Boom

tsa

I won't be travelling anywhere 'til January, but I've been pondering the whole full body scan thing lately. Aside from finding the whole thing invasive to the point of insanity, I've had far more x-rays in my life than an average citizen. To the point where my doc and I have conversations about "is the information we could get here important enough to merit an additional x-ray?" rather than just "let's see what's going on." This began as a concern of hers, not mine--on the scale of Things to Worry About, x-rays rated somewhere below bed bugs, Vitamin D, and what I might want to eat for dinner tonight, down towards the spot reserved for wondering why all my brown wool socks are slightly different shades of brown in some lights, and fretting about whether they are properly mated to a sock of the correct shade.

Anyway, thanks to her getting me to think that perhaps I should try to have many fewer x-rays in the next decade than I had in the previous decade, I have already decided that I'll be opting out of the scan, at least as long as my local airport uses the backscatter variety. This means I get to have some sort of invasive groping procedure as an alternative. Debating between a) yelling "ow, quit it!" throughout; b) hollering "say no to touches" and "that's not my kid code" and variations on that theme; and c) singing Giovinezza and/or Cara al Sol during the procedure.

I was momentarily hopeful about Rep. Nutbar Paul's "American Traveler Dignity Act" (that link is to his showboating statement) and then I went to look at the legislation. Short, sweet, and nearly pointless: just like Mr. Paul, except for the sweet bit.

It is newly tempting to travel in nothing but a bathrobe and slippers, however. Much like the commando-style men in kilts, I guess. Anyway, I will be planning my January travel outfit with great consideration, and will also be sure to add an extra hour or so to my travel time.

The Night Market

I  forgot about these, and just stumbled across them as I was looking for work photos. Behold, the awesomeness that is the Richmond Night Market.

Sweetie, walking down the first row of food booths. All the booths in this shot? They are all selling food of some sort. 

The only food we ate that night that we didn't like came from this very cute doughnut truck. I like the mistaken apostrophe more than I liked the doughnuts. And yes, I continue to insist it should be spelled "doughnut", and my brother still owes me one, either with or without the ugh.

We were both too full to try either the bacon wrap or the japadog here. 

And finally, my favorite sign of the evening, at a non-food booth. I'm not sure whether the pants sold by the booth were also magical, or provided up-ness.

Airport Conversation

I'm skipping ahead to the very end of the trip; I'll backtrack later and bore you all with pineapple and the behavior of Hawaiian moor hens. We're in the Lihue airport, it's almost 10pm, and our fellow travelers are shuffling towards the boarding area. Sweetie and I aren't bothering to get up yet, and the row of shufflers is directly in front of us. A freckly girl in capris stands in front of us, with city shoes on and big (like 4" rectangles) sterile pads taped around each ankle.
Sweetie: Wow, what'd you do?
Freckles (in an adorable Irish accent): Scratched myself to bits from mosquito bites.
Sweetie (laughing hard enough he has to pause): Congratulations!

Beached

We leave for Kaui'i in a few days; specifically, the Elvis room at the Hanalei Surfboard House. We loved Hanalei when we were in Kaui'i in 2001, and it doesn't appear to have grown much--but it has added two farmers' markets. We went to a farmers' market on that last trip, and found an assortment of people selling pineapples out of the back of pickups, with shoppers racing in as soon as the "market" opened--one old lady nearly knocked me down in her rush. I look forward to more of this. 

Eat, snorkel, eat, eat, eat, snorkel...and that's about it. The beach in Hanalei is ridiculous: it's a big half-moon of white sand, with a nice shore break along one side for untalented surfers/bodyboarders and a small reef along the other side for snorkeling with sea turtles. There's also some of the best bird watching in Hawai'i, and two fresh local fish markets, and an organic farm. Because it's a short trip, there's even a chance that Sweetie and I will have our first-ever out-of-state vacation without a thunderstorm. I am hopeful for a day of storm weather; I'd hate to break our 10-year record. 

But the beach is what I'm mostly thinking about. I think a kid's first beach is somehow imprinted in the mind more clearly than any other geographical feature. My first beach was at Ocean City. I remember running barefoot full-tilt across burning sand, for what seemed to my wee legs as miles, until I reached the shade offered by a trash can. Zig-zagging through two more rows of can shade, I'd finally hit the Atlantic, a refreshing bathtub of an ocean, at least in Maryland in the summer.

 

Sweeetie, growing up with the colder part of the Pacific as the closest coastline, expects different things from an ocean. No boardwalks or rental umbrellas. Lots of big, interesting rocks. Hypothermia and crashing waves available year-round. 

 

Which means that Hanalei is an excellent beach for us to be on together. It feels like the perfect midpoint between our imprinted beaches: No boardwalk, but a convenient ice cream shop that also sells tourist crap. A fun shore break, but water that feels refreshing rather than arctic. A few trash cans, if foot-shade is needed. Steep cliffs, which give an "interesting rocks" feel to the place without any interesting rocks actually being in the way of swimming. I'll be bringing back a memory card's worth of photos, so instead of supplying someone else's beach photo, I give you a goofy mural. Note the frigate bird on the left.

Cheque Mate 2: The Suburbs

Two years ago, we dragged some friends to a Chinese Night Market on a trip to Vancouver. We expected a bit of culture shock and an endless array of cheap food. What we got, mainly, was tables full of strangely enormous underpants. Well, we found the right market this time, and it's in Richmond, not Vancouver. This one, for at least this year, is officially known as the Summer Night Market.

It claims 800 booths; I doubt it was that many, but at least half of them were food. In no particular order, we shared: fresh pineapple slushee, egg cakes, dragon's beard candy, a skewer of halal lamb, vegetarian samosas, fried tofu with about six kinds of sauce and a mixed pickle, and a sweet five-spice Taiwanese chicken skewer. Oh, and weird mini doughnuts, with too much lemon extract, but we couldn't resist the doughnut truck. Everything but the doughnuts was delicious, and as soon as my camera battery is recharged, I'll get some photos up, including (hopefully) of a waffle baked into a carp shape.

The most striking non-food memory relates to a carnie game that looked like it was doing pretty well. There were about eight low rectangular plastic tubs, each half full of water with a couple dozen young goldfish (or carp?) swimming about. Customers could purchase a set number of fish (and/or aquariums) or they could purchase a set number of nets, and try to scoop more fish into a bowl, all of which they'd keep. Greed kills, my friend.

The nets were just a few inches across; there was no time limit, but the net looked like it was made of paper, so once the net broke, your time was effectively up. None of this is all that different from any other carnie game; there's more than one sucker born every minute, and I do love watching people lose everything by trying to get just a bit more than they started with. But it doesn't take all that many fish to feel like a winner, apparently, so all around the market I saw people, mostly kids, wandering around with the sort of plastic bag one uses for vegetables, except with a bit of water and a few live fish swimming about.

The part embedded in my memory: A preschooler and his sister, each clutching a bag with about a dozen fish. The boy got distracted by a vendor, forgot to concentrate and fell splat on top of his bag, which broke his fall but burst. The mother kicked in with a very distinctively Chinese version of the International Appalled Mother noise, lots of "haw" and  "ohhh" which started out with a tone that indicated "Oh Dear My Son Fell" and almost immediately became "Oh My God, The Fish Are All Dying Everywhere".

Splat.

Cheque Mate

I expected the days in Vancouver to feel preposterously expensive, since previous trips involved the sort of math that deeply favored the American Peso. Except it didn't, I think because the cost of living in Seattle has gone up so much in the last year. We also didn't go shopping for stuff; we were too busy eating.

My tagline summary--
Vancouver: It's Cheaper Than You Think
Vancouver: 30% More Hobos!
Vancouver: The Real Chinatown Is in the Suburbs
Vancouver: Our Fireworks Are the Best
Vancouver: Least Threatening Cops in the World
Vancouver: We Too Love the Fatburger
Vancouver: Look Out for Swans

We stayed in the West End, which is much like Capitol Hill. Pocket-sized restaurants with cheap, interesting food; drunks scuttling about in the dumpsters around 4am; a few lovely buildings of varying ages, but lots of junky ones; a totally over-sized and fantastic park; sidewalks narrower than they should be; strangely-placed "traffic calming devices" because of bad traffic on the main roads. The main difference is that the West End is right on the bay, and not on a hill. Also, it's in Canada, so everything that is vaguely sinister here at home is vaguely dorky.

The best, and probably dorkiest thing of the whole trip was, and I am not making this up, an eight-minute "celebration of British Columbia" in honor of its sesquicentennial. This celebration was a condensed history of the province as told through the medium of fireworks. It was more fun than it should have been, identifying smallpox and salmon habitat destruction. Once again, the winner of the fireworks contest (seriously: best tourism-booster ever!) was Canada, in particular Archangel Fireworks. In even further particular, they did a rather high-concept seamonster attack, set to original music. Fireworks videos may not be worth watching, but you get a pretty good feel for the cool use of English Bay, the beginning is funny, and the end is just spectacular.

Team Canada - July 23 2008 from Jordan Behan on Vimeo.

The US fireworks sucked: Hearts and REO Speedwagon. It's something to ponder. Does every nation take their fireworks for granted?

Before the show started, there was a public announcement that began, "Excuse me, everyone, I have a relatively serious announcement. We have the uncle of a five-year-old boy who's looking for him. [Blah blah blah, lost child.]" It's announcements like this that make me love Canada. Relatively serious in comparison to what, exactly? I have been in a US mall when it went into full shut-down mode--nobody in, nobody out, for several hours--because of a misplaced kid. In Canada, the announcer sounded all apologetic for breaking into everyone's weed-n-fireworks party. We are a nation of panickers. (It all turns out fine, young master Layton returned to his uncle, and then the seamonster attacked right on schedule.)

Club Your Cholesterol Level Over the Head

Your choice: Harp Seal Omega-3 or Super Harp Seal Omega-3. A competing brand is on sale, if you prefer your baby animals to be sacrificed for bargain prices.

(thanks to tigerhomes.org, of the live animal webcams, for the photo)

funny/horrific

Being stuck in an airport for a very long time is misery-inducing, but the boyfriend in the borrowed underpants ends up with more of my sympathy; sympathy points were lost because of the "auto-forwarding-plastic seat covers" thing at the end, through some sort of complex (and previously unsuspected) emotion-matrix involving assignment of sympathetic feelings and person-in-need-of-sympathy's germ phobia).

Conjugate "To Laze"

We got back from the Yucatan last Sunday. I started two separate blog entries while I was there, but the combination of a poor signal and a wifi hotspot that, no kidding, doubled as a video arcade full of HFCS-amped Alabama school boys. Located right next to a bar that was in the varnishing stage of a remodel. And was playing Air Supply the whole time, underneath all the screeching and zombie killing noises.

Really, the wifi was the only real trouble in the whole trip. Things that could've been bad, like the activities guy who snorted like a stallion every time a woman walked by, were just absurd.  And other things were sheer delight, like the taxi driver whose rearview mirror was essentially unusable from rosary beads: Before entering the freeway, he popped his knuckles, crossed himself, and dropped the fuckin' hammer like my high school boyfriend.

I now understand enough Spanish to enjoy it when two older guys are hanging out at the chocolate specialty cafe, discussing Tiff and I as we come in, and break it off suddenly with, "oh, they're married" as the two trailing husbands sat down. Other happy not-yet-bilingual-but-it's-visible incidents: The guy shrugging and muttering to himself about Sweetie nearly choosing a less-manly hat for himself, and an old and highly competent boat captain saying, "hey Pablo, it's raining NOW (cue thunderous downpour)" to the young surfer-dude naturalist guide who was about to let his little party drown in the deluge. There is a fascinating freedom-within-oppression that I see when people are used to being surrounded by other people who can't understand them. At home, I have never heard a salesman lament his customer's choice to another salesman while that customer was right there.

Most magical: my first-ever sighting of a roseate spoonbill. The roseate spoonbill, whose very name is a poem, is like Salma Hayek wearing an Oscar Meyer Weiner costume: beautiful, or ridiculous? Also: two keel-billed toucans, knockin' beaks, just about 100 yards away from my hotel balcony--no early-morning, mud-filled, scope-needing birding attempts on this trip. The closest thing to effort was a day spent in the Sian Ka'an World Heritage Site. I was more excited about the tiger heron and all the epiphytes than I was the Mayan ruin (although it did contain some deeply cute and tiny bats), but it was a great day...and of course at dinner there was a guy at the bar who was from Seattle, who was just finishing his part of building the world's biggest solar powered house (I looked around a bit online for details, but have yet to turn anything up).

Playa del Carmen is an odd town--a mix of hard-core tourism and small town pleasantness I have never seen before. Walking down the main tourist strip--it's pedestrian-only--is rather dizzying, because it's non-stop "hey, hey, amigo, buddy, hey come look at the menu/buy this" and it gets old really quickly. Just turning off the strip onto a side street, things mellow out, and just two blocks away it's all locals, mostly assuming you've gotten your fool self lost but generally happy to accommodate you and perhaps sell you a wrestling shirt or a grasshopper woven from palm fronds. Best restaurant name: Mr. Pollo Kentucky. Funniest attempt at marketing copy: The brochure's cover at the chocolate cafe simply says, "Your chocolate is amazing. -Brian, USA". (Brian, where are you in this big country, and what do you know about chocolate?) Most Never-Live-It-Down food moment: I managed to order a hot dog sandwich at a small torta shop. I told Sweetie to get his own in case my unknown combo sucked, but he refused, and now I will be hearing about the Hot Dog Sandwich until we are old and deaf. Best tortillas of my life, not just once but several times, and strangely excellent pico de gallo--so sharp and oniony that it was totally different than the bland crunch I'm used to here.

I will save the oddities of a 20-building timeshare palace for another entry. In the meantime, neigh and snort at every woman you see.

Language Arts

We've made plans to go to the Yucatan at the beginning of October. It's my first real trip to Mexico if one doesn't count a two-hour jaunt to Tijuana as a kid (which makes it sound like I was a drug trafficking mule while in elementary school). For our trip to Ecuador, I used a small Berlitz book called Latin American Spanish to pick up a few basic words, focused mostly on food (duh) and polite please-help-me-I'm-sorry phrases. Mexican Spanish is just different enough in the details (especially the food details) that I'm having to re-program some of those basics, while also trying to add to my vocabulary.

Learning a language for tourist travel is vastly different than studying a language in school. In my nine years of French, I spent most years doing things like reading Candide and a whole lot of Sartre (too much for age 15, probably) in the original, and dealing with le subjunctif. Since the late 80s, I've lost most of the conversational ability I had, even though I can still read it well enough to do reasonable on-the-fly figurative translation (not that it comes up outside of cookbooks, honestly). What I'm working on right now in Spanish is asking a variety of simple questions--so memorizing the basic who/what/where/could you words, along with names of various shops, transportation modes and activities. One of the first things I realized with this self-taught program is that "why" is the last question to worry about. For a tourist, "why"--as in "why is the bus not here?" or "why is this closed?"--is nearly irrelevant. If the bus isn't around, I need to be able to ask "where can I get a taxi?", not listen to an unnecessary explanation of why the bus might be running late.

When kids are getting their native language hard-wired, "why" is the first question they ask--"how" (unless it's "how come", which is the same as "why") comes last, because "how" is answered by physically trying out a new skill. "When", even though it comes pretty early in the process, is kind of pointless, because toddlers don't understand the concept behind the answer--sort of like how I am not likely to understand why the buses aren't running on a given day. I think "when" comes up at all because "when" is important to adults and kids catch the importance rather than the whole idea of linear time. "Where" is certainly more important for adults; I think it's a dependence thing, because for a toddler something is either there or not there--it's the grown-up's job to find it. Maybe kids ask "why" so incessantly not because they care, but because it's the only question word they're fluent in--like me, at the moment, with "donde es la/el X?"

When people talk about how hard it is for adults to learn a new language (compared to a kid), it seems like it boils down to this whole "why" concept. In listening to answers of why questions, toddlers are developing a whole language-based world view. In only worrying about where/when questions, adults are adding words concerning their practical needs into their existing world view. It also might explain why people say that total immersion is the only way to really learn a language--it's the only way to really internalize why/because, and until those questions and answers make sense, you're not fluent.

In other Mexico-related news, I spent two hours last night looking for sunscreen that is OK to use while snorkeling around the Yucatan reefs--there's a long list of unacceptable chemicals, which after a while I decided are what make sunscreen actually be sunscreen instead of lotion. Out of the 73 choices at drugstore.com, exactly one variety from one brand was OK--it's Avalon Organics Baby Natural Mineral Sunscreen if anyone happens to care. Weirdly, of the brands that are supposedly all right to use, all the ingredient lists include not-OK items like Parsol 1789 and PABA. During our Galapagos trip, we heard a lot about the need for special soap--they provided it free in the boats--but there was no mention of special sunscreens. I wonder if it's that there are fewer people snorkeling every year in the Galapagos than are in the Yucatan, if it's that the warmer-water reefs are more fragile, if it's a selling tool to make more sunscreen money, or if there's a genuine sunscreen-related ecological problem that Ecuador isn't yet addressing in the Galapagos.