Showing posts with label hotels. Show all posts
Showing posts with label hotels. Show all posts
Monday, February 22, 2016
Thursday, August 20, 2015
Travels part III - Iceland!
By the time we got there, we were pretty much just due to collapse in the hotel room! (This was predicted in advance.) Fortunately it was an incredibly nice hotel.
(Our final two nights in Iceland were at the Geo Hotel in Grindavik - both of these hotels are pretty much brand new - I was initially a bit horrified that I had rashly taken us from lovely cosmopolitan city to isolated country location, but really it is good to see something a bit different - we had an interesting walk around small town and harbor, and the nearby restaurant was surprisingly good - I think this is it - we ate three meals there as options in walking distance were limited.)
Food in Iceland in general was ridiculously good. I don't have links for everything (or even most things), but we had fantastic Thai food here, very decent random local pizza, tons of good fish (with and without chips), a beer at Nico's favorite place, steak lunch here with my friend J. and his two older kids after an episode of puffin watching and delicious cocktails in the lobby at our hotel.
The Golden Circle bus tour was a little overwhelming (the landscapes are amazing, but there are too many people - tourist infrastructure really isn't up to current volume); I loved the small zoo in Reykjavik and the Blue Lagoon also exceeded expectations.
(We had two very fancy meals in Iceland, food on New Nordic lines: one at the Lava Restaurant at the Blue Lagoon, the other at Haust in our hotel lobby. The regular-place food is so good, the fancy food is slightly wasted on me & B. - but it was genuinely exceptional, and I would especially single out lovely desserts. Not so photogenic - subtle rather than flashy - but utterly delicious: at Haust, a rhubarb victoria with almond sorbet, roasted almonds and arctic angelica syrup, and at Lava a poached pear with ginger sorbet, praline cake and elderflower syrup. Divine!)
Pictures below are piecemeal: the final ones are only a small fraction of what was on offer at the glorious Saga Lounge at the airport on the day we left!
(Our final two nights in Iceland were at the Geo Hotel in Grindavik - both of these hotels are pretty much brand new - I was initially a bit horrified that I had rashly taken us from lovely cosmopolitan city to isolated country location, but really it is good to see something a bit different - we had an interesting walk around small town and harbor, and the nearby restaurant was surprisingly good - I think this is it - we ate three meals there as options in walking distance were limited.)
Food in Iceland in general was ridiculously good. I don't have links for everything (or even most things), but we had fantastic Thai food here, very decent random local pizza, tons of good fish (with and without chips), a beer at Nico's favorite place, steak lunch here with my friend J. and his two older kids after an episode of puffin watching and delicious cocktails in the lobby at our hotel.
The Golden Circle bus tour was a little overwhelming (the landscapes are amazing, but there are too many people - tourist infrastructure really isn't up to current volume); I loved the small zoo in Reykjavik and the Blue Lagoon also exceeded expectations.
(We had two very fancy meals in Iceland, food on New Nordic lines: one at the Lava Restaurant at the Blue Lagoon, the other at Haust in our hotel lobby. The regular-place food is so good, the fancy food is slightly wasted on me & B. - but it was genuinely exceptional, and I would especially single out lovely desserts. Not so photogenic - subtle rather than flashy - but utterly delicious: at Haust, a rhubarb victoria with almond sorbet, roasted almonds and arctic angelica syrup, and at Lava a poached pear with ginger sorbet, praline cake and elderflower syrup. Divine!)
Pictures below are piecemeal: the final ones are only a small fraction of what was on offer at the glorious Saga Lounge at the airport on the day we left!
Monday, October 20, 2014
Hot zone update
Sitting at my desk in New York and trying to gear up to write a letter of recommendation that's due today - fortunately I don't need to be on campus until three, as I still have quite a bit of reading to finish before class as well.
Dublin was excellent but phenomenally tiring - any time I was not actually seeing people and doing conference things, I was essentially huddled in bed in my hotel room (fortunately it was quite a nice room - I put up the Do Not Disturb sign and just left it up!).
Interesting interview with Richard Preston at the New York Times about current plans to update his thriller-like account of Ebola as of the early 1990s, The Hot Zone. I vividly remember reading this during my first year of grad school - my roommate LeeAnn had the hardcover and I devoured it! I have been following Ebola developments closely and with interest: my two main fantasy alternate careers are neurologist and epidemiologist, and I am a little sorry that I am not involved in planning and organizing ways to contain the epidemic.
I am relieved to see that Preston admits that one bit of the book is especially in need of correction (I always wondered!):
Dublin was excellent but phenomenally tiring - any time I was not actually seeing people and doing conference things, I was essentially huddled in bed in my hotel room (fortunately it was quite a nice room - I put up the Do Not Disturb sign and just left it up!).
Interesting interview with Richard Preston at the New York Times about current plans to update his thriller-like account of Ebola as of the early 1990s, The Hot Zone. I vividly remember reading this during my first year of grad school - my roommate LeeAnn had the hardcover and I devoured it! I have been following Ebola developments closely and with interest: my two main fantasy alternate careers are neurologist and epidemiologist, and I am a little sorry that I am not involved in planning and organizing ways to contain the epidemic.
I am relieved to see that Preston admits that one bit of the book is especially in need of correction (I always wondered!):
In the original “Hot Zone,” I have a description of a nurse weeping tears of blood. That almost certainly didn’t happen. When a person has Ebola, the eyes can turn brilliant red from blood vessels leaking and blood oozing out of the eyelid. That’s horrifying, but it’s not someone with tears of blood running down their face. I want to fix that.Here's his piece in this week's New Yorker.
Monday, May 19, 2014
Things I saw and ate and thought about this week
On Tuesday: looking down at the Baha'i Temple from the panorama in Haifa; a walk around Nazareth, followed by lunch at Al-Reda (the best grilled vegetables I have ever eaten, and an angelically good salad with oranges, pistachios, bean sprouts and baby greens) and then a dessert from a bake shop, evocative to and devoured by the Israeli friends I was with but slightly overwhelming to me (I was still just wiped out from travel, and feeling a bit queasy!), an incredibly rich flat square of pastry with a layer of cheese topped by a layer of shredded phyllo dough all drenched in syrup and warm out of the oven (we waited for a new batch, it came out in a huge tray); then to Tiberias/Capernaum in the Lower Galilee for a walk through the church and monastery grounds at (I think) Tabgha.
We had two more sites on the day's projected itinerary, but it was nearly five o'clock, we'd left from the hotel at 9:30 and I was absolutely dropping - I had to plead fatigue and beg for us to return to Tel Aviv!
On Wednesday, I was working frenetically to sort out the second of my two talks and put together appropriate handouts for both - normally this is what I would have done before I left (I especially prefer to travel with all the copies of handouts already made, and hard copies of speaking notes in case of some computer-related calamity), but B.'s father's death and the unexpected trip to Ottawa knocked out the two days I'd set aside for that last week (right up until I left town, I was reading huge stacks of other work stuff - on Wednesday last week, for instance, I had a meeting to decide on Whiting fellowships for which I needed to read sixty applications, and then on Thursday the last thing I did before leaving for the airport was a meeting to pick the award-winning departmental MA essays, which also involved hundreds of pages of reading).
I should have done the prep Monday, which was my quiet day at the hotel, but I was too tired. Bad moment Wednesday late morning when the computer suddenly restarted itself (I suppose it was 11 or 12 Tel Aviv time, i.e. 3am or 4am EST) - Word has this wretched habit of not preserving the autosaved document unless the program has shut down irregularly, i.e. not when the computer shuts everything down for updates, and I wasted a good half an hour trying to retrieve five minutes of work that fatigue made me feel I could hardly bear to recover from brain as opposed to hard drive, though really it would have been easier and less stressful just to write it again!
Both talks went very well, I think, and I had dinner afterwards near the university with my friend and host. It is slightly comical the extent to which I am most myself - happy, focused, energetic - when I am in a classroom.
On Wednesday night I slept well, and I woke up Thursday feeling much better. We went to Jerusalem, which was as extraordinary as one might imagine (the only other place I have been in my life that is so shockingly visually iconic was Red Square, Moscow). An amazing thing: you can pay a modest fee and walk the ramparts of the Old City (here's more information - they were built by Suleiman in the sixteenth century, and it gives you an intense albeit historically fuzzy feeling of the crusades etc.!). What you can see, what you can imagine - really quite extraordinary.
The stairs are very deep, but modern railings make it quite safe; there was only a precipitous metal spiral staircase or two to give me a bad moment. We walked quickly round many of the main sites (Golgotha, the Western Wall) and ate amazing hummus and falafel at Abu Shukri. Pleasant delayed-onset muscle soreness in following days from genuinely strenuous walking.
Quiet days on my own in Tel Aviv Friday and Saturday, doing a lot of walking along the promenade (to Jaffa, where I saw the so-called Andromeda rocks, and also north to the old port). It is a gorgeous city, incredibly easy and enjoyable to visit (more so I think than any other place I have ever traveled to.
Alas, I was coming down with a respiratory infection, so I neither ran along the promenade nor had another swim in the amazing 50m Gordon Pool - but walking is good regardless....
I especially liked the hotel I was being put up in by the university, the Melody Hotel. It was one of these small boutique hotels that is somehow perfectly comfortable - not lavish exactly, but really amazing breakfast (also daily happy hour with wine and delicious snacks) and free wifi and a roof deck the like of which one can hardly imagine. Little fridge in the room, and super-convenient markets and ATM and so forth nearby, also a ton of restaurants (I had a particularly good meal on my own at one deli-type one, one of these meat and cheese platters that turns out to be just sublimely delicious, but I think I have misplaced the card and cannot reconstruct the exact name).
And a final very nice dinner with my friend at Rustico (pasta puttanesca), followed by toffee ice cream from Iceberg.
Minor reading on related topics (I am a person who mostly prefers to avoid thinking about politics, but really one cannot do so all the time, and the most disconcerting and, really, dismaying moment I had on the whole trip involved an enjoyable conversation with two extremely nice young journalists from London, visiting on a promotional trip funded by the Israeli tourist board - we were all watching the sunset from the hotel roof - during which it rapidly emerged that they knew nothing, I mean absolutely nothing, about Israel's twentieth-century history: nothing about the expulsion of the Palestinians, nothing about the history of hostilities with Egypt and Lebanon and Syria, nothing whatsoever about the Occupied Territories; I am a professor to the core, I could not help but give a short impromptu lecture, though it is really not one of my preferred topics! Their eyes were like saucers!): two books, each of which is about 60% great and 40% less so, the first because of a sort of columnist's liking for airy and/or emotional generalizations and the second because by necessity it includes so much not-very-interesting detail about a young visitor's coming-of-age post-college - though of course that is precisely the detail required to make the other content so shocking.
Ari Shavit's My Promised Land is extremely absorbing, especially in its account of the country's early years. I was fascinated by the story of how the "Masada ethos" came into being - I had been wondering why my host didn't mention Masada at all, as it looms relatively large in my imagination of Israel due to the TV series, which I did not see but which was very much talked about by my classmates - I suppose the year it came out I was in fifth grade or so? Shavit's book makes it much clearer to me than it had been before why a present-day Israeli leftist might not automatically single out that particular site for visiting! The description of the Israeli nuclear program is also fascinating. Here is a thoughtful review of Shavit's book; my criticisms would be more literary (why, oh why do these reporters have to narrate things in the present tense, and attribute to real historical individuals impossibly specific sequences of thoughts at specific times and places sixty or seventy years in the past? plus aforementioned columnist-style verbiage).
Pamela Olson's Fast Times in Palestine: A Love Affair with a Homeless Homeland is also highly worthwhile. It claims the authority not of deep knowledge and longtime expertise but rather of witnessing. I've seen quite a bit along these lines before, obviously, but this gives a much more detailed account of the ordinary lives of Palestinians in the Occupied Territories over the last ten years or so.
I'm taking suggestions for other reading. I can't read really dense policy stuff, the narrative history mode is more of a default for me, but please recommend in the comments or by email anything you think I would find particularly worthwhile. I think I'm going to go and get some of the academic history from the library - I have been meaning to read this one for instance for quite a long time, now I really will get it and crack it open....
After this, then, the irony (the shame?) of posting this record of what the texture of my week was like!
We had two more sites on the day's projected itinerary, but it was nearly five o'clock, we'd left from the hotel at 9:30 and I was absolutely dropping - I had to plead fatigue and beg for us to return to Tel Aviv!
On Wednesday, I was working frenetically to sort out the second of my two talks and put together appropriate handouts for both - normally this is what I would have done before I left (I especially prefer to travel with all the copies of handouts already made, and hard copies of speaking notes in case of some computer-related calamity), but B.'s father's death and the unexpected trip to Ottawa knocked out the two days I'd set aside for that last week (right up until I left town, I was reading huge stacks of other work stuff - on Wednesday last week, for instance, I had a meeting to decide on Whiting fellowships for which I needed to read sixty applications, and then on Thursday the last thing I did before leaving for the airport was a meeting to pick the award-winning departmental MA essays, which also involved hundreds of pages of reading).
I should have done the prep Monday, which was my quiet day at the hotel, but I was too tired. Bad moment Wednesday late morning when the computer suddenly restarted itself (I suppose it was 11 or 12 Tel Aviv time, i.e. 3am or 4am EST) - Word has this wretched habit of not preserving the autosaved document unless the program has shut down irregularly, i.e. not when the computer shuts everything down for updates, and I wasted a good half an hour trying to retrieve five minutes of work that fatigue made me feel I could hardly bear to recover from brain as opposed to hard drive, though really it would have been easier and less stressful just to write it again!
Both talks went very well, I think, and I had dinner afterwards near the university with my friend and host. It is slightly comical the extent to which I am most myself - happy, focused, energetic - when I am in a classroom.
On Wednesday night I slept well, and I woke up Thursday feeling much better. We went to Jerusalem, which was as extraordinary as one might imagine (the only other place I have been in my life that is so shockingly visually iconic was Red Square, Moscow). An amazing thing: you can pay a modest fee and walk the ramparts of the Old City (here's more information - they were built by Suleiman in the sixteenth century, and it gives you an intense albeit historically fuzzy feeling of the crusades etc.!). What you can see, what you can imagine - really quite extraordinary.
The stairs are very deep, but modern railings make it quite safe; there was only a precipitous metal spiral staircase or two to give me a bad moment. We walked quickly round many of the main sites (Golgotha, the Western Wall) and ate amazing hummus and falafel at Abu Shukri. Pleasant delayed-onset muscle soreness in following days from genuinely strenuous walking.
Quiet days on my own in Tel Aviv Friday and Saturday, doing a lot of walking along the promenade (to Jaffa, where I saw the so-called Andromeda rocks, and also north to the old port). It is a gorgeous city, incredibly easy and enjoyable to visit (more so I think than any other place I have ever traveled to.
Alas, I was coming down with a respiratory infection, so I neither ran along the promenade nor had another swim in the amazing 50m Gordon Pool - but walking is good regardless....
I especially liked the hotel I was being put up in by the university, the Melody Hotel. It was one of these small boutique hotels that is somehow perfectly comfortable - not lavish exactly, but really amazing breakfast (also daily happy hour with wine and delicious snacks) and free wifi and a roof deck the like of which one can hardly imagine. Little fridge in the room, and super-convenient markets and ATM and so forth nearby, also a ton of restaurants (I had a particularly good meal on my own at one deli-type one, one of these meat and cheese platters that turns out to be just sublimely delicious, but I think I have misplaced the card and cannot reconstruct the exact name).
And a final very nice dinner with my friend at Rustico (pasta puttanesca), followed by toffee ice cream from Iceberg.
Minor reading on related topics (I am a person who mostly prefers to avoid thinking about politics, but really one cannot do so all the time, and the most disconcerting and, really, dismaying moment I had on the whole trip involved an enjoyable conversation with two extremely nice young journalists from London, visiting on a promotional trip funded by the Israeli tourist board - we were all watching the sunset from the hotel roof - during which it rapidly emerged that they knew nothing, I mean absolutely nothing, about Israel's twentieth-century history: nothing about the expulsion of the Palestinians, nothing about the history of hostilities with Egypt and Lebanon and Syria, nothing whatsoever about the Occupied Territories; I am a professor to the core, I could not help but give a short impromptu lecture, though it is really not one of my preferred topics! Their eyes were like saucers!): two books, each of which is about 60% great and 40% less so, the first because of a sort of columnist's liking for airy and/or emotional generalizations and the second because by necessity it includes so much not-very-interesting detail about a young visitor's coming-of-age post-college - though of course that is precisely the detail required to make the other content so shocking.
Ari Shavit's My Promised Land is extremely absorbing, especially in its account of the country's early years. I was fascinated by the story of how the "Masada ethos" came into being - I had been wondering why my host didn't mention Masada at all, as it looms relatively large in my imagination of Israel due to the TV series, which I did not see but which was very much talked about by my classmates - I suppose the year it came out I was in fifth grade or so? Shavit's book makes it much clearer to me than it had been before why a present-day Israeli leftist might not automatically single out that particular site for visiting! The description of the Israeli nuclear program is also fascinating. Here is a thoughtful review of Shavit's book; my criticisms would be more literary (why, oh why do these reporters have to narrate things in the present tense, and attribute to real historical individuals impossibly specific sequences of thoughts at specific times and places sixty or seventy years in the past? plus aforementioned columnist-style verbiage).
Pamela Olson's Fast Times in Palestine: A Love Affair with a Homeless Homeland is also highly worthwhile. It claims the authority not of deep knowledge and longtime expertise but rather of witnessing. I've seen quite a bit along these lines before, obviously, but this gives a much more detailed account of the ordinary lives of Palestinians in the Occupied Territories over the last ten years or so.
I'm taking suggestions for other reading. I can't read really dense policy stuff, the narrative history mode is more of a default for me, but please recommend in the comments or by email anything you think I would find particularly worthwhile. I think I'm going to go and get some of the academic history from the library - I have been meaning to read this one for instance for quite a long time, now I really will get it and crack it open....
After this, then, the irony (the shame?) of posting this record of what the texture of my week was like!
Tuesday, March 19, 2013
Closing tabs
The world's first cake hotel. (Pictured below: meringue rug.)
Vacations for cat lovers.
I really cannot get it out of my head that the swimming pool at B.'s condo would be the perfect capybara habitat (dachshund extension optional).
Skulls on stage.
This piece produced in me the sensation that I must read this novel instantly! Fortunately it was available in a Kindle edition....
Miscellaneous other light reading: Peter Dickinson, Shadow of a Hero; Becky Masterman, Rage Against the Dying; Denise Mina, Gods and Beasts (I think that texturally there is almost no crime writer I would rather read than Mina, and I enjoyed this book a great deal - I wanted it to go on forever! - but there is no doubt she's less strong on putting together a coherent plot than on establishing character and mood in language, partly because she thinks in series/stream format rather than in terms of single books); Ian Rankin, Standing in Another Man's Grave (not bad, but perhaps didn't benefit from me reading it right after Mina); the second installment of Seanan McGuire's newest series, Midnight Blue-Light Special; and a very appealing collection of short stories by a college friend of mine, Uli Baer: Beggar's Chicken: Stories From Shanghai.
Vacations for cat lovers.
I really cannot get it out of my head that the swimming pool at B.'s condo would be the perfect capybara habitat (dachshund extension optional).
Skulls on stage.
This piece produced in me the sensation that I must read this novel instantly! Fortunately it was available in a Kindle edition....
Miscellaneous other light reading: Peter Dickinson, Shadow of a Hero; Becky Masterman, Rage Against the Dying; Denise Mina, Gods and Beasts (I think that texturally there is almost no crime writer I would rather read than Mina, and I enjoyed this book a great deal - I wanted it to go on forever! - but there is no doubt she's less strong on putting together a coherent plot than on establishing character and mood in language, partly because she thinks in series/stream format rather than in terms of single books); Ian Rankin, Standing in Another Man's Grave (not bad, but perhaps didn't benefit from me reading it right after Mina); the second installment of Seanan McGuire's newest series, Midnight Blue-Light Special; and a very appealing collection of short stories by a college friend of mine, Uli Baer: Beggar's Chicken: Stories From Shanghai.
Wednesday, May 23, 2012
Day of culture!
Lunch with my dad at La Lunchonette (I had sauteed scallops and salade nicoise, he had gravlax and rack of lamb) and then an excellent movie, Jiro Dreams of Sushi, at the IFC Center. Off shortly to see Cock, whose title gave the NYT some difficulty.
(Apropos of which: "We were allowed seven cunts.")
Also: Zero-gravity design?
(Apropos of which: "We were allowed seven cunts.")
Also: Zero-gravity design?
Saturday, March 26, 2011
I am mournful
that Diana Wynne Jones is dead.
Really I have read many of her books so many times that they are part of my internal landscape, but my two absolute favorites are probably Fire and Hemlock (that was the edition I had, and I read it countless times as a teenager) and Howl's Moving Castle, which I checked out again and again from the school library (but I can't find a picture of that cover online) and have owned in several different editions since.
The first book of hers I ever read was The Magicians of Caprona, which I found absolutely spellbinding (and continue to do so); her most autobiographical novel (it is not her best, but it is interesting, and it takes up a notion that she revisits so often that it clearly had some special personal significance, of the parts of a person's identity being split up in a way that erodes their selfhood) is surely The Time of the Ghost.
I think of all of these books very frequently, it is difficult to explain how deeply I have been steeped for many years now in Diana Wynne Jones's fiction; the one that I have the strongest urge to reread right now, though, and would download to my Kindle if I could (I don't own a copy, though I have given away several), is Deep Secret, which includes among other good things one of the best depictions EVER of a science-fiction convention...
Really I have read many of her books so many times that they are part of my internal landscape, but my two absolute favorites are probably Fire and Hemlock (that was the edition I had, and I read it countless times as a teenager) and Howl's Moving Castle, which I checked out again and again from the school library (but I can't find a picture of that cover online) and have owned in several different editions since.
The first book of hers I ever read was The Magicians of Caprona, which I found absolutely spellbinding (and continue to do so); her most autobiographical novel (it is not her best, but it is interesting, and it takes up a notion that she revisits so often that it clearly had some special personal significance, of the parts of a person's identity being split up in a way that erodes their selfhood) is surely The Time of the Ghost.
I think of all of these books very frequently, it is difficult to explain how deeply I have been steeped for many years now in Diana Wynne Jones's fiction; the one that I have the strongest urge to reread right now, though, and would download to my Kindle if I could (I don't own a copy, though I have given away several), is Deep Secret, which includes among other good things one of the best depictions EVER of a science-fiction convention...
Monday, March 21, 2011
The origin of species
The Costa Rica trip was pretty amazing: by my approximate count, we saw at least sixty-eight different kinds of bird. I am not one of life's natural bird-watchers, but our amazing guide was able to help us pick them out and identify them...
(I liked the end-of-day sessions with the checklist, as I am perhaps a lover of lists and of names even more than I am of actual birds: the bare-throated tiger heron, the slaty-tailed trogon, the broad-billed motmot, the green-and-rufous kingfisher, the red-legged honeycreeper and the great kiskadee and the red-capped manakin! One of the most beautiful little birds: Passerine's tanager. One of the biggest bullies, though with striking looks: Montezuma Oropendola!)
And we saw a brown-throated three-toed sloth high up in a tree along the road to Tortuguero and a number of Hoffman's two-toed sloths, not to mention the rescued sloths at the sloth sanctuary in Monteverde; and three different kinds of monkey (including a very fetching mother and baby white-faced capuchin pair who crossed over a canal by following one tree until it bent down far enough to allow passage to another one on the opposite side, as well as countless mantled howler monkeys); and many coati, a charismatic but slightly sinister raccoon equivalent, as well as agouti, a more innocent little critter like a very large guinea pig with longer hind legs; plus a pair of very slippery and attractive neotropical river otters in the canals of Tortuguero. More lizards than frogs, on the whole, including some handsome iguanas and a number of the brilliantly green and appealingly named (they walk on water!) Jesus Christ lizards. And lots and lots of butterflies, including the ones at the Monteverde Butterfly Garden (these, too, have names almost as lovely as the creatures themselves: the blue morpho, the small postman, the glasswing and the stained-glass and the big owl and Halloween and green malachite butterflies).
These lists are not exhaustive; I am not much of a photographer, but will post a picture or two, I think, to give the flavor. We stayed in some very lovely hotels, though it is cumulatively too many of them no matter how nice they are: the Marriott in San Jose (very nice indeed), the Pachira Lodge in Tortuguero (too much like summer camp, but the wildlife viewing out on the canals is extraordinary - unmissable), the lovely Hotel Fonda Vela in Monteverde, the Arenal Observatory Lodge (volcano!) and for our final night the spectacular Xandari, where we had a private villa whose view is captured in the snapshot below.
Thanks to Brent for a really lovely holiday (it is rare, too, that we are both on vacation at the same time, usually one of us is visiting and the other is working!), prompted by our visit last summer to the amazing Amazon and Beyond exhibit at the Miami Zoo (go there if you get a chance, it is not to be missed) and a certain amount of subsequent prodding to tweak me out of my natural inclination to always stay at home if given the choice!
(I liked the end-of-day sessions with the checklist, as I am perhaps a lover of lists and of names even more than I am of actual birds: the bare-throated tiger heron, the slaty-tailed trogon, the broad-billed motmot, the green-and-rufous kingfisher, the red-legged honeycreeper and the great kiskadee and the red-capped manakin! One of the most beautiful little birds: Passerine's tanager. One of the biggest bullies, though with striking looks: Montezuma Oropendola!)
And we saw a brown-throated three-toed sloth high up in a tree along the road to Tortuguero and a number of Hoffman's two-toed sloths, not to mention the rescued sloths at the sloth sanctuary in Monteverde; and three different kinds of monkey (including a very fetching mother and baby white-faced capuchin pair who crossed over a canal by following one tree until it bent down far enough to allow passage to another one on the opposite side, as well as countless mantled howler monkeys); and many coati, a charismatic but slightly sinister raccoon equivalent, as well as agouti, a more innocent little critter like a very large guinea pig with longer hind legs; plus a pair of very slippery and attractive neotropical river otters in the canals of Tortuguero. More lizards than frogs, on the whole, including some handsome iguanas and a number of the brilliantly green and appealingly named (they walk on water!) Jesus Christ lizards. And lots and lots of butterflies, including the ones at the Monteverde Butterfly Garden (these, too, have names almost as lovely as the creatures themselves: the blue morpho, the small postman, the glasswing and the stained-glass and the big owl and Halloween and green malachite butterflies).
These lists are not exhaustive; I am not much of a photographer, but will post a picture or two, I think, to give the flavor. We stayed in some very lovely hotels, though it is cumulatively too many of them no matter how nice they are: the Marriott in San Jose (very nice indeed), the Pachira Lodge in Tortuguero (too much like summer camp, but the wildlife viewing out on the canals is extraordinary - unmissable), the lovely Hotel Fonda Vela in Monteverde, the Arenal Observatory Lodge (volcano!) and for our final night the spectacular Xandari, where we had a private villa whose view is captured in the snapshot below.
Thursday, October 21, 2010
The pro-zoo camp
Death by fox: penguin cover-up at the London Zoo.
I write from the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Buffalo, New York; I am about to go and register for my conference (I am speaking on Saturday afternoon on Sterne and novelistic conventions for the notation of human gesture) and then investigate the purported rooftop swimming pool...
I write from the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Buffalo, New York; I am about to go and register for my conference (I am speaking on Saturday afternoon on Sterne and novelistic conventions for the notation of human gesture) and then investigate the purported rooftop swimming pool...
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