Fly back in time

Guess what I ended up learning yesterday ??? (drumroll please ) ...Origami cranes ! After a few futile attempts ...(which were surprisingly quite few ;-) and crumpled newspaper sheets all over the floor , I finally succeeded in making one...tadaaaaa ! It was so cool . That thing even looked like one (to me atleast :-). My friend had made this really awesome wall hanging out of them ...cranes hanging down from chopsticks (courtesy ...cheapo china star...awwww now I am hungry ! ) . It looked so beautiful I had to learn it . And today morning I just could'nt resist making one, when I saw those big square colorful post-its sitting on my lab bench. I made the cutest yellow crane , that I gifted to my lab-mate , who took it with a very amused look on his face. He's getting used to it , while it sits on his monitor staring down at him ...he he he.
Yeah , guess that goes without saying that is my new calling ...paper cranes ! I even googled for them today . The art of paper folding actually originated in China , and eventually found its way into Japan. Origami in Japanese means to fold "ori" paper "gami" .As I was surfing those sites (My experiments are going on , I just had some free time ok ? ) , it took me back to the days when as a kid, I used to read japanese , chinese and russian stories (and of course those amar chitra kathas, chandamamas and oh yes champaks :-). It was all so magical ... beautiful girls with whom handsome princes fell in love and killed fire-spitting dragons to prove their love , and then they got married and lived happily ever after ...hmmm. Its amazing when just pure memories can bring back all the feelings and lets you relive it anytime you want to !

An excerpt detailing the journey and history of Origami makes an interesting read for those who wanna know about this wonderful art.

Also posting one of their fairy tales here ;-)
Once upon a time, there was a poor hunter. One day, he came across a trapped crane. He took pity on the crane and released it. A few days later, a lovely woman visited his house, and asked him to shelter her for the night. The next day she didn't go, and eventually the two got married. As well as being beautiful, the bride had a good disposition, so they lived happily. But the hunter couldn't afford to support his new wife. One day, she said that she would weave cloth so that he could sell it to make money (weaving was common as a woman's side job in those days). But she told him that he was never to see her weaving. She stayed in a weaving hut for three days. When the weaving sound stopped, she came out with a beautiful fabric. The hunter took the fabric to a town, where Merchants were surprised and paid gold for it. The fabric was a very rare one called Tsuru-no-senba-ori (thousand feathers of crane). After that, the wife wove the valuable fabric several times. The hunter came to live in comfort. However, little by little, his wife grew thinner. One day, she said that she could weave the fabric no longer. She was so consumed. However, her husband had learned greed, and asked her to weave once more. At last she was persuaded to do so and started to weave again. That time, she didn't come out on the third day. Three more three days passed. He became worried, and finally broke his promise, peeping in at her weaving. To his surprise, it was not a woman but a crane that was weaving. On the next morning, his wife came out from the weaving hut, with the last fabric in her hands. She said "You have seen my true form, so I can stay with you any no longer." And then, she turned into a crane and flew away, leaving the hunter cryng.