I carried a camera around with me a few days during the last weeks of summer 2008 just for fun. I wanted to show the great views and people who make the city so wonderful. Hope you enjoy.
In Ryan Family fashion, we came up with a few songs to sing about Sean and Tina at their wedding reception.
Also, here’s a link to all the photos I took during the wedding.
I apologize, that a lot of the songs are only funny if you know the story behind it. So here are a few facts:
My dad, John Ryan gave Sean a kidney.
Madtown=Madison
Sean “would never have a pet” than he met a girl.
Sean never wore Jeans until he graduated college and Tina’s Dad(Gary) gave him Packer sweat pants when he forgot to bring pants on a long weekend.
Sean had a Bianator - which is like a hard core retainer.
Sean got into an accident driving to Madison.
Sean purposed on a golf course and the couple met at Pedro’s Bar.
I was walking to the nearby coffee shop when I heard a strange yet familiar sound coming from the third floor church window along the way. A few years ago I took a world music class that had a section on the old timey tradition of Shape Note singing and I had a feeling that what they were singing. I went up stairs and this video is what I found. Here’s a five minute taste of Shape Note singing with an explanation of how it works and its history.
Shape Note recently gained some popularity after the movie Cold Mountain had a scene were a congregation was singing out the songs of the “Sacred Harp.” My world music teacher and her husband were the muscial directors in the movie and even had some of their songs featured on the Cold Mountain Soundtrack along side Jack White (of the White Stripes), Riley Baugus and Tim O’Brien. The movie’s soundtrack was nominated for 2 Golden Globes, 3 Oscars, and 3 Grammies.
Here’s a link to a video of Tim Erikson, my teacher’s husband pickin’ the banjo and singing.
Click here.
I wish I made this video. The opportunity to travel all over the world is fun, but also some reason the idea of convincing tons of people to dance for a camera seems even more fun to me. Bringing people together by being goofy, that’s awkwardly beautiful!
As you can see from my post “Plaza Major” I studied in Salamanca Spain, which is a fairly small but extremely beautiful town west of Madrid. Mornings I walked through the Plaza to school, afternoons I sipped espresso sitting in the Plaza cafés and evenings I would meet friends in the Plaza. Now the President of the United States gets shot there. It was so strange when I was looking through movie trailers on the apple.com to see the Plaza Mayor be the primary location of the movie Vantage Point. So, I had to see it. Its good, but wait till its out on video. It was so funny because I could tell all the scenes that weren’t actually shot in the city. They even tried to give it an Arab Moroccan feel even though the city is in central Spain and is far from it. Also, the premis of the movie was a world summit against terrorism, which doesn’t make sense because Salamanca is a center of education in Spain but has little ties to government affairs like Madrid. I guess the director liked the location as much as I did.
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