Minnesota Trains!!

As everyone knows, a vacation is not complete without trying out the local public transportation!

Here in Minneapolis, there's now a light-rail line. (Yes, there's just one line, but from there you can transfer to buses and such.) So I decided to take my sons and my niece Emily on a little ride. My brother Ben and his family came along too.



My nieces were excited to ride the train, but by sons were pretty blase about it:


Oh, boy! We get to ride a tramway almost exactly like the one we ride every day back home in Switzerland.

My kids just wanted to go because they're interested in unusual coins, and Louise (my SiL) told them that the ticket machine gives dollar coins as change.



I also learned an important lesson that day: If you're wearing beige pants, don't put your black camera-case in your lap just before handing someone your camera to take a picture.


Yes, I am wearing pants in this picture.

The verdict: Better than nothing, but not quite the same level of convenience as the transportation in Zurich. ;)

My sweetie knows me too well!!

He decided to get me a special surprise the other day, and here's what he brought home:

Yep, it's Transit Maps of the World: The world's first collection of every urban train map on Earth!! :D

Not only does it have the transit map of every city in the world with an urban train system (real or planned), but it also has historical maps of the oldest subway systems and how they evolved.

I was interested in the usual suspects (London, New York, Paris), but was even more intrigued by the historical maps of the subway system in Berlin, where pre-WWII lines crossed from West to East and back! For decades (before the wall came down) some mostly-west-side lines would pass through "ghost stations" in East Berlin where the subway train just wouldn't stop. Now the Berlin subway system is, of course, re-integrated. It actually makes me curious to visit Berlin -- especially now that my German is improving.

(Don't ask me to say anything in German yet, though -- my best sentence in high German is still "Ich möchte eine Fahrkarte nach Heidelberg, bitte" [I'd like a ticket to Heidelberg, please]. Not that I've ever been there. And my best sentence in Swiss German is the one that translates as "There are many frogs in Switzerland." I'd spell it out in Swiss German for you, but there's no standardized spelling. I'd prefer to be saying "There are many cows in Switzerland" -- to impress my Swiss-German friends -- but the word for frog is easier to pronounce. Anyway, both statements are true.)

So how did my sweetie guess that I'd be fascinated by all these transit maps? And that I'd sit down and read them all, just for fun? Maybe he got his clue when we were in Boston this past weekend and I was contemplating the subway map on the wall, to see how many lines they have and how they connect to each other, etc.


My kids explore Boston!

Of course, I guess he doesn't really have to be paying all that close of attention to have noticed my crazy fascination with urban transit. It was still thoughtful, though.

Here's one more picture to prove that we did come out and explore above ground in Boston. A little. ;^)


A cute bronze sculpture illustrating all of the local wildlife that you'd see in Boston, if only that nature stuff hadn't been paved over.

Road Trip!!!

I think I don't have to tell you guys how much I love traveling by train. (If there's any confusion, please review my trains topic.) However, in the interest of allowing my kids to form their own opinions, we decided to take them on a good old-fashioned American road trip!!!

At my last job in Switzerland, my American colleague and I used to love to swap culture notes with our Swiss colleagues! We explained to a Swiss colleague that getting a used car and driving around the U.S. is a popular adventure for young adults to take, but that the dream -- if you have a little more money -- is to fly to Europe, get a rail pass, and backpack all over. He told us that they have an equal and opposite adventure for young adults in Europe: normally you get a rail pass and spend a few months exploring all over Europe, but the dream -- if you have a little more money -- is to fly to the U.S., buy a used car, and drive cross country!

Naturally, I shouldn't be surprised. Getting in the car for a road trip was the economical family vacation I remember from my childhood, whereas (for me) railway travel was an exotic adventure! I guess it kind of depends on what you grew up with.

Why not take a road trip across Europe? Well, they don't have the (socialist) interstate highway system like here, so it's not nearly as convenient. It's the same as the reason why nobody dreams of exploring America cross-country by train: it may be theoretically possible to do it, but good luck! lol

I've heard that one of the motivations for setting up the (socialist) interstate highway system was a strategic one. Upon realizing how easy it is to wipe out a compact city with a nuclear bomb, the U.S. government decided to deliberately encourage sprawl in order to spread out the potential targets. This is a very real consideration, BTW. For example, if someone managed to take out Paris entirely, France would be in very serious trouble. That said, the disadvantage of the sprawl strategy is now becoming painfully clear: transportation through the sprawl net is incredibly inefficient, so if your energy supply is in question, then you're in very serious trouble.

Military strategy aside, our family's road trip was loads of fun for us and the kids (details and pics soon!) and we've arrived in our little apartment-for-the-semester in New Jersey.

p.s.: Sorry for being AWOL from the Internet while on the road. I didn't mean to post something controversial just before setting off, but I should have known that if I post any remark that's even obliquely critical of homeschooling, woah Nellie, watch out! ;^) But seriously, give me this evening to relax and get my family settled in, and I'll read all of the comments carefully tomorrow.

Have I ever mentioned how much I love trains?

And to think I was impressed by a silly little thing like free Internet on the train from Paris to Belgium. On my way back from my trip to Italy, they had something I never expected to see in a train: A playground!


Yep, a slide -- and if you look to the left, you can see the head of the dinosaur-shaped jungle-gym


And built-in dinosaur 'Memory'! Who'd've guessed?

Back from vacation!

I'm back from my Christmas/New Year's vacation to France and Holland!


Here we are frolicking by the pyramid of the Louvre.



It turned out to be unexpectedly Internet-free, which is why I've hardly posted at all over the past two weeks. (If you're looking for something to read, you can see the latest edition of my weekly roundup Sunday in Outer Blogness or check out some cool carnivals: The Humanist Symposium, The Carnival of the Godless, and The Carnival of the Liberals.) Practically the only time I got to be on the Internet was on the train going back and forth between Paris and Belgium. (Free WiFi in the train! Just sayin' for any of you out there who doubted the awesomeness of train travel.)

Going for days on end without the Internet was kind of relaxing but a little disconcerting (I suppose that's a bad sign).



The good news is that I had plenty of time to read a new exmo-interest memoir (The Mormon Cult), which I'll be telling you about this week. Plus I had time to draw many of the illustrations for Orem High. Of course I still have to scan them all in and color them. Will I be done in time for my planned February 10th start date or will I have to move the date back? We'll see...

Trains, trains, and more trains!!!

You may recall I mentioned earlier that we're all about trains at my house. Well, since that post, the situation has only escalated.

It's hard to believe that it was just this past Christmas that my boys got their first "Thomas the Tank Engine" video from my parents. Now our living room is no longer recognizable as a living room since it's been transformed into the Island of Sodor.

I think we passed the point of no return this past weekend when Leo turned three and we gave into the temptation to throw him a giant "Thomas the Tank Engine" extravaganza!!!



Well, giant for us anyway -- all we did was put little trains on his birthday cake and give him some more toy trains, train books, and train videos.

His daddy picked out for him a cool and complicated new set including a little mechanical crane to load freight onto the freight cars.

"Happy Birthday Leo!!" he said. "Your mommy will assemble this."

That's not as bad as it sounds. Actually part of the problem is how much their mommy loves setting up elaborate networks of train tracks all over the house.

My parents saw me doing this a bunch of times during their last visit, so when they sent a special double-decker train bridge for Leo's birthday...



...they admitted they meant it also as a present for me...



As fond as I am of trains, I was a little leery of the "Thomas" series when we played the first video of it we received. This was because I noticed pretty quickly that all of the locomotives were masculine, and the passenger cars were feminine. So Thomas loves the two coaches he always pulls (named Annie and Clarabelle), who were given to him as a reward for good work. I really have to avoid thinking too hard about any possible human analogy here because it's just too weird and maybe even a little creepy.

But I'm willing to forgive them because this was first written back in the forties apparently, and since then they've modernized it by adding some girl locomotives and other girl vehicles. Plus some of the cars that are pulled by the locomotives are masculine (especially the freight cars and cabooses).

Additionally I think it's pretty clear that James (the red engine) is gay. Now I hope my gay readers won't think I'm stereotyping here by saying that James kind of sets off my gaydar and not just because he's the most beautiful of all of the engines. But since the kids are clearly supposed to identify with these little anthropomorphic trains, I would just as soon go with the interpretation that one of them is gay. I even mentioned to my kids that James is gay. They have no idea what that means, but they can make a note of it for future reference.

You may have noticed that like a lot of parents who end up constantly watching children's programming, I can't keep from doing a detailed analysis of every tiny nuance, probably reading more into it then the writers ever meant to put there.

My dad pointed out to me a couple of times that "Thomas the Tank Engine" is a Christian series -- the original written by a clergyman. He told me this as if it were some sort of selling point. It's possible that he meant it as much as a selling point for Christianity as for the series (as in: "See? Christianity's cool! It has cute trains!").

I don't object to the Christian content as it seems mostly limited to portraying the local vicar as a nice guy and mentioning that the trains take the kids' Sunday school class on outings. I don't think we would let them watch it if it were like "Hey kids, let's all praise Jesus!!" This is largely for the same reason we don't let them watch "Barney", namely that when the kids watch their videos we end up having to sit through them as well.

Plus I think the overall message of the "Thomas" series is relatively positive. The point seems to be that all of the trains want to work hard and do a good job, simply for the pleasure of the accomplishment. And even though they have different abilities suited to different tasks, the most important thing is to be "really useful" by doing your job well. That seems to me to be an appropriate message for kids. Please parents, comment and tell me if there's some sinister alternate message I'm missing...

Because otherwise this is C. L. Hanson coming to you live from the Island of Sodor....

We're all about trains at my house!!!

I was re-reading The Indelible Alison Bechdel the other day, and this panel made me laugh:



Haha!!! That poor mom!

Of course I don't follow the cartoonist's wise advice myself since I don't have to -- my kids love trains!!!

So I can get myself (I mean them ;-) ) as much train track as I want and set it up all over the living room so we can all play together:





Yep.

Normally I love to travel, but I've been feeling so lazy recently that I ended up just spending my whole vacation in my pajamas playing with trains, as you can see from the following photographic evidence: