I spent seven hours doing farm work in a white shirt today. There’s dirt under my fingernails and mosquito bites all along my arms, but I feel better than I did after working the same shift last Thursday. Last week, I was too tired to blog, and too grumpy to cook dinner. This week, the hot water in the shower isn’t working, and I’m not even dreading the cold shower that awaits me when I’m done writing this post. We planted sweet potatoes today. A few weeks ago, some of the workers cleared out all the unwanted plants from a papaya grove, and today we went through and started rebuilding…
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Tea Tuesday: The Tea Garden
I mentioned in my last Tea Tuesday post that Hana Farms grows many plants that can be made into herbal tea. They’re also working on making a designated tea garden, which is a number of stepped beds located beside the farm’s communal buildings. Apparently, this area was entirely overgrown just a few weeks before I got here, but E’s sister started clearing the land and uncovered some forgotten stepped beds. The tea garden has become her pet project, and she has been rebuilding the rock walls out of the farm’s plentiful lava rocks, turning the soil, and planting. So far, there aren’t a lot of plants growing, although there is…
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Copenhagen: Last Look
Copenhagen is a cool city, but I made a few mistakes there, and so, for this last look at my visit, I want to impart a little advice. (When am I not imparting at least a little advice?) 5 Things to Keep in Mind When Visiting Copenhagen 1. It rains… a lot. Copenhagen suffers from bad weather in much the same way that London does, just without the reputation, and with buckets of snow in the winter. I visited during the first week in October, and I spent seven days in Copenhagen. It rained on five of those days. Actually it rained six of those days, but on the 6th…
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Weekly Travel Inspiration: Grand Central Station
I finally changed my homepage away from my alma mater’s student life page, which I think is a positive step towards adulthood. NPR is my new homepage, which is great, except that every time I open up Firefox I am bombarded with interesting-sounding news stories, and I have to spend time learning before I can settle into blogging or checking my facebook. That’s why today, your weekly travel inspiration is an article from NPR celebrating Grand Central Station’s 100th anniversary. It’s called The Ways We Wait, and focuses on the time we spend in train stations just biding our time. It includes a slideshow of photos of people hanging out…
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Maui: First Impressions
I had trouble deciding what to call this post. These can’t really be my first impressions of Hawaii when I’ve only been to Maui. But I haven’t seen much of Maui either because in my first week at the farm I only left the property once. Hana Farms is technically located in Hana, but, until today (my second trip off the farm) I hadn’t actually seen the town. So, are these my first impressions of Maui, Hana, WWOOFing? It’s unclear. Regardless, here’s how this latest adventure is going so far. When E and I stepped off the plane into the humid Hawaiian air, the first thing I noticed was the…
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Tea Tuesday: It wasn’t meant to be
The farm where I’m working in Hawaii grows many different kinds of fruits and vegetables, including a number of herbs that can be made into tea. The most plentiful and identifiable, at least for me, are definitely the mint plants that grow in and among the beds in the vegetable garden. On this farm, they act as a cover plant, which means they take up space where unwanted weeds might otherwise grow. The mint is not explicitly tended to, in part because this variety of mint grows without much encouragement (it grew beside the driveway of my childhood home), but it’s presence is useful and appreciated. As I was walking…
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A Perfect Sunday in Copenhagen
A recipe for a truly lovely Sunday in Copenhagen: Assuming it is sunny, begin your day at Rundetaarn — the Round Tower. This is a tourist attraction in Copenhagen’s Latin Quarter that offers spectacular views out over the city; plus it’s an interesting building in and of its own right. Rundetaarn was built between 1637 and 1642 and is 114 feet tall (34.8 meters). In order to climb to the top, you won’t take the stairs; instead, you will follow the tower’s unique spiral walkway. The tower was built to serve three functions for the scholars of the era: it housed a student’s church, a university library, and an astronomical…
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Weekly Travel Inspiration: Alternative Travel
Your Weekly Travel Inspiration is a day late because I’m still settling in at Hana Farms — the organic farm in Hawaii where E and I will be living and working for the next month or two. We found this opportunity through E’s older sister, but she, and most of the other people working here, found it through the WWOOF website. That’s why this week, I want to highlight WWOOF, as well as some other websites that offer alternative opportunities for travel and living. WWOOF — World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms WWOOFing is an organization of work-trade opportunities on various organic farms the world over. Farms that are interested…
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Tea Tuesday: My Flight is Tomorrow!
As evidenced by the title of this post, I’m leaving for Hawaii tomorrow! So instead of devising a complex blog post for you, I’ve spent the evening furiously packing, and wondering what I’m forgetting. Therefore, this Tea Tuesday is going to be a bit brief… Have some tea porn everybody! My friend, Katie, moved into a new apartment last week, and inherited this coffee table, which she proceeded to turn into a shrine to her tea. I can only hope that when I finally get a big kid apartment, I will have as much beautiful loose leaf tea as her.
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Statues of Copenhagen: A Photo Essay
The Little Mermaid is Copenhagen’s most famous statue. It has become an iconic symbol of the city and a major tourist attraction. Sculpted by Edvard Eriksen and unveiled in 1913, the statue is based on the fairytale The Little Mermaid, which was originally written by the Danish author and poet, Hans Christian Andersen. It’s a lovely statue of a wistful mermaid, but it’s hard to say why it became so famous. It’s certainly not because of its size — the mermaid is just over 4 ft tall (1.25 meters). And it’s not as if it’s the only statue in Copenhagen. In fact, as I wandered the city, I was struck…
