About Landlocked: Landlocked is an interactive blog of Detours magazine. Landlocked bloggers seek to highlight Midwest events and culture with an international perspective. Comments and questions are always welcome!
One question I've asked some of my friends is the origin of the little tag line that says “Show-me State” on every car license plate in Missouri. Everyone knows that is Missouri's slogan but none of them could answer why Missouri is the “show-me state”. I decided to research about the origin of the slogan on the internet – it turns out to be an interesting story.
According to the Missouri Secretary of State website, the “show-me” slogan has several theories associated with its origin. The most popular theory is attributed to Willard Duncan Vandiver, Missouri's U.S. Congressman from 1897 to 1903, when he attended a naval banquet in Philadelphia, and delivered a speech there on 1899:
Summer is coming to the Midwest and Truman! It's hard to keep yourself from going outside when the sun is shining, the flowers are blooming and the birds are singing. However, you can still be entertained and connected while studying. It's wonderful to see how the digital revolution has given us more freedom to get outside.
Ten years ago I thought Walkman CD players were the coolest thing in this world – they allowed me to enjoy my high-quality music outside without having to carry a boom box. The whole world could fit in my pocket, with only a couple of double-A batteries and a few spare CDs! But, now if I go out with a CD player, people will stare at me as if I'm coming from the jungle. The game changed when MP3 players, or iPods,provided a place for your entire music library in a tiny device. And the newest iPod Nano can easily play music and video clips continuously for half a day. The catch? Copy protection is tricky. Your CDs would play in your friend's boom box, but your files wouldn't? Shame on you, DRM.
“In California, my mother had raised me mostly alone. We didn't have many things, but she is warm and we were happy. We moved a lot. We rented. My father was rich and renowned, and later, as I got to know him, went on vacations with him, and then lived with him for a few years, I saw another, more glamorous world. The two sides didn't mix, and I missed one when I had the other. When I left Marco he gave me a gift: a small glass snail. I think it meant that I'd had my home all along: Snails carry their home with them wherever they go." - Lisa Brennan-Jobs, writer, Apple CEO Steve Job's daughter.
There is a saying from someone, with the idea: by reading, you don't really find new stories, places and people, instead you find yourself. As I read Lisa's, I found myself. I don't have a broken family like she did, but I have two sides that don't mix. I miss one when I have the other.
I used to live with my family back home in Vietnam. My parents are both educators. Our family was not wealthy; which means that I didn't get toys, travels, or anything as the reward for any of my good schoolwork. Honestly, that is a bad thing – I was a curious kid (and I will always be). Instead, my father would reward me by taking me to used-book shops or street-side book sales on Sunday evenings, once a month. He would guide and let me choose the books that I liked to have. Coming back home with a stack of old books, I felt like nothing even comes close to that experience in this world. I would sit at home and read all of them during the following weeks.
I heard we will have a Pirate Party in Illinois. Being a pirate is not a bad idea at all. Still, what can be more awesome than being able to travel to anywhere you'd like to with a boat or a ship, seeing the horizon everyday wherever you go? In comparison to Southeast Asian students, doing anything related to seas and even rivers is a luxury to Midwestern students, as they are surrounded mostly by land. But in some regions of Southeast Asia such as Thailand, Indonesia and Vietnam, people spend their life on floating boats. And to make a living, they form floating markets to trade merchandise and fruits on those boats. A trip to those blessed regions, I find, is worth a blog post.
Rivers are the best thing that Mother Nature gives to the regions surrounding floating markets as they bring sediments to the land. The surrounding land is naturally fertilized every day. There, fruit being grown is plentiful, colorful and delicious. Whether it may be coconuts, bananas, mangos, sweet pitayas, jackfruits, watermelons, sapodillas, rambutans, longans; they are literally sweeter than anything in this world. Best of all, the weather somehow also blesses the land so it allows people to grow fruit year-round, so they are always sold fresh.
Being able to produce an excessive amount of fruit, people find ways to trade for other things they need. Once again, rivers do help. A boat can help local people carry much more than any other mean of transportation. Fruit being carried on the boats makes the whole market a show of colorful colors and tasteful smells.
March is coming, which means the weather in Kirksville is getting warmer. In March a tropical country like Vietnam, it's pretty hot, like a summer day in Kirksville. Anything opportunity to cool down is greatly appreciated. If there is one piece that I miss I've enjoyed so much beginning on March, it is going out to eat Che with my friends. Che in Vietnam as popular as Sonic drinks in the US. Except you don't really drink it (and it doesn't have a brand name attached, either.)
Che is a traditional Vietnamese dessert soup or pudding that is usually sweet, and comes with a thousand of different variants. Some of them are prepared by cooking water with beans (azuki beans, black beans, mung beans and some of them are with lotus seeds, then sweetened with sugar.
Fruit Che is like mixed fruit drinks, but with less ice, more fruit and some magic dressings from the maker. It's also common to find a variant with rice dumplings. To make your bowl of Che more interesting, you can order tapioca starch, pandan leaf extract, coconut creme or sesame seeds as dressings. Che can be served hot or with ice, but I personally prefer Che with more ice. It's like Statistics class- with so many options you can really make a whole bunch of different combinations and experimenting, but it's much more fun than doing Statistics homework. After a long and hot day, having a fifty-cent small bowl of Che is just the perfect way to relieve stress and get ready for the dinner.
As you might have noticed, Valentine's day is also the Lunar (Chinese) New Year. For people who are still lonely, the streets of Hanoi, Vietnam have plenty to behold. What's so special about Hanoi streets? Street calligraphers.
A little bit of background: One thing that most of the Western countries don't have to deal with is complex characters – the Latin character set is simple and sweet. China and surrounding countries such as Japan, Korea, Vietnam have (or used to have) far more complex character sets. Each character is a word, and might be a representation of the matter it describes. For example, in Chinese, “gate” is 門 (do you see the gate?), “mouth” is 口, “heart” is 心 (do you see the heart with blood?),... Moreover, a Chinese word can have multiple layers of meanings: The word 心 (heart) above does not only mean the heart, but it also means “humanity” or “love”. So with a certain level of creativity and knowledge, a complex character set is the perfect target for true artists. Because of the nature complex character sets, I really think that any art student who are looking for creativity should learn about calligraphy.
There are two kinds of calligraphic arts: The first is a character filling the whole canvas, the second one is a poem filling the canvas – it's fascinating to see how the meanings of the poems are expressed just by the formation of characters. Students often buy art that has characters like “intellectual”, “success”, “love”,... Others might like “happiness”, “wealth”, “luck”, or “longevity” better. As Vietnam switched over to the Latin character set in the early 1900's, not everyone in Vietnam know Chinese nowadays, so poems written in calligraphic art is less popular. Calligraphic arts are sold on streets either as in premade or on-demand fashion. With the on-demand form, the whole art can be made as quickly as in five seconds. In a not-so-rich country like Vietnam, it is such a fortune: Famous and well-known ones can sell one piece of theirs for as much as hundreds of dollars, less known ones sell theirs for much less, ten dollars is good enough. People do not only buy for themselves, as calligraphic art can also be used as gifts for the new year, to honor intellectual and traditional values.
Languages are beautiful. Learning a new language is a very good way to stimulate your brain and expand your mind. It is usually fun but could be challenging at times. As an international student from Vietnam, English is my second language and overcoming the language barrier is no small deal. I have the most trouble making sense of idioms.
The Midwest is a place where hunting and riding horses is a recreational sport, and there are a lot of idioms about hunting and riding horses. Here are some I found confusing and interesting at the same time:
Shooting a sitting duck.Why was it confusing? I never knew what was wrong with a sitting duck (especially when the duck that I imagined was actually sitting on the ground but not water). What does it actually mean? To do an extremely easy job that is not even fun. Why it is interesting? I found it interesting that people actually do harder work for fun and don't even want to do trivial work.
