50 + 76 points
Ariadne's Thread by Sombrero Guy, susy derkins
August 30th, 2009 9:02 PM
It all started with Sombrero Guy's invitation for trans-Atlantic, parallel, wishful thinking-powered Ariadne´s threading. Sombrero Guy had never been to Cuernavaca or any other place in Mexico and I had never been to Bournemouth or anywhere else in the UK.
He made a list of 10 places for me to visit in my hometown and I made a list for him to go in his.
("Let someone else plan your day" Day). We would follow each other's thread on the same day, and while doing that, we would formally establish a link between pairs of the landmarks we have decided was worth visiting.
"Sister landmarks", "twin locations", "historical/cultural/geographical sibling-sites", that sort of thing. Mostly in order to weird people out.
I got most of my list from browsing Geograph British Isles (photograph every grid square!).
As Jowan's remote Ariadne, I hope I wasn´t too boring, sending him out to the touristy spots. In the scavenging hunt mode, maybe I should have sent him here. Was I too BARTPA, or too little BIOME? You know how it is with tasking, one gets thinking about it for many days afterwards...
I am happy to report that he found just the tree I wanted him to find. And I wonder if the blue plaque is no longer there, on the wall of St Peter's churchyard? I really need to know: what's the story behind "and the heart of Percy Bysshe, her husband, the poet"?
As it happened, the task was to be made in the very last day of school vacation. Since I'm not in school anymore, the last day of school vacation was going to be just symbolic, but on the interest of tasking, it became real: work was decided to be lower priority.
The whole story is on the captions of the pictures, which are at the end (my pics are after Sombrero Guy's, because Friday morning happens in Bournemouth long before it does in Cuernavaca). But before you get there, I want to invest a few words on the effects of tasking beyond what you see in the pictures.
First of all, I hadn´t tasked in many months and I realized I missed it. And Sombrero Guy's thread happened to send me to places where I had tasked before and to some I had never been and happened to be fantastic potential tasking areas. It was a great morning. I'm indebted to the Brit with the Sombrero. I got to feel again that specific nervoussness/excitement of doing something that can be described as either silly or redeeming for humankind. Being outside on tasking mood shifts the whole space, the people, the power one has on deciding to do stuff noone is expecting us to do. Yeah, OK, I had fun. Plus halfway through the route it started to rain. Hard. Being on a crazy plate-affixing journey while soaking wet is particularly fun. Also, I took a whole lot of pictures that weren´t even remotely relevant to the task and I'm normally not into picture taking. I shut up now.
This is my map. I decided to start with the hardest place, the ravine under the huge bridge. I had no freaking idea how to get down there. I mean NO-ONE goes ever there. Well, almost no-one. It was fantastic.
Over to Sombrero Guy.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I was pleasantly surprised by the variety of locations Susy was able to find online. As I tend to think Bournemouth doesn't have much of interest, I suppose I was expecting the obvious places such as the pier, balloon and Ocearium. However, none of these came up and looking at the list I had to do some research of my own before planning my route.
I'm afraid I may have chosen a few more obvious places in Cuernavaca, including the cathedral, a couple of statues and a large museum.
Susy's idea of having 'sister landmarks' enhanced the task, and I used my usual method of making small labels for the places in Publisher before setting out. My full journey following the thread set out for me is in the captions to my pictures. I'm afraid I failed at two of the points. I was unable to find a blue plaque (which is probably in a really obvious place I overlooked), and had to make do with an information board in the churchyard. I was also unsure of the exact tree I needed to find in Horseshoe Common. But I enjoyed walking the route, which took me across both familiar and totally new ground. While walking around, I tried to look at Bournemouth in a new light, and notice things I don't normally see. I became like a tourist in my own town, especially when I reached the bits I didn't know, with only a pixellated printout from Google Earth to rely on.
These are the lists we each had (I've reordered mine to the order I visited them in, and the numbers represent which landmarks were 'twinned'):
10. Drinking fountain at the end of Undercliff Drive
9. Bournemouth's beach West Cliff Zig-zag road and its benches
8. Bournemouth Gardens' aviary
6. Blue plaque for Mary Shelley and her family
5. The giant pocket watch
4. Pebble mosaic
3. Steep footpath that runs down from St. Stephen's Road to Bourne Avenue and comes out opposite the Gardens (alternatively Walkway between Westover and Hinton Roads)
2. V-shaped supports of the town centre by-pass over Braidley Road, behind the Town Hall.
7. Candleholder-shaped tree in Horseshoe Common (alternatively, the pond)
1. Tuk Tuk Thai
(this is my list, I reordered them too)
2. Underneath the Puente 2000 (Independencia)
3. Tennis court near the intersection of Mariano Abasolo and Jose Ma. Morelos y Pavon (alternatively, the adjacent bus station if the tennis court is on private land)
9. Robert Brady museum
5. Catedral de Cuernavaca
1. Don Vito - Pizzeria e Trattoria (Sebastian Lerdo de Tejada)
8. Kiosko
4. Statue of Morelos in the main plaza
7. Tribunal Superior de Justica
6. Statue of Benito Juarez in the middle of a roundabout
He made a list of 10 places for me to visit in my hometown and I made a list for him to go in his.
("Let someone else plan your day" Day). We would follow each other's thread on the same day, and while doing that, we would formally establish a link between pairs of the landmarks we have decided was worth visiting.
"Sister landmarks", "twin locations", "historical/cultural/geographical sibling-sites", that sort of thing. Mostly in order to weird people out.
I got most of my list from browsing Geograph British Isles (photograph every grid square!).
As Jowan's remote Ariadne, I hope I wasn´t too boring, sending him out to the touristy spots. In the scavenging hunt mode, maybe I should have sent him here. Was I too BARTPA, or too little BIOME? You know how it is with tasking, one gets thinking about it for many days afterwards...
I am happy to report that he found just the tree I wanted him to find. And I wonder if the blue plaque is no longer there, on the wall of St Peter's churchyard? I really need to know: what's the story behind "and the heart of Percy Bysshe, her husband, the poet"?
As it happened, the task was to be made in the very last day of school vacation. Since I'm not in school anymore, the last day of school vacation was going to be just symbolic, but on the interest of tasking, it became real: work was decided to be lower priority.
The whole story is on the captions of the pictures, which are at the end (my pics are after Sombrero Guy's, because Friday morning happens in Bournemouth long before it does in Cuernavaca). But before you get there, I want to invest a few words on the effects of tasking beyond what you see in the pictures.
First of all, I hadn´t tasked in many months and I realized I missed it. And Sombrero Guy's thread happened to send me to places where I had tasked before and to some I had never been and happened to be fantastic potential tasking areas. It was a great morning. I'm indebted to the Brit with the Sombrero. I got to feel again that specific nervoussness/excitement of doing something that can be described as either silly or redeeming for humankind. Being outside on tasking mood shifts the whole space, the people, the power one has on deciding to do stuff noone is expecting us to do. Yeah, OK, I had fun. Plus halfway through the route it started to rain. Hard. Being on a crazy plate-affixing journey while soaking wet is particularly fun. Also, I took a whole lot of pictures that weren´t even remotely relevant to the task and I'm normally not into picture taking. I shut up now.
This is my map. I decided to start with the hardest place, the ravine under the huge bridge. I had no freaking idea how to get down there. I mean NO-ONE goes ever there. Well, almost no-one. It was fantastic.
Over to Sombrero Guy.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I was pleasantly surprised by the variety of locations Susy was able to find online. As I tend to think Bournemouth doesn't have much of interest, I suppose I was expecting the obvious places such as the pier, balloon and Ocearium. However, none of these came up and looking at the list I had to do some research of my own before planning my route.
I'm afraid I may have chosen a few more obvious places in Cuernavaca, including the cathedral, a couple of statues and a large museum.
Susy's idea of having 'sister landmarks' enhanced the task, and I used my usual method of making small labels for the places in Publisher before setting out. My full journey following the thread set out for me is in the captions to my pictures. I'm afraid I failed at two of the points. I was unable to find a blue plaque (which is probably in a really obvious place I overlooked), and had to make do with an information board in the churchyard. I was also unsure of the exact tree I needed to find in Horseshoe Common. But I enjoyed walking the route, which took me across both familiar and totally new ground. While walking around, I tried to look at Bournemouth in a new light, and notice things I don't normally see. I became like a tourist in my own town, especially when I reached the bits I didn't know, with only a pixellated printout from Google Earth to rely on.
These are the lists we each had (I've reordered mine to the order I visited them in, and the numbers represent which landmarks were 'twinned'):
10. Drinking fountain at the end of Undercliff Drive
9. Bournemouth's beach West Cliff Zig-zag road and its benches
8. Bournemouth Gardens' aviary
6. Blue plaque for Mary Shelley and her family
5. The giant pocket watch
4. Pebble mosaic
3. Steep footpath that runs down from St. Stephen's Road to Bourne Avenue and comes out opposite the Gardens (alternatively Walkway between Westover and Hinton Roads)
2. V-shaped supports of the town centre by-pass over Braidley Road, behind the Town Hall.
7. Candleholder-shaped tree in Horseshoe Common (alternatively, the pond)
1. Tuk Tuk Thai
(this is my list, I reordered them too)
2. Underneath the Puente 2000 (Independencia)
3. Tennis court near the intersection of Mariano Abasolo and Jose Ma. Morelos y Pavon (alternatively, the adjacent bus station if the tennis court is on private land)
9. Robert Brady museum
5. Catedral de Cuernavaca
1. Don Vito - Pizzeria e Trattoria (Sebastian Lerdo de Tejada)
8. Kiosko
4. Statue of Morelos in the main plaza
7. Tribunal Superior de Justica
6. Statue of Benito Juarez in the middle of a roundabout
16 vote(s)
4
Loki
5Ben Yamiin
5Adam
4Rin Brooker
4Force TheOneAndOnly
4Samantha
5teucer
5saille is planting praxis
5done
5Palindromedary
5anna one
5Professor Møbius
5Picø ҉ ØwO
5Ariadne
5gh◌st ᵰⱥ₥ing
5APR dreamlands
Terms
wowzers5 comment(s)
posted by Sombrero Guy on September 5th, 2009 9:55 AM
I'm glad I found the right tree. I will look again next time I have the chance for the blue plaque, because it isn't the sort of thing which would be taken down. I probably overlooked it somehow.
The story goes, in the words of Wikipedia, that "[Percy] Shelley's heart was snatched from the funeral pyre by Edward Trelawny; Mary Shelley kept it for the rest of her life, and it was interred next to her grave at St. Peter's Church in Bournemouth."
posted by Sombrero Guy on October 1st, 2010 8:19 AM
Only 13 months late...
It's actually quite annoying that I spent all that time looking for it, and then one day it suddenly appears in front of me. Oh well, I can finally call this task entirely complete!
posted by susy derkins on October 1st, 2010 10:12 AM
Yay!
You should get a thoroughness badge.
13 months already?! wow
The twinned landmarks are a nice touch.