ANGEL FALLS!!!

So, over the 4th of July weekend, I WENT TO ANGEL FALLS!!!

It was pretty much the coolest thing I've ever done. Cool doesn't even come close to describing it, though. We (my 2 great travel companions and I) flew in a Cessna right by the falls, spent one night in an indigenous Pemon village, canoed down the river to the base of the falls, slept every night in a hammock IN THE RAIN FOREST!!! (under a shelter, of course), saw howler monkeys, can you believe it? Hiked in the rain forest, saw a million kinds of plants and animals, felt like I was living my dream of being a NatGeo photographer -- we saw lion ants and giant hairy spiders and kingfishers and cormorants and cock-of-the-rock and tanagers and macaws and orandopola nests and we looked REALLY hard for a tapir but we didn't see one.

I learned a ton too, like how Angel Falls is the tallest uninterupted (free-falling) waterfall in the world (you may recognize as the inspiration for UP), how the tepuyes (giant mesa-mountains) and the canyons cause wind and cloud formations unique to the world - their own microclimate! How the Pemon people build huts with palm-tree roofs that last up to 15 years, and how they season their chicken soup with this great tasting spice that comes from crushed red ants (we found that out afterwards, but it was really good!).

We had a great time with our guide and canoe crew (motorized, so none of us had to paddle, but I tell you, Capitan sure did know how to manuever that thing -- he would swing across to the other side of the river to avoid rapids just around the corner that no one could see coming, amazing!). Oh, another highlight: we pulled ourselves up a rope through a river to see a waterfall at the end of this gorge. Wow, what a rush.

Anyway, I had the best time ever, my internet is being awfully slow right now so I'm not able to upload more photos, but you can check out all my photos here. But I'll leave you with one parting shot, looking up from the base of the falls:

El Aprendizaje de Shannon

So, I've been wanting to do some word art for a long time (after seeing some Wordle work on my friend's blog), and I wanted to do it with some of the words I've learned in Spanish from reading Harry Potter. I had WAY too much fun learning words from reading Harry Potter, and I think I can owe a lot of that to reading all the books WITHOUT a dictionary. I didn't look up a single word (well, maybe ONE). I just wanted to read for fun, and if I didn't know a word, I'd just check out the context and then skip it (thank you, 6th grade English for teaching me about context clues!). So by the end, words that I used to have no idea about started to kind of make sense. I owe a lot to este chico Harry Potter, I love it when, say, someone says "Hey, that passport applicant, did he come back in?" And I say "Oh, the one with the limp?" [Internal dialogue -- "Wait, how do I know how to say 'limp?' Oh yeah, Mad Eye Moody, book 4!"] So exciting! I love learning languages, and right now I'm trying to decide if I'd like to learn another language next or go spanish-speaking again and keep working on it. Or go English speaking -- I mean, how could I complain if I got sent to New Zealand, say? But I won't get the list-of-possibilities until August or September, so until then.....I'll just keep enjoying el ESPANOL!!! :) Here's my list of favorite words and phrases from La Serie de Harry Potter!

Xìngyùn bǐnggān

I hope I didn't just say something bad/awkward in Chinese. I think that's the romanization of the chinese word for fortune cookies. Which actually originated in San Francisco (the fortune cookie, not the romanization).

This post is to put to rest any ideas that I have Chinese ancestry (I don't, though I was asked if I did at the last Embassy gourmet night, when you were supposed to bring either a food from the land of your heritage OR one you really liked) and to show that I wasn't bluffing before about making fortune cookies. I made them again!

Clouds

I'm on a cloud kick lately. They do some really cool things here. Lately I've been noticing at sunset how the clouds in the foreground will turn really dark, and then as the sun sets somewhere behind them, the sky in the background lights up, orange, pink, red. It's pretty cool. Happened Saturday, I was reading a book, and it was getting darker and darker, when all of a sudden it was like someone turned on a lamp behind me, the sky behind the clouds had turned a bright orange. And it did something similar to that again tonight (see above), though not quite as dramatic. Still cool, though, eh?

Picture Perfect Moments

And yet this post will have no pictures.....I'm sorry I don't carry around my camera! I don't even have a camera phone, I'm so lame. Anyway, two great photoless-photo-ops the past week or so:

Walking from church to the temple again, this time I DIDN'T fall! But I was distracted again, because as I looked up at Angel Moroni, I saw a couple of birds perched on his trumpet. And not just any birds, MACAWS! You know, the giant-parrot-looking birds that are either blue and red or yellow and red. And they were SCREEEECHING and CAAAAWING at the top of their lungs. I'm telling you, these birds are big and LOUD. It was hilarious. Seeing 2 macaws sitting on Angel Moroni's trumpet even beats out seeing pigeons sitting on Abraham Lincoln's head, in my book. Though not quite as awesome as seeing one pigeon atop EVERY statue going around St. Peter's square in Rome. We're talking like 50 statues here. I think they planned it. But that's neither here nor there. Anyway, back to Caracas, so this other church member passed me, chuckling, and said "Well, I guess now we know what his trumpet sounds like." :)

The other photo-esque moment this week was in the morning, on the way to work. I don't know if you've ever seen a cap cloud before, they would happen sometimes in Utah -- a cloud forms just on the top of a mountain, when there is wind pushing air up and over, that condensates as it goes (or something like that). Anyway, it usually looks like someone wadded up some white cotton candy and stuck it on top of a peak. But the one I saw the other day ran the whole length of the mountain, it was beautiful! Like someone was going to paint a cap cloud, but just kept running the paintbrush along the mountain. I've tried to find a picture online that's similar, but I can't find one to do it justice. So you'll just have to use your imagination.

Life Lessons Learned This Week

1) The hardest part about making fortune cookies is finding a recipe online that actually works.



2) Three recipes later, when you actually find an amazingly easy recipe, and have successfully made about 20 fortune cookes, DON'T be a perfectionist and put the soft ones back in the oven on broil to crisp up, and then forget about them. No one will ever be able to read those fortunes.



3) Don't let burnt cookies get to you, even if they are fortune cookies.



4) Don't try to roll chocolate truffles into the perfect little mounds like your chocolatier roommate used to do -- you will end up with melted chocolate all over you. And subsequently all over your face. Mmmm. Just cut up the cooled ganache into squares and be done with it. Still not sure how she made them round.....maybe that was a figment of my imagination.



5) If you live far from home and you are assigned to give a lesson at church on Mother's Day, avoid mentioning your mother at all costs, no matter what the topic is. You will cry.



6) Don't think you can ever drive like a local -- just as you start to feel accustomed to the driving norms in your area, you'll honk at someone pulling out to let them know you're there because you're passing by, and then you honk again, and again, and again, and they'll ignore you and almost hit your car. I said almost. Just drive like everyone expects you to, and let everyone pull out in front of you.



7) No matter how old you are, WRITE UP A WILL! Otherwise you will leave some poor American Citizen Services Consular Officer (or your family's lawyer, ideally, I wish everyone had one) resolving next-of-kin disputes as people come out of the woodwork arguing about what to do with your body and claiming your stuff. Or claiming they had your children.



8) Not all ants go for sugar. Some prefer black beans, chicken, and egg. I think the ones in my apartment are protein-starved.



9) Trying to sing your Mother a Mother's Day song on a 3-way Skype conversation almost works.

10) Charred fortune cookie prints do not come off cookie sheets, but they do leave a pretty cool design.

I love the mountains!!!

Since I was so verbose in my last post, I'll let the pictures do the talking this time. A bunch of us went up and over the mountain yesterday (El Avila) to eat at this fantastic Mexican restaurant, and enjoy the beautiful scenery!

The clouds rolling in......

Before

After

The sun came out!

I still need to ask my sisters to figure out what kind of bird this is.....they are super bird-species-finder-outers.