I ate my way through Ottawa. These people sure do know how to eat. I had some great dinners here, and excellent baked goods. Highlights of the trip: all the cool people I met at the conference, the food, the creepy hostel which use to be a jail, and the museum of civilization. The museum had a show on all about the pre Incan people called the Sican in Peru. Great gold metalworkers! At the show, this guy comes up to me and starts speaking Spanish, thinking I was a student I guess. Once we used broken French and English, he told me he had never hear of the Sican, and he was from Peru! This is a pretty new area of interest then. BTW, I have no pics of the actual conference as most people ... read more

My first stop was at Princeton University, who had invited me for their Graduate Student conference in the history of biology. Princeton, NJ is a parochial town, where the university is the centre of everything…except the expensive shops that line the plaza. It’s an odd town because of all the well heeled students with Prada bags and ties that belie the university’s snobbery. The poor work in the back, and the full example of the USA’s class divisions are seen in the kitchens which are entirely staffed by blacks and Hispanics. Having said that, the conference itself was great! The organizers Nathan and Daniel were very nice, but more importantly well organized. The papers were all well done, all well presented, and the food was free. There was some really cool people there, and I walked ... read more

Matsuo Basho is my favorite Haiku poet, so any monuments to him are always high on my list. He traveled all over Japan when it meant the same as walking it during the Edo period- around 1600s- and wrote travel diaries with the best poetry ever. Good thing he made a pit stop in Gifu and made some frinds. We headed to the town of Ogaki where Basho showed up in 1684 to take in the sights. He made a lot of friends, one being a guy named Bokuin who also wrote Haiku. The way the Japanese velebrate writers is to enscribe their written charcters on stones, so Basho's poems in his handwritting were placed on stones around the canals in Ogaki, about 15 or so of the monuments. It was amazing to think that Basho ... read more

We were running a bit early so we decided to stopover for an day in Nagoya. As I had done no real research on the area, I did not know what to expect. It's a sleep little city, with a lot going for it. The Atsuta Jingu is a part in the centre of town, sort of an oasis from the concrete that dominates the city. A park and shine combo, it boast holding the sacred sword Kusanagi-no-tsurugi, one of the imperial symbols of ancient Japan. We did not see the sword but a replica in the museum close by. That is really typical in Japan as a whole: don't get too excited to see sacred artifacts because they are usually locked up tight. The shrine itself was havilky dammaged during the war and rebuilt. Since ... read more

Other than touring the sites, we also tried to practice our bad Japanese on the kind people that would help us, the temple cleaners, the attendants and the poor cab drivers. They had a lot of patience with us for being so clumsy! That is the main feeling I have here, that I am a bull in a china shop and I have to be extra careful everywhere as I am just so coarse and the Japanese are so cultured. hahaha...I am a barbarian after all. The two barbarians got into the Imperial Palace! It is the latest of the Imperial palaces built at or near its site in the north-eastern part of the old capital on Heiankyo after the abandonment of the larger original Heian Palace that was located to the west of the current ... read more