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design IS education
TEDtalk Emily Pilloton: Teaching design for Change
The intelligent species
I always thought of crows as pests, but as this episode of The Nature of Things shows, they are quite intelligent.
Stumbling upon art in unexpected places
While we were in Amsterdam, we did not rent bikes. The city was big, and we walked A LOT. It was a nice way to discovery, but not too efficient. As Paris didn’t really have trams, we decided to sign up for Velibs. This way we could get around quickly while still seeing some unexpected places while on route to others.
One particular problem with the Velib system is that people seem to take bikes at the top of the hill and ride them down, but not vice versa. So at the top of the hill there are empty stations and full stations at the bottom.
On this particular day we were searching the back streets at the top of a hill for a Vélib station that was not empty. We stumbled across this narrow street with many whole in the wall restaurants and galleries.
The particularly wonderful thing about this street was it’s graffiti. I am not sure if it was legal or if the building owners just allowed it, but it covered every single paintable surface.
There were a good half a dozen guys painting a mural right as we walked down the street. It was a fantastic site.
If anyone is in Paris and wants to check it out it is located in a particularly Asian neighbourhood with sushi shops everywhere. It is in the 20e arrodisment on Rue Dénoyez.
As we arrived in Paris our first stop was la Centre Pompidou. We got off the metro just outside the hôtel de ville and were surpised with what we saw. Set up outside were some badminton nets and these giant balls that you could roll around in. It was stifling hot, so we decided to opt out of rolling around in giant plastic balls, but instead played badminton for a couple of hours. Jacob won, but it was close…
An afternoon exploring some galleries
A little over a month ago on a sunny day, Jacob and I decided to wander around Dublin and take advantage of some of it’s free art galleries. We started out by checking out a monument in Parnell Square on the way to the Hugh Lane Gallery.
The Hugh Lane Gallery is a modern art gallery that chronologically explores the beginnings of modernism. There are many famous paintings with a specific focus on Irish artists.
We didn’t go through the whole Museum but we saw a recreation of Francis Bacon’s studio and various photographs that were found throughout his studio. The photographs were of different times in his life and displayed as found with finger prints of different colours of paint all over them.
On the bottom floor there is a stained glass room with very intricate small stained glass windows. They are different than any I have seen. The photos do not do the work justice as it has a mesmerizing three dimensional quality to it. They are also a little blurry as I did not have a tripod and the room was dark.
We then made our way through the neighbourhood where the Guinness brewery is to head over to the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA). This area, Dublin 8, has been very industrial, but is now becoming more culturally alive.
This is a photo of the vacant street scape near a main traffic arterial. This sort of street address, which is very common in Dublin, combined with the lack of regard for pedestrians makes this area a little dangerous at night. We decided to just try and stay on the sunny side of the street and got a little lost.
This is the sort of areas we seemed to pass. Beautiful old buildings with the typical Georgian door of Dublin either dilapidated or taken over for less respectable purposes. After heading up a hill and through many winding and smelly streets we saw some black (or dark purple) tulips and knew there must be a gallery around.
We passed through the main doors into a central court reminiscent of a cloistered monastery.
Then under the building through a tunnel into the gardens.
It was a lovely sunny day so we decided to take a tour around the sculpture court, instead of going inside.
Once we finished our tour around the extensive gardens we were too tired and hungry so we just went home. So the second story of the Hugh Lane Gallery and the collection in the IMMA are adventures for another day… a rainy day.
Leaving the rain behind
The past couple weeks in Ireland have been miserable and rainy. So we will leave the rain behind today to head to a sunny and 31 degree Paris. I am going to put in some relatively unrelated photos, because I don’t have any photos to describe these experiences.
An update on what we have been doing lately… We were in Galway for one week working. The city is fantastic, smaller and more Irish than Dublin. It was raining the whole time we were there, so that put a damper on our trip, but we discovered lots of really lovely shops. There is a shop on Shop Street called the “Chocolate Box” with amazing chocolate and the best coffee I have had in Ireland to date. We also discovered a market down a little alley on Saturday. I met a friendly man from Maine who bought Jacob and I a dish of Matar Paneer, and Indian curried dish with fried cheese. We also found some great little girls and bought cozy Connemara wool socks.
More recently we have just been working and running errands in Dublin. An exciting update though is that I finally found good coffee in this city! Even better, the coffee comes along with great ice cream made with Irish cream. The shop is called Murphy’s Ice cream run by a couple of people who are very passionate about quality food. I have tried many different flavours of their ice cream such as Guinness, Bailey’s, brown bread, honeycomb and mint. Honeycomb is a very popular ice cream flavour here and it is amazing. They have two shops, one in Temple Bar and the other on Wicklow street.
We will be staying at our roommates apartment right outside the Boulevard Péripherique. We are staying in Paris for 8 days and haven’t made any solid plans yet. I am sure we will do some of the typical things like the Eiffel Tower, Pompidou Center, Louvre, Sacre Coeur etc. There are also some lesser explored spots I’d like to check out. We are staying two nights with a couple to try out couch surfing, and as a chance to get an insiders perspective on the city.
So onto Paris… la vie est belle!
