Hello, Ewa e ne en skel kel, Kwe-kwe, Bonjour, Kaixo, Hola, Ola, Nihao! These are some of the greetings of the places that I have been this year - British Columbia, Ontario, Québec, France, Basque country, Spain, Galacia, Barcelona, Beijing and Xi'an - places which I hope to tell you a little about in this newsletter. Those of you who I've known for a little while will probably be used to my annual newsletter, but if you're receiving this for the first time I'll tell you that this is something that I've been doing to keep my friends and family up to date with my comings and goings since before I had email - let alone social media - to do so. Now that these more efficient tools have become established the idea of the newsletter seems to have gone by the wayside in many cases, something which you (or at least I) generally only get from organizations which want your money or political support. But I still find great value in the tired old newsletter to reflect on the past year and to think of you, one of my diverse friends from near or from far, who will read this (well, the first half?) and remember our days together. If you would like to check out my older letters - from when I was ten years old and setting out across the Pacific up to this one - you can find them archived on my blog, bradleyclements.blogspot.com. And if you'd rather not be on this list for any reason, just let me know and I won't mind. I wrote my last newsletter to you after a lovely Christmas and New Years with my Grandparents, Uncle John and other family and friends of Princeton, the Sunshine Coast and Victoria, before the start of my last semester at Camosun College. The semester was another intense and highly enjoyable one as I took five interesting classes (Geography of Cities, Cultural Anthropology, Social Systems and the Environment, Archaeology, and Physical Geography of the Biosphere and Atmosphere), went to conferences, chaired and sat on several College and Student Society boards and committees, organized and partook in various rallies, and the usual. I enjoyed my courses and was honored to receive the generosity of the Outstanding Social Sciences Student and Associate Degree - Year Two awards. After a great semester I said goodbye to my many friends, the Camosun College Student Society board, my archery students and head coach at Saanich Park and Recreation, and Bill and Maureen who I had been staying with and our mutual friends, throwing some lovely parties before I flew off to Ontario at the end of April. After my long flight Dad greeted me at the airport in Ottawa and I spent a couple of weeks with the family sorting my equipment for the Camino de Santiago. The preparation and act of walking the millennium old pilgrimage across southern France and northern Spain was a half-decade long act of serendipity; I connected to something very natural for me as I flowed through Europe's landscapes. I walked along the Chemin d'Arles from Toulouse to Oloron Ste.-Marie, the Voie Piemont to St.-Jean Pied de Port, the Camino Frances to Santiago de Compostela, and the Caminos of Finisterra and Muxia to the Atlantic. I made some close friends and had a phenomenal, powerful experience. Although it was an experience which I can never hope to replicate, I have found a love for long-distance walking and plan to do more some day, whether in the hills of Tuscany, the coast of England, the Qadisha Valley of Lebanon or another of the French pilgrim routes. Now, almost half a year after finishing the pilgrimage, I continue to remember it constantly. Ques come from nowhere and I find myself again at a random point along the 1300 km path, asking directions from a French farmer at the corner of his newly tilled field, limping down the cobbles of a street overhung by medieval homes, leaning into the wind before a wooden cross under a sky of torn cloud, damp in the mist of an Atlantic coast forest, or watching a friend wave his walking pole, miniature on the slope of the bulk of a perspective-defying green hill. The day after I arrived on the Atlantic coast (and Spain jubilantly won the Eurocup in football) I talked to Mom and Dad on the phone and learned that Mom was going to Beijing on assignment for work... did I want to come? Still sinking into the acceptance of homecoming I was a bit disoriented, but, yes, of course I did! First, though, after my return to Ottawa via Barcelona, Madrid and Montréal was a trip down Ontario's 19th Century Rideau Canal on a rented houseboat, marvelling at the two-hundred year-old technology as we locked up and down, and mooring in solitary lakes, little historical villages, and in the downtown of the nation's capital. Aunty Mary flew over from Victoria to join us for part of the trip and we had a great time together, canoeing, swimming, kyaking, hiking and exploring. In less care-free news, our cat Clouseau was getting himself in trouble with the law due to his nocturnal excursions in Barrhaven, a community with bountiful by-laws, and when it came down to significant fines for each time that he was reported out at night we tried to find him a more flexible home. However, after he had been a few weeks at the Humane Society without passing their adoption test and becoming ever more unhappy with being incarcerated and vaccinated we decided that it would be best for us to bring him home and hope he could reform his habits. Dad built a pen attaching to the shed, accessible through the pet door by a tunnel formed by a bench, and he has adapted surprisingly well. My cheap tickets took me to Beijing via Detroit, whose airport I got to know well over my long stop over (let's just say that when I arrived in the morning the woman at customs saw my connecting ticket and told me to rush to my gate before realizing that the time on it was "PM" rather than "AM"...). I was one of the few Caucasians on my flight and learned a few Mandarin words from the elderly couple seated next to me as I flew over the iceless Arctic. I got ripped off for a taxi to my apartment when I landed around midnight, being too tired to haggle, and Mom had already arrived on her government-paid flight. The next day we walked the length of Dongjimenwai Dajie, the major street near our apartment, down to the Agriculture Museum past the Canadian Embassy in one direction then back to the Yuan Dynasty Drum and Bell towers. Over the month that I was there I went on long walks on the weekdays while Mom worked at the embassy, especially exploring the hutongs. These courtyard communities of family households crowded around treed allies, their tiled roofs sprouting with grass and gourds, delighted me. I could simply take any un-noticed side-street off of one of the bustling major commercial thoroughfares and find myself lost in Beijing's heritage, and I never once saw a fellow Caucasian. After wandering for ten or fifteen minutes I could count on finding an ally bustling with vending stands of fruit, fish, vegetables, crustaceans, meat, shoes, clothing and all manner or wares, small tables with diners and game-players huddled about them, bicycles of all forms laden high weaving between romping children and cane-supported elders, music, chatter, laughter and haggling. I once popped into one of the hole-in-the wall restaurants in such a junction where the four men seated on the benches at the little tables stared at me loose-jawed as if I'd fallen from outer space. I sat at the unoccupied table, hoping that I was not being completely culturally unacceptable, and conveyed to the cook that I was hoping to find something to eat although my Mandarin was almost as scarce as their English. She stirred a cauldron of noodles and vegetables in chicken broth and her husband served it for each of us and tossed a few cloves of raw garlic on our tables to munch with our meals. I tried to eat as quickly and loudly as my fellow patrons and made sure to finish virtually the whole 5 Y (less than $1) bowl as they had although I thought I would burst. On another occasion I climbed Jinshang Park, the human-made hill north of the Forbidden City built of the earth from the palace's moat to protect it from the spirits that fengshuei had warned of, and saw the red-roofed halls recede in procession into the haze as I stood at the feet of the Buddha seated at the peak. As I sat and drew the scene from a pavilion a man asked me if I could take his picture, which I did, and we got into a conversation. He was a traditional medicine practitioner and researcher from Shanghai with good English, visiting Beijing on a business trip. Eventually he went off and I finished my drawing, but later I met him again and he invited me to join him to go to a tea house which one of his colleagues had suggested. We sat in the traditional little house smelling and drinking several wonderful teas out of tiny ceremony cups, having been elaborately brewed in a specific progression of pots. On other days I visited the Forbidden City, the Yonghegong Lamasary, the Old Summer Palace, a smaller Buddhist monastery which I stumbled upon in my hutong wanderings, and many parks which were always alive with music, dancing, games, singing, calligraphy, fishing, and every manner of activity. Because restaurants were almost as cheap as buying food - at least the sort that we knew how to cook that we could get from places that we could find - and because the vibrant public culture hosted a seemingly infinite number of restaurants of all kinds, all bursting with customers, we ate out a lot and tried all sorts of food (sometimes to the exasperation of those around us when we had no clue how it was supposed to be eaten!) On weekends Mom and I visited more major attractions, like the Summer Palace, the National Museum, the Temple of Heaven, and more parks. After Mom felt like she was more in shape, we decided to go on an excursion to the Jinshanling section of the Great Wall. A driver took us with one of Mom's colleagues out of Beijing and through the pinnacle-like mountains until we reached the Wall, cresting the twisting ridges and setting a watchtower upon each peak despite the writhing hill's attempts to shake the thing off. We climbed up to the largely unrestored but remarkably intact fortification and walked along it for many kilometres I marvelled at the thoroughness of the fortifications, each tower designed to repel forces not from both the north and the south, but from the adjacent sections of wall in the event that any of these were taken: steep and narrow stairways into the towers prevented the wielding of a weapon within them, terraces of crossbow bunkers as the wall climbed up toward a tower, auxiliary walls whose remains were just discernible on the slopes on either side, and beacon towers on the tallest surrounding peaks - to say nothing of the mountainous landscape crossed by deep river-cut valleys - made the prospect of attacking the even lightly defended ensemble seem like suicide. But the feat of engineering was not so awe-inspiring for its apparent military genius as it was for its aesthetic splendour, the masonry serpent flinging itself to improbable hights before promptly falling away, dashing over the green mountains until it finally rose to Simatai on a ridge of jaw-dropping proportions which faded into the distance like a stairway to heaven. The week before I was to leave Dad arrived and I gave him a bit of a tour around Beijing, a place that I had become somewhat accustomed to but which he found to be as alien as another planet. We explored the 798 Art District, an incredibly inspiring contemporary art scene which has emerged from the Bauhaus industrial landscape. For Mom's birthday we flew to Xi'an, the historic walled city which had been a centre of power for much of China's early days as an empire. We stayed in a traditional courtyard house which had been converted into a hostel and visited perhaps two of the most significant archaeological sites in the area - among the most significant in the world, in fact - on Mom's birthday: the tomb and terracotta army of Qin Shihuangdi, the first Emperor of China, and Banpo village, a matriarchal community of China's Neolithic. The next day we planned to walk around the city walls, but they were closed "for protection." We did not realize why until we headed into the centre of town to find a large demonstration being broken up by police which, it was explained to us, was an anti-Japanese rally sparked by tensions that had recently re-emerged over the ownership of the Diauyu / Sinkaku Islands. We saw several smashed and overturned Japanese-brand cars, and all businesses flew the Chinese flag and had nationalist slogans scrawled across their store-fronts. We instead went to the Little Wild Goose Pagoda, a thousand year-old twelve-story Buddhist pagoda (it had been taller before lightening had struck off the top stories). We stopped in at a little gallery where a man taught Dad and I some calligraphy. I showed one of the owners my sketchbook and she was impressed, asking me if I was a famous artist. "I'm not," I said, pointing at Dad, "but he is!" and they begged him to paint something for them. He denied it, but they took us to the back of the gallery where a calligrapher was at work on a large table laid out with an impressive array of traditional equipment, explained the situation to him, and he quickly moved aside and set up a sheet of paper for Dad. The owners watched in puzzlement as Dad painted an abstract composition with the long calligraphic brushes, but his fellow painter stood in wonder. Although he spoke no English, he burst out in happiness when Dad was finished and presented him with a painting of blossoms which he selected from his collection and pulled out a camera, insisting on having their picture taken together. We said farewell, climbed the pagoda where I had a conversation with a local history enthusiast of about my age, then we headed to the Muslim Quarter for dinner. We dined on snacks as we wandered the cobbled streets and narrow allies, busy with business even in the rain, and laughed at Dad being pulled into bargaining with the ruthless salespeople. We bought wonderful naan fresh from a sidewalk tandoor with a group of men around it who wanted to converse with us in their minimal English and my minimal Mandarin, and I confused the matter further by greeting them in Arabic. As we headed back toward our hostel we found the main street barred by police officers standing shoulder to shoulder, and had to walk almost to the north wall before we could skirt them. Soon I was on my way back to North America, leaving Mom and Dad for another few weeks in Beijing. I stopped over in Tokyo after a thorough security check, and a reporter was waiting to ask me about the protests as soon as I disembarked. After another long flight via Tokyo and Portland to Vancouver I took the skytrain and bus to Horseshoe Bay and the ferry to Langdale, breathing in the missed West Coast air, and Uncle John met me as I landed on the Sunshine Coast. He had seen my Uncle Rick and Cousin Alice, so we went to visit them at Alice's figure skating class at the Robert's Creek rec centre and had dinner with them and Aunty Lisa (at a Japanese restaurant, ironically!) As John and I finally drove through the night-time forest to his home I was on the edge of sleep, seeing ghostly Chinese architecture materialize in the trees. We had a good few days together, visiting and hiking, then I headed over to Victoria. Bill met me at the ferry terminal and we had a long drive back to the house, catching up on our musings. I stayed with him and Maureen and visited many of my friends, including our traditional potluck and jam session with them, Berry, Carmen, Derek, Joanne, Ashley, and Ned, a UVic prof who I had met on the Camino, and my great friend Madeline also organized a party with some of my wonderful CCSS friends (yarr!) All too soon I headed back to Ottawa where Harry and I held down the fort in Mom and Dad's absence. I got down to looking for work in the area and ended up in Mom's office (although a different branch) in a clerical position at CIC's litigation branch. It has been very intense and I have been learning a lot working with a great group of colleagues. Besides the ever more hectic work, we spent the days leading up to Christmas taking turns baking deserts and making a very ugly sweater for our long-suffering Muslim boss. I'm continuing to try to be involved in my community, temporary and busy as I might be. In the last week I have had the honour to support the Idle No More movement, marching with thousands of aboriginals and allies from Chief Teresa Spense's tepee to Parliament Hill and volunteering in the preparation of the feast that followed on the 21st, and joining in the round dance outside 24 Sussex Drive the next day. Mom and I are volunteering with the Ottawa Chamber Music Society and going to some great concerts, I took part in PowerShift, a nation-wide youth climate conference, started volunteering with the Ontario NDP in anticipation of spring provincial elections in Ontario and BC, I've gone to Question Period in the House of Commons, got to visit with some of my CFS BC friends at the Canadian Federation of Students AGM, have gone to several Sisters in Spirit and Truth and Reconciliation Commission events, visited with the surprisingly large diaspora community of Victoria friends in town, gone for some good bike rides and hikes, and have been going to Quaker Friend's meetings with Mom and Dad. Dad recently had his birthday, for which we went to a great Jesse Cook concert, and had an art show with the Stone Bridge artists. We've all been keeping up with Uncle John as he has been working through an amazing time to purchase the property that he has lived on and farmed for decades, and we're considering the opportunity to join him to help create the agricultural / spiritual / social community that he and Gran have envisioned there for a long time. I'm enjoying the time with the family, but I am very much looking forward to returning to Victoria this spring to continue my Anthropology degree at UVic. My plans aren't yet set in stone and I'm still looking for a place to stay and some part-time employment, so if you happen to know of anything or anyone please let me know! So lots happening with me / us! How about you? We'd love to hear from you, as always, and hope that you and yours are well. Blessings for an amazing new year! May it be filled with unexpected adventure, deep insight, and realized love. Your friend, Bradley Ottawa, Ontario