New Tee & Bag Designs for Hub City Co-op (200 Words)

September 16, 2016 by Miranda Harton in design, health, inspiration, food, style, sustainability

Just wanted to share my latest design project for Hub City Co-op.

I designed these t-shirts and tote bags based on the original mural I painted inside the store. They came out so great and hopefully they are gonna fly off the shelves.

I put a lot of thought and research into sourcing these.

The tees are super soft polyblend material that people will actually love to wear. They are manufactured in Nicaragua by Next Level, a socially and environmentally responsible and WRAP certified (Worldwide Responsible Accredited Production) which means no sweat shops, no child labor and environmentally responsibility.

The 100% organic cotton tote bags by econscious donate a portion of sales to non-profit Partners like 1% for the Planet, the Rodale Institute the Organic Trade Association and Green America.

They were printed and delivered by a local business, Carolina Headwear.

Not only are they fun & functional merchandise, but they also serve as grassroots marketing, as long as customers wear and use them in public. My focus here has been ideas and promotions that are win-win-win and benefit all parties involved, especially the local community.

So thankful that these peeps let me keep experimenting with and expressing my creativity!

Celebrating Holi in Kathmandu, Nepal

March 22, 2016 by Miranda Harton in travel, nepal, festival

I did not intentionally plan to be in Nepal during Holi but I am stoked to have stumbled into such serendipity.

Holi is a traditional springtime Hindu festival celebrated in India and Nepal that takes place on the Purnima (full moon day) approaching the vernal equinox. It's also known as the festival of colors or the festival of love. Here, everyone comes together for good, colorful fun and at least for some time they all forget about age, politics, religion, ethnicity, nationality, gender, sexual orientation and whatever else has potential to divide people.

It's the only time I've let total strangers assault my face with a rainbow of powdered paint. Oh and kids will throw water bombs at you, dump water on you from the rooftops and squirt you with water guns. The celebration started this morning in Durbar Square with music and dancing and yelling and color flinging and is still raging outside my hotel room hours later as we speak.

Here are my favorite faces of Holi:

A Few Days in Phnom Penh, Cambodia

November 29, 2015 by Miranda Harton in asia, backpacking, cambodia, food, travel

This has been my least favorite city that I've visited during this trip. It's dirty and crowded and smells like garbage since there are always neglected piles of it in the street and on the sidewalks.

I nearly got run over by a stampede of scooters - while walking on the sidewalk. The tuk-tuk drivers are relentless. I get propositioned at least 20 times per day. I can't walk by one without getting yelled at "Lady, hey lady! You need tuk-tuk?" It's like the idea that a Westerner would want to actually walk anywhere is unthinkable to them - that, and they mostly just want my money.

However, my hostel, Aura, was kinda of cute. It had "themed rooms," a rooftop bar at night and decent design. I was in a 6 bed female share dorm with a Lily theme, which means one wall was covered in a huge picture of a flower and there was a vase with two plastic lilies in it on the single table. Could have used a bathmat. It was cute and clean and a bit off the beaten path which made is quieter and made me get a bit more exercise.

Pol Pot & the Khmer Rouge Genocide

During my second afternoon, which was a Thursday and happened to be Thanksgiving Day in the States, I visited Pol Pot's infamous killing fields and S21 prison with my Aussie friend Jayme.

We watched a documentary on our air conned bus during the drive to The Choeung Ek Genocidal Center and paid $3 upon arrival for the audio tour, which was well worth the cost. I think its much more respectful to listen quietly to narration about the atrocities that took place here, rather than have a tour guide shouting about it to you. This was only one of over 300 killing fields around the country where Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge murdered innocent people using farm tools and rather primitive weapons because bullets were too expensive.

The tour started by describing some of the structures that used to be there like the truck stop, the detention hall and a chemical substances storage room. Next to a lake you can stop and listen to a variety of survivor stories, each more gruesome than the next. Then you continue along the path to some mass graves, next to which are glass boxes containing cloth, bones and teeth from victims that surface during heavy rains. There's also the killing tree, where soldiers would execute babies and children by smashing them against the trunk. The tree and the fences surrounding the mass grave sites are covered in bracelets, like a kind of makeshift memorial, to which I added a bracelet of my own.

Being Thanksgiving and all, I was missing friends and family back home but I am incredibly thankful for this journey and all the wonderful people I've met and many lessons I've learned along the way. I'm also thankful for the lifestyle I am able to enjoy at home because I've seen first hand that most people around the world don't enjoy the same freedoms and luxuries that we so often take for granted, like you know, not being murdered by a crazy, genocidal dictator. My next thoughts revolved around the fact that we as humans are slow learners because genocide like this has happened again since then and is still happening today. I wonder if - in 40 years - tourists will be flocking to visit museums and mass graves in Syria, Africa and North Korea.

There is an official memorial as well, a large stupa near the entrance that contains seven levels of skulls and bones from the victims. The skulls on the lower levels are arranged by age and color coded by cause of death thanks to hours of investigation by forensic scientists.

As if that isn't shocking enough, we got back on the bus and headed to town to visit the Tuol Sleng Genocidal Museum, which was a high school that was converted into the S21 prison where they detained and tortured hundreds of men, women and children. Immediately upon entering, I had a very heavy, eerie feeling staring at those yellow and white checkered floors, gray walls and barbed wire. Pictures of prisoners (mostly when they were alive but some post-mortem) are everywhere. Since pretty much all the people had done nothing to justify their imprisonment, they were often tortured into false confessions to satisfy Pol Pot's paranoia and bloodlust. Only two survivors of the prison are alive today and sometimes talk to visitors, but neither of them present during my visit. I opted to take more artistic photos that more subtly communicate the look and feel of this space:

It's tragic how many people were murdered but even more were worked or starved to death in rice fields in the countryside. All because one deranged dude was able to acquire so much misguided power and influence. And you know how his story ended - he died (albeit questionably) in his 70s after living a long and decent life with children and grandchildren on the border of Thailand after he was driven out of Phnom Penh by the Vietnamese in 1979. He never even really faced formal charges or punishment.

I suggested watching a happy Disney movie after this, but the next best thing Jayme and I could do was enjoy dinner and some fireworks at the riverfront since it was the last day of the annual Water Festival. We shared Khmer curry and Pad Thai and veggie spring rolls and were interrupted no less than half a dozen times by persistent kids trying to sell us the same braided bracelets that I already got suckered into buying in Battambang. Some tried more than once after we already said no. It's one thing if I'm at a market or a tourist-swarmed temple and I expect to face a barrage of locals trying to sell me stuff but it's not ok to come interrupt me in the middle of a meal, and the restaurants need to realize this.

Sightseeing Around the City

The next day, I met up with Dennis, a German that was at my hostel in Battambang last week. The plan was to catch the big, red hop-on, hop-off bus - not unlike ones that I've enjoyed using in so many other cities - except we found out it wasn't functioning even though it is advertised all over the city. Instead we made one tuk-tuk driver's day and agreed to let him transport us to some of the sights.

The first involved taking a ferry across the river to Mekong Island. This island was very basic and it felt like we were peeking into Cambodia's pre-urban past. Our driver took us to Silk Island where we got to meet and witness women traditionally weaving silk scarves on giant, wooden looms. Of course there was a shop at the end of the tour where I may or may not have bought a scarf or two. They had a lot of cool spaces that are free for the community to enjoy including wooden pavilions, parks with sculptures, wooden swings and cute little huts on stilts. We drove around and enjoyed the island scenery a bit longer before catching the ferry back to the mainland.

We stopped for lunch where I ordered pineapple fried rice which arrived sans pineapple before heading to the National Museum. This was quite a let down as the architecture and landscape of the museum itself is far more interesting than anything inside. It was mostly just statues or pieces of statues with little to no English information. I found one interesting series of paintings describing the Cambodian version of the Ramayana.

Since the museum was so "meh," we decided to skip the palace as well because it was $6 each to get in and then $10 for a tour guide. Our last stop was the Wat Phnom temple, which was probably the biggest disappointment of all, because it seemed to have lost all of its religious significance and was packed with people trying to make a buck off tourists. There was a stall selling offerings of lotus flowers and incense, a generic Cambodian souvenir tent and worst of all, a woman with little wooden cages full of birds who was charging $2 each if you wanted to free the poor creatures. I later heard that this was a scam and the birds are trained to return to the cage. Either way, Dennis and I were both appalled.

We spent some rest time at our respective hostels then met up for dinner. I was craving Western food so I had french fries and pizza and he ordered Mexican chili - which turned out to be a not-good idea. Pretty much all the menus for the main restaurants have 20 pages or more and hundreds of different beverages, breakfast, western, khmer, asian, thai, indian and apparently mexican dishes. However, I know for a fact they don't stock everything to make all of these offerings as I've ordered a few things that the server had to come back and tell me they couldn't make at the moment. You can order almost anything you can think of at a tourist-targeted restaurant in Phnom Penh.

But I digress. We met up with two girls that Dennis had met in Siem Reap. One was English and one was Aussie but both were living in Cambodia as teachers for International schools. I only had a couple ciders before parting ways because I'm basically an old lady now.

The next day I finally did some yoga, had breakfast and decided to see a movie. An old guy on a motorcycle offered to take me to the mall/cineplex for $2 then once I was on board, he raised the price to $3. I refused and told him the most I would give him was $2.50 because the distance was maybe 2 km - I just wouldn't make my 11:40 viewing time for the Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part II if I had walked. The movie cost $5 for 3D and there might have been a total of three other people in the theater. The movie was in English with Khmer subtitles and was ok. From what I remember from the book, it still generally followed the original plot.

During the walk back to my hostel, I stopped at a Blind Massage business for a foot massage. My masseuse was a young woman named Phka (meaning Flower in Khmer) who seemed excited to practice her English because she was very chatty. She has 7 brothers and sisters, a husband and a daughter. So basically, she lives like most everyone else except she's blind.

Dining in the Dark

Continuing the spontaneous theme of the evening, I made a reservation at Dine in the Dark - which offers a three course meal served in pitch black darkness for $18. When I came back at 7 PM, my phone was confiscated and locked away until the end of my meal, ensuring I couldn't cheat and use it as a light source. My server, Honey, was blind and led me up the stairs to the beyond dark dining room. I was dining alone, not to mention the only patron in the restaurant at that time, and I was pleasantly surprised when she sat down and started chatting with me. She was somewhat petite, very smart and spoke very well. I found out she was currently studying at University and eventually wants to teach English. I also learned that she was born blind and that she is an orphan. (I can't even fathom what her childhood must have been like.)

As for the meal, it was amazing - definitely the best I had in Phnom Penh. The first course was a breaded, fried egg on top of a bed of shredded veggies - kind of like a salad. I tried just using my fork but it was impossible to eat blindly without using my left hand. The second course was a familiar taste of veggie Amok, or a mild coconut curry and rice. I tried to guess all of the vegetables that were in the dish: carrot, potato, zucchini, mushroom and squash. The last course was a fruity mousse topped with fruit. I guessed passion fruit or lime flavor for the mousse but it turned out to be mango/ginger topped with pieces of dragon fruit. (The host shows you pictures of your food after you finish eating.) Guess my palate isn't quite as refined as I thought!

I tipped Honey generously and thanked her for her wonderful service and pleasant company. It's seriously inspiring to see all that she is achieving. I asked if she had an email address and she brightly said "Yes and I have Facebook too!" My first thought was What? Blind people use Facebook? But after a moment I thought Yeah, why wouldn't they? They just have to interact with it slightly differently I guess. I found her account later and it turns out she has way more Facebook friends than I do.

The next afternoon, I was on a plane bound of Ho Chi Minh CIty (aka Saigon) in Vietnam.

Thailand Temple Time: Part II

November 06, 2015 by Miranda Harton in asia, backpacking, thailand, travel, sustainability, temple, buddhist

GENERAL OBSERVATIONS

Thailand is the cleanest Asian country I’ve visited. (Well not counting Singapore which is almost sterile since everything is concrete or indoors.) In the past few countries, there is rubbish everywhere and people tend to put it in piles and burn it from time to time. Bleh - the smell of burning plastic is the worst. But not Thailand - they even have recycling! And I didn’t believe this at first but there are also people that make a living by going through the bright blue garbage bins and taking out anything that is recyclable as well.

I was surprised that the traffic here is pretty much a parade of pick-up trucks. While waiting at a bus stop one day, I counted and there is literally about one sedan for every 20 trucks. Then at the other extreme lots of people buzz by on motorbikes as well. Maybe it’s just Fang but I just expected mostly motorbikes with some small cars mixed in and even tuk-tuks.

There are pictures of the royal family everywhere. On calendars in shops and restaurants, framed in the middle of street medians, on giant billboards. But most of them are not current and show especially the king in his much younger days. Not that I would have any reason to, but I’ve been told on multiple occasions not to insult the king as Thai people are very patriotic and hold their king in high regard.

THE TEMPLE TOUR

I thoroughly enjoyed the little temple tour that was arranged for us on Sunday. Oui, a Thai lay person that runs a canteen at the nearby school and helps out around the temple, drove us around in a truck to three very different temples north of Fang. The first was a traditional Chinese Buddhist temple which is not out of place since there’s a pretty significant population of them in Northern Thailand. It featured the traditional style architecture with the sloping roofs, lots of red and gold, paper lanterns and dragons draped over everything. There was also a ginormous Budai statue, or the Laughing/Fat Buddha that most people recognize in the West because they are always in Chinese restaurants and nail salons. Budai was a Chinese monk who was so well liked and admired that the Chinese consider him a Matrea or Future Buddha. Not the same at all as the original calm, cross-legged, meditating Buddha that lived in India 2500 years ago.

The second stop was an immaculate meditation retreat (open to Thai only) with a golden pagoda that you could see shining amongst the green mountains from far away. As we were driving up the last incline to the entrance, the left and right sides of the road were lined with adorable, lotus-shaped huts that house the resident nuns and guests. The circular temple was gorgeous inside and out and had a series of paintings of the Buddha’s life and legends on the inner walls and a lotus mural carved and painted all along the outer walls. In the center of the temple was a delicate looking glass structure that made me feel like I was looking at a scale model of the Emerald City from Oz. Strategically placed throughout the property was a collection of statues of Buddha, devas and nagas like an outdoor art gallery.

After this we stopped at a local restaurant for lunch and I had pad see ew - the closest thing they served to pad thai. It was basically big, flat noodles with veggies. I was craving a salty snack while they prepared my food so I perused the racks of potato chips that they had to offer - and even 90% of these were meat flavored! There was pork, shrimp, chickend and even cuttlefish flavored crackers or chips, along with like two regular potato flavors and one bag of Thai Cheetohs. I ended up skipping the junkfood appetizer.

Our last stop was an impressive, seven level Forest Temple that was about as close to the Burma border as you can get. The mountains to the west form a natural border with Burma and Graham even pointed out a military base in a clearing atop one of the peaks. I was probably way too excited to see a cat which was pretty scraggly looking and was missing an eye, but still… kitty!

There was an amazing little meditation path the wound through the woods and ended at a giant concrete ‘boat’ overlooking the Me Kok river. The panoramic views of the landscape were incredible from this vantage point. As we walked along the path, Graham told us that some of the older monks can recall the days when wild tigers and elephants used to roam the area but of course they have long since disappeared. The trees would be gone too if it wasn’t protected temple land, and even then some loggers still try to force their way in sometimes.

This is also the location of Wat Thaton, an impressive, rainbow colored temple that houses a variety of Buddhist relics, so it’s kind of like a museum too. There are even ornamental baby Buddhas outside. We took a break here before heading home and I indulged in ice cream, thai iced milk tea and had a cup of traditional hot tea.

FRIDAY FEELS

So many feels today! I decided to have lunch at the canteen that Oui and his wife manage at the school. Yesterday he invited me there for lunch and said his wife would cook me something vegetarian but I wasn’t feeling great yesterday so I just had toast here instead. Today I walked over at a quarter past 11 and all the monks were heading to lunch as well. Oui wasn’t there but his wife was and she was very cute and very pregnant. She offered me iced thai green tea which is very sweet and loaded with condensed milk. Then she cooked me a simple meal of some sort of greens and sprouts with sauce on a bed of rice. I covertly added my usual handful of peanuts for protein and flavor. (I always do this at alms breakfast as well.)

I sat by myself at the end of a picnic style wooden table. It was just like sitting in a cafeteria back home except the students were all boys with shaved heads, wearing bright orange uniforms. One monk cautiously walked past me and said hello. I responded “hello” enthusiastically and eventually he sat down at the table - as far away from me as possible on the other side, but still. He had pretty good English and I found out he was 18 and his name is Kon. After a few moments, another monk shyly approached, said hello and politely asked permission if he could sit across from me. “Yes, of course!” He was very eager to practice his English and was so honest that he admitted he was nervous to practice with me and that he needs to work on his confidence. I assured him that his English was very good. His name is Long and he is 17. He practices a lot because he wants to study English at University and I don’t blame him. It will definitely open up a lot more opportunities for him. The two boys were in the same class and they have been monks for 5 years.

By this time, it was time for them to go back to class so they excused themselves and I thanked them for talking with me. The temple gets plenty of guests but I doubt most of them interact with the monks so much. I really hope I gave those two kids some confidence after our little chat!

When I was finished with my meal, Oui’s wife offered to refill my tea and I asked her how much for lunch and she insisted it was free. I had a 100 baht note (about $3 USD) in my pocket and tried to hand it to her but she refused until I insisted she take it for the baby (in her tummy). She finally accepted it with a wide grin and I walked away with a smile, myself. It can be a bit intimidating being the totally obvious, odd person out but all the Thai people I’ve met so far are so nice so it really hasn’t been bad at all.

Another English-speaking monk actually added me on Facebook last week which I thought was a bit strange at first but then I thought they are just people that want to make connections like everyone else. I'm pretty sure he's going to University soon and may not even be a monk after that. Who knows?

As of today everyone else is gone, even the coordinator, Graham (but he has a good excuse: he’s getting married.) So it’s just me and Longtail, our resident temple dog who I sometimes prefer to call Roadblock because she is always laying across one of the top stairs so that we have to step over her completely. She rarely moves - I think because the other dogs tend to bully her but she’s got it made and gets her own food and water and far more attention than all the others.

I'll be leaving on a mini bus to Changmai city on Sunday but I'm super thankful for this incredible, unique and inspiring experience.