Author: Ken

If you choose to read no further, please hear this:

World travel and seeing how a different culture lives will open your mind and create more empathy in your life for all humans. Please, make it a priority to travel somewhere very different from your life and just take it in. Make a new friend. Share your experience. And SMILE! 

Okay, now read further if you wish.

I felt compelled to start the blog up again and begin with a rant, right after the first Trump travel ban. I was livid over his blatant targeting of refugees and people from Muslim countries. It boiled my blood to be a citizen of a country whose president spews hate and fear across our globe. Then another attempt at a travel ban, then a ban on computers in carry on bags. All against Muslim countries and airlines. Discrimination of a whole group of people based on the hateful actions of a few. How many times do we repeat this lesson in history? How much longer do we spread the fear?

A wave of nationalism has hit our world hard. Look to the madness of other world leaders, Venezuela’s Maduro, Philippine’s Duterte, UK’s May, and so many others, brought to power by citizens hoping for………..what? Countries that contain only people like them? What is nationalism when your Jordanian family had lived in the United Arab Emirates for 50 years, yet cannot be citizens of the country. Seems only blood will allow you to be an Emirati? How does blood matter when you have been adopted and have no idea your “real” nationality? The examples go on and on.

We are a global society. Going backwards, declaring us better and them worse will not help humankind. Yes, change is scary and yet, it will happen without you. So educate yourself, preferably with your own experiences and not what specific news sources or your fear-filled leader wants to tell you.  Traveling and meeting others who seem different than you is the best eduction, the best way to free your mind.

In Islam there are 5 pillars of faith, the third being Purification or Charity. Within this pillar, there are two categories of charity. The first is zakah, being a monetary giving. The second, sadaqah, or preforming an act that brings joy or benefits to someone, like the act of being kind or simply smiling.

What can you do today to make our world a more loving place? Perhaps start with a smile.

PS

We are currently traveling in Dubai, one of the world’s most multi-cultural cities.

We visited the Sheikh Mohammed Centre for Cultural Understanding, which offers tours, lectures and fully open discussion about Emirati & Arab culture, Islam faith and Muslim practices. If you find yourself in this part of the world, and I highly recommend that you do, I encourage you to include this into your visit.

The outlook was grim. Clouds in the forecast. Moderate solar activity. Impenetrable but intriguing dials and graphs on SolarHam.

But anything can happen.

Our friends Chris and Angie had arranged for us all to spend the last two days of our visit at the Mount Aurora Lodge. On Christmas afternoon, we piled into the Prius and journeyed into the mountains outside Fairbanks, far from the light pollution of the “big” city.

The lodge doesn’t look like much, and indeed, it was originally built to house 300 gold miners at a time during the Gold Rush. Nowadays, it houses far fewer people in wi-fi-drenched comfort.

On our last night, the front desk clerk casually mentioned that the Aurora was supposed to be really good that night, and she was staying late to photograph it. My excitement level rose. We went out to dinner, where I avoided alcohol for fear it would make me sleepy. Back at the lodge, before the “scheduled” appearance of illuminated solar radiation, I took a nap. Then came the knock.

We saw the Northern Lights. For hours. They were faint but defined, and long exposures (1.5 to 3 seconds) make them appear brighter in these photos.

String the pix together in a time lapse, and you can see swirling shapes form and dissipate.

In reality, we stood around and talked (and snapped photo after photo), occasionally glancing up to realize a new pattern had emerged. Click here to view a playlist of my Northern Lights time lapses.

I would shoot for twenty minutes or so, get cold, go inside and review the photos, then head back outside. Eventually, the other photographers had all gone to bed, satisfied with their snaps, but I continued looking for new angles to capture.

At one point, I walked down a snowy path and thought, “Hmm, if I slipped and bonked my head here, it would take them a while to find me… and it’s really cold.” I made sure of my footing. When I returned to the cozy meeting room in the lodge later, Karen said, “I was just starting to wonder about you.”

It came down to the wire, but our Alaska trip ended with a spectacular natural light show. I’m grateful to Angie and Chris for setting it up, and to Karen for “starting to wonder” about me (as needed)!

Christmas in Alaska. Fairbanks, to be exact. Some friends asked if we were taking a cruise; others asked if we’d see polar bears. Then they’d pause and think about it. Fairbanks. It’s inland. It’s cold. It’s dark.

“Why are you going to Alaska in December?”

The main reason? To see our friends Chris and Angie, of course! They traveled with us to Peru and met us on the last leg of our world tour in China. Before all that, we had visited them in Fairbanks for the summer solstice in 1999, when the sun never set.

Now, we would be present for the winter solstice in 2015, when the sun strains to peek above the horizon before giving up the ghost and beginning its descent.

It was a Muppet pilgrimage. And it was not my first.

A few years ago, the Henson family announced that it was donating oodles of Jim Henson artifacts to Atlanta’s Center for Puppetry Arts. How much stuff? The Center broke ground on a new building to house it. This I had to see. And why not see it on opening day, when you just might bump into some Muppet celebrities?

Karen (yes, she decided to come along and watch her husband turn into a kid) and I arrived early, in case there was a ribbon-cutting ceremony. There was, but we weren’t VIP enough to get in, so we checked out the new building.

With the ribbon-cutting and all, I was hoping some Muppet luminaries would show up. When Karen said, “There’s Fran,” I was (a) thrilled to catch a glimpse of Fran Brill, an original Sesame Street puppeteer who recently retired, and (b) thrilled that Karen knows who Fran Brill is!

We were moments away from another celebrity sighting: a meet-and-greet with Sesame Street’s Abby Cadabby and her performer, Leslie Carrara-Rudolph. I dutifully stood in line with a gaggle of little girls in fairy princess dresses, and here’s what happened when I finally got to meet and/or greet.

[youtube_sc url=”https://youtu.be/x82l3zepByY”]

Back in the lobby, keep your eyes open. You never know who will turn up.

[youtube_sc url=”https://youtu.be/B2aeXA1XcYE”]

Finally, we entered the museu- wait, nope, we had tickets to the Center’s holiday show, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. It was a good show, with another celebrity sighting and a chance to make some puppets of our own.

[youtube_sc url=”https://youtu.be/mYlPzLBKzT0″]

Can we go in now, pleeeeease? Yes, we can.

Behold, Jim Henson’s desk. And Jim Henson’s moose lamp. Geeky stuff, and I loved it. We eavesdropped on a museum staffer giving a tour to a friend. He said, “This is Jim Henson’s actual desk. I don’t know how long we’ll have it, but it’s here for now.”

Then came the puppets, from all eras of Jim Henson’s career. It’s kind of a blur from here on out. Java and Rowlf… Sesame Street… The Muppet Show… Fraggle Rock… Labyrinth… The Dark Crystal… and more.

[youtube_sc url=”https://youtu.be/eC2TzFiBNlQ”]

Jim Henson isn’t the only game in Puppettown. The Worlds of Puppetry Museum also houses a global puppetry collection.

We’d been at the museum for hours. Scouring every inch of two new puppetry exhibits left me tired, thirsty, and hungry. My brain was full. So of course, I went through the whole Jim Henson exhibit again, while Karen waited in the lobby.

This time it was about looking more closely at the craftsmanship of the puppets, like the exact placement of the eyes. See how the felt circles have a slit cut in them so they lay flat? And the designers use feather-y materials in places you wouldn’t expect, like Sprocket’s whiskers. Beyond Don Sahlin and Faz Fazakas, I’m not that familiar with the names of the puppet builders, so I studied the work of early Henson collaborators like Bonnie Erickson, whose name was listed on more than a few puppets, including Miss Piggy.

A series of texts from Karen shook me out of my reverie. She had spotted “the woman from Avenue Q.” After seeing that show a decade ago, Karen can spot Stephanie D’Abruzzo from across a room? I made a beeline for the lobby, which now contained a beer and wine bar (Karen was halfway through a glass) and lots of nicely-dressed people wearing black. There was obviously a VIP event coming up. Sure enough, that’s Stephanie D’Abruzzo and her husband Craig Shemin (President of the Jim Henson Legacy), chatting with Sesame Street’s Pam Arciero.

I decided not to bother them with giddy fan gushing, so I caught my breath on a bench and noticed the nametag of the woman across from me: Bonnie Erickson. Unable to hold back my fan gushing, I marched over to her and told her, “I just took a thousand pictures of your handiwork.” She laughed, and we talked about making Muppets and things to do in Atlanta.

Jim Henson Company archivist Karen Falk came over to see Bonnie, which gave me the chance to thank Karen. You see, I emailed her a Muppet question years ago (like, via Netscape), and she immediately fired back the answer. Bonnie, Karen, Karen, and I chatted for quite a while about the other Jim Henson exhibit that is being prepared, this one at the Museum of the Moving Image in New York.

That’s right: stay tuned for another Muppet Pilgrimage in 2016.