Avontuur

We’ve made our decision: we’re going to Oregon. This definitely doesn’t cancel the trailer year, just postpones it again (if you’re one of the people who wanted to meet up on our travels, it will still happen, just later.) At the moment, Ted has a job, but I don’t. So it’s a bit of a gamble: either it works out and they hire me too …. or it doesn’t, and we go do something else.

But when / if we do, we’ll have a bit more time to prepare better than we can do from over here – get our health insurance in order, buy and practice driving a big rig, get all the books that talk about mountain grades and campgrounds, and figure out what else we need to know.

I’ve just gotten back from two weeks in Oregon – Ted still has another week there, the lucky bum. The weather was amazingly perfect: it rained a little on Friday afternoon, my last full day there (well after we rowed), but otherwise it was gloriously sunny and cloudless, warm in the day and cool at night as if someone was trying to define the perfect October by example.

This was intended to be the big trip t prepare for our homecoming, buying a truck and RV, but it didn’t quite work out because our outlook is still unsettled. We thought about buying a truck anyway, but decided not to buy it this trip after all, though we did figure out exactly what we want. We’ll probably have to spend a little more if we buy it after we go home in January (because they won’t be getting rid of 2012 models by then) but at least we’ll know if we need it. So with that decision taken, the trip was really pretty useless, except for the purely recreational aspects of it. But it was blissful in the beginning and end, marred only by our having colds in the middle (well, Ted’s was more at the beginning, but he got over it quicker). Also, mostly through luck the timing allowed us to attend the wedding of a young cousin of Ted’s. Well, younger than us – she’s old enough to get married! It was a beautiful and very personalized wedding, held at her new husband’s family’s house on the river there, and it was good to spend some time with that side of his family. I’d only met the actual bride once, which was also the only time Ted’s seen her in the last twenty years, but she’s grown up beautiful and gracious and seemed genuinely happy to have us there. We’ve seen her parents quite a few more times, so we’ve all sort of kept up on each others’ lives to some extent. We especially appreciated getting to spend some time with Ted’s paternal grandfather, because we haven’t gotten to see him on our last few trips.

We got to do lots of cooking and have plenty of quiet time at our place, sitting on the balcony and watching the sun set and turn the lake into an opal. Otherwise, it was rowing, reading, knitting, some work on the house, a little gardening (and a big bruise for me. Note to self: do not wear old too-tight jeans as gardening pants or else do not try to jump up on walls in them), truck shopping, time with family and general hanging out.

In addition, I got about halfway through a Christmas stocking I’m making for my nephew (for which I’d had yarn and pattern delivered there). I’ve made a few changes – really, who knew Christmas stockings carried so much religious and political freight? I’ve made a bunch of white boys into multiracial boys and girls and replaced camels and drums with more secular holiday symbols. Before getting that yarn, I finished one sock and on the way home started a second one, because the stocking needs too many colors to be easily portable.

Getting home was an adventure. I found a shuttle service that goes from Eugene to the Portland airport, so Ted only had to drop me off in town instead of driving all the way to Portland. So that was easy. Then there was the 9+ hour flight, which was OK as those things go. But then I landed on a Sunday, the day that NS most often uses to work on their train lines. Instead of the usual direct train from Schiphol to Eindhoven, it took me two trains, a bus and another train to get home. The Eindhoven marathon is today, so I had to make my way through the blocked off course to get to my apartment from the train station. It hadn’t realy started yet, so that was easier than I was afraid it woud be. (I did break the barrier tape by accident though. Oops.)

Now all I have to do is stay awake until bedtime.

Young drummers:

Festival food – the inevitable squid, plus how to make sure you don’t lose your pretzel:

The shrine is carried along the streets:

Apparently wearing pants is not part of the tradition – the young men wore shorts, but the older ones had something like the thong you may have seen on sumo wrestlers.

I wandered further from the hotel than I had been before, and found some temples where a demon was fighting with a dragon:

Many little girls and a fair number of adult women were wearing yukatas (a simplified lightweight kimmo for summer). The men mostly only wore them if they were taking part in something – the drummers and other musicians wore matching ones as a uniform for each group.

This evening there’s a dance competition – each group takes their turn dancing on the stage, while the other groups and anyone else who wants to dances around them. Most of them dance to the same song, and the moves seem to be fairly standardized.

I am being a bad traveler this weekend. Kyoto is about an hour and a half away and I’m not going to go there.

(Commence whining – you’ve been warned.) It’s hot and it’s going to be hotter there, since it’s in a crater (or valley, the translation wasn’t clear). And I’ve spent about 7 hours on trains in the last 2 days. Also, I’ve been around people and talking all week, including dinners after work every day, and I ‘vant to be alone’. I’m tiiiired. (/end whine)

Instead I’m going to hang out around the hotel, explore the local area (mostly malls), watch the Olympics and knit, and check out the summer festival that’s going to be happening in the plaza next to my hotel. I have no idea what it entails, but the person who told me about it mentioned music and lots of girls wearing yukatas – not clear if the latter is a part of the festival or just what people are likely to wear to a traditional event in hot and muggy weather.

But I have been having new experiences. I wrote about the yakitori restaurant; the next night we ate at a restaurant with a do-it-yourself barbeque in the table – it was described to me as a Japanese version of a Korean version of BBQ. You order any one of many types of meat – they had Wagyu and Matsusaka beef, in varying stages of fattiness. I preferred the leaner ones, which is not surprising from someone who tends to order filet mignon in steak restaurants. They also had a few other things like shrimp and vegetables. Tasty. I’ve been eating much better this trip than usually in Japan; I’m here to train a new Quality manager, so we’ve been joined at the hip all week, including dinners – he’s just moved to Yokkaichi, where our main office is, and his famliy is staying in Tokyo for at least while longer. Having someone who knows the local restaurants and (most important) can read and understand the menu helps a lot.

Yesterday we took the train to Hiroshima, then to Saijo where our local office there is. (The trains – three legs each way – were also a lot easier when traveling with someone who is not functionally illiterate.) Normally I stay in Hiroshima itself, near the train station, but the hotel was full this weekend due to Memorial Day, so they put us in Saijo itself. (Probably not the best time for an American to be n Hiroshima proper anyway – Memorial Day = anniversary of the nuclear bombing of the city.) Hiroshima gets lots of foreign visitors; Saijo, not so many. We had dinner at a fairly traditional place, with a low table and hole underneath for your feet. (I suppose at a *really* traditional place you’d kneel instead.) We had some kind of small whole fish, salted and fried (sardine?), asparagus wrapped in thin slices of pork, a couple of very large fried and battered shrimp, and a “shrimp bomb”. This consisted of ground shrimp mixed with mashed potatoes, formed into a ball and then cruster with small fried shrimp. You’re supposed to eat the whole things, shell, head, tail and all. (The heads were actually not as bad as the tails, because the latter were just shell, and not really crunchy.)

I’m told the hotel we stayed at is the only one in town where they speak any English, but it’s still clearly aimed at Japanese visitors. The bed was very hard, and while there was one feather or down pillow, there was also a rack in the hall with different types of pillows available, all extremely firm and either grain-filled or foam. The best part was the ‘spa’ – not actually a spa but a traditional Japanese bath. I was very sweaty from the train rides and walk to the hotel, so after dinner I checked it out. You shower first, then get into the very hot tub. It was relaxing and peaceful, and I lasted a whole five minutes before getting a bit bored and retiring to the arms of the excellent massage chair in the same area. (They also had laundry facilities in there, very handy for guests.) I may get bored when I can’t bring a book into the tub with me, but I have to say that after a sweaty day, I felt deliciously clean as I went to bed.

After word, we headed back to Yokkaichi, another 3.5 hours on the train, and I’ll stay here over the weekend and through Tuesday.

One more confession: I had KFC for dinner tonight.

My dad is impossible to buy presents for. His favorite hobby is napping, and there’s only so many times you can give someone good pillows. If you ask what he wants, he always says, “Save your money. Spend it on yourself,” which is not terribly helpful when you actually want to buy someone a present. So after I realized that a planned reunion of his family coincided with his birthday, I decided that his present would be a visit from me.

Honestly, I was expecting to have a very quiet visit. This part of the family was important to my dad when he was growing up, but I didn’t know most of them. Ted and I had been to on previous reunion and hadn’t really connected all that much to most of the people there, for whatever reason.

This was one of those times when it’s good to be wrong. Maybe we just didn’t manage to find the right common topics last time, somehow. This time I got to hang out with people of all ages and talk about everything from hair care to the topological aspects of knitting to politics to family stories to travel, and I had a really great time. I got lots of time with my baby nephew, but also got to play with an adorable four-year-old and talk to some very interesting people approaching, just in and recently out of their teens. I got to catch up with the one great-aunt I do know and her kids, whom I barely remember (we used to visit a lot, but I think they were either in college or just old enough to be out with friends in the evenings). I also got to put faces to a couple of names my parents have mentioned a lot over the years.

I figured out why I didn’t know most of them: I grew up at just the wrong time. The ones a little older than I am remember when everyone lived close and got together frequently, and the ones who were a bit younger or who stayed around longer, like my brother, were there when they started having reunions every few years. I must have slotted in just after the informal gatherings dropped off due to distance and before the planned ones started. (There is one cousin my age who seems to be more connected, but she’s got older siblings.) As it turns out, there are really some fascinating people in that branch of the family – artists, architects, activists, and people who have done the work to build a family that, as one first-cousin-once-removed said, “just keeps including people, and really like each other. It sounds like there will be a reunion in Austin in two years, and we’ll definitely try to get to that one.

These are some of the pictures (click on any one to see it bigger); the rest are on Flickr.

In addition to extended family, I got to spend plenty of time with my immediate family, including my baby nephew. What a difference from last October; back then he was basically an adorable, snuggly, little lump. Now he’s pulling himself up on anything he can reach and standing for whole seconds at a time, babbling like he’s invented a whole new language, smiling and laughing, and eating like he’s afraid there won’t be enough. (It takes a good thirty seconds to make him a bottle; the wait is apparently a terrible form of child torture in his opinion.) He’s not at all afraid of strangers, but by the end of my visit I had clearly been added to his list of Approved Big People – too bad he won’t remember me by the next time we meet. (They show him my picture, but I’m not sure he can recognize the link from 2D picture to 3D person.) He did some damage though; I have a small bruise and as many scratches as if I’d been playing with a cat – he’s very strong and has razor fingernails, and of course, no conception that he can hurt other people. I think that takes a couple of years, which should be interesting for everyone around him. He also likes to play trapeze artist on my hair, which if I remember right is par for the course with ten-month-olds (at least I don’t wear glasses these days, except to drive). He has the attention span of a mayfly right now, and can’t crawl more than about five feet without getting distracted (which also probably has to do with having a bunch of people around talking to him). This has major advantages, because he also doesn’t generally cry for more than a minute before starting to smile and gurgle again. Now that he’s crawling he’s slimmed down a lot; he used to look exactly like my brother in his baby-sumo-wrestler days, but now he’s looking more like Dad as a kid, which is fascinating.

To top off the whole trip, on Monday I headed downtown, got re-acquainted with Old Town Philadelphia, walked miles, and met up with old friends – and also patronized independent Center City businesses. I took a bus and train to 5th and Market, wandered around Independence Hall area, then visited my newly-met cousin’s jewelry store at 8th and Walnut, which is tiny but filled with beautiful things. After talking to him for a bit and buying some jewelry (a necklace because it was gorgeous and two pair of earrings to go with necklaces I never know how to match), I was going to go meet my friend Natalie at Cake and the Beanstalk, but I was over an hour early. I hadn’t directly contacted my friend Suzanne who lives and works downtown, but decided to drop by in case she was there. So I hiked up to 16th and Spruce to her place. She wasn’t there, but her assistant called her for me, and we talked about options to meet later. (So I can’t vouch for how Rittenhouse Laser Aesthetics treatments are, but the service is great and the office is very nice.)

I trudged back to 11th and Locust, getting there half an hour early, on purpose. The owner is an old friend and former baby-sittee of mine, so it feels a little funny to see him all grown up and running his own restaurant. It’s a great place to eat lunch or dessert, with light and bright indoor seating and an outdoor area next to a community. I had a delicate mint iced tea and Jewish Apple Cake; I honestly think mine is just a titch better – sorry, Daniel! I’m biased – but this was the real deal, not a bland and soulless restaurant cake. The menu was bigger than I expected, and there were a bunch of lunch options as well as lots of other kinds of cakes for people deluded enough not to go for the apple cake (or who like variety).

Natalie showed up right on time; we’d never met in person, but we’ve known each other since literally the early days of the World Wide Web (it went live in 1993; we met in 1998) and had no trouble talking for hours. After eating cake (me) and hummus (her) we walked over to Rosie’s Yarn Cellar on 20th and Locust. It’s a small store, but has good selection, though we were strong-willed and restricted ourselves to a skein or two each. (Well…. she restricted herself to a skein; I bought three. But it should really count as two, since two of them were sock yarn sized for one sock per skein.) While we were there my friend Suzanne dropped by, with her daughter, who is now a big girl! When I last saw her she was a toddler; now she’s a child. SO at least I got to see her for a few minutes. I felt a little guilty leaving Natalie in the store while I talked to them, but being left for a few minutes in a yarn store is generally not much of a hardship to a knitter.

On the flight home, there was some weirdness going on that made it hard for Delta to print me a boarding pass, but that finally got resolved. I hadn’t been able to upgrade earlier, but they were asking at the gate if anyone wanted to so I did, which means I got a fair bit of sleep on the flight home. It was too short to sleep much, though, just under 7 hours (compared to the 9-12 hour flights to Asia or the Pacific NW I’m used to). Hopefully that means working tomorrow won’t be too painful.

Before I discuss last weekend, I need to day that today, Ted in a quad with his partner Erik-Jan and a couple of junior rowers came in third in the Men’s quad in the Club division of the Head of the River regatta in Amsterdam – this is the biggest and most prestigious regatta in the Netherlands, so that’ a huge accomplishemnt. (Unfortunately the Dutch only award medals to first-place winners. Coming in third in a field of 18 boats deserves a medal!)

Last weekend, we spent my birthday in Lisbon, where we managed to have a nice relaxing long weekend by resigning ourselves to not seeing all there was to see – I think you’d need a week or more just to see all of the major museums, monuments, palaces, beaches and so on. Also, we did so much walking we found ourselves needing to rest before dinner!

The weather cooperated beautifully, with blue, blue skies and temperatures that ranged from sweater-and-jeans in the morning to jeans-and-Tshirt just barely not being too hot in the afternoon. Going in March was great, because not only were the temperatures comfortable but the tourist crowds were much sparser than it looked like they’d be in summer. Ted booked rooms at the International Design Hotel right at the foot of the Rossio square in the Baixa district; I thought the graffiti design on our floor was a bit silly, but the hotel was very comfortable, the staff were helpful and able to give us lots of advice on getting around, and the location was perfect. The Baixa did show signs of recent economic troubles, with a bunch of closed stores, but was still interesting to walk around and full of restaurants.

If we missed a few things, we still saw lots. We also ate some really tasty seafood, drank wine, and enjoyed just being in the sun in a city at the water’s edge. I had salmon one night, shrimp (of course) another, and golden bass the third – I didn’t realize that last was going to be an entire fish complete with head and tail, but then the waiter deboned it for me which made eating it easier (he also took away the head, so it wasn’t staring back at me). Tasty.

On the down side, the public transportation system doesn’t seem too robust; on the way back from the Maritime Museum, for reasons we still don’t understand, our tram and another just ahead stopped and made everybody get off. No other trams or buses seemed to be coming so we started to walk back, a bit over 5km. Finally we saw a few trams/buses go by, but they were so packed they weren’t even stopping. We eventually ended up catching a tram for the last bit, about 1.5 km.

Onour first day, we headed out to Belem, where we daw the Monument to Discoveries and the Belem tower itself, which was built in 1515 as part of the defenses of Lisbon. (You can click on any image in this post to see a larger image).

Near Belem is also the spectacular (and obviously very rich) Monastery of the Jeronimos. Out there is also the Palacio de Belem, the current residence of Portugal’s President, whose former riding school has now been turned into the Museo des Coches, which houses some spectacular royal carriages.

Late that afternoon we ad salmon (me) and an omelet (Ted) at an outdoor restaurant near our hotel, then went out later in the evening for wine and snacks.

On our second day, we started with the Museum of Tiles (Museo do Azulejos). Tiles are a big thing in Lisbon; many houses are completely fronted with elaborate painted tiles, so it was interesting to see how they were made and how they developed. The Museum is set in a forme convent, which has a spectacular chapel that is also on display. Incidentally, most of the tiles are flat and painted, but the Museum had an ingenious adaptation for blind visitors; in several places there were displays set up with Braille explanations and 3-D renderings of the tile patterns to be felt by people who couldn’t see the displays.

After that we headed back to the Belem distric to visit the Maritime Museum, which has sections for military ships, fishing boats, and pleasure boating. Of course, our favorites were the enormous rowing boats – the one in the picture below was last used during England’s Queen Elizabeth’s 1957 visit to Portugal.

The evening before we’d seen a tempting menu for the hotel on top of a hotel nearby, so we tried that this evening, and had a tasty dinner with a spectacular view up the Avendia de Liberdades. The food was excellent (I had shrimp with asparagus) but the evening was most memorable for the long discussion with the Belgian woman at the next table who didn’t quite seem to be able to grasp that I don’t speak French. (In her defense, after she’d repeated “puree de pomme de terres” about five times at the waiter, who spoke Portuguese, English and some French but apparently not that particular phrase, I did turn around nad say “I think she wants mashed potatoes!”)

On our last full day in Lisbon, we headed up the hill to the Castelo de Sao Jorge – this is a very obvious site for defense, so ruins there go back to the 6th century BC, though the main castle does back to the 14th century. The castle has spectacular views over the city. One relatively recent addition was fascinating, though we didn’t take any pictures of it; the Ulysses Tower boasts a camera oscura which provides a 360-degree view of Lisbon. There was a royal palace adjoining the castle which is gone now, but the peacocks still remain to lend majesty. After seeing the castle, we walked down toward the water to check out the Se (Lisbon’s Cathedral) whose oldest facade dates to the 12th century.

From the Se, we walked back to our hotel, but it was still fairly eary, so we decided to pay a visit to the Oceanarium, which occupies a building in the Parc das Nocoes that was part of Lisbon’s ’98 exposition, held to mark the 500ths anniversary of Vasco de Gama’s voyages. This trip didn’t imporove our opinion of Lisbon’s public transit; the bus was packed full, tended to stopp unexpectedly for long periods, and took most of an hour to get out there. (We took a taxi back, which took about 15 minutes.) The aquarium itself was nice, though – they say it’s the world’s second-largest.

We had dinner that night in the heart of the tourist second of Baixa at a seafood restaurant, where I had the aforementioend golden bass, while Ted tried the cod (historically very important to Portuguese maritime history!)

On our final day, our flight out was early – it was painful to wake up before 5AM to catch our 5:30 taxi to the airport. However, in all the times we’ve left hotels early to get to regattas or airports, this was probably the best take-away breakfast we’ve ever been given: a bag with two cups of coffee, two orange juices, four small sandwiches (cheese and ham-and-cheese) and a whole plastic container of small cakes and cookies.

I was browsing through our 2011 iPhoto gallery and noticed that I had not written about river trekking yet. During the summer I went river trekking, for the second time, while on a business trip in Taiwan.

River trekking is basically hiking/swimming/climbing up a rugged stream, and some sliding back downstream – see photos. This is a great way to get out and see the rugged Taiwan terrain, especially when it is hot. Not only do you work your way up the stream experiencing the beauty of the jungle, but you can also jump off rocks into deep pools, slide down natural chutes, and swim in the stream.

River trekking is very hard on your ankles, shins, and knees. You’re either walking/climbing on very slippery rocks or wading through the stream with surprises that you can’t see waiting to trip you up. This means you are always on the edge of twisting your ankle, banging your shins on hidden rocks under the water, or tweaking your knee as your feet slip around. While trekking you don’t think of the danger since you’re so focused on moving forward, all the obstacles just adding to the challenge.

I highly recommend river trekking as a fun outdoor activity. However, guided trips may only be possible in countries where lawsuits are uncommon.

Here’s a link to the map of our travels:

View Driving Trip to Spain in a larger map

Also, this is the beginning of what we expect to be our last year in the Netherlands – plans are to go home at the end of 2011 / beginning of 2012. Dates are vague yet, and I don’t want to be too emphatic about all this as things could always change (as with our previous three(!) extensions, but I think it will happen this time. So here’s a counter:

We arrived back home yesterday afternoon. After all the restaurant food, what I feel like now is cooking. Tonight I’m making hutspot, a Dutch dish with meat and (usually) mashed potatoes, though his particular recipe is more like a beef stew, with beef, chunks of potatoes, parsnips, carrots and Brussel sprout. Tomorrow I will be making red beans and rice – apologies to any reader from the US South, but I’m not making black-eyed peas on New Years Day. Actually, it will be brown beans and rice, that being what the supermarket had. I hope they taste the same.

We tried to eat local dishes as much as possible on our travels – gratin, tartine and lamb stew in Normandy (and now I want a recipe for gratin Normand!); tagine in Gibraltar, which is only 14 miles from Morocco; paella in Madrid; Spanish cheeses and Iberian ham in Sevilla; grilled sole by the Mediterranean; wines from Bordeaux and Ribera del Duero, Rioja and Provence, Valencia and Catalunya. We brought about 8 bottles home, too, including champagne for tonight.

We stayed in hotels ranging from luxurious to adequate – and here they are. In order:
Our airy and charming first hotel in Bayeux and its equally charming door; our less charming but comfortable second Bayeux hotel; our tiny but comfortable room in Mont-St-Michel and a hotel door (actually I think that’s a different hotel, but it gives you an idea of the streets there); our big but less nice room in Bordeaux; the stylish “design hotel” room luxe bath in Bilbao; the equally stylish hotel in Madrid that was yet somehow reminiscent of a Subway sandwich shop and its equally stylish bathroom (Subway’s aren’t like that!); the hotel in Seville with stealth parking but nice rooms (seriously, we were ten feet from the parking entrance and didn’t spot it until I’d walked by it twice); the extremely English hotel in Gibraltar; the slightly-neglected-feeling hotel in Almuñécar that is clearly much livelier in season; the nicer but even more deserted hotel in Mar Menor where we were the only guests under the age of 70; the very modern hotel in Valencia, echoeing all that geometry outside; three pictures of the posh suite in Barcelona where we had two rooms, and two-section balcony, and a ridiculously complicated spa shower; the French version of a Motel 6 at Brive-la-Gaillard; and the cozy dormer room in Chartres. (If you’re actually planning to visit any of these and want to know exactly where we stayed, email me.)

And now, off to peel parsnips!

This is our last night on the road; tomorrow, we head home to Eindhoven. But for now, we’re at Chartres and the cathedral here is beautiful indeed. With all the cathedrals we’ve seen, this one still had me wandering around with my jaw hanging open. Unlike most cathedrals that took hundreds of years to build, most of this one was done by 1250 – the main later addition was one of the western spires, in the early 1500s. Since the cathedral is so early, the architecture is simpler than many later ones; one thing we noticed is that it doesn’t have all the little chapels around the nave that most cathedrals have. But the thing that caused my jaw to drop, is that Chartres still has all of its original stained glass from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. (It was removed and stored elsewhere during both World Wars.) The columns and flying buttresses that permitted large windows were still relatively new then, the the It is amazing stuff; I had thought the Madrid cathedral, which is modern, had the best stained glass I’d seen, but it doesn’t have the rich complexity of Chartres. There are comparatively few plain(er) glass windows, so the colors stand out dense and saturated. Incredible.

The whole Cathedral has that same amazing level of detail. My other favorite bit is the little figures under the feet of the tall statues of the Apostles and others in the Suth Portal. Some of them looked a bit surprised and annoyed to be there!

The Cathedral dominates the town still; as we drove in, we were able to see it from kilometers away. Of course this meant that its bell tower also has the longest views in the area, and of course that meant we had to climb up to one final bell tower. (Or as Ted’s famliy would say, “Help ‘er top!”)