Jananas

We bought lots of antique silver jewelry while we were traveling through Thailand, Laos, Malaysia, and Vietnam. We knew that we wanted to display them so that we could enjoy how beautiful they are and so that we can look over and remember just how awesome our trip was. I knew that I wanted some sort of rack to hang them on. I’d had some ideas bouncing around in my head but wasn’t able to get them to come to life. A random trip to the One of a Kind show resulted in finding some nice wooden necklace racks that worked well. Really well.

This week I finally figure out where to hang them – there’s a space right in our living room that works perfectly. They are visible to us, but not to people looking in through the windows. And we can ogle them all the time now. Yesterday morning I got Jason to hang the racks. Once they were up, he immediately started going through our collection and hanging pairs of earrings up. I went through my own modern day collection and hung up a bunch of my dangly pairs of earrings too (now that they are out in the open and readily visible I might start wearing some of them again).

We still have a bunch that isn’t on display as they are plugs (and thus don’t hang particularly well). Jason’s thinking of making a small shelf to display them on.

Yesterday we headed out to Mississauga to pick up our friends Jo & Guy. Then we were off to Elmira for their annual maple syrup festival. We had a fun car ride out with lots of pleasant and scenic detours through places like downtown KW  (why google maps, why?). And then a traffic jam for the last 4km into Elmira. But eventually we made it in, after parking our car way far away and catching the sort of hay ride behind a tractor thing they had going on.

I’m not entirely sure that I was expecting, but there was way less maple syrup goodness and way more more food vendors of every kind action going on. In fact, it was sort of strange. We did enjoy beating our way through the crowds, ogling the puppy dogs (including the woman who had her little toy dog in a stroller in a packed, packed, packed crowd), and eating ridiculous foods. We had soft preztels, beef jerky, pickles on sticks, maple flavoured cotton candy and kettle corn, and deep fried mars bars. I’ve heard tales of them before and figured that since we’d never come across them in person before that we should try one. You know, bucket list and all that. In this case the bucket list refers to a list of things that will kill you faster…

Jason caught this photo of me showing the mars bar off. It was a pretty strange experience. Partly because the chocolate bar was hot/warm which made the nougat get all extra chewy and tacky. It may just be that mars bars are really really sweet, but this was almost too much. Nevertheless, at least I tried one now.

We did round our evening off with a 4L jug of maple syrup and a pocket full of maple sugar candies, so I’ll consider the day itself a success even if there wasn’t as much fun learning about maple syrup action going on.

If you’ve spent any amount of time at Mazinaw, chances are you’ve jumped off a cliff of two. The highest I ever did was 20′, but my brother (and friends) have definitely gone off some of the 60′ levels. To be fair, my dad snorkeled underneath the cliffs where we jumped to ensure that the water was clear and safe, with no giant rocks.

The Provincial Park has big problems with visitors climbing the cliff face (and thus damaging the rock paintings and disturbing local ecosystems) and jumping (normally dangerously as they don’t really know what’s underneath ‘em).

My dad passed along this youtube video. I struggled with whether or not to post it as I can’t make it any more clear than to say that these people are fucking idiots. What they did is extremely dangerous and highly illegal. I do not suggest that anyone do this. Ever. (insert legal I’m not responsible if you choose to do stupid stuff to cover my ass from lawsuits bit here)

But it does give you a pretty good reference about how high the cliff really is.

Since I’m on a song related blogging roll today, I thought I’d bring you the Eye of the Tiger. Straight outta Bangkok, Thailand. Represent.

I have no idea what it was advertising, but I do think that we need some of them here.

I wrote a Caturday post yesterday based on a photo taken while we were in Sapa, Vietnam. In that post I mentioned some awesome things.

Like most of our time in Sapa, it was chilly and so the mountains were misty. It made it difficult to get good photos, so instead we mostly just enjoyed the view and then bought post cards to remember it by (heh).

I did grab a photo of the H’mong apple wine I tried at the little food stand. For a locally and small scale produced alcohol, it was quite good. It did have that little bit of bite, but the sweetness and taste made it delectable. I can’t remember exactly what I was charged, but this drink was roughly the equivalent of $1USD.

Next up, the spectacular waterfall in the village. The climb down is long and just stairs, stairs, stairs (s0 many that my legs hurt the next day, and just from climbing down!). The view of the waterfall made it all worthwhile. I think I was even able to grab a decent photograph of it, which makes me even happier.

Last picture for this post is something we saw on the walk down to Cat Cat Village proper. Everywhere we went in villages there were drainage and irrigation channels. One of the major ones on the way down was right next to the stairs. It was dry and two young boys were sledding down the irrigation channel. They had overturned stools that they were using like toboggans and were obviously well versed at this particular game. It made the Canadian in me happy to see kids and sleds, even if there was no snow.

Its amazing how universal some things are.