The Steampunk World
The date is set for the bike show, starting April 30 and running one week. Many Ministers have promised to attend. After that, the thinking goes, we'll sell individual bikes to farmers who can afford it and hopefully get a large order to distribute as farm relief. This would turn the center into a factory, basically... I'll be here for two months after the show to start up the business. Maybe another Rat will come and take up the torch! We would start another school only if a large order is requested for the north of ghana, a society that is cycle-centric already.
Looking beyond that, I have a flight home at the end of June with a one-month layover in London. I'll head to Ross-on-Wye near the Welsh border to visit the Rat Patrol UK. I'm eager to ride their creations as well as make myself something to get about the countryside on. They're hosting a rally and I think I'll catch the Clunker Classic (thus my African tallmountainbike training). At the end of the month, right across the channel, the First World Tallbike Convention will be taking place in Amsterdam.
Just as I was wondering how I would get to all these places, I caught a techie show on BBC World... they covered a website, Seat61, by a gentleman in London who is very fond of train travel, particularly in a certain seat. In fact, the guy is a nut about non-flight mass transit, a pleasure I am particularly fond of when I travel. I love to seek out inclined rails and ferries and streetcars and monorails and gondolas and any other device intended to shuffle people around the planet. Here's a guy who has made a very complex website devoted to getting from London to anywhere else without getting on an airplane.
Chunkolini says there is a 'miracle train' to Glouchester from London. Sounds like I'll have to get used to traveling in the civilized world, meaning via efficient train travel. Seat61 shows two ways from London to Amsterdam and back, the most expensive being the Chunnel train. As much as I've always wanted to ride it (and avidly followed the construction and controversy as a young dork), the other option seems more attractive, a city-center to city-center ticket on trains and a ferry for L25. I find it hard to wrap my head around the fact that a cross-England train trip and a ride across the English Channel are merely the *transitions* in my vacation, convenient benefits that are themselves reason enough for a whole trip. Can you believe people fly over this stuff?
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'Round here, though, you've got to make your own transportation. We've built each of the bikes on the cargo page, and I have spun off into a rack-and-basket phase while the students are making different styles of some of the more promising designs. I'll bet the sidecar and the xtraratty will be the cargo bikes of choice, an urban and rural option. Plus the items that can be affixed to the farmer's existing bike.
One of the students, a woman named Emelia, is a natural with the arc welder. From the moment she first sparked it, she doesn't melt metal so much as she convinces the two pieces and the rod that they are but shards of a shared destiny as one piece of metal. The things metal does under her touch are uncanny to the point of seeming supernatural. She's serious about the class, here every day, and I hope she stays on as one of the Center's head welders. Certain other students are very enthusiastic about welding and are plodding along the learning curve, slightly behind myself, relearning arc welding after almost exactly a year away from it. Of course, Akutor is a pro, working in his shop serving the town as well as attending our class.
I actually have some pictures. Our five cameras were broken, and I couldn't find a camera in Konongo, so we went to Kumasi to buy one. Film and batteries were to be found in Konongo. After taking the pictures, it was another hour's drive to Kumasi to have them developed, then a return the next day to pick them up. At the moment we're struggling with getting them digitized... assembling a system and a scanner from the pile. Remember, this is a method that so far has failed to produce Internet access. So we'll see. I'm trying.
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Juju and witchcraft are different things. Juju is generally protective spells that a jujuman or jujuwoman puts on the people who seek his or her protection. Some jujumen were endowed by the little people of the bush, so they are friends. Jujumen get on the good side of the small spirits- the spirit of the town, familial spirits, and spirits in various shrines- by appeasing them with gifts. Spirits hate witches! But evil spirits like evil jujumen, and help them curse, ail, and kill from afar.
Being a witch implies some sort of transformation into a witch. This grants similar protective powers as the jujman but also the ability to shapeshift, into a bird or a small, deadly antelope. Good witches use their charms to protect their families, and bad ones are self-serving and murderous. In fact, evil witches are driven to kill other humans and eat their flesh. Good witches are said to eat at the dump, from the trash.
Looking beyond that, I have a flight home at the end of June with a one-month layover in London. I'll head to Ross-on-Wye near the Welsh border to visit the Rat Patrol UK. I'm eager to ride their creations as well as make myself something to get about the countryside on. They're hosting a rally and I think I'll catch the Clunker Classic (thus my African tallmountainbike training). At the end of the month, right across the channel, the First World Tallbike Convention will be taking place in Amsterdam.
Just as I was wondering how I would get to all these places, I caught a techie show on BBC World... they covered a website, Seat61, by a gentleman in London who is very fond of train travel, particularly in a certain seat. In fact, the guy is a nut about non-flight mass transit, a pleasure I am particularly fond of when I travel. I love to seek out inclined rails and ferries and streetcars and monorails and gondolas and any other device intended to shuffle people around the planet. Here's a guy who has made a very complex website devoted to getting from London to anywhere else without getting on an airplane.
Chunkolini says there is a 'miracle train' to Glouchester from London. Sounds like I'll have to get used to traveling in the civilized world, meaning via efficient train travel. Seat61 shows two ways from London to Amsterdam and back, the most expensive being the Chunnel train. As much as I've always wanted to ride it (and avidly followed the construction and controversy as a young dork), the other option seems more attractive, a city-center to city-center ticket on trains and a ferry for L25. I find it hard to wrap my head around the fact that a cross-England train trip and a ride across the English Channel are merely the *transitions* in my vacation, convenient benefits that are themselves reason enough for a whole trip. Can you believe people fly over this stuff?
---
'Round here, though, you've got to make your own transportation. We've built each of the bikes on the cargo page, and I have spun off into a rack-and-basket phase while the students are making different styles of some of the more promising designs. I'll bet the sidecar and the xtraratty will be the cargo bikes of choice, an urban and rural option. Plus the items that can be affixed to the farmer's existing bike.
One of the students, a woman named Emelia, is a natural with the arc welder. From the moment she first sparked it, she doesn't melt metal so much as she convinces the two pieces and the rod that they are but shards of a shared destiny as one piece of metal. The things metal does under her touch are uncanny to the point of seeming supernatural. She's serious about the class, here every day, and I hope she stays on as one of the Center's head welders. Certain other students are very enthusiastic about welding and are plodding along the learning curve, slightly behind myself, relearning arc welding after almost exactly a year away from it. Of course, Akutor is a pro, working in his shop serving the town as well as attending our class.
I actually have some pictures. Our five cameras were broken, and I couldn't find a camera in Konongo, so we went to Kumasi to buy one. Film and batteries were to be found in Konongo. After taking the pictures, it was another hour's drive to Kumasi to have them developed, then a return the next day to pick them up. At the moment we're struggling with getting them digitized... assembling a system and a scanner from the pile. Remember, this is a method that so far has failed to produce Internet access. So we'll see. I'm trying.
---
Juju and witchcraft are different things. Juju is generally protective spells that a jujuman or jujuwoman puts on the people who seek his or her protection. Some jujumen were endowed by the little people of the bush, so they are friends. Jujumen get on the good side of the small spirits- the spirit of the town, familial spirits, and spirits in various shrines- by appeasing them with gifts. Spirits hate witches! But evil spirits like evil jujumen, and help them curse, ail, and kill from afar.
Being a witch implies some sort of transformation into a witch. This grants similar protective powers as the jujman but also the ability to shapeshift, into a bird or a small, deadly antelope. Good witches use their charms to protect their families, and bad ones are self-serving and murderous. In fact, evil witches are driven to kill other humans and eat their flesh. Good witches are said to eat at the dump, from the trash.
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