Three Cups of Tea!

Three Cups of Tea by Greg Mortenson and David Relin was a very inspirational and educational book. But when I say educational I certainly do not mean in the normal sense of the word. I enjoyed reading it, the things Greg has done, just so far, in his life are so amazing and so much more than I realized anyone could possibly accomplish. From the very beginning I was impressed with Greg. If I was lost in a place I was not familiar with and had to sleep and be froze to the ground, I would definitely be a lot less composed than he was. It's also amazing how much stumbling into the little village would change so much of his life. The stories about climbing K2 i thought were very interesting because mountain climbing has always interested me.

The way Greg lived also impressed me greatly, he lived out of a storage garage and his car. It shows how much he was willing to give up for the people of Pakistan to have a better life. He also spent so much time typing, not on a computer, but on a typewriter those many letters to people for donations. He is dedicated to what he believes in. I really admire him. He really is so humble, as we saw on the video in class. I learned a lot about just not Greg, but about the middle eastern people. I always was under the impression that the mass of the middle east was terrorists, but contrary to what I thought, there are some very fantastic people. Such as Haji Ali and his family. Greg fit very well into their culture as well, he was willing to accept their ways, I think this was part of the reason his schools are so sucessful.

Jean came up with the idea for the CAI, which was absolutely brilliant. The CAI has helped so many children, who without Greg's determination, may not have ever had an education. I never imagined the children in Pakistan or any other middle eastern countries would want to learn. Greg Mortenson is a truely inspirational man, he shows us that although we are only one person we truly can have a huge impact on things. I think his cause is a great one and that it continues to be very sucessful for the members of the CAI. I also think our donation will be awesome!

Overall, the book was very interesting. Although it was not something I would've chosen to read on my own, I am glad i read it. At some points I would become confused with all the different terms Greg used but other than that I really enjoyed reading it. It was a fantastic story, and it was true, it's still so amazing he did all of this just because he stumbled into Korphe after being separated from his group. I usually do not like open endings but I think it was perfect for this story because the CAI is not done building schools and it shows that there is still much more that can be done in the middle east. Very good book.

NaCl^ITS OVER!

boring/hunger making last chapter.. thank you mark k.



first off, i love cheese all kinds. mostly colby-jack though, in my younger years i called it camo cheese. but ANYWAY back to SALT.



genoa and venice, huuuge salt ports. salt was boooming in these days. i still think its crazy that salt was this big of deal, i guess i was just oblivious to the history before my eyes every night at the dinner table. i wonder if someday students will be blogging about us and our oil obsession and think its a bit silly. i bet they will not have blogs by that time.



but anway genoa and venice were very competitive with eachother. salt was used for everything back then, again compared to gas, think about it what could you really do without gas. well you could get places but it would take MUCH longer. the food that was traded back then all used salt because it would probably go bad had it not been for the salt.



ham was getting to be a big thing in these days. i hope they had brown sugar! also it seems rather hard to cook ham, i suppose i'll continue to leave that to my mommy dearest. onto cheese, i didn't know salt was what aged cheese, i thought that aged swiss that i've been stocking up at the good ol iga(grocery store in which i work) was really very, very old. i'll feel a little better next time.



the mediteranean eventually died off and spain took over. everyone has their day i suppose.



hurrah for salt. actually, i learned a lot from this book. it was rather cool to learn about all the ways salt contributed to history. yay salt, but also yay for chapter 6 being over.

NaCl^5.field trip to the adriatic!

welll on to chapter 5. no clever introduction here.



with the fall of rome, the mediteranean was free to anyone for the trade and transportation of salt. hurrah salt. except this caused much competition on the seas.



venice finally conquered all in the amazing "salt" race. they formed salt ponds which had a clever way of pumping water to get the salt, i'm really not sure i was rather confused with this, clarification? i would love to have a vacation home along the salt ponds though, that would be quite the get away.



the people of venice were smart enough to realize how they would profit from salt. i wish i could profit from salt today. maybe next summer i will have a salt stand, although i don't think it would go quite as well as the lemonade stands used to. especially because salt does not quench the thirst, if horses had money it could be quite profitable though.



anyway, why do we play MARCO... polo, if he really has nothing to do with anything about the game. he did nothing to do with hiding in a pool and swimming away from the person who is "it." i think i shall change the name of the game to, THIS MAKES.. no sense.



salt i am finding you more and more interesting by the day!

okay that was a bit sarcastic, but it is interesting how linked salt is to history.

NaCl^4.salad days

this was a very lengthy chapter. i still give props to mark k. for being able to write a whole book on salt, and i hear one about fish as well! oh my.



moving on to the saltiness. the romans ate pigs but i was not impressed with the parts they ate, not impressed one bit.



romans used salt as the united states uses gas. they made it affordable but costly enough that they would still profit, which i suppose it exactly what we do with gas because if there was no profit i don't believe profits would have to be nearly as high.



salt is the root of our words!? who knew.

salary, which soldier were paid in salt.

sal came from the french word solde.

and from solde came soldier.

i think this is very cool, this is one root we had not covered in honors english!



i really don't understand how they all used so much salt and nobody suffered from obesity or heart disease. i suppose they didn't use nearly as much as us, but when it is thrown at us in literature it seems like SALT is a huge part of food, which i didn't realize. i do not salt anything but my corn.



fermented fish sauce as medicine, i choose to stay ill. salty sauces are not your friends!



"and that's all i have to say about that."

forrest, forrest gump :)

NaCl^3.CODFISH

the celts and their codfish.<3awh



in all seriousness, i had never really heard of the celts before this chapter. well possibly in conversation once or twice, but really had no idea who they were.



first connection to salt and the celts, bodys of celts who had been mining salt were found preserved, which i think is very neat. the salt had preserved the bodies, somewhat like it preserved the vegetables and such. anyway the men were most likely trapped by a collapse, somewhat like those that have happened in our area in the past few years. i think finding these bodies would be cool, yet very discusting at the same time. perhaps i will look into a career of looking for preserved bodies.



they salted pigs! i love the celts. their specialty was actually salted meats, which is great because i love ham. the celts were very smart for being considered barbaric. they mined salt at very steep angles. this was a good idea because the salt was closer to get to this way. good thinking guys. i didn't learn about measuring angles til about the third grade so they at least had the eduaction of a third grader to be able to do this. just kidding celts.



because they were big salt miners, many of their tools seemed to keep getting rusty, unlike salad fingers they did not like their tools rusty. [RUSTY SPOONS!] they discovered that bronze did not rust, so they began making their mining tools out of this. they were also great iron workers, on runescape my iron working skill was always quite high, perhaps i was always meant to be a celt, which is depressing i was hoping for a spartan.



basically the celts had many great inventions, which i am glad they get credit for, because one of the great roman emporers decided to attack the celts take their land and ideas. i still love you celts.





this chapter was surprisingly interesting. salt<3

NaCl^2

yay egyptians.


this chapter was more about what they did with the salt then the salt in general, which i liked. the egyptians did however make something similiar to soy sauce, i thought we had moved on from the chinese.

those egyptians loved to use salt. especially on foods, vegetables and fish. the rich egyptians used natron to be mummified and the poor used sodium chloride aka NaCl, which i obviously love. in most cultures sodium chloride was used by the rich because it was thought to be better, but those egyptians were kind of screwy. mummification was a big deal to these guys, and good ol' NaCl made it a whole lot easier for this to work, as did those lovely eye onions. YUM.

for a while in this chapter i actually forgot the book was titled salt. this means that mr. k did a great job of interesting me, for once. i really do like reading about those mummies they are lovely.

now onto the salting of food. egpytians loved to salt their food, just like the ol chinese they salted vegetables and put them in jars. they salted a lot of foods, except the pig! the pigs apparenlty carried leprosy and pig owners were banished. good thing i do not live in the land of the egyptians because i love those piggy's and their meat. especially sausage of the link persuasion.

the egyptians also made lovely olives, olive oil, and raised bread. mm delicious. they egyptians got their salt from evaporating water from the nile, maybe some from the mediterranean trade and defintely some from african trade. in chemistry we evaporated salt water, i felt kind of like the egyptians i suppose.

the pheonicans builts an entire empire based on salt and is still a huge salt empire today. the pheonicans traded with everyone they came into contact with. tuna fed on acorns!?

camels transported salt across africa because waterways were not available. caravans of 40,000 camels carried salt 435 miles, thats a long ways. TIMBUKTU! was a huge center of trade, not only for salt, but also for tobacco. salt is a big deal everywhere.

yay salt.

NaCl.<3 !@#$*%

once upon a time in a land far far away mr farrell handed us a book titled salt. i was actually kind of excited i thought, "this really can't be a book about just salt. maybe it will be fun." i was wrong, dreadfully wrong. the book is about salt, never really did care for the stuff.

first off, i thought i'd read the introduction even though it wasn't assigned. bad idea i got to the second page of that and the person describing their prized salt rock said, "Those who think a fascinationw ith salt is a bizarre obssion have simply never owned a rock like this," and that was enough for me. i moved on to chapter one.

the chinese invented everything. they are the best. they have the first documented history. so on and so forth. the chinese salt history, however, started in mythological times. salt goes way back. there was a lake that people would go to and collect salt crystals, there was possibly a whole civilizations built around this "salt lake." Salt was traded, salt was used in iron, basically salt was the oil of the B.C. age. To make salt they would boil ocean water until the salt crystals appeared, we did this is chem minus the salt water did not come directly from the ocean.

the chinese do not put salt on their food especially rice. maybe thats why they have less obesity over there. Salt was used in soy sauce, which they had all these weird names for, which had the same symbol in chinese and japanese, but here in the u.s of a. we refer to it as soy sauce, so that is what i will call it. The chinese mastered the art of pickling with salt. Without salt the vegetables would just ferment, apparenlty unlike the U.S.A. again, china has much less alcholics. But i am very glad when i get married my wedding present will not be 12-15 jars of pickled vegetables, or else i would have already recieved them by now. Recipes were not so detailed back in the day either. Hard boiled eggs can be made from salt? WHAT!?

the chinese built dams and eventually discovered how to make brine wells. they used bamboo for piping because the salt prevented the bamboo from rotting, which was rather cleaver. soon these bamboo pipes were everywhere causing much chaos along the chinese countryside.

because salt was so very important, there was much controversy over this substance. there were arguments on the tax of the salt, the salt was a neccesity so should it be taxed. "DON'T TAX OUR SALT" could there have been a "bejing salt" party, but if the salt was dumped into the ocean it wouldn't quite have the same affect as the tea?

there was a monopoly on salt, which made china the j.d rockafeller of salt. the salt monopoly disapeared after 600 years, but later came back. you knew you were rich if you served pure salt at the dinner table in china. there were salt riots. things reguarding salt got ooc*. i cannot believe i just wrote that much about the salt in china. although, i think it is ridiculous to read about salt, i have to, and i think some of this information was genuinely interesting.


oh and ps. i never really did care for the chinese.