so no one in the family is allowed to sing or play an instrument. They’re all fine with that… except Miguel. He wants nothing more than to be allowed to develop his musical talent. Eager to prove himself, he tries to steal the guitar from the tomb of a famous local musician so he can enter a competition being held as part of the town’s Day of the Dead celebrations. The theft doesn’t go as planned, and Miguel finds himself on a quest that teaches him about the dangers of ambition and the value of family.
See below for a plot summary with SPOILERS in the form of a beat sheet in the style described in Blake Snyder’s Save the Cat.
