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Temples of Ancient Stone. One of Pure Imagination.

Once or twice a year in my childhood, our tiny Baptist Church’s congregation would join the Presbyterians up the street. They had “Reverend Mac”, a wryly smiling minister who acted Noel Coward and Charles Dickens on the side, made jokes during sermons, and never complained about our footballs and baseballs bouncing on to his front lawn. We had a tightly-wound young fundamentalist who’d have been shocked to know of my Mum’s bridge club, cards being the devil’s playthings. Coming from our plain, cramped sanctuary, the

Awesome as a kid, and still a fine small-town centre.

Presbyterians looked rich and their church seemed a soaring, grand and holy place. It had the highest bell tower in our little town, and in early adolescence I took to sneaky climbs inside the steeple that led to a view of houses, river, ball diamonds, trees, and the farmland beyond them. I’ve found holiness in forests and fields, in looking out over water, in song and in word, even sometimes in the steady rhythm of running or flinging a ball toward its home. I’ve loved, too, architectural prayers: shrines, cathedrals, temples, any place built to honour and inspire loftiness of mind, an enlarging of spirit. (Sometimes, even a gymnasium will do.)

In China, such places have been hard to come by. Before we leave, I hope we’ll get to one of the sacred mountains, but even those sound discouraging, given the masses of people that visit with little that I recognize as reverence; small-town Canuck that I am, I still equate spirituality with solitude, quiet, elevated language and, where possible, green-ness and sky. However, our teaching of English in Dalian does qualify us for more than visas, salaries, and our small service to the torrential societal change in our temporary Chinese home. As we beef up our world citizenship credentials, we also have the luxury of south Asian travel that we couldn’t have managed from Canada.

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70,000 Slapshots from Sochi

It was a groggy, foggy Cambodian morning. The sun over Battambang shone blinding and hot, but the grumpy shades were drawn on me and my companions. Our son had researched, using his Infernal Little Blue Machine, and was sure that the Sochi Winter Olympics opening ceremonies would begin at 11:30 our time Friday night. (All I’d really known, to that point, was my boy’s eager reporting of bad water and poorly built accommodations in Sochi. And listen: aren’t we stunningly tolerant about Olympic corruption? It appears that (some) Russians are winning gold in this event.) Since we had an 8 a.m. taxi ride to the Thailand border planned (which, as we jostled and bumped our way out of Battambang in a right-hand-drive ’95 Toyota Camry, had become a 9 o’clock exit), we planned to be packed and sleeping  by 8:30 p.m., for which we were also an hour late with nobody to blame, which sort of made it worse, I guess.

Identifying the Spoiled Canadian, No. 98 (b): This species can become very cranky and indignant when deprived of their “Mother Corp”, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation which treats hockey as a sacred weekly ritual

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