Asparagus

Asparagus! I got so excited I hopped around whooping and hollering in my backyard garden! Almost as excited as Mio swinging around on the akebi vines.

Poking through the thick, leafy winter mulch they were practically camouflaged. Now two weeks later they are about a foot tall already. One year down, two to go until we can get a decent harvest.

I remember the first time I saw asparagus growing in a garden, in my Grandpa's backyard. He picked a chubby, purply white shoot, barely poking through the straw, and told me to eat it raw. Delicious!

Then a few years later my Mom borrowed a long-ignored garden bed from our neighbor Margaret (she has a knack for acquiring bits and pieces of garden from the neighbors, so she can plant extra vegetables) and plugged it full of asparagus crowns. Now, a good five years later, she and my Dad are feasting on it.

We've got a few more years before we'll get to taste it, but already it's looking much stronger and bigger than the "2nd year" seedlings they're selling at the store. So don't be afraid to start it from seed in the springtime, as long as you're planting in rich soil-- much cheaper than buying crowns. Yesterday I had the wwoofers plant four flats of it to set out this fall in our forest garden.

smoked takuan

I guess it was December when the grandma down the road for us tottered over here with a wheelbarrow full of cute little daikon. I cut off the greens and Masa made some kind of delicious pickles with them that I wish I knew the recipe for. Probably something deceptively easy along the lines of mixing them with salt and stuffing them in a bucket and leaving them alone, and then knowing when they are ready and what to do with them.

As for the roots, I set them out to dry on the table outside, intending only to leave them for a few days but I got busy with other stuff. So they sat there for a few weeks, freezing every night and thawing in the morning. The idea is to dry them out just a little bit, so that they lose maybe 15% of their moisture. Finally around New Years I got around to rigging them up in the smoker and tried smoking them with pruned maple twigs, but it didn't work, or I wasn't paying enough attention or something, and I ended up using a few sawdust blocks, cherry I think. Again, I meant to have them in and out of the smoker in 24 hours but I forgot about them and they were there for another two weeks.

When I got around to making the takuan, Masa gave me a suspiciously vague recipe: Mix nuka (rice germ) with water until it's squishy, form a layer on the bottom of a bucket, and sprinkle it generously with salt (enough so that you can really see it on the surface). Then rub salt into the daikon and place on the bed of nuka, cover with more nuka and salt, then add another layer of salted daikon, until you reach the top. And every now and then throw in a few shards of kombu and dried chile peppers. Pat down the nuka and really cover the top with salt, otherwise mold will grow on it. Apparently you're supposed to put a weight on top at some point, but I neglected to do so and it doesn't seem to have messed anything up.

Then you just wait a month or so, and do a taste test. The daikon will have become really floppy and strong smelling from the nuka. Slice and eat with rice. Mine have started tasting really good just recently, after about 2 months, tangy, salty, mildly sweet, with a little effervescence on the tongue from the lacto-fermentation. One of our wwoofers told me I eat like a Grandma. Not sure exactly what that means. I guess it has something to do with liking traditional foods that are now considered quaint and that may happen to smell funny.

sansai primer part 1: yomogi and tsukushi

 yomogi on the left, the mushroomy looking things are tsukushi, and the feathery stuff on the right is sugina.

We're finally getting warm days here, so it's been nice walking around gathering wild herbs, known as sansai in Japanese. It's common in Japan for people to stroll the fields and forests and forage, maybe since Japan has a more recent history of starvation. Coming here two years ago I was amazed to discover the variety and abundance of edible plants, and all the different ways to prepare them.

Yesterday I gathered some yomogi, or Japanese mugwort. According to Masa (our resident wwoofer-chef), the best time to pick it is after the cherries have blossomed. I'm a little early. But no matter, there is plenty of it already. I gathered about three handfuls worth, steamed it, chopped it fine, and incorporated it into hot mochi (glutinous rice paste) and then wrapped it them around balls of shiro-an (sweetened white adzuki bean paste). It's a nice spring sweet to eat with matcha tea. You see it all over Japan in this season. Yomogi can also be dried for tea, with a flavor maybe halfway between sage and mint.

I also gathered a little bit of tsukushi, or horsetail shoots, which are not really my favorite but they are so weird and funny looking I can't help but gather a bit. Also I don't care for it so much since it's such an annoying weed in the fields, especially in our potato patch, and no amount of plucking seems to slow its growth. If you're going to eat it, it's better to pick the shoots before they've gotten big enough to release spores, otherwise it will be somewhat bitter and on the dry side. I boiled it in a little water, drained it, and tossed it with a little shoyu and mirin. I can't say much for its flavor, but it does have an interesting texture and it makes for a unique side dish.

Actually, yomogi and sugina (the leaf portion of tsukushi which emerges soon after) make up half of one of my favorite tea combinations. My friend at the coffee shop in town makes her own mix-- it's equal parts roasted kuromame or black soybeans, dokudami or houttuynia, yomogi, and sugina. I bought a bag for myself, and liked it so much I bought a few more for friends and family, only to find out later from the proprietress that its main use is as a medicinal tea to cure constipation... she must think I'm pretty stopped up!

I'm feeling inspired today. I washed diapers, planted lots of seeds with my Mom (she is my #1 gardening partner) and Mio, made a really great lunch with Midori (ma-bo tofu, spinach with sesame sauce, miso soup, daikon pickles, and brown rice). And I've been reading my friend Nick's awesome blog about climate change, which in turn got me started reading Gandhi.

Climate change is scary, isn't it? It gives me the same feeling that I used to get when I was a kid thinking about the end of the world. (For some reason this was my biggest fear when I was 5 years old-- I had the notion that the Earth would simply stop one day for whatever reason and we would all die. Maybe I was on to something. And my other biggest fear was dying and then going to heaven and having to spend eternity there... forever and ever and ever and ever and ever and ever and ever and ever and ever and ever and ever and... I would start feeling dizzy and sick. Thankfully I don't believe in heaven anymore.)

Most of the news about climate change tends to be about how we're all going to hell in a handbasket or about what world leaders aren't doing to fix the problem. Depressing. What I like about Nick's blog and about what Gandhi says is that the first changes we have to make are in our own daily lives, those little drops in the bucket that everyone uses as an excuse to do nothing. But if everyone puts a drop in the bucket, every day, then pretty soon it's raining. You never know what affect your seemingly little action will have. So starting now I want to make a small sacrifice every day in the name of reducing my carbon footprint. Tomorrow I'll ride my bike into town instead of drive-- what will you do?

I have been making lard.

 

I know, it's gross. It fills the house with the smell of melting animals.

It's also weird to put so much effort into making fat, especially having grown up in fat-phobic America, where compounds like Slim-Fast and Snackwells were considered healthy and the idea of using animal fat for something cute and innocent like frosting on a child's birthday cake would invoke the gag reflex. Although lard was once commonplace, its high saturated fat content and the accusation that it causes heart disease made it unpopular, and now most people use "healthier" oils or butter, even though butter is arguably less healthy than lard. It's actually lower in saturated fat than butter (40% versus 50%).

Butter survived the war on fat because it tastes so good. Lard either tastes like nothing or it tastes like the animal it came from, depending on how carefully it was rendered. My first experiments were more like bacon grease than lard, a bit brown and toasty. A little bacon fragrance is nice in cooking savory dishes or biscuits but I wanted something I could use in pie crusts. And since I'm rendering wild boar fat, it's got an especially strong, gamy smell, especially if it's an adult male boar (which is why many Japanese people claim to dislike it-- they were probably eating boar that was in the rut). Fortunately my most recent lard jar is filled with the pure white fat of a she-boar.

I began this lard project on a whim, after getting annoyed at the amount of vegetable oil we were consuming, and the expense of butter and extra-virgin olive oil in Japan. We grow, hunt, or barter for most of what we eat, but producing our own cooking fat remained elusive, and I wasn't about to start growing rapeseed and pressing my own oil. I also found out that most oil seeds are imported here and that alone makes me consider it unhealthy-- not unlike another oil we are all addicted to and forced to import. Since my husband hunts, it only makes sense to make use of the parts that none of the hunters wanted and in the past would throw away.

It feels healthy to be eating local fat, and knowing that the wild boar's diet was acorns, bamboo shoots, mushrooms and grubs means it's healthy meat. I wouldn't be too excited about eating lard made from a pig raised in a factory farm or tallow from cows fed corn instead of grass. And commercial lard is usually hydrogenated, so homemade is the way to go.

 It's not so difficult. Just obtain boar fat from the belly, back, or kidney (or some other fat from some other greasy animal), chop it into little pieces, and cook it over a double boiler, or really really low heat, until all the fat is rendered out and you neither hear nor see any bubbling, which takes more than a few hours but can be shortened by cutting the fat into smaller pieces than you see in the picture above. I was just being lazy. Make sure to turn on the fan in the kitchen. Then pour the hot fat through a strainer into your jar and you're done and now you can go wash the smell out of your hair and change clothes.

not quite Ann McIver's apple chips

I've made about 4 batches of this over the past few weeks-- easy to do even if you have a 7 month old baby and guests and a bunch of other stuff you should be doing. It's based on an old recipe for apple "chips" that my Grandmother's friend would make every year and there always seemed to be a jar of it in the refrigerator. I can't say I ever really liked it much as a kid, it was a bit sweet and heavy on the spice (cinnamon and cloves), but since I've got 330 pounds of fuji apples lounging on my back porch, waiting to go mushy and moldy, I thought I'd give it a try anyway.

I cut down on the sugar (the original calls for equal weight sugar and apples) and cut out the spices, wanting the pure apple flavor to shine through. Get out a big pasta pot (not huge but not medium sized-- the one you would choose when you're making pasta for 4 people or so). Put in a kilo or so (2.2 pounds) of sugar-- don't worry about being too exact-- I've done it with twice as much sugar and it works fine. Then start peeling and cutting up your apples into thin-sliced "chips". Keep slicing until the pot is full. The sugar will melt and the apples may turn a bit golden-brown. This is fine. Leave it overnight and the next day cook it over low heat until it reaches a honey-like consistency, maybe 3 or 4 hours. Add lemon juice (I use citric acid since I happen to have it and don't have lemons) to taste. Then ladle while still hot into jars and boil in a water bath for 15 minutes or so to seal.

For some reason the apples retain their shape and a bit of their texture, so they're not mushy like canned apples. Goes great spooned onto toast or stirred into yogurt along with a little bit of the "honey".

asparagus from seed

When I was looking into planting asparagus in the spring I was a bit discouraged from what I found on the internet. Most people grow from crowns, buy seedlings, or do their own starter plants in pots. Why did I find no one direct seeding?

In April a WWOOFer and I prepared a patch of ground. We did a typical sheet mulch by spreading grass cuttings, goat and chicken manure, some seaweed on the ground, then covered it with a layer of newspaper, wet it really well, and topped it with a thick layer of straw and compost, manure, and a thin layer of garden soil on top.

We debated what to do in the area. Perhaps let it settle a bit and plant something in the fall or wait a month and put in some summer veggies. When I mentioned planting asparagus from seed, the WWOOFer said "you can't, they will DIE!" So given my contrary nature, that's of course what I planted. I tucked in some seeds and crossed my fingers.

6 months later they are definitely not dead, but lush and leafy and looking quite a bit more mature than I expected. Maybe next year I'll be able to harvest a few spears even. My Mom continued building up the soil around the seedlings which seemed to help their stability, and sand to help drainage. She planted one little marigold seedling in the middle which has turned into a shrub, it's so big, which shows you how fertile a little sheet mulching can be.

natto success

 See those stinky strands? That's what I was going for. I took it out after about 16 hours fermenting. Probably could have kept it in a bit longer but it was fine. Stirred up with some soy sauce, wasabi, sesame seeds, and scallion over rice it was a pretty good breakfast.

The white stuff is the natto bacteria.

I was a little worried last night when Midori was walking around the big room looking for where the dog pooped. But it was just the natto.

okudo-san, ume-beans, mayo, natto in progress

I have someone very special to introduce to you. His name is Okudo-san, and he is my birthday present from Gen this year. He's got 3 eyes. When he gets hot, smoke shoots out the top of his head. He may sound strange but he's very helpful, especially around lunchtime....

The day before my birthday I caught Gen and Midori discussing my birthday present in Japanese, but again, I managed to crack the code... it was going to be either a fancy electric oven or a sewing machine. Fortunately Gen saved me from both those daunting appliances and proposed that we spend my birthday together, not doing whatever it is most normal couples do on their birthday, but working.

Which suited me just fine. Except for the part where we get in an argument on whether or not to put a chimney on the thing, and the whole working together idea went out the window. Which also suited me just fine. Anyhow, cement isn't the kind of stuff that can wait a half hour when you've got a hungry baby to nurse...

So here he is, all finished. See his face? And his 3rd eye?

He's been making lots of rice and noodles. Sometimes I'll put a wok on his head and he makes vegetables for us too. He even helped me do some water-bath canning. I love him. Thank you Gen, it's probably the nicest thing I've ever gotten for my birthday. And I'm even glad you gave him a chimney (that's removable. Heh.)

In other news, I did some experimenting pickling green beans in the leftover juice from umeboshi. We put up maybe 40 quarts of umeboshi (pickled Japanese apricots) back in June. They're a pretty incredible food, especially since right off the tree they are toxic. After salting them, they start oozing juice and eventually they are bobbing around in their own fluids. Then you put in a little red shiso to turn them pink. Somewhere in this process they become edible. Put them in the center of your white rice and you've got the Japanese flag. They are reputedly healthy, though it's hard to understand why, since they are extremely salty and sour. Corrosive, actually. Which is why I thought the juice might make for good pickling liquid. I'm bored with dilly beans, and we have too many to eat, thanks to Jen's green thumb.

I stuffed a jar with beans, put the juice on to boil, poured it in the jar, then boiled it in a water bath for ten minutes. The beans got all shriveldy and lost their vivid color, and it looks like they're floating in kool-ade. I'll leave them alone a while before I make someone else try them.

Lunchtime. Okudo-san's eyes are fired up. Rice, green beans and tofu and Korean spicy miso, stir-fried komatsuna, and cabbage and tomato slaw. What, no mayo? We'll try making our own, thank you Mark Bittman, this took about 30 seconds to make in the food processor. And it's sooo good, especially after eating MSG-laced Kewpie mayo (which does have it's merits) for the past year and a half. Mmm. I'm dipping radishes, tomatoes, and green beans in it right now.

Then I prepped some soybeans by boiling them til soft for an experimental batch of natto. Apparently, all you need to do to make it is get a package of store-bought natto, mix it up with your hot soybeans, and keep it at around 115 degrees for 24 hours, but it must be ventilated because it needs oxygen to ferment properly. I'm trying to do it in my new dehydrator (another awesome birthday present-- thanks Mom & Dad).

I guess I'd better explain natto a little... it's fermented soybeans which, when stirred, become super sticky and slimy and stringy. When you try to put it in your mouth it leaves lots of little spiderwebs hanging from your chopsticks and then the wind catches it and it gets all over you. And it smells like feet, or cheese, or something gross like that. It's delicious, especially over rice. But not for food wusses. And, like umeboshi, is also supposed to be good for you, packed with blood-thinning enzymes, vitamin K, and it also helps you absorb calcium.

overnight pancakes

Breakfast around here is either pretty sad or it's fantastic. Not much in-between. On the sad days it's leftovers, if there are any, maybe a container of natto, and maybe a cup of coffee. If we've got it together it's homemade bread with butter and plum jam, homemade stove-top granola and homemade yogurt, homemade English muffins or these pancakes, which we eat a few times a week, after we've run out of bread. You make the batter the night before and it rises in the fridge, so when you wake up all you have to do it heat up a pan and fry up your cakes. For me it's easier to get stuff like this done at night when my brain awake enough to measure ingredients, and the baby is usually asleep then too so I've got my hands free.

I like to use all whole wheat flour. The stuff Midori orders is much finer than any whole wheat flour I've had in the US. Sometimes if we've got leftover grains like brown rice, oatmeal, or buckwheat I'll throw it in for texture, plus whatever else I feel like, maybe raisins. The original recipe calls for milk, but I usually use water. I've even done it without eggs as well, it's a bit less tender but still works.

overnight pancakes

2 cups flour, white or wheat or a mix
1 tsp yeast
2 tablespoons sugar or honey
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 tsp baking soda
1 1/2 cups warm water or milk or watered-down yogurt
2 eggs
1/4 cup oil or melted butter (I just put in a glug)

Mix the dry ingredients in a container, then add the wet ingredients and mix until just combined, a few lumps are okay. Put on the lid and keep in the fridge overnight. In the morning stir it down and fry over medium-low heat, no higher, or else they will burn burn burn.

corn and the bean

I love Mexican food. I spent a while down there and fell in love with beans with epazote, real tacos, tlayudas, mole oaxaqueño, chiles en nogada.... the list goes on.

Trouble is, I'm in Japan. You can't even buy fake Mexican food here, let alone cornmeal or black beans (and leave it to me to try to make frijoles out of black soybeans which turned out awfully weird, cause the soybeans have a really firm, meaty texture and they're very sweet, not exactly what I was going for. Not to mention black soybeans are about $20 a kilo.) So I decided I'd grow my own flour corn, grind it up into tortillas, plant a few pintos, and a miniature forest of cilantro. As I popped the seeds into the ground, I had a visions of grilled, spiced venison on hot, fragrant tortillas, topped with some homemade queso and a spritz of sudachi lime with a side of beans.  Mmm. Imagining the food you're going to eat seems to make the work go by faster.

The beans I seem to have planted too early. They got pretty wet during the rainy season and plus having a baby when I should have been weeding didn't help things either. Then they got slayed by an errant WWOOFer with a weed whacker. So no beans.

The corn came up looking pretty strong, but I didn't plant much, and planted a few different varieties at different times: Strawberry Corn for popcorn, Multi-colored Flour Corn, Wachichu Flint, and Hickory King Dent.

The Strawberry Corn did well, although it looks more like raspberries, but anyway I got maybe 10 ears out of it. They're cute little nubbins, kind of annoying to pick off the cob, but it makes tasty popcorn with an incredibly light, crispy texture even though it won't pop into big, fluffy flakes. Not sure what I'm doing wrong here.

The flour corns were a moderate success, and would have done a lot better had I planted more and gotten better pollination. It's neat to see what an un- or under-pollinated ear of corn looks like. The Wachichu Flint is a vibrant red color, the Hickory King is long, appealing, even rows of kernels that look like someone poked them with their thumbnail, and the Multi-color is a mix of indigo, red, cream, and yellow. If I make cornbread out of it it will look like mud.

I'm saving some for seed since I planted the Strawberry Corn paired with the Multi-colored Corn, and the Wachichu Flint paired with the Hickory King Kent. This means that next year I think I'll get some interesting hybrids. Will I get Rainbow Swirl Strawberry Corn and King Wachichu Flint Dent? I sure hope so. I'll have to read up on it in my favorite book ever, Breed Your Own Vegetable Varieties, by Carol Deppe, since I kind of forgot how corn breeding works.

And for the cilantro. I love the stuff, throwing it in salads, sprinkling it on soups, but I guess I got a little cilantro-happy and after putting it into the salad for about the 14th time in a row I caught Gen and Midori muttering to themselves in Japanese about how they didn't like the flavor of it but how it's better if they didn't tell me. But I am finally starting to get this whole Japanese thing, so I called them out on it and now we don't eat cilantro. It's not a totally sad story since I let it go to seed, and now the seed heads are waiting to be plucked and I'll grind them up in the coffee grinder and throw them in curry or falafel.

Here's the queen bean plus a sampling of my corn harvest. I know it's a weird photo but I hate uploading photos, it takes so long and I think it's posting photos that keeps me from blogging more often. Anyhow, it's mostly the Hickory King Dent plus a few ears of Strawberry Corn and Wachichu, and a bunch of ears that didn't get pollinated well.  You can see how the bugs liked it, which doesn't bother me near as much as raccoons or monkeys liking it. I'll take a few squishy little bugs any day over monkeys. I'm a little sore right now since they've taken to digging up all my sweet potatoes when I'm not looking.

It would be an exaggeration to say that today was an altogether normal day in Sasayama, but not much of one. Just about everyone I've met has an interesting hobby-- say, cushion-making, pottery, bread-oven building, or weaving. But this one takes the cake.

I decided to go into Sasayama town to get some new yarn (I'm making slippers) and check out the Peruvian cafe in hopes of finding some Spanish speakers to chat with. Over black-bean tea (a Sasayama tradition) and delicious coffee, I spoke with the Peruvian owner (she married a Japanese man) and her daughter for a half hour or so until an older Japanese man came in telling, in broken Spanish, of his trips to Latin America. He mentioned the famous song about that condor (Simon and Garfunkel did it on one of their albums, it's the song with the ocarinas) and I hum it back to him. He asks me if I like South American music, then leaves and returns with what looks like a big basket of garbage. But it's not garbage. They're just musical instruments made out of garbage.  He pulls out a paint can shamisen, an ocarina made out of a salvaged wooden foot, panpipes made out fuses, shakuhachis made from bamboo and plastic piping, and a ukelele made out of an inflatable pool toy. And he made beautiful music! Amazing! He even gave me his paint-can shamisen (he said it only took 2 hours to make, and that he has other ones).

With the coffee shop owners translating my Spanish into Japanese, I set up a lesson with him on how to make/play these instruments for tomorrow... I'll let you know how it goes.

more photos from Chiapas

let sleeping dogs lie...

"RESPECT: don't litter."

Luis and I stopped to play a few games of foosball with the kids. They charged us 4 pesos a game instead of 3 but it was worth it.

Women from Zinacantán selling avocados in San Cristóbal.

This guy is literally selling "snake gel."

People gathered in the graveyard for two funerals in Chamula, Chiapas.

These are graves on the other side of the old church in Chamula.

The dream of little girls worldwide.

Meet the Baas, from Chamula, Chiapas

This is Pa Baa...

...and here's Ma Baa (a bit nervouse, ain't she?)

...and Baby Baa, who's hungry.

But Ma is a bit camera shy...

...so Baby goes back to eating yucky dirt-grass.

...until, oddly, he decides to head towards me...

...with a gleam of recognition in his eye, perhaps thinking I'm part of the family...

...and nibbles my finger. What a cutie.

And across town, this fella trusts me about as much as the little one.

Maybe it's Cousin Baa?

Sometimes when I was in Mexico I would wake up with an intense craving for papaya. I'd throw on a sweater over my pajamas and slide into Luis's flip-flops with my socks still on and shuffle over to the market, which was across the street and down the hill next to the daycare center. In some ways, the most enticing vendors are at the entrance: the little old raisin-faced ladies from the pueblos sitting on their blankets, working on their embroidery, selling their carefully arranged piles of huitlacoche, chayote, nisperos, fresh shell beans, or bunches of greens like quintoniles or chipilín, but at a high price (for Mexican standards).  If I make it past them without buying anything, I still have to make it through the hallway full of women coercing me to buy their blandas or tlayudas (two types of tortillas, one soft and the other lightly toasted until chewy) in their peculiar nasal voices that I've only heard in markets in Latin America. And if I get past them, I'm into the safe zone, where people are a bit less agressive, maybe just an occasional "Que le damos." There I wander through stall after stall of massive bunches of glistening red radishes, potatoes scrubbed until they shine, frilly wands of swiss chard, mountains of garlic, nopales (cactus leaves) already de-spined and ready to cook, and the most sweet and delicious little pale green summer squash which beat our yellow crooknecks and zucchinis hands-down. I breathe in the aroma of bouquets of fresh basil and rosemary mixed with odor of fresh meat from the butchers around the perimeter-- which is sometimes, but not always, off-putting. And then I make my way to Doña Teresa's fruit stall, where I poke and prod until I find the best papaya, select a a dozen or so guavas (in a gradation of pale green and firm to perfectly ripe and soft, exuding a their musky odor), and maybe one of those tiny, incredibly sweet and fragrant pineapples. And Doña Teresa is always kind to me and drops the price a peso or two. On the way out I stop to buy a liter of fresh raw milk from the two ladies that bring it from their farm every day, unrefrigerated, which they package in plastic bags. And maybe I stop by Doña Gloria's, where she sells all sorts of bulk dry goods, like almonds, raisins, dried beans, flaxseed, corn, panela, and even dogfood. And then I go home and savor every bite of the best meal in Mexico: fresh fruit.

Breakfast in San Cristóbal: avocado, mandarin orange, strawberries, passionfruit, and little bananas that you can only find in Chiapas.

You probably haven't tasted a real banana if you've never been to a tropical country. The bananas here make you actually stop and think about the flavor.

The markets are wonderful, but often all you have to do is look around at the trees and you'll find a snack. I picked oranges, grapefruits, guavas, pomegranates, and mangos (those are pretty tricky, usually you have to throw rocks to get them to fall down because they are so high up).

Our breakfast got a lot of attention, especially from these two girls who came up and didn't say anything but obviously wanted to help us eat it.

a passionfruit

The farther one travels, the less one knows.... ?

I've created this blog as a motivation to reflect on my experiences of the past year, and since I've taken hundreds of pictures it's a waste to keep them guarded away in my computer. I want to revisit my memories and think about them in a more thorough way, through writing, so that they don't just fade away.

I promised myself a while back to concentrate more on living, rather than journalling or taking pictures or otherwise extricating myself from the given situation, as is my habit. And for that reason I took a lot fewer photos than I could have, and plus being in Guatemala and southern Mexico people are either more sensitive to having their picture taken and cover their faces or they see it as an opportunity to make a buck. Or if you're five years old, a cookie.

This is one of the first pictures I took in Guatemala, in a little aldea outside of Antigua. They were walking home from school (the one on the right has her school supplies with her, donated by a charity). Two months later I returned to the same village and saw the little one on the left on the bus, this time with her parents, happy because she had a lollypop in her mouth, sticking her head out the window like a puppy.