After months of quakes and aftershocks, Christchurch residents  have been hanging out for some comic relief.

Last week the comic relief arrived. 

The 18th annual World Buskers Festival, a ten day extravaganza of extreme street theater,  hit  Christchurch city. 

It’s a time for bellies, not buildings, to be shaking as more than 50 highly versatile and talented buskers from around the world set up their pitch around the city and strut their stuff in some of the most colorful, musical, and flexible ways.

From contortionists to ventriliquists, knife throwers to knife swallowers, jugglers to dancers, rappers to hip hop,  these buskers are brilliant at forcing people to smile and shake with laughter. 

This year’s line up includes many of the city’s favorites –  The Blackstreet Boys, the half naked chef, Mullethead, Rubberband Boy – name but a few.  You can discover more about these acts and others that are performing at the World Buskers Festival site.

Soul Call is the name of Chandrika Krishnamurthy Tandon’s debut album. It is a well chosen name, not only because the music comprises Indian chant. It was in following her soul’s call to music that Tandon found her path to create the recording, a path which finds her now the recipient of a Grammy nomination for best contemporary world music album, alongside musical stars including Béla Fleck, Bebel Gilberto, Angelique Kidjo, and Sergio Mendes.

It was not always a straight road. Music was not considered a proper career in her family, so she studied business, always being drawn to fill her spare hours with music. When she moved to New York from her native India to take up work with a major consulting firm, she spent her first paycheck to buy a guitar and and a good stereo rather than furniture for her new apartment.

Tandon did well in business, rising in the ranks of her company and then starting her own firm. She traveled the world for this work, and wherever the traveled she sought out musical experiences. Still, music was on the back burner for her until her daughter was starting high school. “”I woke up one day and realized that, though I had reached many measures of business success, I had not connected with my deepest self, my life’s purpose,” she says. “It struck me that all of my happiest moments in life go back to music! I needed to pursue my passion for music and share it with everyone.”

So she did, setting out to undertake a rigorous path of self defined education in Indian classical music, traveling to India to study and connecting with experts in the United States as well. As much as she was drawn to the complex forms of that music, Tandon also found herself with an ear and a heart for the music of the people, street music and music sung in informal settings to express joy, community, and connection. She started composing songs, and that, eventually, led to Soul Call.

The album consists of different settings of the words of a healing chant more than six thousand years old, which Tandon sings. She composed each setting to follow a different Indian raga. Sarod master Tejendra Narayan
Majumdar created arrangements for her melodies with Indian classical, folk, and Western instruments including vibraphone, acoustic guitar, and bass.

These are healing chants, Tandon points out, and she has decided to further that idea by creating a non profit organization to channel funds from the recording to benefit organizations in the fields of community building, arts, and spirituality.

Will she win a Grammy? Tandon doesn’t know, of course. About the experience of being nominated, she reflects that “this is about a shared celebration of music among musicians. I have met so many musicians that I now admire. I feel utter gratitude to those that took the time to listen, to share feedback, and to support an unknown like me.

“This CD is about creating a circle of love,” Tandon continues. “We are reaching out to each other. We are reaching each other’s hearts and souls through the beautiful sounds that the universe has given us a chance to create.”

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Snow was falling from the ash-grey sky over Ontario as I tromped down into the vineyard on a freezing Saturday morning in January. It was the heart of winter in Niagara-on-the-Lake: the kind of day where you stay indoors and don’t come out until tomorrow. At the Inniskillin Winery, however, these were ideal conditions for experiencing a close–not exact, but close–approximation of what it’s like harvesting icewine grapes in Canadian wine country.

Really, though, we had it easy compared to the real thing. It was probably in the mid-20s, and the wind was only blowing in sporadic fits and bursts; cold doesn’t especially bother me. Plus, once the wind died down, the accumulating snowfall turned rather romantic, delicately slow dancing out of the sky like flakes of white plastic in a shook-up snowglobe.

I tugged on the protective netting that canvassed the vines, and as it snapped open bunches of frozen grapes dropped into my yellow bin like golden coins gushing from a casino slot machine. My nose was red and running, my face was numb, and though the long, black rubber boots kept my feet dry, my toes felt like ice cubes… but I wasn’t stopping until my bin was full. In fact, I would have gladly filled two bins.

Lay of the Land

Inniskillin was co-founded in the mid-1970s by Donald Ziraldo and Karl Kaiser, but their first successful harvest of icewine grapes didn’t occur until 1984 (’83′s crop was devoured by flocks of ravenous birds, which prompted the now-standard practice of covering the grapes in nets as early as October). Just seven years later, Ziraldo, Kaiser, and Inniskillin made a name for themselves by winning the coveted Grand Prix d’Honneur at France’s Vin Expo for their 1989 icewine.

About those icewine grapes: due to strict regulations set by the Vinters Quality Alliance (VQA) in Ontario and British Columbia, they can’t be harvested until temperatures drop to between 17 and 7 degrees Fahrenheit for a sustained period of time (usually 3 days or so). Once that happens, wineries can legally make the call for harvesting, which often takes place in the dead of night on short notice. At Inniskillin, they’ve picked as early as December 2 and as late as March 15; this year they tackled their Riesling, Vidal, and Cabernet Franc vines on December 12.

The grapes are immediately pressed (usually within 3 hours), the resulting juice is injected with yeast cultures from a local farm, and it’s whisked off to stainless steel tanks to ferment for up to four months. The result is a sweet, aromatic, highly acidic, and surprisingly complex product with a naturally occuring alcohol content between 10 – 12%. It’s certainly not the kind of wine you can drink all night–I’d stop at just one small glass or two– but given its premium price tag ($49.95 and up for 375ml bottle), this isn’t your average, everyday table wine anyway. I wouldn’t say it’s a wine to be exclusively poured for special occasions, but it’s close.

Wishful Thinking

We were told the grapes we picked that morning would be used in this year’s vintage, but given what we knew about the precise timing and temperatures required to produce icewine I knew we were merely being humored… or, perhaps, being given added incentive to go through with it during this classic Canadian clipper.

I can’t speak for the others in the group, but I didn’t need any added incentive. I would have bundled up and picked those grapes in conditions far worse than they were that morning; actually, I privately longed to experience this first stage of what many call “extreme winemaking” as the actual pickers do.

Just once, I want to be sent into the vineyards at 1 o’clock in the morning, rip into those nets, and snap those bunches of grapes not just from one small patch of vines, but from an entire row of grapes; hell, from three rows. Wine harvests in France, Italy, Spain, and other warmer climates might have more panache, but there was a certain wintery romance in this process I found strangely appealing.

Of course, I was only out there for half an hour or so: a four- or five-hour session might have me wishing otherwise, so if there are any Ontario icewinemakers reading this, please don’t go signing me up for next year’s harvest just yet.

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_{As is common in the travel industry, the writer was provided with a complimentary tour, tastings, and other experiences such as this for the purpose of reviewing and learning more about those services. While it has not influenced this article, both the writer and Perceptive Travel believe in full disclosure of all potential conflicts of interest.}

To really get inside the head and life of an author, it’s tough to beat a visit to their home.

You can visualize and imagine, “She sat at that desk, he looked out that window while mulling plot twists….”

Here are some ideas for your next trip; six writers whose homes you may want to walk through and enjoy:

**  Carl Sandburg – The Sandburg house in Flat Rock, North Carolina is called Connemara; the setting is lovely and inspiring, and the house is nicely preserved with his mementos and nice piles of paper, books and writer-y stuff.  I didn’t know much about Sandburg when I visited, and was pleasantly surprised by how much I liked his work.

**  Helen Keller – Her Ivy Green birthplace in Tuscumbia, Alabama is full of memorabilia (including, yes, the water pump) plus displays of her books in multiple languages. It’s well worth a visit, and in June and July you can see live performances of the play The Miracle Worker, about the start of life with her Teacher, Annie Sullivan.

**  Laura Ingalls Wilder – As any reader of the Little House series will tell you, the pioneer Ingalls family lived all over the Midwest, so it’s hard to pick just one place to get a sense of her writings. Try her final home (where the books were written) at the Little House on Rocky Ridge in Mansfield, Missouri, the site of the original “little house” (the one on the prairie) near Independence, Kansas or her Little Town on the Prairie home in De Smet, South Dakota.

**  John Steinbeck – the National Steinbeck Center in Salinas, California not only celebrates the writer’s works like Grapes of Wrath and Cannery Row, but also the surrounding agricultural region and its heritage through exhibitions and educational programming. The four-day Steinbeck Festival for 2011 is scheduled for August 4 – 7.

**  Mark Twain – You have some choices here: his lovely house and museum in Hartford, Connecticut where he wrote famous works like The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, or his award-winning Hannibal, Missouri boyhood home, near the banks of the Mississippi River that he loved and that inspired so many of his writings.

**  Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings – The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Yearling and Cross Creek lived in her north central Florida Cracker farmhouse near Gainesville for 25 years; today it’s a National Historic Landmark and a Florida State Park, preserved as it was in the 1930s. On the back porch where she typed, it looks as though she’s just stepped away for a moment to tend to her orange grove.

Where are your favorite author homes to visit? Please tell us down in the comments!

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It wasn’t such an easy journey, or such a safe one, back in the seventeenth and eighteenth century when Spanish galleons sailed the waters out from the mother country to far flung settlements in the new world. God, gold, and glory, swashbuckling pirates and daring seafarers have made their mark on popular ideas of the time. At The Museum of Florida History in Tallahassee, there’s an exhibit that quietly takes things a bit deeper — in more ways than one.

You can imagine the sails billowing as the ships move along as you look at the sailcloth overhead. There are maps such as the navigators on the ships would have used on the walls, and there is, indeed, gold and sliver, Spanish reals stamped with the royal mark and spilled out as they were found across the ocean floor, centuries after this ship sank in a hurricane off Florida’s coast.

The treasure is always a big draw, with kids and adults alike excited to see these true coins from centuries ago. The museum display goes further, though. Often overlooked as people crowd around the treasure are other things — pottery bowls and jars from the ship’s kitchen, a tools the men worked on the ship with over the long voyage, a crucifix, a chalice, a sewing needle, a button — all as they might have been found on the sea floor, as well, markers of the daily lives of those who sailed the waters centuries ago.

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