LA/SS/D Blog

Living in Fukushima day 1

2010-03-12T08:44:00.000-08:00

I flew from Minneapolis to Tokyo earlier today, on Delta Airlines. My job told me I had to teach in Kawauchi, a small Japanese town in Fukushima Prefecture. As I flew into Tokyo, I was slightly nervous. I had only been to an airport in Japan before, and as I got my connecting flight in Japan to Fukushima Airport, I was not sure what I would do. Luckily, when I got to the airport, among the crowd I saw a board with my name, George Richards. I walked to the board and introduced myself to the man holding it, Mr. Nagamasa. He bowed and said "Hello. I am Kobayakawa Kintaro Nagamasa, but please call me Mr. Nagamasa." I bowed and introduced myself too, and he drove me to Kawauchi, a small town in the heart of the prefecture.

Collapse Theory(new and improved)

2009-11-09T11:28:00.000-08:00

The Maya were a very great empire, that spanned a long amount of time. They managed for themselves very nicely, yet they suddenly collapsed. Nobody knows why this happened, but
here is my theory.

(Copan jungle)

My opinion is that the Maya were starved to death from the rainforest dying out. This combines with another theory in saying that the Maya then overfarmed the land. In that case, the erosion would be proved true because overfarming caused erosion. Since they might not have known what the erosion was coming from, they would have left their cities, possibly even believing the erosion was a sign from the gods, and moved into the jungle, and then starved out.

(Eroded area)

However, in the Copan valley, there are still about the same number of people descended from the Maya as there were Maya then, which means that the starvation might not have been that bad.

(Maya Skull from Copan)

Nazca video

2009-10-22T07:44:00.000-07:00

The Nazca

2009-10-22T07:38:00.001-07:00

This is one of the Nazca Line drawings in the ground. They were supposed to please the sky gods. This is a monkey.

Another drawing

A headless bird!

A Nazca monkey on a pot.

Rock formation in Paracas Land

2009-10-22T07:29:00.000-07:00

The Paracas Tribe

2009-10-22T07:08:00.000-07:00

This is a sort of Paracas tapestry. It depicts sme sort of bird-like animal. It probably was one of their gods.

Here is some gold from the Paracas tribe. It is a broken fragment of something that looks like a pot

This is the small territory of the Paracas Land.

This is a very large piece of Paracas pottery. It is shaped like a body.

This is a crazy Paracas skull. They probably did surgery on this skull to make it like this. The Paracas might be the first to perform surgery.

Nice video on the Chavin

2009-10-22T07:05:00.000-07:00

The Chavin Tribe

2009-10-22T06:47:00.000-07:00

This is the Chavin Tribe's domain. The dark red shows the part the Chavin held, with their influences in the lighter red.

This is an image of one of their gods. It is very large, though you can't tell from the picture. This is what is most known from the Chavin Tribe.

This is a Chavin Tribe pot. It looks like a teapot, almost, but it has a gold handle with a spout.

This is a very odd sculpture. It depicts a huge god blowing its nose.