"Don't buy me the things you wish you'd had growing up, teach me the things you wish you'd known growing up"
Finally getting caught up on video work shot, but not produced.
We are very fortunate to have many great interactions with people as we circle the planet. Often the best days are surprises that take on a magic all their own. November 19th, 2017 in Beijing was no exception. What follows is a collaboration between Nicky and Stacia filming, Nicky editing, Alexander and Annika playing, dad writing and narration by Alexander. Hoping you enjoy our message of hope.
(Choose song, poem or essay as to how your visit impacted you.)
Hiroshima
It was a nice and peaceful day
The sun was saying hey
As I looked in the great blue sky
A plane flew way up high
I was in harmony
Which turned into tragedy
It all happened so fast
I barely remember my past
The next thing I knew
I was in a pile of dew
I was in a bunch of trouble
The whole city was ruble
I looked right
I looked left
Metal was in my chest
As I looked all around
I honestly could not tell
If I was somewhere but hell
My world was dead as can be
Why did this happen to me
I truly do not know
– Alexander Balog
I Have Escaped from Hell
Today is a beautiful day
Birds chirping and trees waving in the wind
In an instant, a blinding light envelopes me
I feel a burning heat
Everything goes black
When I wake up, I have died and gone to hell
Fires and smoke, bodies everywhere
Zombies rising from the ashes
It has become night but without moon or stars
I am frightened, I flee
As I run I see zombies shuffling to the lake
As I run I see bodies of friends, still as rocks
As I run I see houses burned to rubble and trees burned to ashes
As I run I see the light, faint but getting brighter
I reach the edge of the night and the beginning of the light
I see people coming to help me as I run up the path
I have escaped from hell.
– Nicholas Balog
Japanese gardening with the master.
Little one, where does your heart take you?
Sensei, is it the items in the garden, or the space without, that makes the garden complete?
Master, how does one know when the garden is complete?
Your garden is complete when the heart says it is complete.
8/20 30 minutes reading, 30-minute essay writing on physics paradox, prefixes
8/21 Eclipses, equations step 1 to 4, reading, start business cards, Chinese tea ceremony, hike to sacred cliff dwelling, Tanah Lot (Temple by the ocean)
8/22 Classical music. Eclipse story. Adding integers, Story time, Business card drawings
8/23 Classical music, game theory, paper airplane contest, nature hike, city research, multiplying integers, rice cultivation, reading
8/24 Cooking class, operations with integers, writing recipes, reading, story time
8/25 City presentations, Black hole videos, walk through local town, Bali architecture, traditional Bali reed weaving, operations with integers, reading
8/26 Subtracting integers, equations step 1 to 3, Activity research: monkeys, nature walk, origami, reading
8/27 Culminating activity, exit interviews
8/28 Travel day. Adding/subtracting/multiplying/dividing fractions, circumference area of a circle, reading, bingo car game.
8/29 Fraction skills, monkey research, asteroid research and writing, reading
8/30 Volcano hike
8/31 Reading 2x, Bali info, vocabulary, video script, equations, math puzzle, science octopus, estate walk
9/1 Green School visit. Video volcano production,
9/2 Volcano paper, bug search and research
9/3 Geometry shapes and markings, reading, vocab, white water rafting
9/4 Video editing, reading, exit interviews
9/5 Travel day, Carpe Diem boat, reading, water activities
9/6 Komodo National Park, reading, writing, math, vocab, water activities
9/7 Equations combining like terms, reading, water activities
9/8 Reading2x, short story writing 2x, water activities
9/9 Water activities, reading, editing short story, intro to graphing
9/10 Travel day
9/11 Singapore video, writing, classical music, tenmarks intro, reading
9/12 Art & Science Museum of Singapore. Travel to Tokyo, writing, TM adding integers, Japan videos
9/13 Travel morning, opposites, multiplying rational expressions, reading
9/14 Buddhism, Shintoism, Sumo, Tokyo research, reading, multiply rational expressions, Planet Earth science, bus ride & train rides through city
9/15 NYC video, Japanese business card ceremony, Planet Earth science, Museum of Innovation, producing a business card, reading, writing, all operations one step equations
9/16
(We’ve been mostly off the grid for a bit.)
The Mt.Batur Volcano sunrise hike.
About a week or so ago, we decided to take an early morning guided hike up a Balinese volcano at 2:30 a.m. The spry young bucks took on two dinosaurs, Dad and Professor Art.
After passing a 3:00 a.m. cremation ceremony*, we trekked from sea level to over 1750m in a couple hours. For most of you, nothing. But for these old dinosaurs, it was a wake-up call. Enjoy Allie’s humorous writing, and narration. The kid spins a fine tale.
*more on cremation in another blog post
Kids, your new teacher, Arthur has sent your first assignment. “In a brief video, no more than 3 minutes each, tell me about yourself and show me who you are.”
Teacher feedback:
“Annika’s vocabulary and comprehension are off the charts. She will be (is?) a force to be reckoned with.
When I was growing up my Mom, Alvina Bartos Balog, owned a travel agency named Watchung Hills Travel. This was a time when a travel agency, as a business was plain lousy, in contrast to today, where it is downright abhorrent. The most outstanding benefit for me and my brothers was that we got to travel places on familiarization trips, or “fam trips” in the trade, boondoggles in most businesses, and what I came to learn about Wall Street types, rampant hedonism. If we were ever unclear as to our good fortune, we were constantly reminded of such by the neighborhood kids who asked, “SO, where are you going NOW?”
And Oh the Places We’d Go. Vail. An early Club Med in Martinique. Kingston, Jamaica. Puerto Rico. Banff Springs, Canada. And Scottsdale, Arizona. I learned “fam trips” were fab trips. And the travel bug infectious. If one ever wonders who was “patient zero” and the origin of our travel bug, it was my Mom. Since then, Stacia has grabbed the ball and run with it like OJ in a white Bronco!
To place this period of time in perspective, one of these trips was in 1965 to Vail, Colorado. Yes, that Vail. In 1965. After it had been only open one year. One. And if I recall correctly Vail at the time had only three ski lifts. The town had two hotels, the Talisman and the Valhalla. We stayed down rent of the two at the Talisman. I will never forget walking past the ‘high end’ Valhalla, and its outdoor hot tub surrounded by a pile of fresh snow thinking, ‘how odd, why would men and women want to sit in THAT, nearly naked, outside in the cold, drinking wine?’.
Skiing was a relatively new sport in America, and I stood on the ground floor. If this were The Graduate and had I had investment chops then, I might well have considered recreational skiing to be my own “plastics Benjamin, plastics”, moment.* But alas…
(Jokake Inn, Scottsdale. Today the quaint entry monument at the Phoenician.)
Around 1975, we were in Scottsdale, Arizona and my father introduced me to a colleague of his named Jean. Jean was a weathered soul, having grown up living through not one but two World Wars which devastated his native France. With no perspective of my own until much later while living in France ourselves, I have come to realize the impact of war in your own homeland, and the deep lasting scars it inflicts on the psyche of its inhabitants. I’ve also come to realize Jean had a certain je ne sais quoi about him that softly whispered ‘very well to do’.
My Dad and Jean were enjoying a glass of wine, chatting, whilst together they prepared the quintessential American staple of grilled animal flesh on the outdoor BBQ. Sirloin steaks.
(du Boeuf pour les cowboys, s’il vous plait)
I’ve since learned that the French have a super warm affinity for all things American West, or les cowboys. Jean must have enjoyed how “charmante” it was to be entertaining Americans on his own spread in Arizona, in the shadows of Pinnacle Peak.
I listened as they spoke of subjects which for the most part were out of my reach. And then I heard him say something that has stuck with me. Jean began, “Jeem…I have learned much in my life from zees wars and zee crazy times. I tell you now…build a band of wealth around zee world. You never know what ees going to ‘appen. Very important you understand zis.” **
Jean was not the type to be arguing for the caching of treasure away from tax authorities, as no Frenchman would ever do zees (cough). He spoke of those that, during the war, lost businesses, art, gold, family, everything. And how it was the smart ones, the educated ones that were able to transport their knowledge elsewhere, and not only survive, but thrive. I have since met example after example of exactly that, in the form of immigrants and survivors alike. Those that adapt, survive. People that do not adapt, perish. And it leads to a guiding mantra, a quote from Eric Hoffer:
“In a time of drastic change, it is the learners who inherit the future. The learned usually find themselves equipped to live in a world that no longer exists.”
……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….
Forty years later, our family was chatting at the dinner table on a recent February night in 2017, speaking about the kid’s school day, when 5th grade Alexander, often shy, reserved, but always thoughtful, blurts:
“What if school wasn’t school? What if the school, if life, could just be one continuous string of learning wherever you are, wherever you went?”
(Alexander, ahead of his time)
“I wish that I had been that observant and thoughtful at your age”, was all Dad could reply, with a sentient glance to Maman.
And then it hit me. “Build a band of wealth around the world”. Not wealth like “stuff” wealth, but wealth like “real” wealth. The wealth that moves with you, gets better with age, and can’t get stolen or compromised, except through diminution by time.
What if, indeed…
*In truth, skiing wasn’t the play, real estate was, and had I recognized that at the time, I would have my attache typing this missive right now from LogJam Air at 40,000 feet.]
* *And given seeming constant political volatility, and people’s normalcy bias, it makes sense. Today zees is commonly called spreading your bets, or simply, hedging.