Sylvia's Journal

This morning there was snow on the ground – not much but enough to cause traffic complications. Knowing that my last meeting of the day would end at 5 PM I happily skipped the early morning rise and left for work after the morning rush instead of before. It is nice not to have to get up and leave in the dark (or worse: snow and dark) – but of course it meant coming home in the dark. It’s going to be dark on one side of the day or the other.

I spent my day completing my Kenya assignment, working on a corporate assignment and some small stuff in between. Adding work up to 8 hours was, once again, a challenge. My departure for Japan next week is a relief and a reprieve from this headache.

Yesterday, a holiday, Axel and I went to the Peabody and Essex Museum in Salem. It was partially a preparation for our trip to Nagasaki next week. We were there to take another look at the artifacts that related to the Dutch trade with Japan, now that we have both read the 1000 autumns of Jacob de Zoet, a sad tale about cultural miscommunications, pride and greed.

The paintings of Decima island in Nagasaki Bay look so much cleaner than life must have been (and was described in the book) in the late 1700s, as do most other paintings of the trading posts in India, China and Indonesia at that time: idealized images of what the westerners wanted these places to look like.

We admired the porcelain ware, much of it commissioned by the Dutch, and the intricate craftsmanship of the Chinese and Japanese artisans who made furniture and household goods for the European and American markets.

We also visited the Shapeshifting exhibit of Native American artistry, old and modern. Its piece de resistance, at least for us, was the thirty or so foot whale hanging from the ceiling made entirely from white plastic chairs.

And all through this, in the background, I play scrabble with my sister in Belgium; she on her iPad and me on my smartphone. She has beaten me royally several times already on an English board, a French board and now we are playing on a Spanish board – a language neither one of us speaks. We are putting down words of which we don’t know the meaning. Playing in a language you don’t know is a lot of work and I am not sure I like it. Next we’ll try Dutch, still a formidable challenge for me.