In London, in Great Britain, throughout the world, people are waiting excitedly for the royal wedding next Friday. It seems you can’t turn on the TV, browse the Internet, or go anywhere really without Will and Kate’s shining faces everywhere you look. Some people are getting a little tired of all the royal wedding stuff. Some people cannot wait for it to be over.

I for one am not one of them.

I’ve mentioned before my affection for London and that extends to my absolute fascination with the royal family, nurtured by afternoons spent walking through the Victoria & Albert museum and discovering Queen Victoria’s beloved family vacation home at Osborne House on the Isle of Wight. Or a magical day trip up to Windsor Castle and the gardens and Queen Mary’s Dolls’ House. Or how I knew I had an obsession when I visited the Tower of London and found myself weeping upon viewing Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation video.

I don’t know what it is. Something about the enormity and the history and the magnitude and the rituals and the perfect pomp and circumstance that surrounds British royalty just has this effect on me. So you better believe I’ll be glued to the TV next Friday for The Royal Wedding.

I wasn’t around when Diana Spencer wed Charles, Prince of Wales but from the photos and memorabilia I’ve seen, it truly was a fairytale wedding. This time around, it’s different. Kate and William will be doing as “modern” of a wedding as they can within the framework of a royal wedding. And moreover, their relationship seems different. It’s being portrayed more like two equals who truly fell in love, instead of this lucky commoner who has landed a spot at the royal table.

If you follow pop culture at all, you’ve witnessed Kate and William’s courtship for years and years now. From the outside, it really seems like they built the foundation for a lasting marriage: they took their time and are clearly great friends too. Kate has had a gradual introduction to royal life and though I’m sure the pressure and reality of it all will continue to multiply after the wedding, most people seem to feel that she will do great. She has the grace and poise of a true princess – even though she is a “commoner”!

How about you, excited for the royal wedding? Tapped out? For me, it’s far less about what will she wear and all the typical “wedding details,” much more about witnessing part of history.

For more royal weddings, look back at the last 150 years of royal weddings.

All photos borrowed from the British Monarchy Flickr PhotoStream.

This weekend was especially tough, being out of town, but I’m still just glowing from it. Spending time with our families is always reinvigorating for me. It gently reminds me of who I am and makes me feel grounded, and what, with all the change and the travel and the moving and the… the change we’ve been going through (and oh, there’s only more to come, just you wait), I so needed that. I think we both did.

(We. My husband and I. Me and my husband. We. Weeeeeee. Oui?)

Okay, so I sort of did a cop out summary picture/vignettes post last night of the “mels” (Ethiopian party), I know. But I was sitting there in the living room with my mother and brothers-in-law, my in-laws if you will (wow, that was a first), eating leftovers, soaking up our last few hours together before we had to go to bed and hop on a plane the next morning, and I mostly just wanted to spend the quality time with them. (Remember, family first. Then blogging.)

So I think I owe you a few more details about the mels:

First of all, we wore traditional Ethiopian clothing, which was a first for me. All in all I really enjoyed that part. It helped me embrace the culture and spirit of the day even more. It did feel a tad dramatic to enter the party with our black velour capes and and crowns on but we soon shed those. I wore an orange/copper colored trumpet-style dress which I never would have chosen for myself (I definitely avoided that style when looking for my wedding dress) but somehow I think it suited me. I never really felt comfortable with the way it binds your legs together, though. Makes it really hard to do all that crazy Ethiopian dancing, and trust you me, there was much crazy Ethiopian dancing.

I say “crazy” because there is something so spirited about Ethiopian dancing that it just fills the room with energy and joy in a way other types of dancing can’t do. There’s a lot on hands of hips and shoulder shaking, which I’m not the best at but Andreas excels at it, which is funny because hates all other kinds of dancing but when it comes to Ethiopian dancing, he’s in his realm. I love watching it. And when things start to really heat up, the women let out this high-pitched “lelelelelelele” sound, that was described to us as “an expression of pure joy.” Amazing.

Some of my favorite moments came when my parents attempted to learn the dancing. I have a video of my Dad and Andreas dancing together that I’ll try to get posted sometime this week.

And of course I have to mention the food, because hello, have you met me? I’m a total fattie. I love food.  I talked a lot before the mels about how excited I was for the food and it did NOT dissapoint. A’s family actually hired an Ethiopian chef to cook everything and it was all incredibly delicious. They had all my favorites: beg alicha (lamb in a mild yellow sauce), with collard greens, cheese, and lentils, and of course  lots and lots of dark, chewy, sour injera. And now I’m really kicking myself for not getting a picture of all the food but I’d like to see you come face to face with a spread like that and say, wait. Let me take a picture.

]]> http://www.thespottedduck.com/2009/11/09/what-with-all-the-change/feed/ 1 http://www.thespottedduck.com/2009/11/08/the-party-the-weekend/ http://www.thespottedduck.com/2009/11/08/the-party-the-weekend/#comments Mon, 09 Nov 2009 02:16:57 +0000 Shelley Senai http://www.thespottedduck.com/?p=1603

Dancing until we were out of breath,
Eating until we were out of breath.
And yes. Of course there was cake.

Party, replete with squealing little girls,
And new friends. And the coming together,
Of two different worlds.

Then memorial after memorial,
And pictures and museums,
On the prettiest of pretty fall days.

Wherein shadows with were played,
Horses were petted,
And sno-cones gnawed to oblivion.

All in all the most superb of weekends.

I haven’t been to New Orleans since last September, for my grandmother’s funeral. It was a nightmarish trip (stranded in Memphis 10 hours before the funeral started, my Dad and I wound up driving through the night to be there) and (obviously) an extremely emotionally draining one.

After the funeral, I began a long email exchange with a cousin of mine who revealed much of our family history to me, the details of which my entire side of the family was unaware. I learned just how tied the blood in my veins is to the very core of Louisiana history, slavery and emancipation, the intersection of black and white.

Now I go back with a bit of a heavy heart. I’ve never known a New Orleans without my grandmother living in it, and I’ve never looked at Louisiana in this new light of my connection to it.

But New Orleans is a city that knows sadness. New Orleans knows how to walk hand in hand with sadness and joy, throw back some liquor and some seafood and laugh through the pain. It was never the city of my birth, but it is the place of my ancestors. And it will always hold a dear spot my heart.

I studied Philip Larkin in the English class I took while studying abroad in London. It was dissecting this poem that showed me how beautiful, how intricate, how artful, poetry can really be. I love to read this poem out loud. Hear how the words float from my lips. I love the meaning, haunting and simple and yet you go, “Hmm. Never thought of it that way before.”

Ambulances
by Philip Larkin

Closed like confessionals, they thread
Loud noons of cities, giving back
None of the glances they absorb.
Light glossy grey, arms on a plaque,
They come to rest at any kerb:
All streets in time are visited.

Then children strewn on steps or road,
Or women coming from the shops
Past smells of different dinners, see
A wild white face that overtops
Red stretcher-blankets momently
As it is carried in and stowed,

And sense the solving emptiness
That lies just under all we do,
And for a second get it whole,
So permanent and blank and true.
The fastened doors recede. Poor soul,
They whisper at their own distress;

For borne away in deadened air
May go the sudden shut of loss
Round something nearly at an end,
And what cohered in it across
The years, the unique random blend
Of families and fashions, there

At last begin to loosen. Far
From the exchange of love to lie
Unreachable insided a room
The trafic parts to let go by
Brings closer what is left to come,
And dulls to distance all we are.

Well, kind of. I didn’t grow up in city. I grew up in a very suburban neighborhood in Maryland, about 15 miles from Washington D.C. But if the choice comes down to city kid or country kid, then yes, I’m definitely a city kid.

There’s a lot that’s good about being a city kid. Like how I feel comfortable navigating public transportation systems just about anywhere, or how I’ve always had access to fine art museums, or how everything I could possibly need wasn’t a far drive (or now, walk) away, or how I can be as visible or invisible as I want to be.

But because I’m a city kid, there’s lots I don’t know. Like how to grow my own food, or what an asparagus plant looks like, or what it would be like to know every single kid in school and what their family grows.

Okay, I’m making a lot of generalizations right now. I realize that. Lots of country kids probably have no trouble getting around on public transit, and likewise, plenty of city kids probably know what an asparagus plant looks like. But the point is, I don’t. I have no clue. I know how to find out, sure, but to country kids this is practically common sense.

Right now I’m reading Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver, and she has really opened my eyes to all I DON’T know about where our food comes from, what living on a farm is like, and the importance of buying locally grown meat and produce. I keep finding myself turning to Andreas and saying things like, “Did you know that each food item on an American dinner plate traveled an average of 1,500 miles to be there?”

One of the most useful things I’ve learned is a trick for knowing whether or not something is “in season.” I always had a vague sense that fruits and vegetables go in and out of season and that if you can catch something when it’s in season, it’s likely going to be cheaper and taste better.

I remember trips to the grocery store as a kid, asking my parents if such and such a fruit or vegetable was in season. (“Hmm, I don’t know. Squeeze it.”)

Kingsolver points out how ridiculous the notion of being able to have any fruit or vegetable, any time of the year, really is. I had never stopped to think about this before but now it gives me pause every time I go to the grocery store. Way back before transporting food was an ordinary thing, before it was even a luxury, people ate what they grew, when they grew it.

The example Kingsolver gives is that it takes a watermelon about three months to grow, so if you find yourself eating one in April, count back three months to January and imagine what place on earth was warm enough to grow a watermelon then. California? Mexico? Chile? Then imagine the cost of transporting a “finicky fruit the size of a toddler” to your door. Yeah.

Most of the produce we now eat has been bred for transport, genetically tweaked and tinkered with to the point that the original fruit is lost altogether. In order to be able to have any fruit or vegetable we want, whenever we want it, we’ve modified our crops for uniform appearance and ease of packaging and sacrificed taste in the meantime.

The trick Kingsolver uses for knowing when something is in season starts with picturing the Mother of All Plants (she calls it the “vegetannual” but I prefer the Mother of All Plants, or the MOAP). Like any plant, the MOAP starts with small leaves in the spring, then bigger leaves, then flowers appear, followed by small green fruits. By summer, the fruits grow “larger, riper, more colorful,” then by fall, they mature into “hard-shelled fruits” with seeds inside. Finally, in late fall, the MOAP hoards it sugars into storage, in the form of tubers, bulbs, and roots.

Now, picture an entire season of foods coming from the MOAP. Start with early spring (April-May), when the leaves start to appear (that’s your lettuces, your kale, your spinach, your leafy greens); then the flowers bloom in May and June (your cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower); come mid-June you have your “tender young fruit set,” (snow peas, baby squash, cucumbers), followed in July by more mature fruits (green beans, green peppers, small tomatoes); by summer you have your colorful fruits (fully grown tomatoes, eggplants, red and yellow peppers); in August and September, the harder fruits and squashes with seeds inside (cantaloupes, honeydews, watermelons, pumpkins); and finally, your root crops.

Granted, there are some exceptions to this model (Kingsolver mentions onions and carrots) but in general, it works, and when I read this, something about it just clicked in my brain. Can it really be that simple? I don’t know why I was thinking that every individual fruit and vegetable had it’s own special time of year in which it matured. Seems like common sense now, but I had just never put two and two together. OH. All leafy greens come into season at the same time. OH, and it coincides with when the trees are pushing out their green leaves in the spring. Of course. Nature isn’t that complicated.

I’m only about a quarter of the way through Animal, Vegetable, Miracle but already there have been several other “a-ha!” moments like this. (By the way, part of my fascination stems from Kingsolver’s incredible writing. If you haven’t read any of her fiction, you’re missing out. Start with The Poisonwood Bible and tell me she’s not a master in character development.)

The only downside here is that all this newfound food knowledge makes me think twice far more often at the grocery store. And while it makes me a more informed consumer and probably a more environmentally friendly one as well, it has also made me feel incredibly guilty about buying out of season. I see fresh asparagus at Stop and Shop now and I think, “Hmm. Asparagus. Well, the MOAP grows asparagus in the spring, so where did this come from? Some place with spring-like temperatures in mid-November. It certainly wasn’t a farm in New England.”

And I know, it’s a good thing. Still, I’m going to miss asparagus.

p.s. I’ll save the lessons I’ve learned about turkey until after Thanksgiving. Suffice to say that nothing, not even knowing now the goings-on in the turkey-making business here in the U.S., will keep me away from my Thanksgiving turkey.

Those of you who read this blog regularly know I don’t usually talk about work or clients. Not because I don’t enjoy those things (on the contrary, I very much do), but because this blog naturally tends to take more of a personal slant. But the Museum of Russian Icons is just such a great story, and I had so much fun hanging out there last week, I can’t resist talking about it here.

The story of this extraordinary museum begins with a gentleman named Gordon Lankton. Gordon was an engineer by trade. He made his money in the nylon industry, heading a company called NyPro for 30 years, and growing it from $600,000 in annual sales to the billion dollar level with locations in something like 16 countries.

Soon after the Soviet Union opened in 1989, Gordon went there to look into opening a NyPro office in Moscow. It was on this trip that he bought his first icon in a market. If you’re not familiar with Russian icons, they are sacred pieces of art painted on wood that depict saints, Bible stories, Jesus and Mary, etc. As Gordon tells it, he bought that first icon for about $20, the next one was $50, the one after was $100, and so it went until his collection topped 100 icons and his wife put her foot down. “No more icons.”

So he looked into donating his collection, approaching several major metropolitan museums in New York and Massachusetts. But he learned that only a few icons would be displayed, every few years. That wasn’t good enough for Gordon. He wanted all the icons to be displayed, all the time. That’s when the idea of opening a museum was born.

Gordon is often asked, “why Clinton? Why not a major city?” Besides the fact that he wanted to give back to the town that gave him so much, Gordon really believes that there’s something to be said for small, single-subject museums off the beaten path. He has a point. As much as I love big museums, their sheer volume can be overwhelming at times. You go and try to see everything but wind up seeing very little. It can be frustrating. A single-subject museum allows you to really dive deeply into one particular type of art, and it’s location makes it a destination in and of itself, again allowing you to really focus on the subject at hand. Not to mention the fact that Clinton is just the cutest little town, very “old New England” yet just an hour outside of Boston. It happens home to the nation’s oldest public park, which sits adjacent to the museum and is nothing short of charming and beautiful in the fall.

When I first went to the museum, I didn’t know what to expect. I didn’t know what a Russian icon was, and I thought the museum itself would be small and humble. From the outside, that seems to be true. The museum is housed in an historic brick building that used to be the town’s first post office. The inside, however, is completely modern and sleek, the icons set against a flat black backdrop with a lighting installation around the walls that goes from fiery red to neon greens and blues.

The setting is stunning, but just plain enough to let the icons themselves really stand out. What was even more surprising to me was how interested I became in these objects. Not only are they beautiful, not only do they display incredible craftsmanship and detail, not only do they tell familiar stories, but they command a significant amount of respect, purely from their age (some date back to the 14th century) and importance.

To members of the Russian Orthodox religion, these are not pieces of art, these are sacred, revered objects that are meant to watch over those who worship them. And they are deeply ingrained in Russian culture and history, first installed in churches to help the (often illiterate) masses understand the Bible stories, then later banned and destroyed en masse by Stalin. Now it’s illegal to take them out of the country, though all of Gordon’s Russian icons were obtained either before this ban went into place or from Western Europe where they were smuggled during those years.

As I’ve mentioned, I love so much about Russia. I love Russian culture, Russian people, and the Russian language. So working with the museum felt much more like fun than work. It helps that my ancestors on my fathers side immigrated from Russia in the early part of the 20th century. It also helps that I’m dating a guy who’s half Russian, whose family has welcomed me with open arms and lots and lots of food.

This week, the museum opened an exhibit called “Two Museums, One Culture” that features 16 icons from the State Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow. All but one of these icons have never left Russia; the Tretyakov almost never lends them out. But through Gordon’s long-established relationship with the museum, he was able to get them to agree to the exhibit, which runs through early May. It was an honor to hang around the museum as they installed this historic exhibit, then hosted a slew of Russian dignitaries and officials from the Tretyakov for the opening.

Amazing how, even now, as tensions mount between Russia and the U.S., these two cultures were able to come together in mutual respect and admiration for each other in the name of these very special objects.

The rest of my photos from my week at the museum can be seen here.

For more information on the Museum of Russian Icons, visit: http://www.museumofrussianicons.org.

My love affair with Russian began not long after I first heard my boyfriend’s mother prattling away on the phone in her native tongue. Before that, I thought of Russian as a harsh-sounding language. I pictured unsmiling men in fur hats muttering to their buddies over a steaming cup of tea (or a couple rounds of vodka). I have no idea where I got this image from, but there you have it.

It wasn’t until I heard a woman speak Russian that I realized how alluring it can be. You see, spoken Russian is very much like a waltz. It whisks you along at a brisk pace, soothing you with its -ush’s and its rolling r’s, then halts suddenly with its hard k’s and odd combinations of letters like -tv and -zd (as in “ZDRAST-vuti”: hello).

After six years of hanging around with A’s family, I’d picked up an atom-sized amount of Russian. I’m talking little more than, “hello, how are you? fine,” and other commonly uttered exclamations in his house, like “come here!” and “be careful!” But after several visits from his Russian-only speaking aunt (whom I’ve decided must also be somehow related to Super Woman. The lady can sew, cook, garden and knit pretty much simultaneously), I made up my mind to learn the language.

It didn’t seem like that much of a stretch at the time. First of all, it’s my heritage too. My dad’s side of the family was hopping off the boat from Russia about this time 100 or so odd years ago. I also live in a very Russian neighborhood. Within minutes walk of my apartment is a Russian food store (mmm… Russian chocolate) and an all-Russian, only-Russian bookstore. It’s a rare day when I don’t hear a few wisps of Russian on the train or elsewhere. But most importantly, I LIVE WITH A NATIVE SPEAKER. Meaning built in practice, any time I want it. Really, I was surprised I hadn’t absorbed more by that point just by pure osmosis.

Alas, like any good love affair, there were issues, the first being that I decided to teach myself the language (yes, you read that correctly). To put this in a bit of perspective, my initial research informed me that in the time it takes to learn Russian, you can master something like all of the Romance languages AND have a passing understanding of Chinese and Japanese, including the alphabets.

That should have been my cue to turn back and call it a day but no, I pushed on (I was a bit delusional, I now think). I bought a workbook. I bought children’s books in Russian to practice basic vocab. I started my own notebook of basic letters, numbers and phrases, and studied it on the train. I gave it an honest try.

But the real roadblock came in the form of the Cyrillic alphabet. Have you seen this thing? It’s like… well, it’s like a whole different alphabet. But it pretends to be easy to learn because it has a lot of the same letters as our own alphabet. That’s where it gets you. See H is really N, and P is R, and B is V, and C is S, but A? A is A. And M is M. Got it?

Even if you learn the Cyrillic alphabet, you still have to do two calculations before you understand a given Russian word. First, you must work through each letter to sound out the word in Russian. THEN, you have to figure out what that word means. This increases the difficulty of learning the language ten fold. I quickly realized how much I took the alphabet for granted when I learned Spanish in high school.

Here’s the thing: I did memorize the Cyrillic alphabet. I could recite it and write it. I could also count to 100 at one point. I felt like I was on a roll. I was doing it. I was actually teaching myself Russian. But then I started getting into things like verbs. And vocabulary lists. And I found myself opening up my Russian notebook less and less. Eventually, I stopped bringing it with me on the T.

Now I’ve forgotten nearly all of what I learned, just a few months later. In a matter of speaking, the affair is over. But I can’t help being drawn in again when I hear people speaking Russian and have brief, flashing moments of recognition. I UNDERSTOOD THAT! I KNOW WHAT THEY JUST SAID!

Given, these moments are rare, and they’re happening less and less. Still, I’m thinking about giving it another go. Maybe I’m crazy (don’t answer that). Maybe it’s delusion setting in again. Delusion… or love.