Five questions
Oct. 2nd, 2008 10:49 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chickenfeet![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif){kind=small}
panjianlien asked:1. Why Canada and not some other Commonwealth country?
It was basically an accident. Work brought me here. I liked it. I have also lived in Australia and spent a fair bit of time in New Zealand. In both cases I find the remoteness rather daunting. Australia has a great climate but a culture (or lack of it) that I really don't enjoy. New Zealand I like in lots of ways but the smallness is a constraint. So on balance I'll take the accessibility, tolerance and multiculturalism of Canada and, especially, my adopted home, Toronto, despite the shocking climate and the distance from the ocean.
2. How has the shift been going, overall, since you decided to do without a car?
Pretty well. I find i need a car once or twice a week for a few hours which is about what I expected. I haven't had any trouble getting a car when I need one and the whole thing has worked pretty smoothly.
3. What are your favorite specialty foods of the country of your birth, and of the country in which you currently live?
Black pudding! I guess I also miss some of the rather old fashioned prepared foods like potted shrimps and whitebait. As for Canadian specialties, I think I would have to say that some of the artisan cheeses are excellent but that the only thing that I can think of that is a true regional specialty that I like a lot is Mennonite summer sausage.
4. What visual art would you most like to master?
This is almost as abstract as asking me what super-power I would like to have. I guess something book arts related. Either book binding or perhaps an intaglio based illustration technique. I suspect that both though would require rather better drawing skills than I have.
5. What is Lady Jane's most adorable quirk?
She is all adorable quirk! Maybe her habit of landing in my lap at high speed with a noise announcing her arrival which is almost impossible to describe but is something like m'reep. Her carefully escalated way of getting attention when I am typing is pretty funny too.
Comment for your very own set of questions.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2008-10-02 03:27 pm (UTC)Anyway, questions!
no subject
Date: 2008-10-02 03:45 pm (UTC)Questions:
1. What's wrong with Kazakhstan?
2. If you ever met
3. What are your favourite cheeses?
4. What would you drink with them?
5. Who would you invite (dead/alive, real/fictional) to your ideal dinner party?
no subject
Date: 2008-10-02 09:43 pm (UTC)2. I think we'd get along fabulously! After all, I am also a cat person. Also, one of my best friends is a Marxist. Though that's only until the revolution at which point he'll shoot me.
3. Hmm, so many! Proper Cheddar is hard to beat. There's some Irish cheese called Armangh or something which is so, so, so nice but I can't get it anywhere - it smells like rotting feet but in the best way possible. Dolcelatte is always a hit, Pecerino Dolce...ooh and Neufchatel!
4. A nice ale or a good claret.
5. The temptation with this question is to stick in nine of history's most sparkling wits. However, this would not work - after all, a great wit needs contrast, either with those who with stimulate hit wit with gentle probing; or else, give a dark contrast to the sparkle of the main speaker.
PJ O'Rourke has written what is, in my opinion, the definitive essay on the dinner party, and therefore he must be included. Boris Johnson's wit would not go amiss, so he's also there.
Three philosophers - the sanguinity of David Hume, the Delian crankiness of JG Hamann, and the dark, bitter wisdom of Joseph de Maistre.
I'm almost certain that Chaucer would make a bawdy drinking companion. Franz Schubert would be nice, plus he could take charge of the post-prandial musical festivities. Add me and we're done!
The cooking would be done by Escoffier.
no subject
Date: 2008-10-02 04:28 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-10-02 10:01 pm (UTC)So, questions?
no subject
Date: 2008-10-03 12:37 pm (UTC)1. What's the best thing about living in Paris?
2. The worst?
3. What difference to your general outlook do you think being fluently bilingual makes?
4. If you weren't allowed French wine where would most of your supplies come from?
5. What sport would you like to be really good at?
no subject
Date: 2008-10-03 02:12 pm (UTC)And of course I would need to make five times as much practically anywhere else to have the comfortable standard of living I enjoy in Paris.
2. How resistant to change everyone is; how hard it is to get a decision on anything; how difficult it is to simply get PAID. And how political every organisation is. Yes, there are politics everywhere, but 70%, of the energy expended at work in a French outfit is on sterile, mean-minded politics.
3. Oh, it makes me a different person altogether; I have no idea what monolingual Shezan would be like. I constantly adapt my thought processes to three cultures, sometimes more (aspects of German, Israeli, Japanese, depending on where I am staying for a bit at the time, in addition to French-English-American, which are constants.) I'm always aware that there is a world elsewhere, thinking differently. One of the consequences is that I am always a bit of a tourist everywhere, even in France.
One practical consequence is that I've never stayed with expat communities when living abroad; I go native instantly and durably.
4. Chile. That was my great discovery when living in New York, where for some reason the French wines I bought (nice ones too! Gruand Larose! Beychevelle! etc.!) tasted blah. (Dunno if the travel/warehousing killed them, or if they were plain fakes.) But there were very nice, not massively expensively-priced Chilean ones I bought. (Admittedly made by a Rothschild property, Los Vascos...)
5. I enjoy swimming, but I don't have that fish-like ability to glide through the water, getting the breathing and emerging elegantly synchronised just so; I'd like that. One sport I gave up on years ago (it would result in broken bones today) I would have loved to be good at, skiing.
no subject
Date: 2008-10-03 01:42 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-10-03 01:56 pm (UTC)1. How did you get interested in cricket?
2. What's the most interesting place you have visited?
3. What's your favourite mode of travel?
4. What are you most afraid of?
5. What is your quest?