Saturday, April 30, 2011

My Funny Valentine

**St. Désir War Cemetary Approx 3000 graves - Canadians, Americans, British, and German. Copyright 2011**

Okay - I have finally found a moment here to write something substantial!


How is Everybody!?!? I miss you all very much!

I am currently in the city of Caen, just south of the coast in lower Normandy, basically just south of the D-Day beaches. The history here is incredible! I spent almost 7 hours in the D-Day museum here - so fascinating! It was incredible to be standing on Ohmaha Beach, where almost 4500 soldiers died in one morning. The bunkers overlooking the beach are so well hidden, and maintain an eerie presence. Equally shocking was the artillery battery at Point-du-Hoc - a few hundred square metres that was hit with 700 tonnes of bombs the night before the landings! It was incredible to be walking between the craters, and inside the bunkers, where you can still see the bullet holes in the walls from the invaision. Truly eerie.

Aside from getting my world war two facts straight (and there's a lot of stuff they didn't talk about in High School social studies!), I have been enjoying many of the local specialties in the city of William the Conqueror - I tried Tripe a few nights ago - my first venture into organ meat - I actually really liked it! It had the texture of a well cooked ham, with a taste that destroyed the boundry between pâté and a porkchop! Really good! As well, many local cheeses - my favorite being I think the Pont L'Eveque (sp?). Really similar to Camembert, but it's made in squares instead of rounds.



Before Caen, I spent four nights camping in the small town of Cambremer - about 40km from Caen, in a rural campsite that was run by this tiny old lady. She was incredible!!!! She is 85 years old, living on her own, in a MANSION! Seriously though.... She is in perfect health, and had so many wonderful stories! I was the only person in the whole site, so we had coffee together, and chatted, and swapped stories. Truly a blast!

And I have to say that my time in Honfleur was incredible! I stayed with a couchsurfing family for two days, and they were SO kind! It truly felt like I was with family! Honfleur is a truly beautiful city! I absolutely recomend that people go there! It's the first sand beach that I encountered, and it's one of the towns that didn't get totally levelled by the war.

That's the other fascinating thing to realize. Most of the cities I've visited were totally razed. Everything has been rebuilt since 1944... Truly strange to think about that I find!



And in news - MY DAD IS COMING TO VISIT ME!!!!!!!!!!!



We are going to meet up for a week in Paris. I'm really glad - it's going to be so nice to see a familliar face! And plus, I'm going to get to see all the parts of Paris that I missed because I was constantly running around trying to get all my stuff organized! I'm really looking forward to that week too - just settle into a hotel, and relax - guarenteed a place to stay, somebody to eat with, talk with - it's going to be weird speaking in English sudenly!


Speaking of english, I have to say it's really miraculous what even just a few weeks in France can do for ones French! While my vocabulary still lacks a bit, and if I'm trying to explain something even the least bit abstract, it's a total disaster, but my accent has come LIGHT YEARS, and well, when a french person says - Mais, vous parlez bien français; vous venez du Québec? - I guess I know I'm doing okay... I love french, and I wish I could keep speaking it for many more months. Alas...


And, things are changing - I'm going to head to Iceland in June, for a few months instead of Italy - I'm going to try to avoid the summer crowds by going to a quieter country. Plus, that's supposedly when Iceland will be the most beautiful! Thousands more photos - all back-lit and polarized as seems to be the icelandic tradition!!!


Speaking of which some useless stats:


Almost 700km on the bike

7 Days camping

16 Days couch surfing

1400 photos


And that's all I can think of...


PS - Kids, knives are sharp.... don't play with them... That's my Speedskating leg...





Much love to all out there, and everybody should send me their mailing address!!!


POSTCARDS!!!


Trying to keep the rubber side down,


-Ryley-



"All is Well"





This is Paris



Taken from the left bank of the Seine, just beside Pont Alexandre III


Copyright 2011

Thursday, April 14, 2011

France France France

Hi everybody!

Welcome to my first post in-transit.

I must be quick, I appologize.

The one thing I want to mention before I go any further is that all photos on this Blog after this point will be original photos unless otherwise specified!

I am currently working my way up to Dieppe from Paris, where I will start my tour of the D-Day beaches. Paris was incredible! Biking around the streets and taking everything in was an experience unlike any I have ever had before!

I stayed with a wonderful man named Jean-Michel. I have to say - he is one of the nice-est people I have ever met. He believes solidly in the good nature of humanity, which is an incredible energy to be around! He lent me his second bike for the first few days until I was able to get a bike of my own, which was incredibly nice of him. The bike worked great - except for the brakes!!

So here I am rocketing into Paris - a downhill ride the whole way - with no brakes, passing the Louvre, Bastille, Notre Dame, the Eifel Tower, and countless other beautiful buildings, surounded with mopeds, bikes, and cobblestone streets.

And everyone here smokes! No matter what they are doing, people always find a way to have a ciggarette hanging out of their mouth!!

Anyways, I must go - more exploring to do.

Much love to everybody!

-Ryley

Saturday, April 02, 2011

There Will Never Be Another You

**photo: Ryley flies the Arriflex Alexa on a Steadicam® "Ultra 2". Photo courtesy Aaron Brown**


Good day all!

I am currently sitting in Vancouver airport awaiting my plane bound for Calgary.

I have spent the last week down in LA taking a workshop, and man was it fun!

I saw PALM TREES!!!!!

Those things are totally out of this world! Such prehistoric looking things. Not only did I see palm trees folks, but there was a palm tree outside my window at my hotel! In other news, I successfully navigated both the LA airport, and their Metro system (which was actually really similar to Montreals Metro - just much sketchier).

So I caught a ride up to Lake Arrowhead with this guy named Dave (he was also taking the workshop, but he had a car). I'd been watching the forecast for the region for about a week or so in advance, and it looked like it was going to be quite warm! I mean common - it's California... right.... hmmm...

So it's beautiful in LA, and we're rocking out, going up into the mountains and then - whiteout!

Literally, have never had so little visibility! I don't think that we could see more then about 15 feet ahead of us for big chunks of this narrow, winding, surprisingly busy mountain road. When we arrived, we could barely see anything! Good thing I listened to my parents and didn't bring any warm clothes..... flawed premise #..... Love you mom and dad!

So anyways, we got there super early, and so we waited around for quite a while, and then this big van pulled in, and out got this HUGE man! This guy must have been six foot six or eight. Then it hit me - That's Garrett Brown - Inventor of the Steadicam!

Following him out of the van were Jerry Holway, Peter Abraham, Chris Fawcett, and Rubin (I'm not sure of his last name...?) - our instructors for the week.

It was wild to have Garrett showing me how to do up my vest, and how to fly the rig. It is a sensation like no other! As I stepped back from the stand, and suddenly had 50 - 60 more pounds of steel hanging off my body, I truly became an appreciator of the technology. Even with all this extra weight, I didn't feel like I was exerting any extra effort! But there's this really cool sensation of this thing hanging off of you, and just floating there - literally - let go of this stick, and it just hangs there in space, immune to all movements of your body - at least that's what I thought at first....

Turns out, it's incredibly sensitive! Basically the idea of the rig is that it is a bottom heavy pendulum - with the spring loaded arm supporting all of the weight from the centre of gravity. One of my hands (usually the right) holds the mechanized arm and guides it through space vertically (boom), and my left hand grabs the post just below the centre of gravity and points the camera (pan and tilt). My legs then take the weight of the rig (which is channeled through my body by the vest), and propel me and the rig around set! Brilliant!

The problem is that because the rig is basically a pendulum, every time you move the rig, the post wants to tilt in the opposite direction of movement. This gives the operating hand (left in my case) the job of correcting for this (to keep the post level) while still trying to do some artistic framing! It's really hard, but after five days wearing the rig, I think I was starting to get a handle of it!

The instructors were great - all of them distinguished operators, and teachers. They had incredible communication skills, and I they managed to conduct the whole workshop in a wonderfully light hearted manner! I learned so much, and met 15 other awesome students. Everybody was so wonderfully different, yet we all seemed to get along! There were six different languages represented by the students - English, Finish, Arabic, Portuguese, French, and German, with people coming from around the world - even Australia!

But yes, the weather promptly turned itself around, and I am now pleasantly sunburned, and have experienced 30 degree weather in March.... I spent the last day in LA. One of the students from Portugal asked me if I would like to split a hotel with me, and it turned out he had found a deal at the Sheraton hotel right beside the airport!

We wandered around Venice Beach for a few hours and caught dinner at a little hole in the wall pizza place. It was beautiful. I got to see the beach right at sunset, with the palm trees all in silhouette, and the waves crashing in from the open ocean with surfers riding atop - like, all the clichés! It was other-worldly! I could have sat on that beach for hours! Venice is interesting - quite weird, but interesting. Lots of like - freak show deal-ies... not my style, so we just wandered and looked for food. I liked the beach...

And the ocean was so nice! I love the water (I can see the ocean from where I'm sitting right now actually)!

Sam wanted to meet up with a friend of a friend over in west Hollywood (at least I think that's where it was...) afterwards, so we wandered down and met them at this really funky bar / desert restaurant! They were really nice people! Even though they mostly spoke Portuguese the whole time (which is such a beautiful language), I was at least able to find the tone of the conversation, and every once in a while Sam would say some word like "Steadicam" or "Dave" etc... and I was at least sort of able to follow. He tried (very patiently) to teach me some Portuguese, but I was terrible at it... maybe I should stick to learning English first...

Anyways, this post is getting WAY to long, and my plane is about to leave. Snow bound for the last time for a long time!

Lurve y'all

-Ryley