Category: Travel

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Gardens of Power

Florence’s Boboli Gardens, photo by kajmeister

They say all roads lead to Rome, or perhaps lead back to Rome in European history. All garden roads seem to lead back to Rome. Where did Italian gardens originate? Roman models. How about Hampton Court, the “other” estate of Henry VIII? English gardens came from Roman models. Palace of Versailles? French gardens copied the Italian ones. But even the Romans would have known about the earliest ones in Persia, like the garden where Cyrus the Great used trees and lawn to  demonstrate his power.

In Florence on vacation, our first stop was Boboli Gardens aka the Medici gardens. This was the Renaissance garden of power, which made me think about garden styles and how different styles and different regimes have influenced those garden styles. This is mainly an excuse to show a few vacation photos, but still, who doesn’t like a lovely little garden?

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U is for Utah

Author’s note: We are down to the last six posts of the alphabet. You may have noticed that they’re going to slide a few days into May, so not technically finishing in A to Z April. Still, let’s finish this alphabetic journey about dinosaurs … we are on the home stretch!

Geology Utah, dinosaurs discovered across the variety of ages.

Normally, I would not be touting tourist information for any particular place, and certainly not gathering or sharing information from a chamber of commerce-y site. But this is about dinosaurs and that site is Utah. Utah is a dinosaur place. So is Wyoming and so is Colorado. And China, Argentina, Mongolia. Those are your international dinosaur hot spots.

(Gosh, I sure would like to go Ulaanbataar and see their dinosaur fossils and Chinggis Khan artifacts. How am I ever going to convince my spouse that would be the next great vacation, when we haven’t even been to Paris or Germany or Prague or Madrid… hmmm… anyway.)

There’s just no getting around it. Utah was prime real estate for capturing fossils from almost all significant ages. It also has the second-most different types of dinosaurs discovered, only behind China.

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The Grind

Nahaul mother teaching daughter to use the metate

It may seem a stretch to go from Mesoamerican cooking techniques to Ebenezeer Scrooge and gender disparity, but bear with me. Since I am touring the west coast of Mexico, reading a book called Payback, and pondering the meaning of Christmas stories, this is top of mind. This will be a different kind of vacation post.

Hand grinder from Noguelas museum, kajmeister photo.

Metate

We were touring a museum in Nogueras, a small pueblo magico, aka a Mexican historical site, near Manzanillo. There was a thousand-year-old kitchen display showing the many types of foods prepared. Of course, many of the foods that Europe (and the North Americans) built their cuisines around originated from Mesoamerica, which you learn if you take a cooking class in Arizona or summat. Corn, squash, chiles, tomatoes, and I forget which exactly is the six but also coffee and chocolate are all native here, and not in Europe. What the Eurasians call “corn” really means a grain with a seed in it. So the Bible refers to corn, but they meant wheat or barley or farina. Corn i.e. maize (you all know that one) originated here and was exported east with the Great Extraction.

Santiago showing us the coffee “cherries” become seeds.
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