Zai Zhen Beijing, Hola Distrito Federal

We?re back in Mexico. And we came right into the middle of the big yuck? Mexico City. Okay, okay, there are really great things about Mexico City too and actually I?ve been having a good time. My husband, Pancho, and I have decided to stick with the Beijing Bicycle lifestyle. The main difference is that here we?ve traded in our Chinese one-speed heavy metal bikes for titanium rockets complete with shocks, borrowed from my two brothers-in-law! The shocks are for the topes (speed bumps), the coladeras (drainage holes), and the cobblestones. The rockets (leg-powered) are for escaping from the crazy drivers on Tlalpan Avenue! There is plenty of traffic to deal with here, like in Beijing, but what?s missing are the mandatory bike lanes where cyclists ride free and without the impending threat of being squashed. We also have no one riding at our sides. The millions and millions of cyclists in Beijing created a biker bond and it is tough not to think longingly back to taking over intersections with fifty other cyclists even when we didn?t have the right of way! In exchange for an army of cyclists, Mexico City has an army of small buses that circulate called ?peseros?. These buses are known for their speed, their disregard for any other vehicle or person on the road, and for their inability to use any type of signal or brake light, although their horns seem to work. We have been polishing our ducking, weaving and dodging abilities to deal with these mini bus monsters. Since they always run in the outside lane we are constantly in battle with them. I usually ride behind Pancho since I don?t know the routes yet and several times we?ve had to pull over beside a stopped pesero so Pancho could (calmly and respectfully? Mexican style) explain to the driver that he had just brutally cut us off or rubbed us so close to the curb that we were about to jump off our bikes. Pesero drivers are never open to someone telling them their driving skills aren?t up to par and so the conversation often ends in blunt remarks by both parties followed by several blocks of steaming solo commentaries as Pancho rides away. The days of peacefully riding with our heads in the clouds, content in our bike lanes are over.

There are, however, cyclist similarities between Mexico City and Beijing. Every time we tell our friends we arrived on bikes they ask us where we came from and then can?t believe it. A twenty block ride is considered far and sometimes even causes gasps among less-active acquaintances. My Beijing friends were the same, always shocked at our bike outings, especially because bike riding in Beijing is usually reserved for those people who can?t afford cars. It seems that people in both cities prefer sitting in their stopped vehicles to riding with the wind in their hair, passing traffic jammed cars.

In addition to being a quick mode of transport and a great way to keep fit, family outings are a blast with bicycles. Unfortunately, we haven?t put a baby seat on either of the bikes yet. I especially miss having Denya, my two-year-old on board, poking me from behind, but I am more comfortable leaving her with her grandma then trying to manage this traffic with her safety in mind. She doesn?t agree though and when we go out on bikes she gets upset and I?m sure she?s reminiscing back to her little green seat in Beijing where she spent many a happy hour checking out her surroundings from the back of mama?s bike.

All this and I have yet to mention the extreme temperature difference between riding in Beijing and Mexico City. When we left I was wearing gloves, a scarf and a toque (Canadian word for winter hat) and Denya was wearing four, five and sometimes six layers of clothing to combat the cold. Pancho, being Mexican sometimes wore up to seven layers of winter clothing. Here we go out in sleeveless shirts and shorts and enjoy the sun beating down on our backs.

In addition to the pleasant change in weather there is also a significant decrease in smog here in Mexico City, at least the visible kind of smog. I can?t say that I understand this change because I am sure that there has to be as much pollution here in the biggest city in the world as there is in Beijing. Regardless, when I climb up to the rooftop here in the morning and look into the distance I am filled with joy that I can see farther than the next two buildings. This feeling of happiness at the lack of visible smog is probably a good indication that we need to get out of all cities for a while.

What else is good? If I get lost I can easily ask for directions. The first few days I couldn?t believe everyone could understand what I was saying. When they would open their mouths I was also shocked that everything they said registered and made perfect sense. I found myself saying, ?xie xie,? ?due? and ?mai she? in response but no one seemed to notice my Chinese responses.

If you remember, I was teaching small children in a Montessori School in Beijing over the last year and a half. I?m temporarily retired from that career and I?m now working free lance. I?m an English (ESL) teacher, Ashtanga Yoga Instructor, Fire and Stilts Performer, Chinese Paper Cutting Artist and Instructor, International Importer (specializing in China), performance agent and blog writer! He he.

I have also been helping Pancho out with his performance jobs and the workshops he has been giving here. The other night at 1:30am I was laughing to myself as I did some reparations to a Spider Man costume. I thought how strange to be sewing a Spider Man costume for my full grown husband, something that many moms do for their little ones around Halloween time, but not usually for a show where their husband comes out as Spider Man climbing and jumping from pole to pole and fighting off his colleagues, who were dressed as luchadores (Mexican Wrestlers). If only I had some video footage to post for your pleasure!

My daughter has been adjusting to things here in Mexico too. She is constantly trying to convince me to take her into the streets to search for street dogs. Way back in a previous blog I mentioned that the dogs in Beijing were all little Pugs and Pekinese (surprise surprise) on tight leashes with big yaps. Here in Mexico there are loads of street dogs all with their own dread locks behind the ears. Denya loves these Rastafarian dogs and she sits in her stroller saying ?dog? over and over again until she gets the urge to pet her new friend. That is always my clue to slowly push her away with promise of another dog just around the corner. I can always be sure to find another one around the corner, just as dirty. As I often say, Mexico is dog Heaven on Earth, where even the mangiest can roam free, surviving off of scraps and finding refuge in the faces of other liberated dogs.

China, only three weeks, and forever ago, is with us daily. Everyone we meet is curious about our experiences in Beijing and we can talk about China for hours because only now that we?ve left have we realized all the amazing differences we took for granted while we were there. Talks about the food leave my mouth watering and I?m reminded that when we were there how talks of tortillas and fresh fruit water left me longing for Mexico. It?s the differences in worlds that make traveling so interesting and wonderful. Each place has its own magic. I thrive off of this magic and it always leaves me longing for more.

Meat the Dogs - Preparing for the Last Great Race

Teachers, Outward Bound Instructors, Wildlife Researchers and all around adventurers, Michael and Jen have been tending to and training dogs in remote Alaska for Iditarod Musher Ed Iten. Here are a couple of recent excerpts from their blog, as they prepare for the 2007 Iditarod, starting on March 3rd.

Feb 18, 2007:

I put my meat suit on (What the hell is a meat suit and why would you need one?), carefully slipping into the navy blue coveralls so as not to touch its tainted outer skin. I zip it up and button it as high as it will go in an attempt to conceal any exposed flesh. I originally bought the garment as a joke, as a costume item that I might wear out on the playa at Burning Man. But now, I think I understand the purpose of coveralls, and it is not about style or making a statement. I grab my warm hat that never ever goes to bed with me (anymore), the clear protection glasses, a re-breather mask, and an old bandana that serves to wipe the glasses clean.

The portable Honda generator sits on a little sled so that it can be hauled around to wherever you need it. I grab its sled leash and drag it out of the workshop/our front door, down the snow mobile tracked walkway that prevents us from slipping down the ramp when it gets icy. The green extension cord, once neatly coiled, now trails behind me as I fumble with my mask and fogged up glasses. The generator doesn't slide so well on the rubber track. I jerk it to pull it to the snow where it glides easier. Ten below zero today; shouldn't be so bad for cutting meat.

Finish this entry at "Meat the Dogs".

Jan 14, 2007:

Our lives up here have been full of all kinds of new things from all day darkness to sheefish and we have sent out lots of stories of those things. But really, it is the dogs that fill our days and our hearts. My Dad emailed after one of the updates and asked, “Why don’t we hear more stories about the individual dogs you guys are running?” Great question and here’s a little more insight into our lives with the dogs.

Well, we train the young dogs, the up and comers. So what does that mean? It means when Ed or his son Quinn are looking for a good dog to try out in their team they take it from ours. It means that not every dog we are training will someday make the race team.

Tofu. No we don’t just love him for his name. Poor Tofu was supposed to be Taku, but when he was little everyone decided that he was too soft and sensitive to be given a tough name like Taku and so he became Tofu, named for a soft little square that not many Alaskans are very fond of. He is a baby, but he’s coming around. When we first got here Tofu was so nervous we couldn’t even pet him. Now he loves to run and after a run he loves to get a belly rub and he smiles with his bottom teeth or a little crooked smile with his canines sticking out. When we go to his circle he tilts his head and sticks out a paw asking us to come over and give him some love. We have attached a photo with Tofu and Delta. Tofu is particularly living up to his name looking like a softie in his pink jacket and booties. He’s one of those dogs you can’t help but love.

Read on and Meet More Dogs.

Michael and Jen's Location:

michaeljen tagged map by user - Tagzania

Track Michael and Jen back to 2004 and tune in to see what's next.

The Worst Day of the Year

Some years ago, a British researcher, Cliff Arnall, came up with a formula that he claimed enabled him to calculate the worst day of the year. The formula (and it is a formula, looking on the page like a bit of algebra gone wrong) will usually locate the worst day of the year on the last Monday in January. It makes sense: this date always comes up because it's distant enough from Christmas that the cozy glow is gone--but not the Christmas shopping bills, which will have now stacked to their greatest height. The weather is cold and gray, spring isn't even a rumor, and New Year's resolutions have either sputtered out comically or gone down in flames.

Like Punxsutawney Phil, the Groundhog Day groundhog, and people who celebrate Festivus (For the Rest of Us), Arnall's formula has become a filler item that turns up in the news every year. You would not think a formula would work for something like that; you would think, in fact, that it should work about as well as the groundhog's shadow does in predicting spring. But my own response to Arnall, every year, is, "Yeah, that's about right."

But his system is not perfect. My own low point traditionally comes in the middle of February. Like, right now. That today is Valentine's Day doesn't help matters; this, I've always thought, is one of those holidays that exists mainly because the candy and greeting card companies want it to (Mother's Day is the other obvious entry on what is actually a long list of such holidays). The weather outside is kind of crummy, and I want to get back into the mountains. Into Yellowstone especially, but I would hardly object to Yosemite.

Still, I can't complain, especially when I think about the winters I had during the years I worked in Yellowstone. Contract dates for jobs in Yellowstone tend to end between mid-August and mid-September. Later in my career there, my own dates might run through mid-October, but still, that left a dreadfully long gap between then and my return in May. Why the big gap? The snow, of course; as I write this, travel in Yellowstone requires an over-snow vehicle, or skis or snowshoes (I wonder--has anyone ever tried dogsleds?). For half of fall and all of winter and much of spring, I was cast adrift.

Once, I fetched up in Death Valley, which I will have to write about at greater length sometime; first, I'll have to make a return trip to the valley and find out if it is still as--let us say challenging as it used to be. The landscape was, of course, sere, blasted, amazingly harsh. When we got up in the morning, we checked our shoes for scorpions. The air was so dry that it sucked all the moisture out of my face and put a crease on one cheek that has never gone away; it looks like a scar from a duel, a duel with sabers. Usually I enjoy this sort of thing, but all I could think about was getting back to Yellowstone.

Once, I fetched up in Texas, in a town on the lower edge of the Hill Country. The town, like so many farm communities, was half-dead from economic sclerosis. The Hill Country, though, you could not call dead in any sense. I wandered through it with friends, scrambling over the granite domes at Enchanted Rock State Park and floating down the Guadalupe River like Huckleberry Finn in sunglasses. We spent a fair amount of time exploring the caves that fissure the region, deep clefts filled with odd creatures (scorpions among them) and stunning formations. It was a grand adventure--and I hated it. I wanted to be back in Yellowstone.

Once, I fetched up in southeastern New Mexico, in a place that had it all. We were close to the high mountains around Ruidoso and Cloudcroft (lovely name, that). We were not far from Guadalupe Mountains National Park, one of the hidden jewels of the park system. We were surrounded by beautiful desert. This place was the last straw. I missed Yellowstone so much that I arranged to bring the winter exile to an end for good. My way of doing so was by going back to graduate school.

Obviously, I didn't handle it well. These days, I have ways of coping with the winter morale slide. I wrote this entry a few days ago, in a little shack in the hills above the town of Inverness, California, right on the edge of Point Reyes National Seashore. I have written about the place before (twice, actually, here and here). We did the things we usually do. We let the kids play on Drakes Beach, the favored destination of Bay Area people who just want to goof around on the sand. Later, while Dustin and Lewis were in the visitor center that the National Park Service runs here, I walked as far down the beach as I could go, heading west into the sun. I was searching the sand and rocks along the high tide line, looking for interesting junk, when I chanced to look up just in time. Directly ahead of me on the beach, maybe thirty feet away, was a thing like a boulder or fifteen feet of old growth trunk, but alive with rippling flesh and fat. It raised its head, picking its leathery proboscis up off the sand; it was not, however, interested enough to look me over. It was an elephant seal, and might have weighed as much as five thousand pounds. I had never been this close to such a creature before; I thought first of Yellowstone bison (which, however, weigh maybe a third as much), and was happy that elephant seals do not move as fast as the bison do. There was a trail in the sand where the seal had hauled out of the water, and crushed sand on either side where he had lolled back and forth and used his flipper to scoop sand and pour it all over himself. A mile or two ahead of me on the beach was the stretch that has been taken over by the seals as the site of a breeding colony, but I never got close to it. Still, by the end of my walk, I had seen nine of them.

We went hiking the afternoon we arrived, climbing up and over the ridge that bisects the peninsula and down toward Tomales Bay, which is itself essentially a rift zone created by the San Andreas Fault. The whole of Northern California was being soaked by the first storm since the start of January. The treetops were lost in mist, which poured off the Pacific, over the ridgeline, and all around us. The rain was, for an hour or so, not hard, but every breath of wind shook water loose from the trees and dumped bulging drops on us by the hundreds. The forest was dense, the foliage so thoroughly soaked that it pulled the branches down until, though long stretches, we had to hike bent over. We were quickly soaked. My socks were all wet and knotted up around my toes. Lewis, our two year old, was trying to make the hike without recourse to his jogging stroller. We take him on these outings because we know that, if we don't, later in life he will just want to stay inside at the computer or some other glowing screen. Now, we were facing an opposite but related danger: that he might come to regard hiking as one of those loony things mom and dad were into. They stopped, and I hiked on to see how far we had to go to reach our objective, the bay shore. We were, I discovered, nowhere near halfway. When I got to the bay, I couldn't see it.

So we take the good with the bad, and in the end, I don't suffer through my winters like I used to. In fact, I have come to understand that it was the winter and its tedium that sent me reeling back into graduate school; I'm in a position to enjoy things today because I didn't enjoy them then. But mainly, I've become aware that I simply have nothing to complain about.

So Many Things...

I have definitely fallen into a rut since moving back to my home town last summer. It's so easy to let yourself go and trick yourself into thinking that talking about your aspirations is the same as doing them. When really, nothing is getting done. Every day I go over in my head everything that I need to do before I leave. I need to sell my car. I need to give my clothes to Goodwill. I need new luggage. I need a passport photo. I need to get my TEFL certification. I need to spend more time on the elliptical trainer that I just spent so much money on.

All of these things I hear so loud and clear in my head every day. And yet they are still undone. And I am still here. And daydreaming about visiting Buddhist Temples and exploring Asia isn't getting me there. My research of Korean cities is still just research. And my personal list of "Things to do in Preparation for Teaching Overseas" is still scribbled on a sticky pad with only two out of twenty- something things crossed out. I'm easily distracted. And easily discouraged when my mother starts guilting me about leaving again. I'm the youngest of three, and once I leave I am not planning to come back. I mean, to visit, of course I will. But not to live. And once I'm gone, my older sister will be the only one of us still here. And my mom hates that. It's impossible to talk to her and feel as though she's proud of me and eager for me to see the world. She says that she doesn't understand how I can love people so much and still leave them. I guess I don't view it as me purposely leaving anyone. And I think she does.

Sometimes I think that I am scared to leave everyone I know behind. I'm going alone. And I'm allowed to be scared. I don't feel terrified, but I do feel a little reluctant to leave and risk not being as happy as I am now with everyone currently in my life. I don't feel as though these thoughts overpower my decisions. But they exist. And in some ways make it easy for me to put off completing the steps that will have me packed up and shipped out before I know it.

I'm confused about what agency I should go through for teaching overseas. I hear so many different things from so many different experiences. I've been told to go with a local Korean agency vs. one that is based out of the US or Canada. I've also been told I shouldn't go through any agency at all, I should just fly to Korea and find a job once I get there. I'd like to think I'm an adventurous girl, but I don't want to completely overwhelm myself with challenges. And when it comes to written agreements, I've read that if at all possible I should avoid signing a contract before I visit the school. But then most of the jobs require a signed contract prior to arrival.

It's a bit exhausting trying to decide what to do. Although, one thing is for certain, I know this is what I want. And I know I will make it happen. So at least there's that.

Arizona Snow Storm?

I got a ride yesterday from a crazy old Bureau of Land Management employee named Rich. I had been working on a trail crew rebuilding a historic trading trail in a remote mountain valley in southeastern Arizona, and Rich was our transportation. At the completion of our work, he and his BLM partner drove their government trucks into the Gila Mountains to retrieve our crew. During our drive, he noticed a Hawaiian sticker on my nalgene and asked if I had ever been to the islands. I told him only six weeks ago I was living and working in Hawaii. His response: "And now you're here? What, did you have a momentary lapse of reason or something?"

I thought about his comment in relation to the past few months of my life and ultimately burst into laughter. Indeed, about a month and a half ago I was living in Maui, only two minutes' walking time to the beach. My afternoons were spent watching the sun set into the South Pacific while tossing a Frisbee around with a couple of my roommates. If it was a "cold" day I could tolerate wearing a hoodie, but most days were spent in flip flops, boardshorts, and not much else. Palm trees lined the streets, delicious fresh fruit was for sale everywhere, and the bikini beach scenery was not something to complain about.

And just a few weeks ago I was wandering down highly cosmopolitan boulevards in Oslo, drinking wine with a hilarious Norwegian family, and hiking up lushly forested Scandinavian mountainsides. (Norway in January was, to my surprise, rather warm).

But yesterday... there I was, talking to crazy old Rich, sitting in twelve days' worth of sweat, mud, and funk, and thankful to be resting in a warm truck.

So maybe I did have a momentary lapse of reason. To most sane people, living the easy life on a tropical island is much more desirable than living in a tent and doing hard physical labor in cold, wet weather. Kind of a no brainer, right? And yet here I am, six weeks removed from the tropics and now part of a trail crew that just experienced a freakish Arizona snow storm. That doesn't necessarily make me insane... maybe just a little un-sane.


Working on a trail crew in Arizona will definitely have its rewards, though--I am not entirely crazy for choosing trail work over Hawaii. Spring will arrive in the next few weeks, the sunsets and sunrises on the red Southwestern rocks will be spectacular, and my days off will be spent basking in the Arizona sun watching Spring Training baseball games. But most importantly, I am doing something I like to do--and I am getting paid for it. The next three months of work may be rough, grueling, and full of all types of complaint-worthy weather, but I can guarantee that I will be happy and proud of my time spent working on trails in the Southwest.