🍇 Wine and walks.
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How are you doing?
Just wrapped up an awesome week.
We were in Armenia for a short week and it was brilliant.
To be honest, I didn’t know much about Armenia before the trip. It was one of those destinations we could fly to easily and had visa on arrival for Indian citizens.
The place totally blew my mind, especially Yerevan city!
I didn’t know it was such a vibrant place and we had so much fun walking around, listening to people busking on the street and drinking lots of wine.
It was a different and refreshing experience to be in a city that’s actually walkable. I was also in love with the water fountains throughout the country, I had missed the taste of real water as opposed to the soulless RO water I drink here.
We met lots of interesting people throughout the journey. A hitchhiker from Germany, an Armenian who was displaced to Lebanon and later moved to the States, an Iranian couple traveling the world while serving specialty coffee, an Armenian from a small village serving delicious Indian food who fell in love with India, and many more.
Also, while we were walking, my eye caught an old Soviet camera(Zenit) from the 60s!
So I bought it!
I always wanted to shoot on film and this felt like a nice early birthday gift.
More on Armenia probably next week, I’m writing some stuff on that, hopefully next time.
Without further ado, here are 10+1 Things worth sharing:
📜 Letter to Pop: Krishna writes a satirical story in the form of a letter from a Mars colony boss to his great grandfather. It starts as a dream of building a new civilization on Mars and slowly turns into a wild tale of baby-making experiments gone wrong, ending in a women-led revolt. Dark, sharp and funny!
💼 Career to Wealth: A nice writeup by Asher on how to build wealth as a regular 9-5 person. Contrary to the popular opinion that only entrepreneurs can make serious money, he argues a steady career can be just as powerful an engine if you use it right. His core idea is simple: income is what flows to you, wealth is what you keep and put to work. Worth a read if you’re on the career path.
📵 118 Things: Annemarie at Wirecutter put together a huge list of 118 things to do instead of doomscrolling on your phone. It ranges from the obvious like reading a book or going for a walk, to fun stuff like making your own limoncello, sticking googly eyes on things, or teaching a cat a trick (good luck with that!) A nice list to bookmark!
🧀 Cheese Hiking: BBC featured Trevor, a Seattle cheesemaker who quit his job to go find rare cheeses around the world. 6 years in, he's been through 20+ countries, lived in a Mongolian yurt milking yaks, and walked 130km with Georgian shepherds and 300 sheep. He calls them ‘fossil cheeses’ because they're almost lost. Great read.
🗺️ Cartographers of North Korea: Wonyoung So noticed something interesting. For a country like NK with restricted internet, there are close to 889 contributors mapping it on OpenStreetMap. He reached out asking why, and the answers range from just for fun, to helping people escape, to someone who started after watching a K-drama. Crazy that it’s all done by people who’ve never been there.
🐢 Oldest Animal: Jonathan is the world’s oldest living land animal at 194 years old. Scientists recently sequenced his genome and found that parts of it look almost identical to a five year old tortoise. He was born before the Civil War and is still just hanging out on a tiny island!
🌿 Moss Labs: I came across these cool modular hexagonal panels made from 100% real moss. You can build a living wall in whatever shape you want by connecting different panels, and they snap together magnetically. As per the claims, they can survive almost a year without watering! Would be a cool backdrop for a work desk.
💡 Lightbulb Computer: Guillaume shares an interesting take on the future of computing! His vision is a projector shaped like a lightbulb that screws into any standard socket and projects info onto any surface, be it recipes on your kitchen counter or maps on a wall. He’s even built a working prototype.
🗺️ Stick Charts: This cool wiki describes how the Marshallese used to navigate the Pacific Ocean using charts made of thin sticks tied together with shells to mark islands. Instead of showing land, they mapped ocean wave patterns and how islands bent the waves. Navigators would memorise the chart before the trip and then lie flat in their canoe to feel the waves against their body. Beautiful piece of ancient knowledge.
🔬 Printer Droplets: This year’s Nikon Small World microphotography awards are out, and Ole Bielfeldt won first place for a stunning shot of ink droplets suspended mid-air inside an inkjet printer as it prints. The crazy part is he built the whole setup himself after reverse-engineering his printer and using a flash in a dark room as the shutter. He started during COVID lockdown with an old microscope from his parents’ attic.
🎙️ Sounds of Nusantara: Indonesia is building a new capital to move away from sinking Jakarta, and these researchers at Mongabay are documenting the forest sounds of Kalimantan before it’s lost forever. They’ve placed recorders across 20 sites to capture gibbons, hornbills, and the great argus, working alongside the local community. A quiet but powerful piece!
That’s 10+1 Things for the week!
Which one was your favourite this week?
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With Love,
Rishi
“Three eggs for fertility, one kilo of flour for life, 500 grams of sugar for a sweet life and baking powder for a fluffy cake.”