Any Snow Angel, For That Matter

So, my sock collection didn't grow at all this year after Christmas. Typically, I am the *Queen* of receiving plush footwear from relatives. Socks with slip-proof bottoms, socks with bells, socks with stripes. White socks, toe socks. All spilling out of my stocking on Christmas morning. But this year... nada. Not one pair. Just a dust ball and a few crumbs where the socks usually go. And not that I ask for socks. I'm just so used to getting them that I put off replenishing my sock drawer because I know that come Christmas time, I will have new ones. The good news is, however, I got more money from cash and gift cards than usual. Bad news is, more than likely that extra money will go towards buying the socks that I didn't get for Christmas. *Sigh*

Other than my baby-sock-drama, Christmas was good to me this year. And not in material gain, but in a "Personal growth section of a bookstore" kind of way. I came to the realization that this may be my last Christmas with my family for a while. I have no idea if I'll be able to make it home for Christmas next year. And part of me doesn't want to rush home for that week if I'm in Asia. I'm eager to experience Christmas and other holidays in different cultures and countries. It's hard for my mom to understand that, but I think she's warming up to the idea. She was a bit upset that my brother and his wife didn't leave their home in Oregon to come home for the holidays. I know she just wants to keep us as close as possible, and she's terrified of losing touch. I keep trying to remind her that I talked to her more when I was living in Alaska than I do living thirty minutes away. Hopefully she's not in complete denial about me leaving in the spring.

Aside from my personal revelations involving the spirit of Christmas, I am still coping with the fact that it has not been cold enough to even think about snow. (65 degrees and raining is no way to spread Christmas cheer. Nor is it conducive to perfect snow angels. Or any snow angel for that matter.) Despite the unseasonably warm weather, my Christmas was spent with my sister and two nephews, and our mom and dad. I moved in with my sister earlier this month to help out with the boys and to save up money for my move to Korea this March. Living with them is so much fun. It's amazing how much positive energy a six and ten year old can bring. When I was moving my stuff in a few weeks ago, I remember thinking how much fun Christmas will be with them around. And even though I was dreading the early rise on Christmas morning, it was rather adorable waking up to them jumping on my bed at 7am and shouting, "WAKE UP SARA, IT'S CHRISTMAS!!"

Ding Ding Dang

My daughter learned the Chinese version of Jingle Bells this year for our school's Christmas Concert. Imagine twenty-fine little babes all under three shaking their little bells and singing, well? humming and awing, to Jingle Bells in English and Chinese. Of course each of them was also decked out with a little Santa Hat, like the cherry on the cake. Precious!

I remember back to my blog last year around Christmas Time and I had been feeling really lonely and far from family and friends. That feeling was amplified knowing that Christmas was in full swing back in North America where as my China experience consisted of tacky cardboard Santas found on the second floor of shopping markets. This year, after living a year and a half in Beijing, Christmas felt more festive. In our school lobby there were Christmas Carols happily brightening the mood. There were all the appropriate whispers of Christmas presents and stockings and Santa Claus. We had a Show for a Christmas Eve Party, and we even hosted a Christmas dinner for friends. There was something else? oh, right; it's freezing cold, which oddly enough puts me in the Festive Mode.

About that Christmas show?
I've been doing my best as a promoter here in Beijing. I've been promoting our small performance company consisting of my husband, myself and two of our friends. We do Children'?s parties and Fire acts and Stilts shows and Feicha shows (you remember, the kung fu stick), and recently we've added Black Light Shows to our repertoire. Well, Pancho, my husband, and I had a big show on Christmas Eve. It consisted of three mini shows, each about six minutes long. The first was Stilt Angels where we are two angels complete with wings and we come out among the guests and dance together. It's very elegant and we added a nice touch by giving out roses to the guests. It went well. The second show was Pancho's Feicha act, which is always great, and the third act was a Black Light Flags show.
To explain a little more, a black light show works with UV light tubes that glow purple, the light makes everything white and fluorescent colours glow brightly. Anything black will disappear, provided the background is black. Pancho was going to be clad in white for the show while I would be dressed in black and invisible, part of the black light trick. When we arrived at the venue we noticed that the curtain behind the stage was a glowing white. Uh-oh. I had been clear about the need for a dark curtain, but it didn't seem to matter. In the dressing room they kindly provided for us (a dirty storage room under the stairs) I set to cutting open big black garbage bags and taping them together to create a huge black plastic curtain. It worked, but the hanging of the curtain was nothing short of a disaster, with an entire tray of drinks spilling during our rushed preparations. The Black Light show went nothing as we had practiced and at the end I was mortified and stayed hidden behind the curtain for a lengthy period of time in order not to show my face to the guests and the man in charge. When I finally slinked my way back to our storage room Pancho and I fought about whose fault it was that the show had gone so badly. Again, I slinked out of the storage room to find my contact for payment. When I saw him I could only keep my head down for fear of conversing. We went to get payment and after a few moments walking he turned to me and in his broken English he said, "Black Light Show Best! Very Good, Amazing, I like very much Black Light Show." I couldn't believe it. I thought he was joking. But he wasn't and in an instant all my suffering ended. He happily paid me and even accompanied me to congratulate Pancho on a show well done. Christmas was saved!

After the show we went home to drop off our props and check on our little daughter Denya, who was being looked after by a friend. After a satisfied peek we went out with some friends to the Christmasiest (that is an actual word) place in town, a Reggae Bar. The bar is in a beautiful setting, right on the edge of Hou Hai Lake, in the heart of Beijing. We ate and drank and even did a little fire performance for the other Christmas patrons. It was fun, I only remember having one other Reggae Christmas when we were living in Mexico.

The festivities didn't stop on Christmas Eve. Christmas morning was full of cheer at opening the presents Santa left behind for us when he arrived very, very late the night before. Then my friend Dulce and I began our plans for Christmas dinner. The wonderful thing about living in a place where nobody celebrates Christmas is that everything is open Christmas Day and there are no inflated prices. So we went about gathering our food from the fruit and vegetable market and then to the foreign supermarket to get some special ingredients. What would Christmas Dinner be without quesadillas? To say it best, our dinner was fusion style. A taste of Mexico (the quesadillas), a taste of China (pre-roasted chickens with a hint of Anis), a taste of Canada (that's where I learned to make a Garden Salad), a taste of Italy (Fettuccini with pesto sauce) and I honestly don't know where Cream of Mushroom Soup comes from, but we had that too! We were nine adults and one munchkin and we all ate and were merry. It was a lovely Christmas.

This will be our last Christmas in Beijing, at least for a while. New Christmas traditions aren't the only things I will miss about my time here. I'm concerned that we will lose our Chinese hybrid ways. I will miss our nightly showing of the 'Intelligent Tree' Chinese Children's program that my daughter loves and sings along with; I will miss our Chinese vocabulary that we've all adopted into our everyday conversation (cat is mao and garbage can is la ji kwong); I will miss visiting Ms. Lee, my Chinese Paper Cutting Teacher; I will miss (and so will my husband) the 24-hour a day Peking Opera channel; I will miss cheap markets and generous people and safe streets and construction dust, okay, not that last one. Beijing has become a part of me and a part of my family. We are now a mixed, mixed family and at my daughter's February Birthday I'm not sure what will come first, presents, cake, piñatas, or little red bags inscribed with the Chinese Character for Happiness and carrying twenty yuan, or pesos, or dollars.

Our time in China has been unforgettable and everyday has been about learning and growing. Working and living in another part of the world has been amazing and it has left it's mark on me and my family for the rest of our lives! Go out, discover, take chances. You'll be amazed at what you find.

Kitschery Row

My mother- and father-in-law recently celebrated their fiftieth wedding anniversary. To commemorate this remarkable milestone, their children arranged a weekend in Monterey, on the central California coast a couple of hours from my home in Davis. I had little enough to do with arranging the weekend; I was just along for the ride, and available to help with whatever emergencies presented themselves (flat tire, lost wallet, stinky diaper needing disposal in the middle of the night, that sort of thing). Having spent many weeks stuck in the Central Valley, I was more than ready to flee. It didn't matter that I have always found Monterey disappointing.

When I was younger, I spent most of my time stuck in another inland valley, the San Fernando Valley. A month or two in the Central Valley will bore me, today; when I lived in the other valley, I sometimes did not get out for years on end. Monterey, which I had then seen only in photographs in places like Sunset and the auto club magazine, seemed like very heaven to me. I pictured it as a vast headland of black, jagged volcanic rock, jutting into the Pacific in defiance of the elements. In between storms that lashed the rock with brilliant white foam came waves of fog that--penetrated only by foghorn and lighthouse beam--blurred all the edges and lent an air of mystery. Tortured pines grew inland, bent permanently to the lee of the weather. The town itself looked like a seaport in a paint-by-numbers set. The people all wore yellow rain gear, and said things like "Avast!" and "Arrr." This, again, is how I pictured it: a place that looked, in short, kind of like the Maine coast, only not so far away.

And this was, of course, not what I got, when I finally made it to Monterey. I had been in the area before, so I knew what to expect when we motored into town for the reunion. My brother-in-law had been in charge of reserving hotel rooms. He flies all over the world on business, and accumulates so many frequent-flier miles that he actually has trouble using them all. So he set us up in a hotel I would not have gone to if I were paying (or if he were paying, either): the Monterey Plaza, on the bay in the middle of what was once Cannery Row. When we pulled in, we discovered that we would not be allowed to park the car ourselves. A platoon of valets and bellhops were all over us. They looked a little funny carrying, with greatest care, my filthy and odd-smelling tackle box, and Lewis' diaper bag. It developed that they were going to charge us $18 a day to park the car, down the street somewhere, even though we were staying here; there is no free parking along the shore, even at businesses that are already making plenty off the occupants of the cars. One of the bellhops took us to our room, which was of course spectacular.

We quickly learned that this was the sort of place where we would not be allowed to do anything by ourselves. When the feared stinky diaper problem presented itself at about one in the morning, I went looking for a trash can outside the room. There were none, in the whole hotel; we were apparently intended to summon the staff if we wanted to throw out a gum wrapper or toothpick. If we needed something from the car--like some antacid, or another stick of gum--a valet would be dispatched down the block and would return with the car in a hurry, delivering the stick of gum as if it were cargo. Everywhere, staff members hovered, yearning to help:

"Sir! Oh, please, sir, allow me to carry that! Oh, it hurts me where I live to see you exerting yourself, even in the slightest. Yes, please allow me to carry your wallet." And make a judicious assessment of its weight.

"Sir! O, sir! Slow down. You move too fast! You've got to make the morning last! Rest here, sir, and allow me to massage your toes. O, no--I would not think of you giving me a tip."

"Excuse me, sir, your buttocks seem a little uneven. Will you allow me to straighten them for you? Sir?"

The service, like the room, was spectacular. Having worked in places like this, however, I did not at all enjoy being the subject of this kind of attention. I am not sure why.

But much of the Monterey experience leaves me wondering. Monterey is not the windswept seaside village I had dreamed about, as a teenager, but rather a gigantic tourist trap. The center of the action is Cannery Row. The name of the street is a hangover from its former life as an industrial nightmare: until about forty years ago, sardines were converted into fertilizer and also canned here by the millions, until the whole operation destroyed the very fishery it depended on. The smell is supposed to have been breathtaking. Why would people travel from around the world to see the ruins of such a thing? They do so in part because John Steinbeck made the place famous, in books like Cannery Row and elsewhere. Steinbeck is treated as a kind of patron saint here, which I think could only work if people aren't reading the actual books much. This is, after all, the author most famous for The Grapes of Wrath, a story of desperate, grinding poverty. How could this person work to attract tourists? There is even a Steinbeck wax museum. Coming soon: a theme park with jalopy rides and robotic starving Okies who guffaw when you throw quarters down their throats. I'm kidding, for now.

We ate that night at the Bubba Gump Shrimp Company, a restaurant based entirely, and relentlessly, on the movie Forrest Gump. It left me wondering what other movies might become theme restaurants: Plan 9 from Outer Space, maybe, or The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the Eighth Dimension. The food was good. We walked up and down Cannery Row, and I was confronted by another mystery, one I have been pondering for a long time. Salt water taffy, fudge, designer cookies, an entire Ghirardelli superstore--why is the food in a tourist zone always like this? Why, that is, do the food offerings always run on fat like a car runs on unleaded, and at a rate of about a thousand calories a bite? Fat and sugar are of course easy ways of hooking people, and I suppose tourists are more easily hooked than others, being far from home and always a little lost. This would explain the other businesses that proliferate in such places: t-shirt shops and wind chime shops and shops selling drink coasters with John Steinbeck's face on them (he came out looking like George Costanza's dad on Seinfeld, more than once).

Just offshore is another world. Sea birds live here in such quantities as to make themselves a nuisance, for the human merchant. Kelp forests grow just offshore, and support a population of sea otters. These creatures, once close to extinction, pop up in surprising places along this coast. I watched one from our hotel room, and two others from the lobby balcony. I watched yet another from the commercial fishing pier; the otter surfaced and floated on its back in the classic otter posture, using its belly as a platform to hammer a shellfish open. A gull flew over and set down in the water about six feet away; the two then engaged in a long staring match. Harbor seals swim around the marina and sun themselves on rocks. Submerged, they look like small whales. And not far offshore, real whales migrate up and down the coast.

The people here do not ignore this other world. There are, however, a lot of distractions.

Island Fever

And then came the call from Maui...

A few days before I was supposed to move from Yellowstone to Oregon, an old roommate from Alaska called to see what I was up to. Half jokingly, she introduced the idea of moving to Maui. I thought it over for a night or two, and then decided, "Yeah, why not Maui? Why work indoors all winter in the rainy Northwest when I could spend my mornings and afternoons catching sunrays on a south Maui beach?" Naturally, I proceeded to buy my one-way ticket to the Kahului Airport the day I was supposed to leave for Portland.

And here I sit, in an Internet café 100 yards from the beach, palm trees, and humpback whales.


Maui has a lot of great things to offer, but I had no idea what any of those things were since I had never been to any of the Hawaiian Islands before. It would have been nice to have the inside scoop before I moved to the island, so if anyone else is considering winter (or summer) relocation to Maui, here are a few tips:

Lahaina and Kihei are busy beyond belief. There are more enormous resorts and American and Canadian tourists than you can shake a stick at. The beaches can be very crowded, the traffic is congested, and the air overflows with the noise of hustle and bustle. The cities are great for beach and surf access if you want to occasionally fight your way through thickets of people. There are plenty of jobs in Kihei and Lahaina, and most of the island is easily accessible from these two miniature metropoli. However, if you're looking for a slow-paced, relaxed island experience, then Kihei and Lahaina are not the best options.

Anything "upcountry" in Maui is relaxed and mild. The pace is much slower, the people are much more down to earth, and the temperatures are moderate with a crisp, dry air. Makawao, Kula, and Haiku are great places to stay if you want to put your feet up and enjoy the island with leisure. Here you'll find goat farms, quaint bed and breakfasts, and palm trees mingling with evergreens, redwoods, and willows. The only downfall is that these towns do not have nearly as many available jobs and require 20-minute drives to the nearest city or beach.

Maui's North Shore is also very relaxed; Hana, Haiku, and the infamous Paia are all towns you could find hugged into a mountain fold in Northern California. The towns have more of a bohemian feel with much less tourism than any of the cities. Botanical gardens, Buddhist shrines and centers, organic food stores, and coffee shops are commonplace upcountry and on the North Shore--amenities that you won't find in Kihei or Lahaina.

Hitchhiking is easy in Maui, especially with locals. If you see a brand new Jeep, convertible, or small sedan, don't expect to get picked up. These are rental cars, and Hawaii tourists tend to have tunnel vision when it comes to strangers poking a thumb out on the side of the road.

Having your own car is not necessary since hitchhiking is easy enough, but it does help if you want to explore the island. You can buy a standard "Maui cruiser" for less than $1000 and sell it when you leave the island. Cars are constantly turning over, and it is not difficult to find a reliable (yet ugly) vehicle to rally around the island for half a year.

And finally, finding work is not a problem. Nearly every business, restaurant, or service of any kind hires new employees year-round. If you want to make money while in Maui, find a tipping job (server, bartender, bellman, guide, etc.). If you just need to make enough money to survive and buy a few six packs, then any job in Maui will do.



As for me, I've been on Maui for two months now, and it is already time for me to leave. The island is small, and I think I've already caught island fever. I'm feeling the traveling bug already; I need to lace up my boots and wander around for a while. If all goes accordingly, I'll be off of Maui in less than three weeks, sipping some sort of hot beverage in Scandinavia.

Next stop: New Years in Norway.