From ash rise the phoenixes

Our guest Ulrike just left yesterday for New York to try her luck in catching the first plane back to Amsterdam. She stayed with us earlier for the 62nd Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Neurology and was supposed to have left a few days ago. She didn't know she would be stuck for four days in Toronto due to Iceland's volcanic eruption. Before she left she jokingly said that she would have an extraordinary memory of Toronto because of the artwork she kept thinking of and eventually bought from our artshop seemed to have predicted the volcanic ash disruption. The artwork is an etching of two phoenixes flying, now easily depicted as phoenixes rising.

Ulrike fell in love with "phoenixes rising" when she had breakfast in our gallery artshop in the first day of her stay. During the next five days of neurology meeting she kept coming back to look at it. I know that Phoenix is referred as the mythical bird Fenghuang in China, but when I googled, I further learned that Simurgh (Phoenix) originates in Persian mythology, is equivalent also to Firebird in Russia, Bennu in Egypt, Adarna in the Philippines and Garuda in India.