MeyerBros

i’m in Cambodia on SST with a group from Goshen College. my real family has been asking for some photos of me with my host family here in Cambodia, and I thought this was the easiest place to post them.

the first one is a photo of my house. this is the main (and only non-bedroom) room in the house. my cot is to the right, covered with a red and white sheet.
the next one is my family. clockwise from back left: brother Sam’oun (22), brother Piseth (26), brother Sehung (28), sister Sambok (30) who lives down the road in her shop, and brother Tanheng (36) who lives in Australia with his wife and one child. In the front row are my parents, mother Simen (56) and father Saran (60) Ngin.
the third photo is me with my family eating dinner at the “dinner table”.
the fourth one is 5 of my classmates with me in Khmer language class with Mr. Meng.
the last photo has both of my parents.

For those of you interested, download this (Windows) program to remind you of upcoming birthdays and anniversaries of your friends and family. Developed by David Glick with a requested $5/computer fee. Click the link below to download:

reminder.exe

so after downloading 17 widgets off of the dashboard top 50 list (check it out Mac users — there are some cool ones there), david told me about last.fm. it automatically “scrobbles” (records) the music that you listen to on your computer, which…hmm…has some helpful purpose i’m sure. but it’s fun, and you can see what music your friends are listening to and find people who listen to similar music. you can also create custom streaming radio stations. and best of all, you can successfully waste an entire afternoon and not feel guilty about it.

in other news, floyd landis lost the yellow jersey today, but not to a main competitor. i think he’ll be able to get it back this week.

so i saw Syriana the other night (i should note that i watched most of the movie by myself, because aparently it wasn’t good enough to keep the attention of hannah and kelly for more than 45 minutes). i thought it was a decent movie, but way too complicated to really understand without rewinding a few times. i have to admit that i actually watched 3/4 of the movie, read the wikipedia synopsis, and then finished the movie. i had most of the plotlines and characters correct, but there were a few things i definitely would not have caught without reading the synopsis, even after watching the entire movie. perhaps the characters are a bit stereotyped (especially how all Arabs are presented as puppets of the US). oh, and it criticizes the US, which is why columnist Charles Krauthammer says “Osama bin Laden could not have scripted this film with more conviction.” well, i’d like to see him try anyway.

hannah and i made it safely to bulgaria this afternoon, though we were an hour late or so. we were picked up by Susan Hunsberger (Hannah’s aunt on the Graber side) and driven the 30 minutes to their amazing new house on the side of a mountain overlooking the outskirts of the city. we sat around and had some snacks (and tried the local beer), sat in the jacuzzi, and watched England beat Paraguay in the first full day of the World Cup. now getting ready for supper. not bad, not bad at all…

So we saw Jane Eyre tonight at Trafalgar Studios on the West End. Great directing, great acting, great set, great lighting–great show! The company is Shared Experience, and Polly Teale is co-Artistic Director. No wonder they’ve performed After Mrs. Rochester a lot, and now also Jane Eyre and another one she wrote called Bronte. Helen Edmundson, who wrote Mill On the Floss used to be a member of the company as well. But yeah, it was definitely worth the amazing 4th row center 17.50 pound seats (man I love London’s student concessions).

Tomorrow morning we’re up early to catch a 5:30 am cab to Heathrow airport, and then on to Bulgaria!

on our last day in newcastle, we took a boat ride out to the farne islands and saw a bunch of birds. it was windy (and became very foggy), but the cuteness of the puffins made up for the weather.

then we went and saw yet another castle: bamburgh, which is still being lived in.

on the way back to Newcastle we stopped by alnwick castle and gardens, which as i mentioned earlier is being lived in by the percy family (the current duke and duchess of northumberland). this is where the quidditch matches from harry potter were filmed, among other things. it was definitely a tourist trap, but still rather interesting.

yesterday morning we visited belsay hall, garden and castle, and we got to watch some very serious croquet players warming up.

yesterday afternoon we traveled by train to London and arrived at London Mennonite Centre just in time for a nice supper with Tim and Charletta and then a game of San Juan with the above-mentioned and their friend Joel. good times–and they baked me a birthday cake, which certainly made for even better times. thanks, tim.

LMC is such a beautiful place; I could stay here for a long time just relaxing. instead, i’ll leave really early tomorrow morning for the airport and eventually bulgaria. tonight we’re going to try to see “Jane Eyre” at Trafalgar Studios on the West End. It’s written by Charlotte Bronte, and adapted and directed by Polly Teale (who wrote “After Mrs. Rochester”). if we can’t get tickets for that, we’ll try to see “Sunday In the Park with George,” which aparently is a pretty amazing production. we’ll see.

we’re spending a lot of time trying to decide what we’re going to do with our last week here in europe, after the 15-day family par-tay. we’ve narrowed it down to 4 options: hike across england on hadrian’s wall, come back to LMC to relax and see shows, go somewhere random (Italy? Spain? Corsica?), or find a cozy B&B or Hostel in southern France or Eastern Switzerland. anyone have any suggestions? we like: hiking, good food, affordable lodging ($20-40/person/night), and beaches, if possible. we could do without beaches if we have nice weather for hiking instead. so let us know where we should go…

to be honest, i didn’t expect newcastle to be near as beautiful or exciting as it has been. well actually, i’ve seen very little of the city of newcastle, but the surrounding area is great. my mind has spent most of the trip so far in 100-300 a.d. (don’t ask me what that means). today we hiked a beautiful section of hadrian’s wall. apparently, roman emperor hadrian thought it’d be a cool idea to build a wall across northern england to keep the scots out of the roman land. this was built some time in the 2nd century, and much of it is still standing today. (we’re standing on top of the wall, and you can see it extending over the ridge in the background. it’s stone, with grass growing on top).

there’s a castle/fort every 5-8 miles, and then a tower every mile in between. we began in the ruins of housesteads fort and hiked east for 2 hours, some on the wall but mostly on the trail beside it. the ruins of housesteads fort itself are pretty darn cool, and include a very “advanced” latrine.

they sat on wooden benches around the edge of the room and water flowed in one side and out the other, so they basically had flush toilets. simply the fact that these stones (even the water troughs) remain 2000 years later boggles my mind… there was also a room (for the commander) where the floor was missing and we could see the gap under the floor for heated air that travelled up vents in the walls. man, this fort was more advanced than my house!

luckily, that’s a lie. but anyway, it was impressive.

tomorrow we see some puffins on an island, and a castle that’s still in use. it’s where the current duke and duchess (the percy family, who also owned warkworth castle) live. it’s the place where the quidditch matches were filmed for the harry potter movies, and the stadium is on the castle grounds. you should be jealous by now…

oh, by the way, i added photos to my last post too, so check that out again.

well, i suppose the castles weren’t sleepy, but i was. and i figured maybe i really wasn’t but they were, and that’s why i thought i was in the first place.

i also spent a while today trying to figure out why some words in english act as their own plural. it seems that the entire deer family does that: gazelle, antelope, elk, moose, deer. for a while i had a theory that any word ending in “p” was its own plural: pop and poop came to mind. then cousin benjamin said “heaps” and “caps,” and i was ruined. any thoughts?

i’m in newcastle, england. today we saw two castles:

warkworth

and dunstanburgh.

they were pretty darn cool. i’ll upload some photos tomorrow night perhaps. warkwarth was owned by the percy family until 1987 (when they were still using it for picnics, etc), and that’s the same family that still owns much of northern england. a scene from shakespeare’s “henry iv” is set in warkworth castle, and the character “harry hotspur” is a member of the family. interesting…

yesterday was my birthday, and it was spent napping in the sunshine in howth village outside dublin.
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Wow. I feel totally honored to join y’all here as an official contributor. Hopefully you won’t downgrade my privileges anytime soon. Here’s my first post:

What I’ve Been Reading
(and would like to share with you)

1) “Holy Skirts” by Rene Steinke, a novel about the Baroness Elsa van Freytag-Lorenghoven. Subtitled “A novel of a flamboyant woman who risked all for art.”

This woman was courageous, outrageous, and true to herself even when it hurt. She didn’t just make art, she lived it. A close friend and would-be lover of Marcel Duchamp. She wore taillights, bird cages (avec bird), and postage stamps, among other things, and a Time writer wrote of her: “She was New York’s first punk persona 60 years before their time.” Everyone thought she was crazy by the end of her life, perhaps from syphillis, but perhaps, as Ezra Pound wrote of her in a poem:

“Well, of course, there was a certain strain
On the gal in them days in Manhattan
the principle of non-acquiescence
laid a burden.”

I think I want to write a play about her.
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Hannah Gerig just completed “Creating for the Web” at Goshen College with this fantastic first site. Much better than my first. Congratulations Hannah, I love it. Hope we can rope you into working with us on Meyerbros.