ktravula – a travelogue!

Two Plans

There are two plans, each of them going to different directions, with different planning processes, and a different destination. One of the good thing about being in the midwest is the ease of accessing much of everywhere else in the country. In this case, the ktravula radar has picked up signals all around and has developed a very familiar restless feet. This time though, it could be more fun, and who knows, more challenging than the last ones.

Without further ado, here is plan A: St. Louis to Arizona (site of the Grand Canyon, and then later to Las Vegas, Los Angeles, San Francisco and everywhere else.) 23 and a half hours by road. Oooh.

The other option, of course, goes in the other direction, eastwards. For me it’s a less attractive option perhaps because I’ve been there more than once before. However, in this case, I am a minority. It would depend on the cooperation of fellow travellers to select a right site to go. In any case, here’s the other plan, 16 hours 32 minutes:

The “when” is uncertain, as is the “how”, “why” and “with whom”. The only thing certain is the desire, and an otherwise useless longing for new spaces :).

At the DMV

While applying for my driver’s license last week, I had to answer a few questions at the Secretary of State’s office. One of them was whether I wanted to register to vote. I found this very helpful, even though I’m not American and I turned down the offer immediately. But the fact that the system is set up in such a way that voters can register at the nearest Secretary of State’s office even when elections are far away made a lot of sense. It will reduce the rush that must attend such events when elections come close. There are many things to learn from that.

The other questions I was asked was whether I ready to sign up for the Organ-Tissue donor programme. This is a programme of the state where one’s name is put in a list of prospective donors and a card is put on one so that in case of a fatal accident, one’s body would not go to waste but would be put to immediate use to save someone else’s life somewhere else. One of America’s socialist programs that makes sense, but my immediate response to that, which I didn’t immediately understand, was tufiakwa. No way. Why would I donate any body organ? Who needs it anyway? And more importantly, why am I being asked this question right now? Are they saying that I am going to die the first time I get behind the wheels? And, to borrow a thought from George Carlin, would anyone who finds me at a point of death on the road at the site of an accident have any motivation to save my life if he knows that I have a body organ/tissue that he needs to some transplant for some other dying person? Yea, crazy questions in one moment of answering a question: “Yes or no, sir?” It didn’t help that a first attempt to donate something to the Red Cross ended up in a rebuff tied to the part of the world from where I came. Read the very annoying old piece here.

The next time I talked to someone about it – someone who had actually signed up and technically donated all her body parts to science in the case of her demise (in a motor accident or such), I was told a very revealing statistic: over ninety percent of black people answered “no” to the organ/tissue donor question. Is this surprising to me? Not really. Africans have a strong attachment not only to life and its selfish preservation (do they, really?), but also to their own dead bodies for which they really have no further use. What would it do to me, for instance, if after I’m dead, the remaining useless body is cut and distributed to help someone still living, and the rest burned up with the ashes scattered across some peaceful place? The real reason for objection is that we really really don’t want to consider dying. The same reason why people refuse to make wills, immediately one begins to consider dying, there is a prevalent belief that one has set the process in motion.

Now, before I go, I must tell you that while sitting and waiting for my license to be printed – which was like two to three minutes after the road test – three white people answered “no” to this same question, without any visible change in comportment – the kind of which I had experienced the first time I gave the answer. I say this to somewhat debunk the racial aspect to the objection. In any case, the whole matter has got me thinking very deeply about not just what it means to be selfless, but what it means to die.

Why did I decide to get a car and a driver’s license in the first place? Yes, it beats me too. 🙂

PS: Contrary to the selfish sentiments in this post, it is not meant to discourage people from donating organs to save lives. It’s a very worthy endeavour.

Dotdotdot

This is how writing procrastination works: you tell yourself that you have nothing worth saying, and you wait until such a time when you think you do. Usually that time never comes and you stare day by day at the empty page hoping that something miraculous would happen and fill up the page. You could be lucky to have tonnes of other things to do to take up your space and time, but if you have been notorious in the past for writing even under extreme pressures of work, teaching, classes, events and many things else, you would usually not be forgiven for taking any kind of break. Yes, I know the works.

The evil thing about procrastination however is that it never ends. Like the fabled Sisyphus bound to head to the top of the hill with a ball of garbage only to be sent downhill rolling with no brakes, and to be condemned to repeat the same process for eternity, each day comes and goes, and the readers wait, and wait. In some cases the writer gets a kind of cruel satisfaction from keeping them in that kind of wait. Well, I never promised you to publish my everyday thoughts. I keep some of them for private people, or send some of them to newspaper editors in hope that they find them good enough to publish. And well, I’m such a risk taker myself and I wouldn’t mind to hear news that someone actually placed a bet that I would not write as much this month as I usually do. Wait a minute, why am I talking to myself?

All of this make a kind of sense, doesn’t it, and there is a win at every turn. The other thing that could bring a greater fun would be hours spent talking to people about an intending road trip: twenty-three hours on the road towards Las Vegas and California. Now wouldn’t that be something? Yet, it won’t be sufficient excuse to stay off the blog for that period of time. Well whatever, life goes on. 🙂

Meet Booboo

In the absence of time to tell you a few things on my mind, how about I introduce you to a photoshoot with one of my newly acquired friends. His name is BooBoo, and he lives somewhere in Glen Carbon getting all the petting deserving of a helpless coon as himself.

We had this little shoot sometime last week while enjoying the beautiful weather outside. On the other side of the camera at the time of this wonderful shoot was his brother, called Boo, a more mischievous but younger version of BooBoo who won’t even sit in one place enough for me to take his picture. He reminds me of Garfield, and sometimes thinks of himself as a dog.

Well, there. I’ve blogged.

PS: My love for cats started just last year. All the ones I’d met before then were never patient enough to let me get to know them.

PPS: This one is not mine, but it hasn’t stop us from being friends.

Remodelling the Arch

The Gateway Arch in St. Louis, Missouri, is one of the United State’s most recognizable monuments. Well, not really. The State of Missouri and the city of St. Louis has not explored the tourism potential of the nation’s tallest man-made structure as much as they should have. And over the years, the most iconic images of the United States abroad has been either the Statue of Liberty in New York or the Hollywood sign in Los Angeles. In some cases, even the Golden Gate Bridge and the Mt. Rushmore carvings in the Black Forests of Dakota have taken a bigger pride of place on items that represent America the most. Until now. The city of St. Louis and the state of Missouri have devised a plan to revamp the image of the Arch and develop its potential for tourism around the country and around the world.

To achieve this, a competition whose goal is to revitalize the grounds at the Jefferson Expansion Memorial where the Arch is located was set up. The aim was to elicit proposals from architects all over the world out of which the best is chosen and implemented for the beautification of the whole area. “We gave each competitor 10 goals to meet in their plans, including connecting the Illinois side of the river,” Tom Bradley said. He’s the superintendent of the Jefferson Expansion Memorial. The estimated cost for the project is $300 million. So far, each of the 5 finalists of the proposal have been given $100,000 to create not only colourful, but meaningful, proposals which are going to be scrutinized before the winner is chosen.

Speaking with Chancellor of the University Mr. Vaughn Vandegrift last week at the public exhibition held at the Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, I got the impression that the project is not only beyond the State of Missouri, the State of Illinois and the city of St.Louis where the monument is located, it is beyond this current generation as well. The renovation of the Arch and surrounding which is expected to begin when the winner of the bid is announced later in the year will be expected to be totally complete in 2015. “As this plan makes progress,” he said to the campus newspaper, The Alestle, “students can tell their children and grandchildren that they once saw the winning project on display at SIUE.”

All of the proposed designs incorporate parts of Illinois on the other side of the river into their designs and each presentation make for very enchanting viewing. One proposes an international conference centre around the Arch so that people don’t just come to see the monument but could also come for shows and events. Another one proposes tram, bicycles and pedestrian paths across the Mississippi river in a way that gives a better viewing access to the Arch area. What most of the proposals have in common is their love for flair, and a very thorough re-imagining of the Gateway Arch and its surroundings. If one thing is sure as the judges look over the finalists to choose the winner of the bid, it is that the riverfront and the areas around the Gateway Arch is not going to remain the same in the next ten years. Hopefully, it will open a bigger opportunity for tourism in the St.Louis area of the United States. For me, I will be glad to be able to say that I was here when it started.

The Gateway Arch, also known as the Gateway to the West, is part of the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial in St. Louis, Missouri, and was built to commemorate the westward expansion of the United States. It is located at Walnut St & South Memorial Drive St. Louis. It was opened to the public on July 10, 1967 after two years of construction. It is located is 630ft tall. The Washington Monument in DC, its closest competitor is only 555ft tall, and the Statue of Liberty in New York is 305ft.

« Older Entries Newer Entries »