Immersethrough.com
engaging with the world
welcome to immersethrough.com
photo: JEFFREY ALFORD
Morning noodles at a Yi market in Yuanyang, southeastern Yunnan.
Grilling kebabs at the evening market in the oasis of Turpan, in Xinjiang
photo: JEFFREY ALFORD
TECH NOTES:
We're beginners at this, so you may find that the website doesn't work as smoothly as it should. We know it looks better when viewed with Safari or with the latest version of Mozilla Firefox. Please let us know about any glitches and we'll see what we can do about them.
AN OCTOBER 2008 UPDATE: A helpful suggestion from a guy in Ottawa named David, followed by some extremely helpful resizing of all the photos on the site by Naomi's cousin Jennifer, should now make the site load more quickly. Thanks Jen! Apologies for the time it's taken us to get the resized photos posted.
AND A REMINDER:
Please visit our blogs. We're posting new comments fairly frequently.
Tuvan village of Hemu, in the Altai Mountains, Xinjiang
photo: JEFFREY ALFORD
who are we?
We're Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Duguid. We met over twenty years ago, in Lhasa, where each of us was exhilarated to be, and since then we've travelled together and separately, and worked together raising our two kids and making books that engage with culture through food and photographs.
Now (fall 2008) we're embarking on immersethrough, and you will find our writing and photos in various places on the site.
We each have a page here, where we can write about where we're at now, what projects are happening for each of us, what we're enjoying most these days. You'll find them by clicking on jeff's place and naomi's place in the navigation bar.
(You can find out more about us, about our cookbooks and other projects, at our original website, beautifully designed for us several generations ago, in web terms, by Lynne Heller. You'll find it at the head of the list of links, on the food page.) Or just go straight to it, at hotsoursaltysweet.com
ploughing flooded paddy field in central Bali
photo: NAOMI DUGUID
Immersethrough.com is an idea. It's an idea about a place where people can share with others their passions, research, questions, and observations on the particular subjects within which they find themselves IMMERSED.
Our friend Judy, for example, who has a remarkable ear and gift for language, and a passion and curiosity about it, has embarked on learning Japanese. Our friend Jon is passionate about barns, about their social history as well as their construction, and is now learning about the post and beam temples and houses of Southeast Asia.
Another friend, Astrid, works with endangered species, and is at the moment living in Spain and working with Iberian lynx, helping to breed and raise them in captivity so that they can be reintroduced into their natural habitat.
Steppe magazine, launched recently by two imaginative and know-no-limits young women in England who are passionate about Central Asia, immerses its readers in Central Asian culture and landscape. A guy we came across on the internet spent several years living in Korla, a Silk Road oasis town in Xinjiang. He has been posting incredible blogs about his daily life in western China.
All this is immersion...
Immersethrough.com, in our most fantastic dreams, will be a place that inspires, informs, connects, explores. It is all about the concept of immersion, of immersing in something so entirely, that every once in a while we must "come up for air."
For the two of us, immersion is almost always associated with travel, with crossing borders and crossing cultures, and with making ourselves vulnerable.
Morning market noodle stand in the Dai town of Menghan, southern Yunnan
photo: NAOMI DUGUID
And because we write cookbooks for a living, the prism through which we most often immerse ourselves is food: flatbreads made by semi-nomadic pastoralists, the Tajik, in the Pamir mountains; aquaculture among the Dai people in the southernmost tip of China's Yunnan province; the spring run of Arctic char fished by the Inuit in Ungava Bay; the rice-growing traditions of the Dioula of Senegal's Casamance region...
Immersethrough.com is just a baby, not even crawling yet!! But it's a baby with big dreams.
- jeffrey & naomi - September 2008
Please check out our "first ever culinary tours" set for Chiang Mai in February 2009. And have a look at our initial stabs at getting everything started - at jeff's place, naomi's place, photography, and food.
Most important of all, start communicating, by writing your comments to us, giving us feedback or letting us know of new cross-connections to other immersers! We're at: immersethrough@gmail.com
You can also find us at our blogs:
