...so I'm going to talk about Buddhists.  They are nice people and they don't get enough attention this time of year.  

These are some pictures I took when I went to the "Big Buddha" near Hong Kong last month.

It's located near a working monestary and they've built an attraction with giftee shops and even a Disney-like attraction.  It features animated versions of "Monkey King" stories so it's actually kind of appropriate.

.

Of course the highlight of the experience was walking 1,000 steps up to the Buddha.  It was a bit of an effort, but at least I didn't have to carry anyone on my back.

I really liked the people there...very pleasant, polite, happy to be there.  Very humble and very human people. 

This is a figure of one of the "lesser Buddhas" .  The people I was traveling with tried to explain their significance but I'm pretty sure I can't do their account justice.  

But I did appreciate the effort.

Things I enjoy doing...and that I only started doing in the last 12 months:

1.  Walking the dog at midnight while listening to Danish electronica on my Walkman.
2.  The dog.  He is insanely cute.
3.  My NADS-Box which allows me to continue to write my stories with my Tandy WP-2 portable word processor (which is 20 years old this year and still functioning very well!)
4.  Downloading old movies (legally) and watching them on my media player.
5.  All things lomographic.  Especially using my Smartdraw software to make silly cartoons with the pictures.   Speaking of which...

...i stretched my software just a little bit too far...

...here are some less ambitious efforts....

• Image

  

Deep inside my body, evil events were underway.  The ghost of a cow must have cursed that steak I had and powerful and naughty microbes were attacking my GI tract.

This is a scary time to get sick.  You keep wondering if something that feels pretty ordinary is going to be something a little less ordinary but a lot more lethal.  And I was in Hong Kong, birthplace of SARS, where they put new condoms on the elevator buttons every three hours.

Waking up sick in a hotel room is a surreal experience.  While you're trying to remember what city you're in, you're wishing you were in a different body.

It is also one of the lonelier experiences you can have.  Not traumatic, but you're aware that you don't have too many people to call at this point.

Well, you realize you're not dead -- which is a good start.  Being alive means that you can try do something to improve your condition. 

But it is annoying to look over at your shoes and know that they probably feel better than you do.

Let's get up and meet Mr. Bathroom.  He's going to be your closest friend today.

Let's check out the tenants of Mr. Bathroom's estate...what can they offer to you today?

So you make a selection from the medicine menu and go back to bed.

You dream about a dog.

A wonderful magical dog.

Who takes you on a walk...

...it is a beautiful morning.  Just you and your dog are enjoying the clear air and the early sunlight.

And you know that you have to get better so that you can really meet that dog and really walk that walk.

My first Sunday pack home I spent at the laundry mat -- if you believe that cleanliness is next to godliness then you will agree that this was a sincere act of worship.  I did good but we really have to get the dryer fixed before we're buried in more sheets and socks. 

There should be an 11th Commandment.  All socks have to be the same colour and fabric so that it is way easier to sort them.  We were not given the gift of life to waste it sorting socks or watching infomercials.

So I was at church this Sunday.  It happens sometimes.

Went for a walk before the service because it was a beautiful day.  Still lots of fall colours and really warm for November, and of course I had one of my weird little cameras along and turned it into another one of my lomographic expeditions.

Made it back in time for the service.  Perhaps there will be more here on the Remembrance Day sermon later on. 

After the social time after the service (I'm afraid to call it "Coffee Time" because I don't want to upset my Mormon family but there you go, I just did it)...one of the senior ladies from the congregation  comes up and brushes my shoulder.

"I was wanting to do that all through church," she says.  Then a ladybug falls off my shoulder and lands on the floor.  It is completely inert.  Poor thing looks very dead.

"Maybe it fell on me when I was out walking," I said.

Rather than just leave it for the janitor to sweep up, I decide to take its body outside.

I find a bit of soil beneath one of the pine trees and I try to depoist the body of the ladybug onto the ground.  Whereupon, it flips over, opens it's little dome-shaped wings and flies to the base of the tree.  Then it crawls away (happily I like to think).

My blog title is ironic, I really don't think that I have the ability to resurrect dead insects, nor do I think Rev. Manson's sermon (even though it was a very good sermon) was so uplifting that it returned the little creature's soul to its body.  Naw, it was just hanging out, chillin' on my shoulder until it could figure how to get to a spot if was more familiar with.

Even so, it cheered me up to discover that instead of dealing with a dead ladybug, I was dealing with a live one.  Kind of makes up for the time I ran over that poor catapiller with my bike last year.

Oh, yeah then me and the boys went to see The Men Who Stare at Goats.  That cheered me up lots too.

and much as I enjoyed my time in Hong Kong, it feels so good to be home for a while.  I can tell that I've been away for a while because my spatial orientation is a bit messed up.  Compared to Asian cities, Toronto feels absolutely flat and empty.  In a nice comfortable, not too Omega Man-ish, sort of way.  Some thing happened to me after my first trip to England...after five weeks there...when I got back to Alberta...our two bedroom apartment seemed absolutely HUGE.  I recall trying to enjoy the sensation as long as possible.

Something's clicking now that I'm home -- knocked off about 50 pages on the manuscript since I stepped off the plane.  Not too shabby.

Maybe we have to blame Curtis for all those great photographs.  I'd like to write a science fiction story about an anthropologist from the incredibly media rich 27th Century who travels back in time to 19th Century North America and discovers to his profound shock that the First Nations cultures actually existed in colour! 

Once again sitting in the airport lounge in Hong Kong trying to get a sense of what happened and what

was achieved since I started here in August.  It was a good trip, although it was pretty intense at times I felt that I managed to get deeper into the substance and real processes of the culture than I ever have before.  I also had the opportunity to witness the results and condition of some of my projects here from ten years ago -- which was both pleasing in some cases and disturbing in others.

What was truly interesting was how much of my time was spent taking photographs -- I won't revisit the lomography issues from the last blog -- but I think at some level the photography has been a very useful way of helping me to look more carefully at what is going on around here...and to try and put all of this into a context that makes more sense.

Our research interns have been a godsend because they are a great reality check on local events and impressions.  I was showing some of pictures I've posted here to Nicole (one of the interns whose about to start her M.Phil in Art History) and she agrees with me -- while Hong Kong is a wonderfully colourful place, it looks really interesting in black and white.