Quarter Year

Bagan Temple Tour from Mike Goldstein on Vimeo.

(Come to the page if you can’t see the video above).

Here’s Az inside one of the many temples – from January 2010 in Bagan, Myanmar. Below are a couple stills pulled from the video.

… then watch it again in a month.

Salatin Project from rob walker on Vimeo.

In 50 minutes Salatin sums up the most important reasons to eat locally, organically and seasonally.

by MIke

This took place in the basement of a restaurant in Rize, Turkey. One of the men here has taken it on himself to collect, celebrate and distribute important pieces of Turkish & Ottoman culture. You can see in the background that there’s a table of women enjoying the show as well – definitely a sign of a liberal establishment. Most of the men playing the instruments are college professors, apparently, so this is a progressive group.

They had a book with over 5,000 songs – it was a hand written book with pages falling out and notes tucked in… Somehow they knew all the songs. Apparently Turkey has 14,000 folk songs. This was a contrast to what we’d just experienced in Haiti – a culture that has only been around for a few hundred years (though some folk songs surely reached back to West Africa). Point is that countries with indigenous cultures just acquire more songs, culinary and medicinal traditions, art, unique lifeways… they’ve had more time to be where they are. I prefer traveling in places like that.

Osk, Turkey

(If you can’t see the above video, click here)

by Mike

A little video of break time at a rubble site. N-Joy!

Some details from a Balinese rice paddy.

by Mike

Bali’s climate is so f-ing perfect that on any day of the year you can see all phases of rice cultivation: sowing, growing, harvesting. We came across this little corner when we were lost and trying to find our way back to Ubud. We knew we wanted to come back, so we made a backwards map as we drove home – Azure took a picture of each corner we turned, then the next day we traced it in reverse.

While I’d always understood presence to mean a sharp focus on – say – your breath as it hits your nose, here it meant paying attention to the area within earshot, which I consider Place. When we look back at photos sometimes I remember, “At that time I was dealing with a window washing issue back home.” or something like that. How strange is it that I’m looking at photos and thinking of a far-away adventure, but at the time of the photo I was thinking about home? It’s one of the struggles of modern travel: leaving home at home, not just in words, but in thoughts and attention as well.

From the town of Troo, near Tours, France.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KTnwYI2ltxg&hl=en&fs=1]

Porto, Corsica

Narrated by Mike

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sYVbKcqR1yk&hl=en&fs=1]