the human face of tourism

I should have listened to my own advice - a friend has published some of this blog in the college magazine. Remember Da Nu Rossetta Stone? Turns out it looks pretty racist when read on its own.

The last few days I've been in France on tour with my choir, singing in some grand old Cathedrals and eating some fine fine food. We stayed with host families, and mine went out their way for us, literally, driving us to and from rehearsals. Their children were lovely, we think - we were mutually incomprehensible. Yesterday the choir was treated to a diplomatic reception from the Mayoress of S -, for whom we were about to sing a mass. They handed out some tourist bumf including a priceless leaflet written in flamboyantly haphazard English. Titled 'Expressions: The Human Face of Tourism' it includes such corkers as,

The river is 'A real delight, for image hunters but also for fishermen'

The area 'knows haw to enhance the sky. Nature and man have drawn pictures with varied taste and colours'

You can look forward to 'the biggest conglomerate of troglodytes, gardens brimming with rare flavours, exuding golden and chalky reflections.'

And finally, your visit will be 'a journey sprinkled with water and history which will not let you forget that S - and its region has a multitude of marked hiking paths'


And if all that wasn't enough, I found a £ in the street yesterday.

radio ga ga

Yo yo yo yo! Yes he's back, back again, Buri's back, tell a friend. So the blogging's dropped off a little lately ... sorry. Although you're never supposed to appologise or explain - was that expression invented for the British? Someone drives their 4x4 up the pavement, ploughs through the garden and parks in your front room, so you applogise profusely and make a cup of tea.

But that didn't actually happen, so here's a handy newsreel. Remember M. the chef? We went to his old restaurant and waited two hours for a bruschetta and some cold pizza - good thing they've asked him back to sort things out. There's been going home, singing, going to plays, running around, and also work, but more on that later. It's time to pack up and go again, so there'll be less internet than usual. Time for an experiment: can I last a week without email, instant messaging, facebook, browsing?

the illusion of progress

There is a telescope perched on an extinct volcano in Hawaii which cost £24 million. It is the result of a series of incredible engineering feats, gathering light to its core with a huge reflector made of tessellated smaller mirrors which are cooled, shifted by thousandths of millimetres and polished by ionic sandblasters (these are so precise and gentle that they can autograph a hair)

Richard Hammond's Engineering Connections saw the presenter cooing over this testament to human ingenuity and demonstrating some of the technologies that went into it by setting fire to a dinghy and sensing one doctored tennis ball in five hundred. In hushed tones he concluded that this telescope was producing images from the very edge of the Universe, giving us insights into its formation between 13.61 and 13.85 billion years ago.

If I take my glasses off I can barely distinguish a friend at arm's length, but I can focus upon objects only an inch away from the tip of my nose. If it weren't for the invention of lenses there would be no big picture for me: no leaves on faraway trees, no stars, no birds. So, thank you science. But how could anyone could be so shortsighted to spend £24 million to see something so insignificant to humanity? Who cares when/how/if the Universe exploded from nothingness when that amount of money could restore the sight of 1.3 million people?

Sources: ORBIS, BBC iPlayer