Category: Sabbatical

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The art and science of the Eiffel Tower

When I was first learning about travel stock photography, the Eiffel Tower was given as an example of a universally-recognized landmark that is both most-photographed and most demanded for editorial purposes. This is a bit surprising, because with so many images of it available, one would think that the demand would be satisfied many times over.

Still, there is something more to photographing the Eiffel Tower than simply chalking up another must-take image on the itinerary, at least for me personally. Just being there reaffirms that I am, in fact, in Paris. This is why it this one of the first sites I like to visit when I am in the city. Also, it somehow represents the synergy between the art and engineering, which I find fascinating.

For example, I found out recently that one of the first wind tunnels for fluid mechanics experiments was designed by Gustave Eiffel and installed in the aerodynamics laboratory at the foot of the tower in 1909. It was later moved to its present location in Auteuil in 1912, where it’s still operational, in principle. It is also curious that around that time, Eiffel was involved in a scientific argument about equivalency between testing the aerodynamic properties of objects in a wind tunnel and towing them through air on railroad tracks. Apparently, he appealed for mediation to Henri Poincaré, who declared that the tests would be equivalent, provided that there would be sufficient room in the wind tunnel to from around the tested object without obstruction (what we now refer to as low blockage).

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Fiction


I write quite a lot as part of my job as a university professor – journal papers, reports, research proposals, etc. All of this is squarely in the non-fiction category. Recently, I came across a suggestion that writing fictional stories could a fun creative exercise and a way of cultivating observation and communication skills. I decided to jump on it, taking advantage of my sabbatical. Frankly, at this time I’d jump on any idea to mix things up in terms of the workflow and study techniques – that is what a study leave is all about, I think.
Writing fiction is a completely new thing for me, though. So, as any good student, I turned to YouTube.  I decided to try this exercise, described by Abbie Emmons as a “story smoothie” (the point being that all stories are, in-fact, re-told old stories that are “blended” into something new):
  1. Take your four favourite scenes from fictional literature (or even movies, Abbie suggested, but I was happy to be able to recall four books that I liked).
  2. Take one of the four components from each of the four books/scenes – genre, theme, plot and character(s) – and mix them up into your own story.
  3. For a bonus point, change the genders and social positions, etc. of the main characters. Et voilà, c’est fait – the blended “story smoothie” idea is ready.
I do realize that there is much more to writing than generating a story idea, but it has always been the difficult part for me. I really liked this, somewhat algorithmic, way of tackling at least this first creative aspect of writing. Because I am on sabbatical in Paris, I decided to base the story here.
Can you guess where I (mostly) took the main character and the plot from? Hint: It’s an opening of a famous novel, which was made into movies many times, and the action of which mostly takes place in Paris too.
If it doesn’t ring a bell (yes, I am aware that cliché is not our friend – it’s on my list of things to work on), then I blended the ideas sufficiently well to at least avoid blatant plagiarism.
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Flashback to Milano

While flipping through my sketchbook yesterday, I came across this picture, which I sketched exactly four years ago to the day. My wife and I were on sabbatical in Milan, and our daughter and I were drawing plants on a sunny day in the Brera Botanical Garden – a quiet green nook in the middle of the city. There, we met a local artist, who came over and mentioned that he used to have the same kind of sketchbook. We chatted and looked through each other’s sketches – mine on paper and his on his phone. It was one of those fascinating “one chance – one meeting” moments, which I often go back to in my memory. Actually, it turned out to be not just one meeting, because we later had a chance to visit the artist’s home studio, being somewhat overwhelmed by his and his wife’s hospitality.

I took thousands of photographs and video clips during our six-months stay in Italy, but the sketches, which I got into a habit of doing fairly regularly, definitely carry more emotional content for me personally. On reflection, this makes me want to pick up the sketching habit again.

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Things to do in Milan

I am not a fan of “Top N things to do in Place X” type articles, partly because I think Rick Steves already does an excellent job with practically any place I realistically would want to visit. Having said this, last week, a friend asked about some advice about places to stay at and sights to see in Milan, so I pointed her to the Sabbatical section of my blog. While doing so, I realized that last year, while on sabbatical with my family, I wrote more than thirty posts about our life there – less than what I originally wanted to write, but more than I retrospectively thought I did. It actually felt good to know that my personal experience and opinion could be of use for someone else, even considering the wast amount of information available on the internet and elsewhere. Rick Steves might be a professional traveller and a better writer than me, but he is not me, so his impressions and opinions are not mine.

So here are my recommendations for a few days in Milan:

I suggest trying to visit the lakes (Como or Maggiorre) if you have a chance. Maggiore is particularly nice – you can take an island-hopping boat tour. Here is my blog post about how we did it. The town to stay in is Stresa. It is also easily accessible by train from either Milan or Switzerland.

In Milan, try staying close to Duomo – it is in the middle of everything, and the cathedral itself is the main attraction anyway. The most posh shopping is right next to Duomo too, but there are more reasonably priced stores (most of the same brands) on Corso Buenos Aires, a couple of metro stops away from Duomo. The kids will probably like the the Lego store (one block behind the Duomo along Corso Vittorio Emmanuele II).

Other areas worth visiting are Brera (for the ambiance), Sforza Castle (for the museum and the park), and Piazza Gae Aulenti (for the modern architecture). There are also some very neat churches, which are like mini museums (…those are real gems, and it reminds me that I’d like to write about them some day).

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Keeping up with children

After spending a beautiful afternoon at the Butchart Gardens, my daughter wanted to go for a run/bike ride with me. We first did thins kind of thing last year in Milan. I would go running, and she would bike alongside. We would go from our apartment along Naviglio Martesana to a playground that was about 2.5 km away. That was about how far my daughter could pedal nonstop at that time. Today we did a solid 5k, almost without a word of complaining from her. Our average pace was still nothing to brag about, but I am not taking for granted that we can do this together at all. At some point, it is I who won’t be able to keep up and will be slowing her down. What are the chances that she would want to run with me then?

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Sketching at the museum

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We discovered that our daughter loved drawing in museums when we are on sabbatical in Milan last year. We would bling her sketchbook and pencils wherever we’d go, and she would stop in front of every sculpture to draw it.

Today, we went to the Royal BC Museum in Victoria to see the wildlife photography exhibit, and there were some interactive setups aimed, I suppose, to teach kids the “rule of thirds” of composition. One could look at an animal figure through a frame with some wire grid and sketch it on a piece of paper.

Our daughter was happy to draw the animals, and she thought that the frame was cool, but as far as I could tell, she did not use any composition rules. I am glad that she she feels in her element drawing in public. And I miss our Italian museum trips, where my daughter and I sat side by side, sketching something. We should start drawing together again, while she still wants to do it.

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Running with my daughter

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Today, my daughter and I went for a bike ride/run to a nearby ocean-side park. I ran and she biked. I remember that the first time we did this was last Spring in Milan, where we were on a six-months sabbatical. We would run/bike along Naviglio Martesana. She could handle about 15 minutes of non-stop pedalling on her bike, which we borrowed from my colleague. In that time, we could get to a playground, where she would play for about half-an-hour, spending most of that time hanging on monkey bars. We would eat an apple and some pretzels, which was her go-to snack over there, much like “fishy crackers” are consistent favourites here in Canada, and head back home. It was hot. We strategically chose the path to stay in the shade, as we ran/biked along the canal.

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Today, it was cold (by Victoria standard anyway – about 0 degrees C) and windy. My daughter is stronger now and she has a bigger bike, so she can ride 30 minutes non-stop. Still, I ran at a pace, where we could talk without breathing hard. It was fun to run with her, but it was no question about playing when we got to a playground at the local park. It was so cold, that even stopping was uncomfortable. This is the thing about Victoria: the running trails around our home are some of the best I’ve tried anywhere in the world. The air is unbelievably fresh – I was really missing it in Milan. The nature is spectacular. The people are friendly and polite. Yet, it is just not quite warm enough to be truly enjoyable.

To be fair, though, I would need to compare apples to apples, or rather, winter to winter. The very first time I ran in Milan was in the winter, in the cold, in the dark, along a busy Via Melchiorre Gioia to Piazza Game Aulenti, which was the closest place to our apartment (that I knew of), where some stores were open late at night. I wanted to buy a thermos for my daughter to bring hot chocolate in to her ice-skating lesson the next morning (the irony of the fact that she came to Italy from Canada to learn skating is not lost on me, by the way), so I decided to make a running workout of the shopping trip. It was slippery with ice, windy, dark, noisy and generally quite unpleasant to run that night. But at that time, when we were without a car for the first time in many years, simply bing able to cove some distance on foot and explore the new city was liberating.

Today also, the simple fact that my daughter and I could on the whim put on the runners, jump on a bike and be in a forest, by the ocean in less than 15 minutes, chatting all the way there, was definitely a gift, cold weather or not.

Night view of the Unicredit tower in Piazza Gae Aulenti. Milan. Italy.
Night view of the Unicredit tower in Piazza Gae Aulenti. Milan. Italy.

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Well-forgotten old

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There is a saying: “New is well-forgotten old”. These days, as we are unpacking after returning from sabbatical, I am confirming that there is indeed a lot of truth in it.

We had so much luggage while travelling for seven months that it seemed that we were carrying the entire household with us. In reality, we had much more stuff packed in boxes while we are away.

When we came back, there are many logistical issues to take care of in order to put the school-work-other life routine back on track. It seems that whatever stuff we have brought in our suitcases is perfectly enough for us to function. It is tempting to think that the rest of it is simply not needed (which, technically, is the case).

It is actually a fairly unique chance to re-consider which objects “spark joy”, to borrow the term from Marie Kondo, and which ones can be thanked for their service and discarded. The killer, of course, is that the “konmari” organizing principle implies physically picking up each single item I own and engaging with it intellectually and emotionally. And I have too many socks to talk to.

On the other hand, our daughter is having a blast as we unpack the boxes, because she is uncovering her old toys that she has completely forgotten about. It literally seems like Christmas. Oh, and of course we are are re-confirming the well-known fact that the packing boxes often make much better toys than whatever gifts they contain.

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Time running like a cheetah

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It’s been a month since we came back from sabbatical, and our six-years-old daughter said, being in one of her philosophical moods: “In Milan, time was running like a cheetah, chasing away holidays, so that they would pass quickly. Here in Victoria, time goes a bit slower. I like that.”

I am not sure I agree – I hardly noticed the last month with all the logistics of re-establishing the daily routines and the start of the school year, both for us and for our daughter. I did go to Japan during that time, though, and visited the places we called home during our last sabbatical. That was certainly nice, and I guess, a lot has happened in this short last month. Doest it mean that time runs fast or slow? My daughter is probably right after all.

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Kanazawa seven years later

Kanazawa Castle. Japan.
Kanazawa Castle. Japan.

Kanazawa was our home base for three months during my last sabbatical. Coming there again has some strong sense of deja vu.

Riding a bus to the university and hearing the names of the stops that I thought I had forgotten, walking past the building called “Rifare” near the train station where my wife went for Japanese lessons, wondering around Kenrokuen in the the summer heat and stopping to have green tea with sweets in a teahouse by the pond, sliding in my socks on the wide wooden floor planks of the castle and wondering how many samurai died while climbing those insanely steep stairs – everything seems familiar and nostalgic.

But things has changed a lot in Kanazawa since the last time I was there, and the reason is the new shinkansen line that now makes the city easily accessible to tourists. While seven years ago there were hardly any English signs at the bus stops (many stops had no written signs at all), now there are tourist information points and signage in both Japanese and English everywhere.

Oyama Shrine. Kanazawa. Japan.
Oyama Shrine. Kanazawa. Japan.

Most strikingly, there are many foreigners on the streets, while it seems that seven years ago my wife and I were the only ones. I still remember one time when I turned a corner in the Nomura bukeyashiki district and came face-to-face with a schoolboy of about 10 years of age. When he saw me, he stopped right in his tracks, turned around and ran back to his friends yelling: “Gaijin san! Gaijin san!” Now, it seems, there are as many foreigners as there are Japanese tourists around main attractions like the castle, the Kenrokuen and the Higashi Ochaya district.

Women in traditional clothes in Hagashi Ochaya district in Kanazawa. Japan.
Hagashi Ochaya district in Kanazawa. Japan.

The Higashi Ochaya deserves a special mention. I went there on my last day of this visit, and the place was swarming with tourists. Just like in Higashiyama in Kyoto, people were strolling around in rental kimonos, taking selfies. I remember that during our last trip, my wife and I were enormously happy that by shear luck we were able to capture a photograph of a group of people in yukatas walking along the street. The whole place was largely empty then. This time, there were literally crowds of yukaja-wearing people, and my main photographic challenge was to isolate just one group in the frame.

And of course, the teahouses themselves have multiplied. Where before there were only a couple of cafes serving sweets and tea n the whole district, now I had a choice of at least five or six on a single street. I went to the same place where my wife and I went before. This time, there was a book by the door, where I had to sign in my name and wait in line until it was called. And the menu has expanded too since the last time. I had a hot matcha latte and a “matcha parfe” – a culinary masterpiece made of vanilla and green tea ice-cream, whipped cream and soft sweets made of mochi and red beans.

The shinkansen has definitely opened Kanazawa to the world, and the change has been sweet!

Women in traditional clothes in Hagashi Ochaya district in Kanazawa. Japan.
Hagashi Ochaya district in Kanazawa. Japan.