August 5, 2010. 400 forest fires burn out of control just a few hundred kilometres northeast of us. And the wind is blowing the wrong way. We are getting it, smelling the smoke. And we can see it. We are in no danger but the last month of beautiful blue skies accompanying our usual clean crisp air have been replaced with a thick smelly haze that hints of campfire in the air. It is not pleasant.
Visibility is down to about one mile and the City of Vancouver, a hundred and fifty miles further away is on an air quality alert. Seems they are at a 5 on a scale of ten, enough to advise the elderly and those with breathing difficulties to stay indoors. This all happened the day our five Hong Kong students arrived.
I greeted them at the airport, appalled at what they must think. They had just landed with the commuter flight out of YVR and the sky must have been a thick grey all the way. As we greeted one another, I asked “What does it look like up there?”
“What does what look like?”
“You know, all the smoke and stuff from the forest fires?”
“Wow! Forest fires!? What forest fires?”
Turns out the air was much the same as they are used to in Hong Kong. For them, nothing was out of the ordinary! We drove through the usually picturesque town of Campbell River and I purposefully drove a route that shows suburbs, townhouses and the like to give a sense of what ‘housing’ in Canada is like. They oohed and aahed at the large homes and were amazed at the lack of traffic and absence of pedestrians. But the ominous grey haze that dominated the overall impression was still not a factor for them. Being able to see only a mile or so was normal.
But they were also exhausted. And it took another two and half hours to get home due to a full-ferry wait. I had five asleep students in the car lolling about like rag dolls as I drove them sliding and lurching down the 20 miles of windy logging road to the boat ramp. They were beat.
We all got home and they had dinner and then they kind of grabbed a second wind as all kids dutifully checked back with parents and friends via Skype or e-mail. The house didn’t get still until midnight.
Before we all settled down, Sally and I were presented with one of the most unique gifts we have ever received. A nicely wrapped box was offered to Sally for opening from all five of the students. It was a small box about a foot long and four inches wide and deep. In it was one of those glass bubbles sitting on a wooden base. In the bubble were two wax figures, a man and a woman wearing traditional Chinese pyjamas. He looked a bit like Stephen Spielberg and she looked a bit like a Medusa-haired grim looking lady wrestler. They were quite intriguing but the best was yet to come. It seems that Winnie had been in Beijing where a computer driven machine was used to transfer the likeness of our photos (previously taken on our last trip) and fed into a wax-maker mould machine. These figures were the computer’s version of us!
I was very pleased. I have never looked so good! Seems I have finally found my ‘best look’……..wax. Since the computer concentrates solely on the face, I was notably slimmer in this rendition and Sally, significantly thicker. She was also depicted unfairly grotesque. I shuddered at the image. The kids explained that the face-reading program was better suited to Asian faces and that the dolls were not as close to our likeness as was real life. No kidding! Still, I liked it a great deal. And so did Sally, good sport that she is. In wax, I am cuter than she is – that should give you some idea of the flaws in the program. But we love it!
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