Category — Traveling

Last week Chinua and I signed a lease for an apartment in Santa Cruz, California. We’ll be there for three months.

We signed it and got the keys to the apartment, unloaded a few suitcases and then immediately got back in the van and drove for two days to get to a wedding in Oregon.

We sat on grass and benches and picnic tables and talked to many old friends. We watched our kids playing together. It was such a beautiful weekend. I don’t think I could have dreamed it up, especially on some of the lonelier nights in India.

I am simultaneously longing for my scooter in the jungle and all my stainless steel cups and bowls, and incredibly blessed to be sitting by the fire watching my children talk to the children of my friends. I am dreaming about the farmer’s market in Santa Cruz, and about organic summer squash. I am trying to think of what to furnish the apartment with. (We have a few things, maybe it’s enough.)

I don’t know how to explain how the last few weeks have been. Maybe some of the above will explain it.

I think I’m going to take up jogging.

Meanwhile, check out this picture that my friend took at the wedding, is this ridiculously cute or what?

We’ve left Marin County.

It was lovely. We spent time with friends, got some solid homeschool time in, and soaked in whatever good weather we could.

We went for walks.

Solo attempted to feed our friends’ cat.

He wasn’t all that grateful.

And we had one spectacular day out with our friend Amy.

At a very special place.

She treated us to an outing at the Academy of Sciences Museum in Golden Gate Park, in San Francisco. (Kid A wasn’t so sure about going back to San Francisco, until Chinua told him that we’d try to find a dog and bite it. And he laughed his anxiety away.)

An urchin.

Other urchins.

* San Francisco was Chinua’s home for about a dozen years, and it was the place we first met. The YaYa sister was born there. We have a lot of memories all wrapped up and entangled in that lovely, difficult, creative city.

We’ve mostly been cooking on our journey, on a budget, getting by on simple food and the loving meals of our friends. But there are these little points along the way. Food that I’ve been dreaming of. We went to Kiki Sushi, a sushi place on 9th and Irving that is not the best sushi you can find in San Franciso, but good enough for me, and cheap! Before we went, Chinua was wondering why the restaurant stood out in his mind.

“That’s where we went the night that I told you I was pregnant with Leafy,” I said.

“Aaahhhhhh. Yes,” said my Superstar Husband.

All these points of love and sorrow stand out like stars, everywhere we go.

We just dropped into the Bay Area last night, after a teary day of driving. The sky was crying also, great buckets of grey tears, and that may have had something to do with my mood.  And it may have been leaving the ranch. And it may have been coming back to a place of such beauty in my life, as well as such pain.

Some of the most precious and most sorrowful things of my life have happened here.

We are with friends in Marin County. We have not yet crossed the bridge. (We will when we come to it- Oh sweet Lord, a pun on my blog!) We woke up to the sun and are carving into the day slowly.

As for the necklaces, you sweet people, I love you! Thanks for the sold out message!

I have enough of the lovely coral pieces to make one or two more of those, which I will put up when I make them.  And I have many beautiful stones.  I’ll let you know when new designs are in the store.

The house we’re in now is one of the first places we stayed when we were newly married, and also one of the first places that Kid A visited when he was a little freshie, just out of the womb. What memories. I will sip them slowly, and with hope. There are so many lovely things ahead.

(This photo is unrelated to the post: just a beautiful oak tree here on the ranch.)

Yesterday was adventurous, and not always deliberately so.

We dragged ourselves out of the house, because it was sunny.  Or rather, we leaped out of the house, beaming, but rather later than we planned. We drove through forests and fields, exclaiming over the wildflowers. It never gets tiring to us, we are easy to please.  We filled up at a tiny little gas station, in a cute little town, planning to drive the hour and a half to Shelter Cove.

When we stopped at the grocery store, we saw an old friend in the parking lot. It’s always nice to see an old friend in the parking lot!  She pointed out that our tire was getting low.  It has a slow leak. Mmmm hmmm! we said, and then headed into the store to stand in the chip aisle for about an hour, gaping over the 800 brands and styles of chip. How does one choose? And then another old friend found us there, and gave us big hugs.  And so we invited her to the coast with us. She said that maybe she’d meet us later.

I don’t know what happened in that grocery store. It was like a vortex.  It felt like we had been there for our whole lives. It felt like one minute we were dipping our toe in the world of food products, and the next we were emerging from a sludgy pool of time waste, gasping and spluttering. I know that I spent far too many minutes staring vacantly at price labels. Part of the problem is that, Post-India, I still don’t understand money. What is a dollar, exactly? What does it represent? When I look at something that costs $3.00, for instance, I think with excitement, “Well, I have three dollars!  I have three dollars right here in my wallet!” And then I buy it. But was it a good price? I may never know.

We did leave, eventually, with bread, hummus, swiss cheese, pickles, salami, and crisp, hard apples.

And promptly forgot about the tire.

Which meant… that we drove twenty minutes down a remote road and then had to fill it with our little emergency tire inflater thing, that you plug into your cigarette lighter.  (I didn’t even know that we had a tire inflater thing!) The only problem was that our cigarette lighter doesn’t work. Fortunately, a sweet woman was waiting in her car for her grandson to get off the school bus. And she was more than kind. We used her cigarette lighter and chatted for a while. The kids scrambled up and down the hill, grabbing onto trees and digging in piles of dirt and pine needles.

With a full tire, we were back on the road.  We drove up hills and down hill, curving around, and then back around the other way. Suddenly, I realized that my brakes weren’t exactly working.  I leaned on them with all my weight and slowed down enough to pull off the road. I put the van in park and pulled the emergency brake. Immediately, smoke was billowing out of the wheel wells. There was no fire, but they were hot. I burned them. I’m very sorry.

We let the brakes cool, hoping that they would work again. We inspected the flowering tree by the roadside, which I thought was purple. YaYa disagreed. She thought it was blue. In reality, it was probably periwinkle.

We peered at wild irises. Chinua taught the kids to throw stones so they could hit a knot in a tree. I tried to meditate. I prayed. I thanked God for the view and for being able to stop, and for my family.

Eventually, eventually… we were ready to go again. The brakes worked fine.

Our friend had passed us and probably wondered what under heaven was taking us so long, but she stopped and talked to us and we decided to follow her to a spot she knew of.

A spot where the waves crashed wildly, in a frenzy. In a mad, uninhibited, orchestra of frenzy. It was very soothing.

We climbed on top of a very big rock, and she told me she’d been sitting on that very spot when the recent large Humboldt earthquake had occurred. I thought that was crazy, to be sitting on a piece of rock at the ocean when the earth starts shaking? Wow. I mean, if you’re going to be anywhere when there’s this shaking, this dog-pick-you-up and toss you back and forth shaking, maybe the line between earth and sea is the place to be.

We hung out for a few hours. We ate our picnic. We talked. The kids ran around and Solo ended up wading through very cold water.  I pulled his socks off and rubbed his little feet. We decided that it was time to go. It was getting close to sunset.

And we drove home, our friend following us, just in case our tire tried anything sneaky on us again. And we made it back to the ranch, ready for bed and sleep and the absence of dreams of going down hills with no brakes.

(Updated to add: the tire is fixed!  And my camera is found! Two good endings.)

The open road. In a way, this is where it all started.

*

On the freeway through the Fraser Valley in British Columbia, I was shocked by the deciduous-ness of the trees. They throw these leaves out, so quickly, all by themselves.  Symmetrical, photo-synthesizing, green sheets burst out of old branches and fill mountaintops like many small, welcoming hands.  They are so green!  So new! And then they only last for a season. They wither and fall, and all of them wait until the next year to burst forth again.

It seems so extravagant. So prodigious. Prodigal trees, shedding themselves and then growing back new again and again.  It is organic waste, the best kind of waste, the kind that regenerates, that brings life.  Amazing.

It’s crazy how something like being away from deciduous trees can make you see something in such a new way.

*

I am on the drug trip of the North American road. I need nothing but the grey ribbon of asphault, spooling out behind me.  This is where it all started.

*

In Kelowna, I met with lovely people. Sweet, encouraging, inspiring people.  We stayed with friends and ate together. We reminisced.  There were clouds racing across the sky. A lake that pulls all the clouds into itself.  One cloud looked like a paper airplane that God was throwing.

*

In Victoria, I cocooned with family. My mom and I drank coffee in the morning and I influenced her in bad ways, getting her to pour cream into her coffee when she’d been able to drink it without adding that dollop of fatty goodness. We talked and talked.

*

Now we are in a new stage of travel. We move towards California slowly, like we’re in a dream, stopping to chat along the way. We choose connection over convenience, luxuriating in the warmth of the homes we stop in. I look for people to talk with, in coffee shops, in grocery stores, in parking lots under skies filled with swiftly moving clouds.

I suppose I will emerge from the jet-lag wrapped cocoon of sleepiness and culture shock that I’ve been tucked into.  Today I actually feel a little more normal.  My eyes aren’t stinging as much and I respond when spoken to. Which is a good sign.

Don’t underestimate the power of jet-lag on children, either. Goodness. We’ve had a rough few days, but everyone is getting better. Solo is leaving the non-stop cranks for sunny fields of cheerfulness, thankfully. And there is nothing like a little voice, shouting through the house at 4:00 am, “Can I please have some BREAD!!!”

But we are adjusting. There have been many hugs and kisses and so much love. My parents picked up all the required car seats and booster seats from their storage space, and they’ve done so much to welcome us. I have a new baby niece, which is amazing. We had dinner with her parents (my older brother and sister-in-law) on our second day here. And I have a baby niece or nephew on the way.  A little Uncle Matty and Auntie Lara.  It’s pretty awesome to have a baby in the family that isn’t mine! And we had some Auntie Becca squeezes and hugs. Did you know that she’s in fashion design school?  I’ll have to do a post about some of her creations soon.  I told her, “I love your hoodie,” and she said, “Really?” with this mischievous glint in her eye. “What do you like about it?”  I thought she was joking until she told me she’d designed and fabricated it. Wow.

The thing about reverse culture adjustment, or whatever you call it, is the understanding, always vibrating through you, that you should be more aware of the differences around you.  But you just switch back to what you grew up with, except for moments of awareness.  For instance, there are at least fifty six things in this room that have no part of my life in India. Soft chairs! A stove with four electric burners. A real oven. A microwave. Wood flooring. Cupboards. A fireplace. Ceramic dishes that we eat off of! Light switches that go up rather than down.  Hot water coming out of the faucets.  And I could go on and on.  But instead of being continually in wonder, I just click back into life in North America.  How strange.

I do have my moments. Mostly it’s had to do with space.  Space on the streets, which seem empty and uncluttered. Too empty. Is anyone alive?

And personal space.  I stepped up to an ATM, to get in line behind the man who was there, standing about a foot behind him and to the left, looking over his shoulder without thought, until he shot me an alarmed glance.  ATM etiquette!  At my ATM in the closest village to mine, (we have to drive 20 minutes to get there) there is a security guard who lives there. If I arrive in the morning, he is singing and ringing a bell, burning incense for his puja, shirtless, wearing his nighttime dhoti. He gets dressed soon after, I assume, because the rest of the time he is wearing his uniform, and ready to help should I hesitate in my transaction.  Push this button, he’ll indicate, leaning over me and pushing a button on the touch screen.

I need to relearn ATM etiquette.

Yesterday we wandered around downtown a bit.  We are in Victoria, a beautiful city where my parents live right on the water. I paused beside a bus stop to call back to Chinua, asking him if he had something.  I didn’t even realize that I had paused with my face just six inches from a man’s face, a man who was waiting for the bus, until he leaped back in discomfort. Whoops.  It may take a while to reset my personal space parameters.

Other than that, what are we loving?

Soft, cozy couches.  I loooooovvvvee soft cozy couches.

Grass!

Grandparents.  Also fast internet.

Thrift stores.  Yesterday we went looking for some much needed warm clothes, and found that the Value Village in Victoria is like a clothing heaven. There were books, too, more books than I’ve ever seen in one place in India.  I was too overwhelmed to look for myself, but I happened to catch a glimpse of one of my favorite books of all time, so I got it for Kid A.

And then there is the Leafy kiddo. He has chosen to fixate on one aspect of the scenery here that is different for him.  Since he recently watched “Over the Hedge,” it is, you guessed it, Hedges!  We don’t really have hedges, where we live, at least, in India.

Every time we are in the car, he is a non-stop narrator of Hedge Activity. “A Hedge!  A HEDGE! A hedge!” he says, over and over.  I’ve learned that there are a lot of hedges in Vancouver and in Victoria, something I may not have known if it wasn’t for my Leafy boy.

I’m sitting in this ultra modern, chic transfer area, which styled in shades of grey and taupe, with white stamping of birch trees on the wall. Everything is rounded and retro-modern.

Today I am thankful.  I am thankful that I will see my family in a few hours, that we will jump up and down and hug each other.  I’m thankful that we were able to spend time with Cate in Bangkok.  I’m thankful that I’m traveling with this big amoeba-like mass of children who are my own, wriggling and crawling over everything.

For a small magnolia farm, glimpsed through tall buildings on the way to the airport this morning. For inflight movies and the peace they so technologically enforce. For comfy seating.

For the gift of these two years away, for the simplification, the self denial, the way I’ve been shaped into a tougher person.

Psalm 116 talks about a sacrifice of thanksgiving, which is a funny kind of sacrifice, except when you think that perhaps sacrifice is something that doesn’t just pour out, but something you have to rustle around in your deep pockets for.  In my case, it’s not that I’m unthankful, but that I’m preoccupied by so many questions.  Nothing stills my heart like sacrifice; the pebbles I take out and smooth in between my fingers.

One random thing:  Nori-flavored potato chips are a new favorite thing. The best chips ever, chips from heaven.  I’m thankful for them, too.  And flip-flops and my two new comfy t-shirts and water when you’re really, really thirsty.  And anything green. And a few hours in an airport to simmer down and contemplate.  (And chase after Solo.)

We are flying in a matter of hours and I am a mess.  I am not such a calm person, after all.  Okay, the mess is mostly inside, mostly centered in my chest cavity, and if you were looking at me you might think, “How calm she is!  Sitting there with her iced coffee and her laptop, perched on her hotel bed!” Do not be deceived.  Inside, I am all aflutter.

Here’s a tip for you and me. You don’t need to answer questions about who you are and what your place in the world is, hours before a flight.  Just get your bags together and get ready to go.

Chinua wrote some good stuff on the Red Shirt protests and the Song Kran festival.  There is even a video, of the first day of Song Kran, much tamer by far than yesterday, when thousands of people were on our street with buckets of water, just waiting for us to serenely traipse by. If you’ve never experienced it, just ask a few dozen people to dump ice water down your back, when you are not looking.

We have been traveling.  We arrived, as you know, in Bangkok on the 31st, then took a night train to Chiang Mai on the 2nd and then we took a bus to Pai on the 6th.  Now we are back in Chiang Mai, and we’re getting back on that night train tonight to go back to Bangkok.

It has been adventurous, delicious, and very, very hot. Weather in the 40′s, averaging around 106 degrees Fahrenheit, for the Americans. Fortunately in Pai, where it was hot like that, it cooled down at night and we may have even pulled a sheet over us.

Yesterday on the bus from Pai to Chiang Mai, I sat with a baby sleeping against my side, looking out into bamboo forests. It is the dry season, and there were controlled burns, so sometimes we would whirl around a corner and see flames among the bamboo, smoke hiding the road until we came through it. It has been hazy since we arrived, though, the haze of pollution and no rain or wind, and the sun was a perfect orange disk in the sky as we traveled on the bus.

There were a few Rain Trees, scattered here and there.  I think the Rain Tree is my favorite tree now.  A Saman tree, is another name for it. It looks like a huge umbrella, with small pink fluffy flowers on its leaves.  They smell like heaven, but the Saman trees here and in India are so huge that you couldn’t get your nose anywhere near the flowers if you tried.  Still, they arch over the roads protectively, and that is just as good.

Everything was dried out and withered.  I wonder if there is whooping, here, when the first rains come. Singing? Dancing? Sometimes the first rains of monsoon are like that, in India, when it is so hot and they finally bring their cooling. I listened to Kid A talking with Cate.  They noticed a water slide at a carnival, and he said, “Oh, I love water slides! My friend Danny made us the best water slide. Do you remember Danny?” he asked her. “He was from Scotland.”

The slide he was talking about was a large piece of linoleum that our friend set on the side of a sand bag slope at a beach shack in Goa. He ran buckets of water down it while the kids flew down, shrieking.  Eventually somebody found a hose, and a steady trickle of knobby kneed kids waited their turns, when they were being well behaved, and pushed past each other, when they weren’t.

It is amazing to me that this is my son’s impression of a water slide. Sometimes he just amazes me, my oldest child, suddenly so different. I returned to our guest house room today, when we were checking out, to give it one last search (always a good idea) and found him placing the remote control carefully beside the TV.  “I was cleaning up,” he explained, and as I looked around, I saw that he had made the bed and straightened the towels.  As we left the room he carefully placed a piece of trash in the trash basket.  Who is this child?

Or the other night, when we were at the Sunday Walking Market in Chiang Mai, a beautiful market of hand crafts and food, and he wanted to find out how much the little poached quail eggs were, so he could try them. I watched him speak to the woman at the stall so politely, and he looked like a grown up, suddenly, like he wasn’t my seven-year-old son.  He listened to her seriously, his wide deer-like eyes trained on her face, and then handed her the money. He came back to our table and ate one of the eggs. “Hmmm,” he said.  “It tastes slightly more bitter than a chicken egg.  But it’s good!” I just stared at him, I couldn’t get enough of him.

And Leafy, the other night, when we walked back to our guest house in the finally cool evening.  He was overflowing, for some reason.  He just couldn’t stop giggling, and when there were disco lights in the street and Chinua stopped to dance, Leafy stayed for a long time after, unable to keep himself from dancing his little groove in a circle of colored lights. Sometimes, lately, he runs and every four steps he flings his arms out and jumps, like he’s trying to fly.

And YaYa, dreaming of owning her own elephant.  Finding more animals to fall in love with. “I just need to say one last goodbye,” she said, when we started to walk away from an elephant that we met on the side of the road. She ran back and gave the elephant’s leg a little hug.

We are learning about a new place, thinking of returning to North America, taking each day as it comes. In our guest house in Pai, I would get up and pray in the morning, sitting by the river which was so low and sluggish. I would bring back homemade yogurt and scones from a bakery, and we would drink soy milk. The best you’ve ever tasted.  I bought tiffins, little chinese style lunch containers, and brought home street food for lunch. Wide noodles with chicken, spicy rice. I’m trying to keep from using styrofoam, but the street food is so much cheaper, and then take away is so much easier.  We had bubble tea on the side of one dusty road. We eat whole mangoes.  Marvel at them.

One day we went to an organic farm outside of Pai.  The lady there took us on a tour, and we saw the bungalows they have built, the nurseries, the mango orchards. She showed us where they ride bikes to run the pump from the well, to water the garden, or fill the washing machine. It was lovely. The kind Thai woman who showed us around stopped in front of a gigantic swing and pushed the kids, one by one. People here are very kind.

It has also been hard.  Traveling with children just is. Last night we had an encounter with a stressed-out guest house manager who wanted us to keep our children from crying.  Keeping Solo from crying when he is tired after a long bus ride is something that I don’t yet have the magic button for.  We’ve never had it before in Thailand or India, this kind of interaction. I cried, of course. Chinua was wonderfully diplomatic.

Soon Song Kran will start; the amazing Thai water festival, when everyone throw water on each other for three to six days.  I say three to six because there were young children on the roads yesterday, unable to keep themselves from starting.  I can’t wait, since it has just occurred to me that a city-wide, multiple-day water fight may just be the coolest thing my kids will ever encounter.

It’s just going to be the same thing, over and over again, here.  You might want to skip past these parts.

EVERYTHING IS SO CLEAN!  I was examining our guest house today, trying to figure it out.  Why is the effect so peaceful?  Is it the tiles, and how they line up with each other?

Pedestrians have the right of way.  That’s just inch away from death for us, my friends.

And… I’m still freaking out.  But mildly! Inside!  And a word to the wise!  Just because there are amazing coffee shops and amazing coffee everywhere doesn’t mean you have to drink it all the time! (It adds to the freaking out, friends, it really does.)

I saw a Starbucks today. I just shut my eyes and turned in the other direction, pretending it wasn’t there. It might have taken me over the edge.

We are in Chiang Mai, in the north.  We took a sleeper class night train last night, which is a totally pleasant way to travel, even if you have too much stuff with you. Bring snacks though.  They charge a bundle for the train food, unlike India.

Our daughter is named after an African country which begins with K and ends with ya. When she told the man at our guest house her name, he pointed to Leafy and asked, “His name Congo?”  I laughed.  It was really witty, I’ve never had anyone ask me that before.  Then he started talking about the City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco and the Beat Scene, totally randomly. (It had something to do with wanting dreadlocks, but not wanting to deal with the stigma in Thailand.) And then he refused to give Cate a coconut shake because it’s too hot out for coconut. “Not good for the stomach.”

A character. He’s helping himself to a little too much of this fine coffee.

So, in approximately thirteen minutes I am off to take a Thai cooking class.  I’m hoping to learn all about the Thai Players.

I’ll try to take pictures.