So, now that I've gone through the Google Photos and rescued 3 travelogues from there (see HERE, HERE and HERE), I thought I may as well try and capture any remaining travelogues that may be out there. So I took some photos from Facebook, and made them into a Youtube video.
This is a trip the wife and I took to Phnom Penh in February 2018. For me, it was re-visiting old stomping grounds. (I lived in Phnom Penh from 2011 to 2015). For the wife, it was the first time visiting Cambodia. So I tried to show her all the tourist stuff in Phnom Penh. We did a little tour of all the stuff within walking distance of central Phnom Penh--similar to the walking tour I did back in 2014.
Continuing on from the previous - two travelogues, here is another travelogue that I rescued from Google photo albums.
This is Sam Tuyen Lam Resort in Dalat City from the fall of 2020.
We had previously been to Dalat city in 2015--I linked to the Facebook album HERE--but in this second trip, we spent the entire trip just staying at the resort. (We had a toddler with us, so there didn't seem to be a lot of point in doing touristy stuff.)
Continuing on from the previous travelogue, this is another trip I rescued from Google Photos. This was in the summer of 2020. We went to Quy Nhon for a wedding of one of my wife's relatives. But then while we there, we also spent time at Phu Yen. And we also included Tuy Hòa Beach, Sala Tuy Hoa Beach Club, Kỳ Co, Eo Gió, Bãi Xếp, Đầm Ô Loan, Gành Đá Dĩa, Cầu Gỗ Ông Cọp, Khu Du lịch Gềnh Ráng. (My wife planned the trip, so I just followed her. I couldn't tell you which places were which.)
I've now come to the end of my old Facebook travel photo albums. But the process of going through those old photo albums, and making them available on this weblog, got me thinking about what other travel experiences I've neglected to share over the years.
I thought of the December 2020 trip my family and I did to Phu Quoc Island in Vietnam. We had saved the photos and video from that trip on Google Photos, but I never shared it here. So I went through the old Google Photo album and made a Youtube video of that trip.
In a beautiful throne room, surrounded by a dozen or more young men and women, sat the Queen of the Skeezers, Coo-ee-oh. She was a girl who looked older than Ozma or Dorothy—fifteen or sixteen, at least—and although she was elaborately dressed as if she were going to a ball she was too thin and plain of feature to be pretty. But evidently Queen Coo-ee-oh did not realize this fact, for her air and manner betrayed her as proud and haughty and with a high regard for her own importance.
The very fact that Dorothy lived in Oz, and had been made a Princess by her friend Ozma, prevented her from being killed or suffering any great bodily pain as long as she lived in that fairyland. She could not grow big, either, and would always remain the same little girl who had come to Oz, unless in some way she left that fairyland or was spirited away from it. But Dorothy was a mortal, nevertheless, and might possibly be destroyed, or hidden where none of her friends could ever find her. She could, for instance be cut into pieces, and the pieces, while still alive and free from pain, could be widely scattered; or she might be buried deep underground or "destroyed" in other ways by evil magicians, were she not properly protected.
At some point in his Oz series, L. Frank Baum decided that no one would die in the land of Oz.
This had not been the the rule from the beginning. (The first book actually has a very high body count.) But at a certain point, L. Frank Baum decided that since he was writing for children, he wanted his Oz stories to be a happy place where no one ever has to worry about death.
However, something Dane and I frequently comment on in our reviews, is that in subsequent books, in an effort to get around his "nobody dies in Oz rule", L. Frank Baum actually makes the series more horrifying.
These lines from Chapter 1 of Glinda of Oz are a perfect example.
I should clarify that Ca Mau has 3 meanings. It can mean Ca Mau province. Or it can mean Ca Mau Peninsula (which is inside Ca Mau Province). Or it can mean Cape Cà Mau, the southernmost tip of the Peninsula, and the Southernmost point in mainland Vietnam.
This album contains photos from all 3. My girlfriend (now wife) took me into Ca Mau province because one of her cousins was getting married. But while we were there, we also did the tourist stuff and went to the national park on the cape where we could walk out the walkway onto the southernmost part.
The primary appeal of this place was that it could be reached as a day trip from Ho Chi Minh City. Usually we don't get out of Ho Chi Minh City unless we have a long vacation coming up, but this was a couple hours drive down, and a couple hours drive back.
...although, my primary memory of this trip was the agony of the drive down and back. Because I don't drive a motorcycle, I sat on the back of my girlfriend's (now wife) motorcycle. And I learned that being perched on the back of a motorbike is okay for short trips, but not long trips. My butt was already pretty sore just from the trip down. On the trip back, I started out with a sore butt, and it just got worse and worse. I ended up having to ask the girlfriend to stop the motorbike several times just so I could stand up and walk around. It took us forever to get back.
It is difficult to convince people that problems can arise from bits of text they are hardly aware of. Some of the strategies required (eg working out what reference words like it and this refer to) may be dismissed unless the practice material offers genuine difficulties. It is important not to work on a skill unless you can demonstrate that problems occur.
The time to raise an issue is when the students have been brought face to face with a problem, and can therefore see the point of practicing a strategy to deal with it. If you can manage without training on some of the duller aspects of text attack (dealing with complex syntax, for instance), so much the better--but not at the expense of leaving the students helpless. My view is that a certain amount of specific strategy training is helpful, but that most of it should be ongoing, as problems are encountered in the text.
If you are not clear about the purpose of an exercise, or not convinced of its value, it is better not to use it, because it is easy to make training seem pointless.
**********END QUOTE************
This seemed to me to be really good advice. In my teaching career, very often I have been required to do certain lessons on teaching reading strategies as part of the curriculum I was following. In most of those lessons, the students were completely disengaged from the lesson, and often I had trouble making the students believe that the lesson was valuable for them.
Therefore, this advice of not bothering with a reading strategy until a demonstrable problem occurs seems to me like really good advice.
This was a group tour that the girlfriend (now wife) signed us up for back in 2016. It hit all the major tourist spots of Central Vietnam: Danang- Bana Hill, Quang Nam- Hoian, Hue, Quang Tri- La vang Church, Quang Binh- Paradise Cave.
There are 727 pictures in this album!
I took so many pictures, and I tried to upload them all onto Facebook at the end of the trip. But I think it was too many pictures for Facebook to handle. (Or who knows? Maybe the problem was my Internet connection.) I kept getting the message that the upload had failed, and that I would have to start over again. So I kept trying to to upload again. The result, when everything finished, was that a few of these photos got uploaded into this album multiple times. (If you scroll through the album, you may notice some repeats).
I'm also not sure that all of my photos uploaded correctly. There could be photos from this trip that were on my camera but that got lost in the upload. At a certain point, I was just over it, and couldn't be bothered to double check the 727 pictures on this album against everything that was in my camera storage. (The original photos are long gone, by the way. My camera storage was full, so I had to delete everything after the trip. Like a lot of people, I use the Facebook and the Internet as my permanent storage for photos.)
I guess the lesson is to divide my pictures into smaller albums.
I think the issue gets back to meaning. "rejoice" is a feeling, so it needs an animate subject. It's hard to tell what the student wanted to say outside of context, but possibly "one cannot help but rejoice in the fact that..."
This is a little walking tour I did of Phnom Penh in September 2014. I had been living in Phnom Penh for 3.5 years at that point, but had never gotten my camera out and taken pictures of it. I only ever got out my camera when I left Phnom Penh and went to another part of Cambodia (see HERE, HERE, HERE, HERE, HERE, HERE and HERE). So after a couple years photographing all my trips outside of Phnom Penh, I thought to myself: "I really should get some pictures of Phnom Penh".
I had a day off from work in September 2014 for a public holiday, so I took my camera with me and walked around the city.
I spent the whole day walking, so all of the pictures are what was within walking distance of my apartment. (Granted, I walk for long distances, so I have a generous definition of "walking distance"). It's also all within Phnom Penh city, although Phnom Penh city does have a funny little divide between the two sides of the river. On one side of the river is the big city, on the other side of the river is the countryside. Once you walk across that bridge to the other side of the river, you instantly leave the big city behind and are suddenly photographing rural Cambodia.
(Or at least that's the way it was back in 2014. Who knows how much the city has developed and expanded since then?)
I had a hard time uploading these photos onto the Internet. At the time, I didn't have an Internet connection in my apartment, and only accessed the Internet through my data plan on my smartphone. I used my digital camera to take the photographs, then transferred the photos to my smartphone, then attempted to load the photos onto Internet from my phone. I tried to upload them onto Google Photos, but that didn't work (for whatever reason).
I tried to upload them onto Facebook, but I kept getting error messages, so I kept trying again. As it turns out, I accidentally created the same post on Facebook 3 different times.
I also think I lost some photos in the process. I'm relatively sure I started out this photo tour by taking photos around my apartment and my local street, but looking at this photo collection now, I can't see any of those photos.
The order of these photos is another casualty of that upload. Unfortunately they are no longer in the order that I took them in, so the geography is now all shuffled about.
I also originally intended to turn these photos into a blog post, and I even wrote the first few sentences of that blogpost back in 2014. It's still saved in my unpublished post archive:
So, a couple months ago, my school was off for (yet another) public holiday in Cambodia. I decided to wander around the city with my camera and take some pictures. (I have taken my camera with me now on several trip outside of Phnom Penh, but I had never previously documented the sites of the very city I was living in. It seemed like an oversight.)
Because it was a public holiday, the city was quieter than usual. To get the full flavor of a typical day in Phnom Penh, you'll have to imagine more traffic.
I started out from my apartment, and got some pictures of the view from where I'm living.
...and that's as far as I got. I got busy with other things, and never finished writing that post.
...but, that being said, I actually do want to post Steve's answer to my most recent question, because it's about The Iliad, and now that I've started re-reading The Iliad, I may actually incorporate this when I get around to writing my review.
Uh, well, written certainly by one person. I don't think there's any doubt in the world, when you read them, I don't think there's any doubt in the world that The Iliad and The Odyssey were both written entirely by one person. But composed? That person was was writing down huge set pieces that had been shaped and molded by many other people, which is why, that accounts for them that changes narrative tone and even tempo, because the person who was writing these things down wasn't the person who originated the material a lot of the time, I would say. So, single hand on the pen? Sure, absolutely. But obviously not a single generating mind. I don't think anybody has argued for that.
Another Facebook album link. (This is part of the project I explained about in this post HERE.) This Facebook album is: Day Trip Outside of Phnom Penh
Back when I lived in Phnom Penh, a couple friends and I were sitting around one evening, and lamenting that we never got out of Phnom Penh except on the long school breaks. But all our weekends were spent trapped inside the city. And then, one of these friends, said he knew of a day trip we could do just outside the city to visit an old temple--Phnom Chisor. And so, we went.
...and indeed, the material is fascinatingly macabre. All the old Bolsheviks, all the old crew who we've been following for the past couple years now on Revolutions Podcast, all get killed off by Stalin. This truly is the end of the Bolshevik era, so it's a fitting end to the Russian Revolution series.
My only complaint is that the episode slips into a little too much philosophizing when I wanted more narrative. I mean, we all know that Stalin purged all the Bolsheviks. (That's high school history stuff.) So I'm listening to this podcast because I want the details. Who said what at the trials? Where are the speeches? etc
Trotsky's story is also glossed over. I guess Mike Duncan was figuring his audience already knew the whole story about the ice pick in Mexico, so he wouldn't have to retell it. But I wanted to hear it retold. (That's what we're all here for, isn't it?)
The problem with this episode is that it is trying to do 2 things at once: cover the great purges, but also wrap up and reflect on the Russian Revolution as a whole. Thus we get a lot of maudlin reflections, when I wanted more narrative details. IMHO, it would have been better to have one episode focused solely on the just the narrative of the great purges without also having the burden of concluding the series.
But, that's not to say I didn't enjoy this episode. I mean, sure I would have liked more narrative, but I still found the episode a great listening experience.
Other Notes:
* Strange to think that during this whole period, Stalin still had his supporters internationally. (see, for example, HERE). I mean, I understand that the Communist ideology still had international appeal during this period, but how come the whole international Communist movement didn't go over to Trotsky's side during the period of the show trials? As Mike Duncan points out in this episode, the conspiracies that the old Bolsheviks were accused of and convicted of are literally unbelievable. No sane person could have believed that the old Bolsheviks had conspired to assassinate Lenin and Stalin and to partition the USSR.
* There is still- some problems with mixing up the names. Or at least, there was one incident this time. Mike Duncan at one point says that Trotsky was Stalin's true heir, when I'm sure he meant to say Lenin's true heir.
* Speaking of Lenin... one of the things I wish would have gotten covered in this episode is that, according to Wikipedia, Stalin was probably behind the poisoning of Krupskaya (Lenin's widow) in 1939.
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Mike says he's going to take a few months off, and then come back with a series of final reflective episodes to wrap up the Revolutions Podcast. But as for me, I think I'm going to stop here with my episode-by-episode reviews.
My original intent was never to review this series on an episode-by-episode basis, but rather to do video reviews of each season, and then to do one written review of the whole series (as I explained HERE). So I'm still catching up on the back episodes. (Currently I'm doing the French Revolution).
When I started up the Weekly Reading Vlogs back in March of 2021, I initially started out simply noting which podcast episodes I was listening to each week. But after a while I found it hard to resist the urge to add comments. From about episode 10.50, the podcast started to get amazingly good. I mean, it was always good, but from episode 10.50 we started getting into all the really fascinating stuff: Rasputin, World War I, the collapse of the Second International, the death of Rasputin, the February Revolution, the Tsar's abdication etc.--it was all pure gold in terms of story telling. So, for example, on episode 10.60, I added the comment to my Weekly Reading Vlog: "Mike Duncan's Revolution Podcast is really hitting peak form. Such excellent storytelling!"
In addition to the podcast hitting peak form, this was also during the Corona Virus lockdown in Vietnam, when I started to get lonely in my apartment and I started to crave more interaction with the outside world, and got the urge to just tweet out or blog about everything I was reading or listening to. And so from episode 10.63- Abdication, I started doing little blog posts every time an episode of Revolutions Podcast came out.
And then once a precedent of publishing weekly reviews has been established, then I felt like I had to keep it up, even after the lockdown ended.
But now that the narrative is done, I think I will also end my episode-by-episode reviews. I'm going to go back and continue to catch up on the back episodes now. (I'm still stuck on the French Revolution.)
For the record, here are all my mini-reviews from episode 10.63 to the present:
* 10.103- The Final Chapter: See you on the other side. (Current post)
So, from now on I'm going to turn my full attention to the back episodes. I'm going to continue my original plan--I'll listen to each season 3 times over, and then do a video review for each season. This will mean, when I work my way up to it, revisiting the Russian Revolution as part of my video project. I look forward to revisiting it.
I then plan on listening to the whole series straight through start to finish 2 more times (something I'm also looking forward to), and then doing the written review.
So, I'll be back, someday, with more thoughts on these episodes. Until then...
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