Amazing

It's so interesting explaining something you know so well to someone that it is completely foreign to. Helping them make connections to things they are familiar with. Putting the pieces together. It really puts a perspective on the things you actually do know. Sometimes, it's so easy to see the areas where you are weak and where you can improve, but when you get a glimpse of the basis of what it is you do know, you begin to appreciate yourself even more. Yes, yes you can always learn and know more, but do you ever look back and appreciate what it is you already know?

This realization may have come from a combination of events that occurred recently, including watching "Inception" for the first time, but I felt inclined to share.

This is going to be my last blog before 2011, thought I would complete this year with some excitement of what could be.

royal fireworks

Blue

On my walk on the Vieux Port in search of Pad Thai (I have had a hankering for 3 months), and still with no avail. Where art thou, Where art thou, O'Pad Thai. In the midst, I was drawn to blue lights and sound. A camel walked by. "What is going on," I think out loud. I see men dressed in costumes with their faces painted blue, Oh the "Blue Man Group!" ... not.  I look up and there is someone crawling down the building head first like he was a spider. What IS this?

Alright, what could this possibly be? I feel strange, a weird sense of hysteria. People are standing around, for what I can't quite place, they are waiting for something. Then I see a man in blue sitting at a table going through what seems to be an appointment book. I think it was the opening of a restaurant or an art show. A man in blue approached me passing me a book and asked, "sais-tu comment lire?" Baffled and repeating in my head, "did he just ask me if I can read?!"

So I reply, "bien sur!" Then he says in french "Would you give a lesson to the crowd?" Very strange, it tickled my curiosity. That was my cue to leave.

Christmas in France

statue, tree, ornament

tambourinaïre

dressed like santons

provencal costumes

one of my favorites, she spun around to smile for me. 

tambourinaïre

dancing 

chic woman in fake fur (I hope)

Crèche de Noël

Commonly known as the nativity scene in english, la crèche de noël is the most common symbol in france for christmas. In Provence, artisans make beautiful figurines of all sorts of people, they make them doll size and smaller. They also fabricate scenes and in the center of town, they set up rows and rows of wooden shelters to set up their beautiful creations to sell during Christmas time in the market. You can expect to pay 30€ (~ $45) for a figurine. My mom has a few in the states she brought all the way from France since before I was born. The ideas are all the same, but I went in search for one that most resembled hers. It seems today they may use different material, but I can't be positive about that. 

Christmas Vacation

Just a couple more days until Christmas vacation begins! I'm surprised they call it "Vacances de Noël" in public schools here in France. In the states in order avoid discrimination against the other holidays that occur in December, they call this period of vacation "Winter Break."

My teacher's lounge was decked out with a Christmas tree, lights, garland, you name it. Today even Père Noël (Father Christmas or Santa Claus) came around delivering chocolate candies. He saw me twice so he gave me candy the second time acknowledging that he already gave me one.

Christmas time in France is similar and different in a lot of ways. The foods they eat and the traditions are a little different than in the states. I don't believe they eat a ham at Christmas, they eat sea food. I'll let you know for sure once I celebrate it with my family. Oh and in France, they get together with family on Christmas Eve (la veille de Noël) and they eat then. In the states, people join on Christmas Day in the evening. I'm accustom to opening presents on Christmas Eve anyway since I grew up in a french household. That must be why I was always lucky to celebrate twice, once with my family and Christmas Day with a friend's families.

Check back soon for pictures of some sights in France during noël.

Bise!

Alaska Map "Painting"

Some of you may already know this, but I make maps. I took the opportunity to make a custom map for my dear friend who spent some time doing mountaineering school in Alaska. I figured, I have the knowledge, power and skill to pull this off. So I set out to create a topographic map of the area he spent time in. Here it is, and I'll explain my methodologies as well if you are interested.

Matanuska Glacier and Powell Glacier
(original size= 24"x36") sorry if it's too small the see here

First, I visited the USGS website and selected the seamless server NED (National Elevation Data) download page. I zoomed into the area that I needed and selected the area with the download cursor. The 1" NED data wasn't available for that region and neither was the 1/3" or the 1/9" so I was forced to settle with the 2" NED Data. Instead of giving me a seamless raster, it brought back 4 tiles for my selected region. I downloaded the tiles (4) and extracted them all to my project folder.

Then I added all 4 rasters to my ArcMap document and projected the entire data frame as "State Plane 83 Feet Alaska FIPS 3" It projected the data quite nicely. I then went into the toolbox to merge the 4 tiles to make them seamless. This is called mosaicing, it "stiches" the images together making them one. It seemed that I had to make a raster in as the output, so I just went into ArcCatalog, copied one of the raster folders that I extracted and gave it a new name, "Output." Then I went back into my ArcMap document and hit the "Mosaic" tool in the ArcToolbox. I navigated to my newly created raster as my output and added the four rasters to the list of desired tiles. I gave it a name "merge" and hit ok. After a couple minutes it was done mosaicing (praise the programming gods) and the image was complete. The 4 tiles were now one raster. I saved the .mxd (Esri map document) as chugach.mxd as this is the area of interest. I will begin beautification.

detail

Creating the hillshade was fun and ridiculous at the same time. I tried 15 different combinations of azimuth and altitude before I settled on one that I liked. I found that, at least in this case, staying close to the default was the best choice. The purple color represents the highest elevations which melt into brown, yellow, green and then finally blue being the glaciers.

The contour lines were a whole separate ballpark. I created them using Spatial Analyst (pretty solid ArcGIS tool). I took the DEM (Digital Elevation Model) and, since I had merged 4 tiles together, had to adjust the range values. Excuse me if I'm being brief/vague with my methodology. This isn't meant to be a tutorial. Then I created the contour lines, I had to convert my values from meters to feet, which was also a series of trial and error, but I finally got it. I am displaying only the contour lines with easily readable values (2000, 3000 etc.) at intervals of 20 feet. I then labeled only the primary contour lines and gave them a more prominent line weight/color. The secondary contour lines are displayed but not labeled, but since they are at every 20 feet, you can deduce what the value of that line actually is.

I also set out to make it so sweet, but unfortunately there wasn't too much available data for what I was looking for. I found some really excellent sources of data that seemed to be good leads until I downloaded them and tried using them. For example, I wasn't able to find a complete point dataset with the peaks and their common names of the area. It would be really cool if someone who is really familiar with the area created a dataset like that. I found some great glacier data that I also used in the map. Anyway, since my resources were limited to internet database searches, I decided to make it look more like a painting than an actual "navigational" map. Enjoy!

Je ne sais pas

There is this facial expression that is clearly french. When talking to a person and they don't know how to reply or they don't know the answer to something, they make this facial expression. It's like a closing of the lips followed by a pursing of the lips, then a bulging of the eyes with expressive eyebrows and the added forward head bob. I think it's equivalent to the shoulder shrug.

Market Photos

I took only these photos while at the market. Enjoy!