May 29, 2016 by trs

The First R&R (Shanghai)

Ah, R&R. Good ole Rest and Recuperation. Or Rest and Relaxation. That time when the State Department pays for you and your family to get out of dodge, er post, on holiday.

The Foreign Affairs Handbook (3 FAH-1 H-3721.2) defines the need for R&R as Conditions of life at the post present distinct and significant difficulties of sufficient severity to justify temporary relief for an employee and employee’s eligible family members during a period of assignment.

That sounds pretty dull actually. I searched and searched for something in the FAH that had a bit more pizzazz but to no avail. Some might not think Shanghai is the kind of place that would justify temporary relief. I will be the first to tell you that we have things pretty good here. Our apartment and apartment complex is amazing. The city is full of great things to see and do. The supermarkets usually have a good selection of fresh produce and restaurants are plentiful. However the poor air quality, the internet restrictions, the crowds, the language, the pace of work can get to a person. I will tell you I feel a palpable sense of lightening when I am outside of China.

This was actually my first R&R with the State Department. Yeah, that is right; Ciudad Juarez had no R&R because well, it was literally five miles from the US. None of the Mexican border posts had R&R although interior Mexican posts did. I will refrain from my personal opinion on this but suffice to say that some of my colleagues were not too pleased that the dusty desert border city with 15% danger pay was a no but culturally rich and exciting Mexico City was a yes.

I am just grateful to have an R&R, even if I have to work on the resting and recuperating.

Part One: Virginia

Jet lag? What’s that?

We landed at 5:40 am at Dulles International Airport. My father loaned me one of his cars for the duration of our time in Virginia, so I drove him home (my parents live only ten minutes from the airport) and then to the hotel. The hotel management was really awesome to let us check in at 7 am. All the luggage into the room, a shower, and then we were off to our first activity.

My daughter loves horses. I mean LOVES horses. At 4 she is a bit young for horse riding lessons but there is a wonderful stable in Aldie, Virginia called Stonelea Farm that has a Hello Pony program for kids ages 2-5. They get to groom a horse, ride it twice several times around an arena, feed the horse snacks and receive a horse shoe souvenir. The program is only on Saturdays and we only had the one in Virginia…so fresh off a plane, jet lagged and all I took my little girl to see a horse. Afterwards we headed to a restaurant to meet my parents, my aunt, and my sister, brother in law, niece and nephew for lunch. We made it to 5pm before falling asleep.

On our second day we met a friend of mine who had recently relocated from New York to DC. And we went to PetSmart because we like an entire store dedicated to animals where people bring their pets to shop. And then we went to Target because I love that store with a special kind of love from deep within my core. You never know what things mean to you until they are gone. Target is my happy place when I come back to the US.

We spent the third day in historic Manassas, Virginia. It being a Monday the museum was unfortunately closed and we did not have the time to visit the battlefield, but we did enjoy a stroll around the historic section. After lunch we drove to the home of an A-100 colleague. A-100 is the 6 week course that all new Foreign Service Officers take. Your A-100 class is like a freshman dorm or hall – it is your identifying mark, your built in network. Although this colleague has left the Service she still remains in touch and had offered my daughter an opportunity to meet her beautiful horse and I was finally taking advantage.

On Tuesday I went into “Main State,” the Department of State’s headquarters on C Street in Washington, DC. Why pray tell did I use up a day of my vacation to do that? Believe you me; the day before and morning of I too was wondering the same thing. Later this year I will go through the mid-level bidding process for the first time. “Bidding is a wonderful experience,” said no one ever. From what I understand bidding appears to be a special long-drawn out form of torture we put Foreign Service Officers through again and again and again. We may have a career but we need to make a huge effort to get each job.

Flags Flown At Half Staff At The State Department After Ambassador Killed In Libya

Not the usual R&R destination

With this in mind my mentor had suggested I consider taking part of my R&R in or around Washington and make my way through the halls of the Harry S Truman (HST) building to meet with people. I embraced this idea wholeheartedly and managed to score four meetings with desk officers working in countries where I have a strong interest in serving (and which at this time are projected to have a vacancy in a political job at the time I transfer from Shanghai) and also a meeting with my mid-level Career Development Officer. I had lunch with two friends who are currently desk officers.

Yet that morning I really was feeling resentful. This was my vacation. I wanted to be vacationing, not networking. Once inside the building though I felt different. First, I was immensely pleased that I managed to get from the front door to the cafeteria to buy a snack and to my first appointment on time. I may have been lost for only 20 minutes. For me, Main State is akin to the Winchester Mystery House. I have actually not been to the haunted home in San Jose, California, but I read about it in a ghost book when in elementary school. I was fascinated with the idea of a crazy house with stairs that lead to the ceiling, doors that open to nowhere, and secret passageways. HST has corridors cut in half, stairways that lead to doors outside but will take you nowhere else in the building, and hallways that are labeled the same number but are not connected. Second, I felt connected to the greater work of the State Department in a way I do not feel at post doing visas. Visas are a big part of Consular Affairs but there is so much more going on. It seems obvious but it felt like a revelation nonetheless. My meetings went well; I have no idea if it will help in any way come bidding time, but I learned a lot.

Phase Two: Kentucky

Off we flew to Louisville. I was there for a few reasons. One, I had never been to Louisville, which is generally, in my opinion, a good enough reason to go somewhere. Second, I was signed up to run the Derby Half Marathon. Of course. Few R&Rs are complete without running a long distance that one is not well-prepared for. Third, my daughter would spend two days and two nights with her dad – the first time she would visit with him without me.

The first day was for my daughter and me to get out on the town. It was just 10 days before the Derby so it felt essential to start our visit at the Kentucky Derby Museum at the famous Churchill Downs. The museum has the right mix of the modern and historic, and exhibits for adults and children. The admission price included a tour of the racecourse, and we were there at an early enough time in the morning to see several horses being put through their paces. It is hard to say which my daughter loved more—the real horses on the track or the pretend Derby race in the museum. I really hope someday to take her to see the real thing.

Next we visited the Louisville Slugger Museum, which was a lot of fun. C seemed a bit hesitant at first, until she saw the Captain America statue out front. She was more impressed with that than the 120-foot tall baseball bat. I really enjoyed the factory tour and C tolerated it enough to let me get through the whole thing without incident.

The following day we met her dad and his new wife for lunch and then the two of them drove off with C to the zoo. (Just for clarification I was never the old wife. Someday I might address our particular situation, or not. But suffice to say we get along and he loves C).

What to do with myself though? Now that I was on the town on a Friday night without my child? With the half marathon the following day? Well, the weather was predicted to be less than ideal, with the rain set to begin around 2 am. And my training had not been particularly inspiring. Once again, I just wanted to get out on the road and run. So, I went to the Jim Beam Stillhouse. Because bourbon was the best thing I could think of.

This seemed the appropriate way to celebrate both before and after a half marathon in Kentucky.

The next day I was up early. The rain had not started in the early am. Even at 5 am the skies were cloudy but dry. A little before 7 I walked over to the start line. Just before the race was to start at 7:30 my heel began to hurt. So, that was a great sign. At the one mile mark my chest started to tighten and I began to wheeze. It felt like the start of asthma. It had stopped bothering me by the 3rd mile. I stopped at a port-a-potty at mile 5 but the line didn’t move after five minutes so I just started running again. Around mile 5.5 it began to rain, lightly but steadily. At 6 I stopped to put on the one-time-use rain jacket I had bought at Target the day before. (See? Target.) At mile 8 we entered Churchill Downs. There are no spectators allowed inside, but I had heard on the TV that morning a reporter say she would be there and to stop at her tent, covered from the rain, to say hello. So I did. We chatted. We did an interview. I told her my goal was a personal worst and I looked to be on track. The rain became harder. I was getting tired. But I kept going. I’ll tell you it was not easy to clinch that slowest time. Even with all those stops and the bourbon I barely beat my next slowest time. I really had fun though. What a great course Good support throughout. I celebrated with lunch at the Hard Rock and a visit to the Jim Beam Urban Stillhouse for some more tastings on 4th Street Live.

The following day I took a drove to pick up my daughter. Her face was glowing. She had had a really wonderful time. She had so much to tell me. Her favorite thing about her dad? His wife! Given how happy she made my kid she gets super high marks in my book too.

Part Three: Virginia, again

A girl, a dog, and a cabin in the woods. This is R&R. This is America.

This time we landed around 4 pm. The jet lag had nearly worn off anyway. We drove out to Winchester, Virginia to stay with my aunt. We spent two nights at her home there and one at her cabin at Stone Mountain, West Virginia. I had visited the cabin with her before. Heck, my sister got married there. C had even been there before for a July 4th celebration. But something about this time felt like it was where I was meant to be on R&R. That perhaps this is where, if I were really after rest and recuperation, I should have spent the whole vacation. There is no television. Internet service is extremely weak, mostly non-existent. The cabin is a studio with a loft. When it rains the pitter-patter on the corrugated roof is about the only sound you hear. The activities? Setting and up swinging in the hammock. Sitting on the porch and looking out at the field. A walk down to the river. Maybe a conversation with a neighbor that stops by to tell you of a rare orchid he finds in the woods. Then a search through the woods for said orchid. A hike up Stone Mountain. More conversation.

We departed my aunt’s on Thursday late morning. There was another day and a half left. We spent some more time at Target, of course, another meal with a friend, a pizza and movie night at my sister’s house. Then it was time to return to Shanghai.

I made it to the top of Stone Mountain and the view is so worth it.

March 23, 2016 by trs

Americana: A Californian Chinese New Year

I have heard the time around the Spring Festival, as the Chinese call it, referred to as the largest annual human migration in the world. It is not only all the Chinese traveling to be with their families, but also the foreigners in China taking advantage of the long holiday to get away.

When we first arrived in China it was just three weeks before Chinese New Year. I knew having just moved to China that 1. I would not have the energy to take a trip that soon, and 2. Even if I had wanted to, it was far too late to book a trip.

It was good to stay in Shanghai that first Chinese New Year. My household effects (HHE) were delivered just the day before the holiday started so I could spend it putting my apartment in order. The streets were quiet and I had a week to get to know my new city. But I told myself there was no way I would stay in Shanghai the following Lunar New Year.

The way the holiday shook out is February 6-10 (Saturday – Wednesday) were the Chinese national days off. The following Monday, February 15 was President’s Day. So I could take just two days of annual leave and have ten full days off. I thought of going to Kenya or Jordan or Thailand. Somewhere exotic. That is what I used to do when I had a long holiday – take a long trip to someplace unexpected. But what I really wanted to do was be in the US drinking in America.

A Huntington Half Marathon

C gets in some pony riding in her Elsa dress and pink cowgirl boots. Because that is how she rolls.

We started our holiday in the Newport / Huntington Beach area, about an hour south of Los Angeles. Back in August I had signed up for the Surf City Half Marathon. The heart issues had started but I positive that I could still train for and complete the half. It was before the Medevac to Singapore and then Washington, DC. It was before I had the heart procedure. By November 11 I was back in Shanghai and determined to train. My plan was a 5K before the end of November, then a 10K before the end of December and finally 15K by the end of January and then just try my luck.

I did the 10K by the end of December but it was really, really, really slow. I had some serious doubts. But my virtual group of runners trying to hit the roads and trails all around the world encouraged me to still try – that the time would not matter. And a very good friend currently posted to Washington, DC said she would fly out to run with me.

Before the half C and I just sampled the joys of being back in the US. Our first day in the States involved landing, renting a car, and then driving down the coast in Friday afternoon Orange County traffic. So it was pretty great.

For our first full day I took my pony-loving daughter to Irvine Regional Park for pony rides and a visit to the zoo. We had hot dogs and French Fries and sat outside in the glorious Southern California sunshine. Such a change from the cold, overcast, smoggy skies of a Shanghai winter.

I got me some race bling. And some running zen.

The morning of the half the sitter arrived from Mollycoddlers, an Orange County sitter and nanny service. (I am sure lots of people have wondered how I do these half marathons in different parts of the country as a single mom. The answer is a hotel babysitting service!). I met my friend in the lobby of our Huntington Beach hotel for the race shuttle to Newport Beach. We had a lot of time on the shuttle and at least an hour at the race hotel before the start to catch up. It was important because although we have run several races together, we do not actually run side by side as her pace is a good two minutes per mile faster than mine.

I had no idea how the half would go. My training had been haphazard. I was jet lagged.

The temperatures were unseasonably warm. Yet it was a good course. Flat. I did not care about my time. I ran a half for the first time in a long time without a running watch (it had been in the unfortunately misappropriated bag lost to the taxi driver in December). I walked through each water stop. I had fun. I told myself I could finish in three hours if I needed to. But I didn’t. It wasn’t even my slowest half.

I realize that many people might be shaking their heads – why in the world would anyone run a half marathon on their vacation? For me though, when I run, when I was running, I was not a mom, I was not a visa adjudicator, it was just me running in the sunshine on a course with a bunch of other strangers – all of who have their own reasons and goals for running. It’s liberating.

Afterwards, it being Superbowl Sunday, C, my friend, her boyfriend, and I sat in the hotel bar, watched part of the game and the half time show, and ate and drank. If that isn’t Americana, then I don’t know what is.

Friends, Family, and Disney

When I was 11 years old my mom took my sisters and I to LA. I begged to go to the La Brea Tar Pits, but we didn’t. I had to close the circle.

After Newport Beach we headed south to Carlsbad to stay with my mother’s cousin who I had not seen since I was twelve years old. Now I am….much older. Yet despite the years, when I reached out to her she responded immediately to my email and invited C and I to stay with her. We had such a wonderful time and her husband and their therapy dog. We also drove down to San Diego to meet up with a friend from my Jakarta book club days and on another day we met a grad school friend at the La Brea Tar Pits.

Back in my pre-State, pre-mom days my vacation modus operandi was generally to fly solo to another country or another continent but rarely to visit home. Maybe it is age or being a mother or this particular career, but I have a strong desire to spend more time reacquainting myself not only with friends and family but also with my country.

I felt such incredible joy driving a car down US highways, listening to Top 40 radio stations, or lying awake jet lagged watching American television programming featuring tiny houses. Even billboards featuring Serta mattresses make me deliriously happy. There were several times when apropos of nothing I simply stretched out my arms and yelled “I love you America!”

But I am familiar with America. For me a trip home is celebration of the things I love and miss (or even had no idea I missed) and want to revisit and carry back in me. For my daughter though, it is not a place she knows well. In her four years of life she has lived only a quarter of it in the States.

A few weeks before traveling to the US I read an online parenting article aimed at American parents and their propensity to take their kids to Disney on vacation. The author’s goal is to encourage parents to broaden their children’s horizons, which is certainly admirable. But there is nothing wrong with taking your kids to Disney. Disney is the quintessential Americana. And I very much want to give my child those kinds of experiences. She may not always or even ever just be able to get on a bicycle and ride around a neighborhood. So if I can give her Disney and quality zoos and snow cones and ballpark hot dogs on occasion, I will.

This happy face needs no caption.

After nine days in beautiful Southern California it was time to head back to Shanghai. I am not sure that I did this, but I hope I took a sufficiently long deep breath of the good air quality air and closed my eyes and savored the warm feel of the SoCal sun on my face.

January 31, 2016 by trs

Hong Kong Birthday

At the Lantau Island Buddha in the summer of 1996. I look pretty stunned, which could explain why I have no recollection of this at all.

Hong Kong. To me, it is one of those places the very name evokes a sense of adventure and excitement. I first visited in the summer of 1996, a vacation from my English teaching job at an after school cram school in Seoul, South Korea. It was part of a wildly concocted two week trip that would include Hong Kong, Macao, Guam, an unexpected stopover in Saipan due to a typhoon in my flight path, and Guangzhou. The most thrilling part I recall was running full speed down a pier in Hong Kong and jumping aboard the boat that would take me overnight to Guangzhou, the gangplank pulled in behind me. The second time was in the spring of 1999; I was an English teacher in the government-sponsored JET Program in Yamaguchi, Japan and spent a few days exploring Hong Kong while securing my visa to re-visit Beijing. I must have gone up Victoria Peak in the tram that second time. Yet all I have are a few vague memories of cold, bureaucratic, but quick formalities at the Chinese Consulate.

How had it been so very long ago since I had visited? I wanted to visit Hong Kong once again. After some research online – determining that January was one of the best months in the territory – I decided my daughter’s birthday over the Martin Luther King, Jr. weekend was the time to go.

Back in August, when I bought the tickets, it seemed quite reasonable and exciting to have trips planned for September/October (Dominican Republic), November (Chengdu), December (Sanya), and January (Hong Kong). By the time the Hong Kong trip was rolling around though I had instead come to the conclusion that I must have made these plans in a fit of insanity, possibly a function of having nearly survived a summer without leave through the biggest visa demand period in history. Maybe. Or maybe I just do crazy stuff like this all the time? (My past travel record would, I expect, point to the latter)

The Dominican Republic trip happened of course and it was wonderful. But Chengdu was cancelled because of my unanticipated month-long Medevac back to Washington, D.C. And Sanya, yeah, that one was far less restful than expected. (See Shanghai Escape, Derailed)

A colder and wetter view than I had expected. Star Ferry ride over to Hong Kong Island.

Given the Sanya episode I approached the Hong Kong trip as a nervous travel maniac. I double-checked, triple-checked, quadruple-checked the departure time of the flight daily on a travel website to make sure the flight time did not change. The last thing I wanted to do was miss a flight…again. I decided not to check a single piece of luggage. I hesitated to bring the newly purchases Kindle Fire Kids Edition (the replacement for the lost/stolen iPad), but in the end placed it and several other belongings into a new tote that would, I hoped, never leave my eyesight.

My soon-to-be four year old daughter too seemed traumatized by the Sanya episode. When a week before our trip she accidentally punctured a colorful sport ball we had had since Juarez and I informed her that we would need to throw it away, she broke down in sobs. “No,” she blubbered, “I don’t want to lose any more toys.” She insisted that the deflated ball was now her second most favorite toy in the world, after her beloved stuffed animal Black Cat, and that Pink Ball should also come with us to Hong Kong. I said no but then relented, imagining the hilarious pictures of Pink Ball in various Hong Kong locations. Unfortunately the day before departure I could not locate Pink Ball. <sigh>

The day before departure I wondered if maybe we needed to be at the airport earlier than expected? Sure enough I checked with a colleague who had just been and yes, we would be traveling through the international terminal and passport control on both ends. I thanked my lucky stars I knew that before rather than after the flight. Visions of Sanya, and the missed flight that started it all, swam through my brain.

Still the flight left late. I thought back to when I lived in China in 1994 and how foreigners fondly changed the acronym for the Civil Aviation Administration of China (CAAC) to “China Airlines Always Cancel.” I have heard that every single commercial flight in China must be cleared before take-off through an office in Beijing. I do not know if it is true, but I have yet to be on a flight that departed on time. Only flights we were not on (i.e. to Sanya).

Maybe it is Nathan Road or my own limited outings in Shanghai, but Hong Kong sort of felt more Chinese to me than China. Except with Facebook.

January is supposed to be one of the best months to visit Hong Kong. I read online, it has the lowest amount of rainfall and the most comfortable temperature. So imagine my dismay as I checked, and re-checked the weather report for our trip dates, and it was not only colder than expected but predicted to rain four out of the five days. Over 80% chance of rain each day, including our days at Disneyland and on C’s birthday.

Despite the late flight, the rain, the colder-than-expected temps, I felt pretty pumped when we landed and as we rode into town on an airport bus to central Kowloon. A very kind Indian woman, resident in Hong Kong for fifteen years, not only engaged my daughter in conversation on the bus, sharing photos of her own recent trip to Hong Kong Disneyland and explaining she was pretty good friends with the Princesses, but also helped us to get down from the crowded bus when we reached our stop. The ten minute walk down three long city blocks through the cold misty rain did not damper my spirits.

We arrived at our hotel, down a side street in Mongkok, somewhere near where I must have stayed in a cheap cramped guesthouse with friends in 1996, and in our room I posted direct to Facebook. Freedom. Hong Kong may have been returned to China, but with an international flight and immigration checks to get here and a very different Internet environment, it certainly did not feel like China.

On our first full day out in Hong Kong disaster struck. C lost Black Cat, her much-adored stuffie who had been with us for over two years. For a little stuffie Black Cat sure got around. He or she, C referred to it as both, went with us everywhere from the grocery store to museums to across the globe. Black Cat had been to seven countries and territories and approximately sixteen US states. I thought Black Cat would be the stuffie that C would hold onto forever, into adulthood. But Black Cat must have used up his nine lives. He had been dropped, run over by the stroller, left behind and retrieved, so many times that our second chances had finally run out.

The last known whereabouts of Black Cat

I took a picture of C sitting on a bollard near the Star Ferry terminal. She has Black Cat. Then she hops over to the stroller and informs me we need to make a pit stop before we head to the ferry. I spy a public bathroom just 50 feet away and off we go. By the time we make it to the stall she no longer has Black Cat. We run outside but in that space of time and physical space we have lost the stuffie; he/she is nowhere to be seen. C is inconsolable. She bawls loudly as I push her through the ferry terminal and onto the vessel. Huge tears roll down her face as she sits on the ferry. She sobs out loud “Black Cat, don’t leave me. Please come back. I miss you so much!” I tell her I am so sorry and ask if there is anything I can do. “Yes,” she tells me, “find my Black Cat.” There is nothing I can do. I tell her this. There is no reason to sugar coat it although I feel like the worst mom in the world.

On the other side, on Hong Kong Island, we meet up with my friend L who back in 2001 took a summer intensive Chinese class with me in Monterey, CA. We were roommates that summer and we both graduated from the Monterey Institute of International Studies. She has been living in Asia, in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Singapore for most of the intervening years. This is not how I wanted her and her children to meet my normally high-spirited, effervescent daughter, now in the throes of her greatest loss. But it is what it is. And surprisingly, C, after pouting for a good 30 minutes, warms up to them all and is in good spirits at lunch.

I should have known something was up. By the time we return to the hotel by 4 PM she is calm and rested, having napped in the stroller the whole walk back from Tsim Sha Tsui. However, when she wakes she informs me that she will simply ask Santa to bring her Old Black Cat next Christmas. I am amazed at her creativity and feel like the Grinch when I tell her this is beyond Santa’s powers.

The next day we wake. It is Sunday and C’s 4th birthday. I again feel pretty bad about letting Black Cat get away. However, when I ask C about it she informs me, “Black Cat likes Hong Kong and has decided to move here to be with his Grandma and Grandpa.” I am stunned. Four years old and already so grown up. Plus Black Cat is one very wise stuffie; I too want to move to Hong Kong.

Hello wonderful Disney Hollywood Hotel.

We meet my friends D&B, who had come down from Guangzhou to visit Disneyland with us, down in the lobby. It is raining cats and dogs, heavy sheets of rain are shot down from the cold, steel grey sky. It looks like an unfortunate day to visit an amusement park. We cannot get a taxi. It is also the day of the Hong Kong Standard Chartered Marathon and no taxis are able to get to our particular road. We wait. The rain lets up and we all decide to try to walk over to the MTR stop some fifteen minutes away to try to take the train to Disneyland (there is a stop at the park). We are lucky to find a nice taxi driver willing to give it a go.

When we pull up to our hotel, the Disneyland Hollywood Hotel, the whole place smells like fresh flowers after the rain; it is a lush desert oasis after a terrible sandstorm. There on the red carpet leading to the hotel I cancel my hotel the following night near the airport and book a second night at the Disney hotel. The magic of Disney was already working on me.

We store our bags and head straight to the park. The sun, believe it or not, comes out. I know I cannot believe it but I am thrilled. I may have even danced a jig. I may have thrown my arms out and thanked the Gods, Mother Nature, or Kismet for this blessed event. I had wanted this day to be perfect for C and though determined to make it so despite the rain, I was glad I did not have to contend with a soggy day.

Of course we met with several princesses! Ariel wins for most awesome because she spent a lot of time with the birthday girl, even playing a little game of tag with her.

We rode the carousel, two times; it remains C’s favorite ride. We all took a spin on the tea cups, which by the way are not built for three adults and one child. Nor for someone my age who sometimes feels sick in the backseats of cars after spending so little time in them while living much of my adult life overseas. A trip on the Jungle River Cruise revealed that natives shooting arrows from an unfriendly village and a mountain that breathes fire are not four year old fare. I read the warning after the ride. Oops. Yet we even rode Space Mountain, C’s first roller coaster. I could scarcely believe that she met the height requirement, but she did. Just. Once the ride started I felt kind of bad to have brought her on, remembering my own fear riding this same attraction when I visited Disneyland California at age eleven. It was sort of hard to hear C crying over my own screams. Yet she surprised me once again when she declared at the end (after heaving a huge sigh of relief that we had survived), “I had to cry a little bit, but it was okay.”

We took a break, returned to the hotel, checked in and enjoyed a walk around the grounds and a rest before returning in the evening for the parade and fireworks show. I had expected just a good parade and then some good fireworks. Both were beyond anything I could have imagined. I sort of felt that other people who had been to Disney had been sworn to some secret oath not to reveal the true amazingness of the spectacle.

We said goodbye to D&B the following morning after breakfast and C and I returned to the park for another day of fun. The weather was even better than the day before. As a result, despite it being a Monday, the crowds were larger and the wait times for rides longer. More carousel time, a whirl on the Disneyland railroad, a visit with Anna and Elsa and Cinderella and we managed the Winnie the Pooh and Dumbo rides despite the longer lines. We called it an earlier day so I was very glad to be able to relax in our lovely Disney hotel room and catch the movie Up with C in the lobby bar and restaurant.

The next morning as we departed for the airport right after the 11 am check-out it had grown cold again, the fog so thick that visibility was very limited. Had we tried to head to the Lantau Buddha, my original plan until I realized that getting there would take more time than we had, we would not have seen much. Our flight was not until 4 pm but the man at the check-in counter moved us to a flight leaving an hour earlier. Of course though, this being a Chinese flight, it left an hour late…

All in all, even with the loss of Black Cat, Hong Kong turned out to be a wonderful getaway.

The view from our Disney hotel room on a beautiful, clear Hong Kong morning

January 1, 2016 by trs

Shanghai Escape, Derailed

It is winter in Shanghai, which apparently translates to short, cold, gloomy, and overcast days. When it has not been raining the air quality has been poor. It is not Beijing Red Alert poor, but it has already warranted twice receiving this message:

The second time we received it was the day before our flight. It was time to get out of dodge.

The Plan: Leave the drab, choking skies of Shanghai behind for a beach resort in Sanya Bay, on the southern Chinese island of Hainan, known as China’s Hawaii. The island is located at the same latitude as the Hawaiian Islands and is China’s only tropical beach destination. Blue skies, palm trees, warm weather, and a place in China where no one has to check the Air Quality Index. The perfect balmy Christmas getaway.

The Airport: We arrived at Pudong airport at 9:25 am for check in for our 10:45 am flight. Except it turns out that our flight time was moved up, to 10:05 am…and the flight closed 40 minutes before departure…so even before I stepped into the check-in line it was already too late. In all the years and places I have flown I have never missed a flight.

The airline was able to rebook us on a later flight departing at 3:50 pm. I felt rather thrilled we were still arriving the same day and I made sure to take advantage of the time at the airport. We had lunch and then C took a nap while I cracked open the 700+ page book for my January Book Club meeting. Then the flight was delayed two hours. No problem! There was a massage chair place located across from our gate – I had a massage and my daughter sat in the next chair playing nicely with her iPad.

Just three hours by plane from wintry Shanghai to the balmy beaches of China’s southern most point

The Plane: Once on the plane I realize this is the first domestic Chinese flight I have taken since 1994.

I particularly remembered a flight from Chengdu to Urumuqi. There was no English to be found on the plane. Instead the information was in Chinese and Russian, the airplane seemed to be an old Aeroflot. The color scheme of the cabin was something like hospital white. Plane cabin temperature was set to somewhere around “sauna” and a leak of some sort dripped on me from the overhead compartment for the length of the flight. And smoking was allowed on the plane.

Fast forward to 2015 and the China Eastern flight is world-class. Comfortable seats, designer cabin colors in a palette of warm sand, professional flight attendants, English information. I sat back and relaxed, reading my book club book to page 345. We were on our way to vacation!

The Holiday Inn Resort Sanya Bay. It is beautiful.

Arrival and Derailment: We land in Sanya at 8:30 pm, 5 ½ hours later than originally planned, but it is 77 degrees so I don’t care. Suitcases in hand we headed to the domestic airport legal taxi stand and wait.

Twenty-five minutes later we are in a taxi. Whew! We are soon to be on our way to the hotel to officially start this vacation. I feel so happy. I tell the driver the name of our hotel and she doesn’t understand. She confers with a taxi line attendant then she grunts in what I assume to mean “ok, yeah, I know where that is” and off we go–all of 20 feet before the driver pulls over, gets out of the taxi, and barks at the occupants of the back of the taxi line. Soon three additional passengers, two additional fares, are squeezed into the cab. I am forced to hold my daughter on my lap.

We stop and the driver tells the man in the front this is his stop. Then the driver gets out and opens my door, takes my daughter off my lap and places her in the street and tells me this is where I get out. “But where is my hotel?” I ask. The driver makes some noises that sound like “I don’t know” and “You can look around here.” She points to the suitcases in the back and I tell her the blue one. And then suddenly headlights are on us, a truck is heading our way, my daughter is in the middle of the street. I am distracted. The taxi driver takes off. I get my daughter to safety. I realize my other bag is in the taxi…with my new computer, my daughter’s iPad, and our jackets…

I walk two blocks with my daughter to the closest hotel. An English speaking manager helps to locate our hotel and takes us there by taxi. We had been nowhere nearby.

Despite the rocky beginning, my daughter jumps for joy on the beach.

At our hotel the police are called. The officer who arrives is far more interested in my marital status than in my missing bag. He is fascinated that I am single, never married and have a child. He says he will return the next day, but I never see that cop again.

In the hotel room my daughter says, “Mom, I am sad about our bag, but this is a beautiful hotel.”

Fuel to the Fire: After breakfast and some beach time I head onto my first order of business to recover my vacation – obtaining chargers for my two phones (the chargers were unfortunately also in the bag).

The hotel furnished me with the location in Chinese where they promised up and down I could obtain chargers for both of my phones. I admit, I was skeptical, but I was thrilled when 30 minutes later we arrived at a phone supercenter, selling just about every phone and accessory you could imagine. Not only did they have a charger for my iPhone 4S but even for the Nokia dumb brick phone provided by the Consulate. I not only felt relief, I felt I had personally thwarted fate in a superhero kind of way.

The Hui woman who sold us the Little Mermaid accessories, um, I mean, the shell necklaces.

We had lunch nearby and I bought C an ice cream cone that she nursed our two block walk to the beach and then as we walked along the waterfront. It actually sort of, kind of did remind me of the walkway in Waikiki. If I had been in Waikiki maybe in 1930? I bought C a shell necklace and conk shell whistle from an ethnic Hui woman on bicycle. Although the Muslim Hui are generally a northwestern minority, there is a large group on Hainan. I mused that perhaps there were more similarities between Hainan and Hawaii beyond their latitude and the letter “H.” There is also the military presence (with a base right in the middle of Sanya Bay fronting the beach, much like Waikiki’s Fort DeRussy) and an ethnic group subsumed and co-opted by tourism.

I had difficulty finding a taxi to take us back to our hotel – all the traffic on the beachfront road was heading in the wrong direction, all the cabs already with passengers. Even after turning up a side street to a crossroads, the taxis were few and already full. So I made the decision to take one of the two motorcycle taxis that had been vying for my business for ten minutes.

What do you mean that airport is not a tourist spot? Doesn’t everyone hang out here on holiday?

I know, the parents amongst you may cringe and the Foreign Service Officers may tut-tut my decision. But the current and former backpackers might just give me a thumbs up. C, sandwiched between myself and the driver, yelling “wheee, wheee” as her hair blew in the wind. All was fine until we arrived back at the hotel. I got off the bike and burned my leg, badly as it turned out. Second degree. In all the times I was on motorcycles throughout Southeast Asia I was never burned before…

The Quest: My friends M&S from Shanghai also in Hainan for the weekend joined us for Christmas dinner for company and to get my mind off everything that had happened. And as luck would have it, they hailed a blue colored cab on the way over and secured a telephone number for me. It turns out that there is only one dark blue taxi company in Sanya. How many female drivers could they have?

Bright and early on the second day I prepared for Operation: Get My Bag Back! I started up my iPhone – it was not connected to a phone network and had no VPN, but it could still connect to WiFi and I activated “Find My iPad.” Unfortunately it was offline, but I typed up a message in English and Chinese that would let someone know it was lost and how to reach me. Then I called the tourist complaint line number M&S had provided me and explained the situation in Chinese and then, almost unbelievably, the woman told me an English-speaking colleague would come in at 8 am and call me. Even more unbelievable is at 8 am an English-speaking person DID call me!

Betel nut is popular in Hainan. I ironically found a bag of fresh betel nut left behind in taxi. I handed the bag over the driver and kept one for a photo.

At 9:30, after some checking she phoned me back and told me that I should phone the Airport Customer Service number. I did. Incredibly, they also had someone there who spoke English. That woman told me it would be best if I went down to the airport to talk with the Airport Police to locate the surveillance tape of the taxi line for the night in question. Of course! This is China and there are surveillance cameras everywhere!

Off we went to the airport. I located the police station on the second floor and again told my story in Chinese. The officer there did not seem too sympathetic as he stood in front of a four word police slogan that stated something like “integrity, honesty, service, hard work” – similar to one of those annoying motivational posters found in employee break rooms across the US. He informed me that in fact it was another police station that would be in charge of the taxi line and he gave me their number. I asked him, since I had just explained my whole story, if he could call for me. He shrugged and said he could not as it was my problem and not his.

I did call the number and explain again, in Chinese, my story of woe shouting in my phone above the airport and police station din. However, the policeman on the other end did seem nicer and told me he would see what he could do. A few minutes later my phone rang – an English-speaking woman who identified herself as Lisa and a friend of the second policeman. Lisa would prove to be not only sympathetic but incredibly resourceful.

Despite the off-putting description of this area as a “Buddhist Theme Park” the landscaped grounds are quite nice and the statue is pretty cool. Not an amusement park ride to be seen.

While Lisa did whatever it was she was doing, I went in search of the surveillance tapes. Unfortunately, it turned out that due to airport construction the taxi line bay in the domestic terminal presently has no cameras. Of course it doesn’t! Despite this setback, I took advantage of our time at the airport to have lunch, visit the first aid center to have a nurse take care of my burn, and purchase the only thing resembling a diary from an airport book shop. (Yes, it turned out my diary too was in the bag. I have kept a diary since I was 12 years old and traveled with one all over the world and have never before lost one. Are you sensing a theme here?)

Back to the hotel. Lisa had sent the hotel duty officer the photos of the NINE female drivers employed by the dark blue taxi company for me to identify in a virtual line-up. I selected a few but emphasized that my driver had long black hair worn in a ponytail. We arranged to go to the taxi company the following morning to meet with the drivers and enjoyed the rest of the evening with pool time (well C was in the pool, I was sidelined with my second degree burn) and pizza in our hotel room watching either CNN or the Discovery Channel, our only two English options.

On Sunday we headed to the taxi company. I was quite disappointed to arrive to find only a single female drive in attendance – a woman with short, brown hair. When I explained my disappointment the two women at the taxi company appeared unphased. They said I had identified this woman as one of the possible drivers. I conceded I may have found the face similar from an employment photograph but in other aspects she did not resemble my driver at all. They suggested that perhaps I had confused dark blue with light blue as there was also a light blue taxi company in Sanya. They also incredulously suggested that perhaps I had mistaken a male driver for a woman? I stared at them.

This taxi driver was worth his weight in gold – when C fell asleep on the way to the Goddess of Mercy, he offered to carry her.

I was told that this one female driver was the only one who had been to the airport on the day in question. Ms. Chen showed me the elaborate tracking system they use on all of their taxis – they could input a taxi driver number and a date and time and show exactly where the taxi had been. It seemed impressive but I could not help but feel they were trying to appear helpful without actually being so. In one final show of assistance they typed up a BOLO (Be On the LookOut) describing my lost bag and sent it out to all of their entire fleet of 200+ drivers. They suggested I also visit the Public Security Bureau, but I was done.

Instead back on the street I hailed a taxi to take us to the 108 meter high Goddess of Mercy statue located at the Nanshan Cultural District Buddhist Cultural Park. I may have lost a bag full of valuable items, received a second degree burn on my leg after an ill-advised motorcycle ride, and spent countless hours in fruitless pursuit of the aforementioned bag, but I was going to see one tourist site in Hainan! The funny part is that on the way I started to think about what I might see the next time we came. If I was thinking about a next time, this time could not really be that bad, right?

I could have seen this as just a crappy vacation where everything went wrong or I could see it as a trip with some challenges and an epic quest, which though was ultimately unsuccessful in obtaining the sought after item, resulted instead in learning valuable lessons on what is truly valuable. I did lose a lot of stuff (about $1300 worth) but I can replace them and am lucky to be in a position to say that.

In the taxi over to the taxi company, my almost-four-year-old daughter turned to me and said, “Mommy, I am sorry about our bag, but don’t worry, it is just games.” She was thinking about her lost iPad, but regardless, she had a point. And if my kid is telling me at this age, I have to be doing something right.

The view of the South China Sea from our hotel balcony.

November 7, 2015 by trs

Sick, Abroad

I am writing this post from the comfort, or, er, sometimes discomfort, of my Medevac (Medical Evacuation) to Washington, DC. This post however is NOT about my Medevac.

Someday, I might be able to write about this, after I have put some distance between myself and this whole crazy, stressful, yet, I hope and believe, ultimately positive experience.

To keep my mind off the current situation my mind has turned to some of my past experiences when I have found myself a bit more than just under the weather while overseas. The pre-Foreign Service, pre-Medevacs times.

There have been those days when I just did not feel right. You know those days, they happen to everyone. But when you are traveling or living solo in a foreign country those days may feel all the more bewildering and lonely.

So there was that time I had my appendix out in Japan.

In January 2000, a few days after returning to my teaching job after a lovely Christmas and New Year’s getaway to Australia, I came down with an excruciating stomach pain. It started an hour or so after eating, the pain building by the hour. Eventually, convinced I had a terrible bout with food poisoning, I called my Japanese friend Tomomi who called the local ambulance to collect me.

I lived in the small town of Kogushi, which in Japanese means “little stick,” (which I found rather appropriate) located on the famous San-In coastline of Yamaguchi prefecture. I was half way through my third and final year of teaching English at the local high school. I not only taught at the school up the street but once a week, on Thursdays, at another high school in the next county over, and alternating on Tuesdays a school for the deaf located about 45 minutes away, and the local hospital school. The hospital school was adjacent to the small county hospital, and this is where the ambulance took me.

Tomomi, a student in my three times a month adult class, who had become a close friend, however met me at the hospital to assist. Though I had thought it to be a very bad case of food poisoning it turned out to be appendicitis; I was scheduled for emergency surgery the following morning.

I learned a lot from my time in Japanese hospital. I quickly learned the Japanese words for IV, pain, nurse, doctor, and all manner of hospital-ese. I have forgotten them all except for “appendix.” Pronounced “moe-cho” I thought it sounded like “mo-jo” and I like to say I had my mo-jo removed in Japan. I also learned how amazing a health care system can work. The ambulance, albeit in a small town, arrived quickly, and was also free. My whole bill came to about $800. This included the operation, my two days in a private room, and four days in a shared room, everything. As an employee through the Japanese Ministry of Education, I was enrolled in the Japanese national health care system. Because my bill was less than $1000 I had to pay upfront, and then seek for reimbursement. To do so I filled out two pages, front and back, of simple paperwork – my name, address, date and type of illness, the procedures, the hospital information, and then the information of my post office savings account. Within ONE WEEK the entire amount was reimbursed directly into my account. I am still in awe of this efficiency all these years later.

Then there was that time (or rather the two times) I came down with food poisoning in Nepal.

On my next to last day in the country my two travel companions, A&P, and myself decided to celebrate with dinner at a recommended Western-food restaurant. P and I ordered the same delicious chicken dish. It was scrumptious. Then the next morning, around 6 am, my stomach cramped up. Bad. It was race to the restroom time. Again and again. Thankfully I had one of those wonderful backpacker rooms with the tiny bathrooms, which allows one to uh, excuse me, well, you might know where I am going with this. (If you have been a sick backpacker abroad with one of those closet sized rooms then I am sure you and I are on the same page).

After hours of this I walked, or rather crawled, up a flight or two to A&P’s room to discover that P too had had a disagreement with dinner. I had planned for a final day of sightseeing before heading to the airport the following day, but the most I did was walk really, really slowly to a place where I could buy beverages to keep me alive curled up in my room. A&P stayed on another few days and A took P to the doctor who confirmed food poisoning.

That was in the Spring of 2001. Fast forward to Fall 2002 and I find myself back in Kathmandu for a week. I planned to finally take the trip out to UNESCO World Heritage Site Boudhanath Stupa and then Pashupatinath, Nepal’s most important Hindu temple. These were the same sites I had missed the previous visit and to celebrate my plan I went to the same restaurant and also had the chicken. Was it really so shocking that in the middle of the night, around 1 am, I woke up with a familiar and unfortunate feeling? I tempted fate and it came back and bit me.

Yet I was determined. Though up most of the night with my, uh, issues, I dragged my weak, dehydrated self out to Boudhanath and then for extra measure walked the 2+ kilometer walk to Pashupatinath. The walk revived me some and my initial impressions of the temple were positive; it was colorful and the cultural importance and the comings and goings fascinating. However, then the smoke from the funeral pyres started to get to me, my stomach reminded me of its’ earlier malcontent, and I unfortunately caught site of a body part in a pyre alongside the river and I knew I had to get out of there.

I suppose getting food poisoning twice by the same restaurant in Kathmandu trumped the time I came down with a terrible bout of stomach issues following a cooking class in Thailand. I did not know whether to blame the green papaya or chicken from the wet market or my preparation of said items.

And then there was the time I came down with the mumps as an adult…

Yes, you read that right. And yes I did in fact receive the MMR vaccination as a child.

After I returned from that second bought of Nepalese food poisoning, I had a weeks of finals in Singapore, and then I flew to Bangkok to begin approximately seven weeks of backpacking in Thailand, Laos, and Burma for winter vacation (oh, I miss graduate school). In Bangkok my jaw started to ache, in a way it had never ached before. The following morning before I flew to Chiang Rai I had a lump on my jaw and felt queasy. By the time the plane landed I could hardly stand and my jaw had swollen even more. I made it to a guesthouse, checked in, got my pack to my room, and then stumbled down to the front desk area to ask if there were a clinic nearby. When I explained I could not walk to one even 500 meters away, a man in the lobby jumped to his feet and declared he would take me on his motorbike. He not only took me to the clinic, but he also waited with me and during my appointment, took me to the pharmacy, and then back to the guesthouse. When I tried to offer him payment he stated he was a Thai policeman and that is job was to help people. Awesome.

The doctor had told me that I had “mume.”which seemed a mysterious illness indeed. I put on a hoodie to cover my misshapen face and then secreted out to an Internet café where I used one of those online medical sites to input my symptoms and voila – mumps. I made sure to purchase a fair amount of beverages so that once again I could sequester myself to my room. I also bought a packet of pumpkin seeds – one of my favorite backpacker snacks – and after eating maybe three of them that caused my jaw to throb for hours afterward I was very, very sorry.

I read my Paul Theroux book and played many, many hands of solitaire with the deck of cards I used to always carry in my pack. After a week I felt well enough to move on – to the Thailand/Laos border to continue my trip, including a two day slow boat down the Mekong River.

Besides these rather unforgettable experiences I have had a few other opportunities to experience medical care overseas – I had my first sigmoidscopy in Tunisia, an emergency doctor visit in Singapore when my fever spiked and my hotel implemented their SARS protocol (I was SARS-free), my first pregnancy ultrasound in Jakarta, and a fun emergency room trip in Tasmania the night before a half marathon.

Thinking over all of these experiences reminded me that while I did feel pretty awful at the time, I did recover. And I shall recover from this too (the procedure was successful and I am on the mend). And maybe someday I will be able to write about it.

October 17, 2015 by trs

What China is This?

I stand above the Yangtze River for the Three Gorges cruise – the river and the gorges are not now what they once were.

I first came to China in 1994 as a student at Beijing Normal University as a part of the College of William & Mary’s study abroad program.

It was an eye-opening experience for me. On our second day in country we were served fried scorpions at lunch. Even more surprising to me is that 14 out of 16 of the students in our group ate them. I refused. (I then ordered a bowl of chicken soup only to find as I stirred it an eye ball popped to the surface – and this is how I kept my girlish figure while in China, by surviving on white rice with soy sauce and peanuts and garlic stir fried broccoli.) I had my first experience with a squatting toilet – something again I refused to use. I even held “it” one day during a 12 hour bus trip from Changsha to Zhangjiajie National Forest Park, steadfast in my determination as each rest stop only presented “traditional” facilities. A delayed flight and Mother Nature eventually forced my hand and it turned out not to be so bad.

In my Beijing Normal U dorm room. I cannot believe how great my hair looks.

We stayed in the international dorm – each of us assigned a Japanese roommate to encourage our Chinese language acquisition even first thing in the morning and just before bed. I had a room on the fifth floor of the dorm – no elevator of course. We had only one telephone per floor located at one end. Hot water in our showers was available from 5 PM. It was supposed to last until eight, but if you waited too long you were generally in for major disappointment – and a very brisk bathe. We also had two hot plates per floor for cooking. I used it perhaps twice in six months – not a surprise at all as my good friends know that is only a little less than I use my kitchen now.

I rented a shelf in a mini fridge of an enterprising Korean student. There I kept my few prized refrigerated items like cheese and Tang. Each of us was issued a large thermos. Most evenings I would make my way down the five flights and to a small brick building across from the dorm where there stood a very large coal furnace constantly heating water. I would pop off the corked top of the thermos and fill it with scalding water and then carry it back up to my room. I would leave the top off overnight to cool the water and then in the morning fill my smaller bottles with the water, mix in the Tang, and then switch the new bottles for the cool ones in the rented fridge.

The old hot water furnace and my super chic thermos. I thought it would look even older in Sepia; I was right.

I had an old bicycle that two thoughtful classmates acquired for me. As I understand it they staked out an area in the massive student bicycle parking area and monitored activity. They identified a weather-beaten green one that, according to them, had been left neglected for weeks. So they liberated it and gave it to me. I did not ask too many more questions. I took it to an on-campus bicycle repair shop to get it into riding shape and I joined the (hundreds) of thousands of Beijing cyclists that took to the roads daily.

I rode to class each morning, with my glass bottle of drinkable yogurt in my basket (the bottles were returned to the dorm café to get a few jiao back), and across town to the little Uygur village behind the Minority University where I would go to the last shed where I bought the most fabulous tudou qiu (potato balls) with a soy sauce and cilantro dipping sauce. Once while riding to my English teaching job of two Korean boys who lived in the Asian Games Village, all the spokes on my wheel dropped off one by one in a spectacular fashion. I simply coasted a few hundred feet to a roadside bicycle repair guy, who for a handful of kuai had me on the road again in no time.

Twenty years later I find myself once again living in China. Although I am in a different city I feel as though my life has circled back around. Amongst the modernity there are glimmers of the past and I experience the occasional sense of déjà vu that transports me back to the China I first knew.

Shanghai is so incredibly modern and glitzy now (as is Beijing and other major Chinese cities) that I imagine few students here would know what to do with the giant furnace I once had to use. And only one phone per hall would be cause for most students these days to walk out in protest.

A glimpse into our hard seat train compartment.

There are so many things that have changed. No longer are bicycles the chief transportation method. Gone are the bicycle lanes that rivaled those for cars and parking areas where they sat by the thousands awaiting their riders. There are still some intrepid cyclists, but they have been mostly replaced with fancy cars, mopeds, and even electric bicycles.

Train travel too is not what it used to be. The trains now, at least those I have had the pleasure of taking lately, are ultramodern and sleek. Comfortable reclining chairs with tray tables in clean and efficiently serviced non-smoking compartments. This is so far removed from the two day train ride in hard class chairs that my friends and I took between Beijing and Qingdao. On the return trip I remember an old man in front of us smoking beneath the no-smoking sign. When my friend and I asked him to put out the cigarette and pointed out the sign he took a deep draw and turned and blew all the smoke in our faces. The hard seats were just that – hard benches with unforgiving straight backs. Bleary-eyed and desperate for sleep I asked for and received the newspaper another man had finished. I took it and spread it down in the aisle and it was there where I went to sleep for a few hours. I was awoken in the morning at 6 am by the snack cart coming through – I was surrounded by apple cores and banana peels and other debris. And the time we took the two day hard sleeper from Beijing to Chongqing. We were the top of three bunks, maybe a foot and a half from our sleeper, i.e. hard fake leather slab, and the ceiling. A small electric fan by my head kept shorting out and when I tapped it sparks flew and it made a few more revolutions. THAT is train travel my friends, the kind that you never forget.

Advertising is also a bit different. Gone are the unimaginative roadside billboards extolling government policies like this one:

Hooray for the one child policy!

And instead they have been replaced by sleek advertisements for just about everything including luxury goods, international brands, and world-class performances on stage at first-class theaters. Even commercials that remind the Chinese to be good citizens of the world, such as this one, which might surprise many people outside of China:

And probably one of the most surprising things of all is the number of signs everywhere directing Chinese to behave in public. No smoking. No spitting. No littering. No this. No that. People get into lines. I can hardly believe it myself. Gone are the days at a fast food restaurant where those who were served first were those who fought their way to the counter best. Or like when I stood in line at the Forbidden City in Beijing and many people behind me chose to pay those in the front of the line to buy their tickets too. There are still those would-be line jumpers but these days the Chinese around them will usually give them a good scolding and maybe even rough them up.

But there are still glimpses of the past. Off the main glitzy streets, I mean just one block off, you can find clothes still hanging out to dry from apartment windows – even twenty or thirty stories up. Also many women still wear pantyhose in inappropriate lengths – knee highs with thigh high skirts or even thigh highs with short shorts. This really takes me back. People still squat down on their haunches on the street – today I passed a young woman doing this on West Nanjing Road, old Shanghai’s premier street. She was reading text on her smart phone.

The parks on mornings and weekends are still full of groups of old and young doing tai chi or ballroom dance. Nowadays you can also find the occasional belly dancing or hip hop group, sometimes right next to one another, their music and routines in side-by-side competition.

Taken in 1994 but except for the fashions (or even including the fashions) you could see this in most parks in China today.

I am especially tickled to see that correct English spelling and translation remains elusive. Despite the rise in the number of Chinese who speak English fluently, you can still find some fun signs about town.

The country is modernizing so quickly and leaving traditions behind; there are times when I do not feel I am living in China, but rather somewhere else. Somewhere with some Chinese characteristics but not quite China. Sort of like Singapore, but not exactly. It can be a challenge to live here – as an international student or a foreign diplomat – but it offers every visitor and expat, at the very least, some interesting experiences and never ceases to surprise. More than twenty years on and I am still trying to find my place in China.

October 4, 2015 by trs

Decompressing in the DR

I really, really, really needed this vacation with my daughter in the Dominican Republic.

Yeah, I said the Dominican Republic.

Usually when I mentioned that we were headed for the DR for the combination holiday of Mid-Autumn festival and the multi-day National Day together called Golden Week I heard: Why?

Well, why not?

The Occidental Grand Punta Cana Resort. This will do.

I am aware it is nowhere near Shanghai. That is sort of the point. I have a history of traveling places nowhere near where I am living. When I lived in Jakarta I vacationed in Moldova, the south of France and South Africa. And when we lived in Juarez we visited places such as Panama, the United Arab Emirates, and the Isle of Man.

Do I have friends in the DR? Did family meet us? No and no. I just had a few criteria for this trip: warm weather, a beach, small child-friendly hotel, in a new-to-me country, and fairly far away. The DR met them all. Check. Check. Check.

It might seem a bit crazy to travel 27 hours and 45 minutes or so with a small child to get to a vacation destination. Maybe.

The population of Shanghai is approximately 24 million people squeezed into an area of 2,445 square miles. It is almost impossible to ever be alone in Shanghai (and as I have a small child any chance to be alone is already infinitesimally small). The DR on the other hand has a population of 10.7 million in an area many times larger than that of Shanghai. Even with the near constant music in the DR – the wonderful tipico band that greets arrivals at the Punta Cana airport and the Merengue or top 40 hits playing in the restaurants or during the nightly resort entertainment – it felt quieter than most any day in China. That most of the sounds were the soft roll of ocean waves and the rustle of the wind through palm fronds and laughter did not hurt either.

I also did not run into a single Chinese tourist. Not one.

Sunrise. Not a Chinese visa applicant in sight.

I very much enjoyed hearing and speaking Spanish again. Granted I would be very hard-pressed to score above a 1+ (if even) on a Foreign Service Institute test in Spanish at this point, having forgotten terribly important words like nuclear non-proliferation or labor union. Yet I remembered the word for bacon so though FSI might not agree with me, I feel I am winning that balance sheet.

Sunrise.

This was not my usual vacation. Any of my previous travel stories will tell you that much. I am not generally the stay in one place and do little kind of traveler. But strange times (adjudicating 16,000 visas and counting let’s say) call for strange measures, which to me is an all-inclusive resort with nine restaurants, three swimming pools, a Kids’ Club, nightly entertainment, tennis courts, archery, spa, gym, “Punta Cana’s best nightclub” and a bunch of other amenities. I’ll tell you I was so downright lazy that we went to only two swimming pools, ate in only four restaurants, and managed to do little else.

Most of my days went like this:
Wake up (and this started around 1 am due to jet lag and then gradually managed to move closer to 5:45). See sunrise. Eat breakfast. Laze around room. Laze around pool. Eat lunch. Laze around. Walk on beach. Eat dinner (though this was only once the jet lagged had eased and we did not fall asleep before sunset) . Sleep. It was magical. Once I had passed the half way point of my vacation I even began to wish I had booked two weeks of this instead of eight days.

The oldest cathedral in the Americas

We did make it off the resort twice. The first time was for an all day tour to Santo Domingo. As a self-declared history buff, if there was anything I was going to do while in the Dominican Republic other than little-to-nothing at the hotel it was to see Colonial Santo Domingo, the first permanent settlement in the New World. Only the fourth day in of a twelve hour time difference, I was not sure how C or I would fair with the jet lag, but the trip went off without a hitch. Well, okay C woke up at 2:30 am and vomited for an hour or so, but hey that is just travel with kids, right? Right?? She fell back asleep, and then woke demanding bananas; 2.5 bananas later she was ready for our 2 ½ hour bus trip to Santo Domingo. We slept most of the way there and back and enjoyed all the sites for the day. They crammed a whole lot in and yet it did not feel particularly rushed. I would have liked more time at some places and to see others that were only drive-bys, but overall I was quite pleased with the trip. And C was not the only child on the trip. Another couple brought their one year old and there was also a two year old boy. All the kids did really well. Hooray for parents traveling and sightseeing with their kids!

Our first view of Santo Domingo

Our second off-resort trip was to Manati Park so that C could see some animals. We were the first picked up in what C referred to as the “Rainbow Bus,” the colorful US-school-bus-like transport painted in the full pallet blasting energetic Merengue music as it made its way from resort to resort and then through a torrential downpour before arriving at the park. Four other similar buses disgorged their passengers at the same time and a brief flood of people poured in. It is not a particularly large park and not particularly awesome, but it is a good place to take a small child who loves animals and is too small to take part in other outings like swimming with dolphins or snorkeling or caving. And she got to not only ride some ponies (a lifelong dream even at age 3) but the staff even let her help them as they brushed and washed a pony. The guy even gave her the lead so C could take the pony back to his stall.

At the Taino Village in Manati Park

It wasn’t a perfect vacation mind you. There was bored, beer-guzzling Bob from Chicago who took a little too much of an interest in my daughter and I, or maybe just in my mini-bar beer. On the evening of the lunar eclipse, I popped just outside my room for a look-see while C snoozed. It was just before 11 pm. The man I will call Bob appeared to be heading out but then stopped to comment on the moon. We got to chatting for a bit. He seemed friendly enough. He was headed to the all night pizzeria for a snack and, after I had mentioned I do not drink, he said he would come back to get my neglected mini-bar beers. Given the time, I expected he would head up to get pizza and then be back before 11:30 pm for the beers. He knocked on my door at 2:30 AM! And then asked if I would wake him for sunrise the next morning when we headed to the beach. It seemed harmless enough though he was drunk enough to be swaying dangerously as we made our way to the beach. And except that then he just kept stopping by at odd hours. Odd because it is an all-inclusive resort that includes free alcohol with most meals and at any of the seven bars open from as early as 9 am until 1 am. And odd because at no time did I say, hey Bob, my daughter and I would love to have you randomly insinuate yourself into our holiday.

I was pleased as punch to not only see the lunar eclipse but to actually get a decent photo with my point and shoot. But beware those you meet under the lunar eclipse.

I suspect Bob is just a lonely guy who got his signals crossed (or is so numbed by alcohol he is unable to read them) but nonetheless I requested a room change. Thankfully it was granted. We still saw Bob around the resort at least once a day, but at least I did not have to keep sitting in my room pretending I did not hear the knocks on our hotel room door.

There was also Jorge who came to my room to check my air conditioning unit. He was only in the room for maybe five minutes before his pointed questions revealed I am a single mom and we live in China. Jorge graciously offered to move to Shanghai to take care of me and give C a father. As romantic a proposal from an overweight only-Spanish-speaking hotel maintenance guy I had just met sounds, I turned him down.

Our final day was my birthday. I spent it, in very uncharacteristic fashion, doing almost nothing. I even took my very fair-freckled self to the beach for over three hours. After several hours of play my daughter wrapped herself up in a towel, lay on a beach chair and watched the ocean. She then turned to me and said, “Mom, let’s go home.” “To the hotel room?” I asked. “No mom, to Shanghai.” I told her the following day we would head home (via a little overnight stop in Newark).

Traveling to the Dominican Republic reminded me why I love to travel and see new places. It reminded me how much I love tropical countries and beaches. And it gave me the opportunity to relax and spend quality time with my child.

Oh, and not a single Chinese tourist.

Another sunrise.

September 13, 2015 by trs

Ode to Nanjing

Nanjing (南京), it means “south capital” but to me in the traditional Chinese fashion of associating long-winded English translations to a few characters it means “long weekend getaway from the sinking morass of endless visa adjudications.”

It had been 14 weeks since returning from my two-week May getaway. Fourteen weeks through a historically-busy, record-breaking crazy visa application summer. I needed a break.

View of Nanjing from the 45th floor of the Zifeng Tower

I know this falls into the realm of a “first world problem” and that even at home there might be quite a few people who would roll their eyes at my whines regarding lack of vacation time, but to me I really and truly had reached a breaking point.

“Capture of Nanking Rain and a windstorm rage blue and yellow over Chung the bell mountain as a million peerless troops cross the Great River. The peak is a coiled dragon, the city a crouching tiger more dazzling than before. The sky is spinning and the earth upside down. We are elated yet we must use our courage to chase the hopeless enemy. We must not stoop to fame like the overlord Hsiang Yu. If heaven has feeling it will grow old and watch our seas turn into mulberry fields.” ~Mao Ze Dong, April 1949

I could not find a pretty quote about Nanjing. Despite its significant role in Chinese history it is its more recent history, the brutal subjugation of the city in 1937, that it is perhaps most famous for. The weekend might also have been an odd choice of destination considering it immediately followed China’s newest national holiday – “Victory Day” – marking the 70th anniversary of victory in WWII. Although it was announced by the Chinese government in May it did not occur to me as I was buying the train tickets in early August that perhaps the location of one of the greatest atrocities inflicted on the Chinese as part of the larger WWII conflict happened in Nanjing. I wondered why some of the trains were already booked full (though it could have as much to do with a multi-day holiday as anything else, most people were given both Thursday September 3 and Friday September 4 off).

Regardless, our mini holiday in Nanjing became my reward, my focus, my mantra.

Nanjing! Nanjing! Nanjing!

And the trip finally arrived – and I remembered how I love to travel and learn about new places, the history, the culture, and especially to see another place in the country where I serve. I also was reminded how it can be a wee bit challenging to travel with a toddler especially when I insist on trying to do things certain ways.

The Zifeng Tower. Our room was waaaaaaaaaaay near the top

Like taking public transport. But I packed light and we were able to use not only the Shanghai metro line to reach the Hongqiao Railway station, get ourselves onto the bullet train to Nanjing (less than 2 hours – 300 kilometers or about 186 1/2 miles), then we easily maneuvered our way through the Nanjing metro system. Well, as easy as one can with a duffel bag, stroller with one malfunctioning wheel, and a preschooler. But then they made it easy for us – touch screens, choice of English, plenty of easy to read maps, and a direct 10 stop trip from Nanjing South Station to Gulou, our stop.

I booked us a room at the Intercontinental Nanjing, which occupies the lobby and floors 45-81 of Zifeng Tower, the tallest building in the city (at 1,480 feet tall). Regular guest rooms are on floors 49 to 71 and through a series of events we found ourselves with a room on the 71st floor! As we rode up the elevator, beginning on the 45th floor I thought that we were already well above the 19th floor I live on in Shanghai, which already seemed rather high up.

It was a bit of a cloudy day and our view was sometimes very nearly obscured during our visit – because sometimes we were inside a cloud.

After settling in we headed to the very old Jiming (Rooster Crowing) temple, one of the oldest in Nanjing. It was within walking distance of the hotel and I figured a worthy first stop. Because 3 ½ kids love old, historic Buddhist temples, right? She might have liked it more if we had not had to pass the Paleontology Museum on the way. Posters of cool-looking cartoon dinosaurs and a nearly full glass wall revealing some equally cool dinosaur skeletons just had to be on display. Any interest C might have had in Chinese/Nanjing/Buddhist history was quickly gone (I give my kid the benefit of the doubt). Then I had to keep hearing about the dinosaurs, the dinosaurs, the dinosaurs for the rest of the block.

Entrance gate to Jiming Temple, with a view of the Zifeng Tower in the background.

Thank goodness the temple included three large incense sticks in their ticket entrance price. C took these to be drum sticks, specifically her drum sticks and the temple as her castle and was placated for a little while. She was even okay with climbing up all the stairs. Particularly as once on the third or so level she could look down and yell at her subjects. “Hey, all you all down there! This is C! This is my castle. I am the police! Please listen to me! Stop what you are doing!” When I asked her why she kept yelling she said it was because no one was listening. I pointed out she was yelling in English and that most, if not all, of the people coming in to the temple were Chinese. So she switched to yelling random Chinese words of her choosing. Good thing the Chinese generally like little kids.

At the top level, just below the pagoda, we enjoyed some time joining the crowd throwing coins into the large Chinese urn for good luck. C likes this kind of activity. Then I showed her where everyone was placing their incense sticks and demonstrated how we would do the same. She seemed completely on board until we actually lit them and placed them standing with the other incense. Then she lost it. As luck would have it (perhaps the temple gods were smiling down on us?) we turned a corner as she sobbed and found three perfectly nice incense sticks lying on a temple step. The day was saved!

We headed back down and then on to Ming Dynasty City Walls, apparently one of the largest city walls ever constructed in China and still with large portions intact. C was not impressed. She made it clear that she did not want to see any walls but instead wanted to see dinosaurs! It started to rain. It was around 4 pm and we were just up the street from the Paleontology Museum and so made the correct mom decision to return to the dinosaurs.

C skipped up the steps happily right into the arms of a museum curator who informed us the museum closed at 4. What? Who closes a museum at 4? Smart little C immediately broke into huge sobs accompanied by the word dinosaur in both English and Chinese. As the door was wide open and other kids and their parents were still in the museum, he relented and said we could just visit the dinos in the foyer. C perked up immediately – though this was short lived when she learned after ten minutes it was time to go and she walked out, lip pouted, shoulders hunched, dragging her feet. The curator told us to come back that weekend – open 9 am to 4 pm Saturday and Sunday!

An hour at the hotel pool and another 30 minutes in our awesome tub and C forgot all about dinosaurs.

The following morning we took the metro to the Nanjing Massacre Memorial Hall. Yeah, I sure do know how to pick the family friendly locations. But C is a good traveler and she was very good here as well.

Outside the Nanjing Massacre Memorial Hall.

It was a Saturday and the one after the new Victory Day holiday, so there was a long line, but with the exception of a few line jumpers it was managed very orderly and well. I have long wanted to visit Nanjing and I knew that when I did I would visit this memorial hall. This is a sobering place and is on par to visiting the Holocaust Museum in DC or a concentration camp like Auschwitz or the Hiroshima Memorial Peace Park or the Killing Fields of Cambodia – all of which I have visited. It is a hard place to visit yet also a “must-see” to understand a time in history and serve as witness to the horrors humans are capable of committing, appreciate the resiliency of survivors, and resolve in your heart to never allow this again.

We spent most of our time in the park area and not in the museum, though we did have some thirty or forty-five minutes inside. In theory I could have spent longer there – the displays are well-done and informative – but given the subject matter our total hour and a half at the memorial hall was all we could take. C demanded lunch and then either dinosaurs or elephants.

Elephants, even stone ones at a Ming Dynasty mausoleum, are cool.

After consulting C elephants it was. And those elephants would be the large stone ones, along with several other stone animals, flanking the Sacred Way to the Ming Xiaoling Mausoleum, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, located at the foot of Purple Mountain. Thank goodness for those animals and the lovely shaded walk – C approved! She also did not mind the other walk with large stone soldiers flanking the way and climbing through some large gateways. She did show some rebellion at the Golden Water Bridge. The carved dragons, though I pointed out they looked like a bit like dinosaurs, did not impress her in the least. Arms folded, she delivered me a few pointed raspberries in my direction, but agreed to soldier on.
The Mausoleum is huge. We passed through archways and walked through or around memorial halls finally to the large palace-like building at the end and we climbed up all those steps too. Little C bounded up them like a champ.

Although there might have still been time to make it over to the Sun Yatsen Mausoleum, had I still been a single woman, I called it day. C agreed this was an excellent decision. We still had to make our way all the way back from the tomb and find a way back to the hotel. This proved to be much more difficult than I expected as every single taxi driver I saw refused to stop. Finally we found a bus stop that took us to the metro and we were back to the hotel for the evening.

On Sunday morning I did try to reward C with a trip to the Paleontology Museum, after all she deserved it for being such a good sport the day before. But wouldn’t you know it we arrive at the museum around 9:30 am and they tell me it is closed all day. Poor little C. She was disappointed. I owe her some dinosaurs for sure.

View towards Xuanwu Lake and Purple Mountain from the Nanjing City Wall.

We continued on to the Nanjing City Walls. C made it quite clear she did not want to see the “stupid walls.” She’s 3 and did not really use the word “stupid” but it was so implied in her huffy attitude. I insisted and she plodded alongside me, heavily sighing, shoulders hunched. It became warm – our hottest day so far and we were exposed up on the wall. And I began to think that maybe seeing the walls was okay but walking along them just might have been “stupid.” Sometimes mommy is wrong.

We did eventually make our way to the next gate, Xuanwu gate, from where we could descend from the walls and found ourselves in the middle of Nanjing’s Sunday matchmaking market. There are few things that matchmaking grannies and grandpas like to see more than a 3 year old, curly-blonde haired girl. C handled it pretty well.

Back at the hotel enjoying our welcome (farewell?) drink at the café while a hostess played peek-a-boo with C seemed a good way to end the trip. We successfully navigated ourselves back to the train station with the metro and onto the bullet train to Shanghai. Nanjing has a lot to offer and I think we will back. Maybe next time we will finally see the dinosaurs.

September 2, 2015 by trs

I Love You Backpacking Long Time – Part Ten Still in Bali

I haven’t had a hot shower in over a month. I wear flip flops every single day. I wake up when the roosters start crowing. I have mango or papaya or pineapple or water apples or mangosteens or rambutans or some other exotic fruit every day (though durian, soursops, and snake fruit are not to my liking). I feel fairly busy every day although the next day I couldn’t tell you what I did. It is quite lovely.

A stack of Balinese offerings. I made a whole bunch of these one day. Not great for the allergies, but a great way to feel like one of the women.

The bus dropped me off at Lovina Beach, in the village of Kalibukbuk, a suburb of the town of Singaraja, in the regency of Buleleng, Northern Bali on Christmas Eve. There I met a cute guy and decided to stay a bit longer than a few days. After some more days I moved my departing flight back a week. A week later I moved it back even further, checked out of my guesthouse and moved in with the cute guy and his extended family. It was my Eat, Pray, Love move before there was an Eat, Pray, Love.

When I say his extended family, I really mean just about everyone. He lived in a fairly traditional multi-family compound home. The entrance to the home was to the north, towards the beach. As you enter the gate in the center is an open courtyard. To the right of the courtyard there are three rooms. The first is a roofed area, walled on three sides and completely open on the fourth. It is an all-purpose room, there are simple wood benches, and there is a loom. Later, after I have been here some time, I sat with a group of women here to make hundreds of Balinese flower offerings. The second and third rooms are kitchens. I learn later that it is this way because the cute guy’s mother does not get along with one of her daughter’s in law and they refuse to use the same kitchen.

To the south at the back of the courtyard were two bathrooms. They were two large rooms each with a concrete floor, a squatting toilet, and a large cistern with buckets to use to wash or to flush the toilets.

I have to take a deep breath before I throw a bucket full of cold water on me. Usually a few buckets later and I feel quite nice, but I can never quite get over the shock of that first bucketful. And the toilet paper, or rather the lack of it, is rather a mystery to me. No one else uses it but how they accomplish this feat without soaking themselves is beyond me. I can observe the eating with hands (or rather hand, only the right) and sort of copy it and get some of the food within the range of my mouth. But I cannot exactly observe the mysterious toilet paper-less feats. So every week I buy myself another roll or two and continue to look somewhat like an idiot clutching my paper as I make my way to the bathroom.

Seemed like a good reason to stop traveling for awhile…

The left of the courtyard had the living quarters. The southwest portion housed cute guy’s third oldest brother, his pregnant wife, and their two daughters. From their section, the next room was that for cute guy’s parents. The was then a long open hallway where the family gathered for watching television and eating sitting on the floor; it wrapped around with more hallway and two additional bedrooms, one for cute guy’s second oldest brother, his wife, and their daughter, and then cute guy’s room.

Cute guy is named Kadek. Though I usually try not to give away names, because of Balinese naming convention, this actually gives away little. Names in Bali. You can call me Putu. If I were born in Bali that would be my name as I am the first born. In Bali children are named by their birth order and then given another name. If you are first born then you are called Putu or Wayan. If you are the second child you are Kadek or Made. The third is Komang or Gede. The fourth is Kutut. If you are the fifth child, then you are Putu or Wayan again. And so on. The names are for males and females. Kadek is named so because he is the sixth child, but he also has a nickname. However while in school he was called Made because there were already enough Kadeks to go around. His second name is Partama, but until the age of 5 it was something else, until his uncle said it was a stupid name and it was changed. There are no family names. The second name, the given name, is also chosen depending on caste, but it is changing was some children have foreign names. Some people are called by their birth order name, some by their second name, and some by a completely different nickname.

Heading to the temple with the family.

It was amazing to live with this family. I learned a lot about Balinese culture and incredibly was welcomed by and became woven into the lives of the family.

Kadek’s third oldest brother’s wife gave birth to their third child while I lived there. One morning they roared off on the motorcycle to the hospital and a few hours they roared back with a newborn.

Nearly every day for four months I watched Kadek’s second sister-in-law Ngah, from the village of Tenganan famous for its double ikat weaving, sit at her simple wood loom, pumping her legs and snaking her arms in an elaborate and fluid dance until she produced a beautiful piece of finished purple cloth with gold threads. When she, with her sister in law, came to my room to offer me the piece at the family and friends price, I readily accepted it. I felt I belonged.

It took a little time for the children to warm to me, but soon I felt like part of the family. Bodoh tai tunglep, which translates from Balinese to “you are as ugly as chicken shit” is a fond taunt of little children. All the children from three and up regularly call themselves and their friends UACS (ugly as chicken shit). It is a sign of my acceptance by the children that they now fondly call me the same. It is very touching and often brings a tear to my eye to be called ugly as chicken shit, have the child smack me, and run away giggling. Progress it is!

At the community temple wearing the beautifully woven skirt from Ngah.

In my time in northern Bali I had the opportunity to attend a wedding ceremony, a cremation, a tooth filing ceremony, a child’s naming ceremony, and a Balinese wayang kulit (shadow puppet) performance as part of a wedding reception. I also was able to attend important festivals in the Balinese calendar.

Bali is gearing up for the big festival of Galungan, when the deified ancestors return to the family temple and must be entertained with food. This week the family has been busy. Sunday was the day to prepare the bananas. Monday was the day to prepare the caked of rice and today is the day to kill the pig. Ah, nothing like a good animal sacrifice. Okay to be truthful I am not all that comfortable with the animal sacrifice. It unnerves me to hear the squeals of pigs or squawks of chickens in their death throes. It is more unnerving to step outside and see a just roasted pig on a spit leaning up against the kitchen door or to have a chicken with its throat cut trying to make its last getaway throw itself at my feet.

So the deified ancestors are coming and will be around to party for about three days. Three being an auspicious number for the Balinese, as it is for many Asians. I will probably borrow some temple dress from Kadek’s sister-in-law again. Although the last time I was tempted to stuff the top with toilet paper as my bust is a bit smaller than the average Balinese woman’s.

I also experienced the Balinese New Year. This Saturday is New Year’s Eve and Sunday welcomes the New Year 1923. Yesterday there was a procession from the family temple to the community temple and then finally to the beach (or lake in other parts of Bali) to cleanse in preparation for the New Year. I was in my traditional temple clothing, my handmade sarong from Kadek’s sister-in-law. Today people are generally getting the house ready and heading to their home villages if they have not already. Tomorrow there will be a festival of giant monster effigies called Ogoh-ogoh. They were built in competition between villages. They will be paraded through the streets and then burned. Then on Sunday people stay home to welcome the first day of the new year. Traditionally people do not eat, drink, work, smoke, or go outside the home compound, although generally the guidelines are not so strict anymore. Eating and drinking will be practiced in many homes and some people, probably me included, will sneak out for a little while just to see what it is like out on the streets with no one else about. Happy New Year 1923.

An amazing demonstration of a village-made Ogoh-ogoh

It was not all festivals and celebrations of life events. Many of the days there was little to do; it rained every single day in February. But I went on walks, several dolphin sighting trips with snorkeling, I learned to play pool pretty well as that was one of the few pastimes in the local bars and I memorized all the songs to the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ Californication because it was the primary soundtrack and go-to playlist for the bars and bands in the area.

Ultimately it did not work out between Kadek and I, though I am very grateful for the time I was able to spend with him and his family and the people I met in Lovina. However, it was time to stop putting off the final legs of my around the world journey.

August 12, 2015 by trs

I Love You Backpacking Long Time – Part Four Hungary to Bulgaria

Hungary got off to a rough start. I dislike arriving in a new country after dark. If I had stayed the night at the unfriendly hostel in Zagreb I would have arrived in Pecs early afternoon the next day. Instead I arrived at Pecs after 9 pm. The train station was a ghost town. No money changers or restaurants or anything at all was open. I had no idea the exchange rate or the direction to go for the hostel. I went to an ATM to withdrawal money. I went with 2000 forint and hoped that I was not withdrawing my life savings. Then I found a taxi.

I arrived after dark with no map of the city and no bearings. I had only the name of a hotel from my youth hostel guide. I probably could have walked – it would only have been about 30 minutes – but I did not know in what direction to go. So I took a taxi and was ripped off royally. The taxi ride, according to the hotel desk clerk, should have cost me only 600 forints, but the driver’s meter moved at a furious pace and it cost me 2000! I was so tired I just wanted to cry because it was all the money I had just taken out of the ATM and I was hungry but I had no money to buy food. The hotel was more expensive than I thought as there were no single rooms. However they were nice enough to let me pay the following day when I could get some money. The hotel was pretty nice and the staff was extremely kind.

The next day though I learned the exchange rate was quite in my favor making the 2000 forints only about US$7 and Pecs turned out to be a very pretty town. After two days I headed to Budapest.

A little Buda and a little Pest

I did not write much on Budapest. My time there was a lovely respite after the realities of the Balkans and the coming craziness of Romania. I took day trips to Szentendre and Eger, the latter where I had a glass of the famous local red wine with my Hungarian pizza lunch and then walked delightfully buzzed through the castle. (I rarely drink so one strong Hungarian red was quite the treat) I walked both hilly Buda and flat Pest, crossing the Danube multiple times. I soaked in the Turkish baths and sat languidly in parks overlooking the city. I even eschewed my usual alone time and hung out with several other backpackers from the hostel, most of whom were also taking breaks from the rigors of the road while in Budapest. I played billiards at the hostel and even made out with a fellow backpacker (ha! I bet you were beginning to think I was too prudish for such a thing.) Budapest seemed to be the place to let my hair down.

It was a good thing because Romania was about to test my traveler mettle.

Romania. So far it has been quite a test for me. I took an overnight train from Budapest. When I bought my ticket I picked up a handy flyer on how to stay safe on the train. One tip was not to sit in a train compartment alone. Unfortunately I was the only person in my compartment and there seemed only ten other people in the whole car. I thought other people might come in, but no one ever did. As a result I felt a bit uncomfortable sleeping. The pamphlet mentioned that many compartment doors, when closed, could not be opened from the outside. Not my compartment door. I had a bicycle chain with me to sometimes secure my backpack if I need to use the facilities. I could have chained it closed had there been anything to chain it to. So I made sandwiches I had made and packed and read a book.

I had fallen asleep when after 11 pm a conductor came to check my ticket. He informed me I was in the wrong car. I pointed to my ticket, which clearly showed car 454, the car I was in. He pulled out a book showing the train carriages—there were two cars with the same number! I was told to move to the next car because very soon the train would separate. At the station my passport was checked by border officials and I waited a while. I could feel the train being disconnected, but I was still alone in my compartment and unsure if I was in the right place. I went in search of someone to ask but there was no one else in my car or any of the other cars I checked! I looked outside of the train, in the pitch black of the Hungarian-Romanian border station, and saw no one. I began to panic. I was very tired. Finally, I saw a man with a flashlight and I asked him if I was on the train to Sighosoara. He said no and began to laugh. “Where?” I asked. He pointed off into the distance and with a sinking feeling I came to the conclusion I had been left behind. I lost my cool, kicked the train door, and could feel tears starting to form.

Sighisoara. It does not come off as the hometown of a blood-thirsty prince.

I gathered up my things and got off the train to look for someone. Picking my way along the train tracks in the dark I found some border officials who showed me my train – still there but on another track. Again, I was the only person in my compartment, but I spoke with the other six people in the car. Three were Romanians, one of which spoke English, the other three were Czech or Croatian, two of which spoke English. I tried to settle down to sleep, but this train was in much poorer condition than the Hungarian train. My previous compartment had been warm, the new was one was very cold. We stopped again at the Romanian side for some time for the border formalities.

I woke up around 6:10 am and began to prepare to disembark. The train was scheduled to arrive in Sighisoara at 6:35. The time came and went with no sign of my stop. I asked a woman in my car who told me we had passed the stop some time before. After a minute or two of despair, I decided to continue on to Brasov and just find a place to stay there. Luckily no train conductors came to check my ticket on the train or upon exiting the station in Brasov. I later learned that there had been a time change; Romania was one hour ahead. So when I woke at 6:10 it really had been 7:10.

The excitement of Romania did not end there. From Brasov I took a day trip to Sighisoara, the birth place of Vlad Tepes or Dracula. When I took a bus to the Brasov train station, I had a narrow escape from two overzealous ticket checkers.

I was pulled off the bus by two bus ticket collectors who demanded I show them my passport. I refused and they pulled out some licenses that appeared as if they had been made on a Fisher Price laminating machine and demanded my passport again. My offense was not validating the 20 cent bus ticket with a hole punch machine that looked more like a bottle opener. I refused again. I had after all bought a bus ticket and had given it to one of them. I refused again and tried to walk away. They grabbed my arms and I shook them off and yelled at them. They followed me five or ten minutes down the street threatening me with the police and fines of $1000, occasionally coming close and shoving me. I was nervous but grateful it was broad daylight and I tried my best to ignore them. Finally I turned around and poked my finger into the chest of one of the men, yelled for him to leave me alone, and then turned and bolted down the street, running as fast as I could toward the train station. They pursued for a block or two and then gave up. Whew. I figure they were probably not even legit bus people but had hoped I would be afraid enough to give them money or my passport, which they would then use to extort money for its return.

Despite the great bus ticket chase, I enjoyed my days in Brasov. I remember the amazing beauty of the old town; particularly people watching as I slowly dined in a sidewalk café on the town square. Day trips to the medieval town of Sighisoara and to Bran Castle, getting my Vlad Tepes fix, were in order. Sighisoara, with the exception of some modern conveniences, felt little changed since the days The Impaler took his baby steps in the town. I had lunch at Casa Dracul but kept to a light meal despite blood being on the menu. In keeping with apparent Romanian tradition to try to rip off foreigners the restaurant tried to pull a fast one by sneakily adding the “bread I didn’t order or eat” charge, but I was on to that one. At some ruins before Bran Castle, myself and two other backpackers were stalked by a ticket seller demanding a camera charge – for taking pictures of some low stone ruins on a hillside. I did not relent on that one either.

From Brasov I headed to Bucharest with a stop off to tour the more modern neo-Renaissance Peles Castle in Sinaia. I enjoyed the tour of the palace and the wooded walk back to the train station. A fellow US traveler joined me. He was heading north, while I south, but on the way to the train station he regaled me with a tale of his recent attack by dogs. I was fascinated, but would soon realize that his words were more than apocryphal.

I previously wrote about my own unfortunate incident with a dog attack in Bucharest and departure from Romania in my post A Blast from My Travel Past. It is unfortunate that my eight days in Romania are colored by so many attempts at minor extortion and bribery culminating in the dog attack. Even on departure day, an additional swindling attempt and a fake border official wrapped up my visit. I cannot say I was not glad to put Romania behind me.

The photo is a bit blurry but I liken it to “instagraming” instead because it gives Tsarevets Fortress in Veliko Tarnovo a soft dreamlike feel which it was after Romania.

I traveled five days in Bulgaria with an Aussie backpacker I met my last day in Bucharest, after returning from my dog confrontation. We stopped first at Veliko Tarnovo to visit the historic town and castle that served as Bulgaria’s medieval capital. Then we headed on to Sofia, the modern day capital. What I remember most about Sofia is unfortunately not any of the sites other than the gold-brick streets. I remember an old woman swathed in traditional garb and baggy stockings squatting right in the middle of the road to, uh, loosen her bowels. I remember contacting the US Embassy doctor to see about getting my rabies shots. He arranged to come to the hostel to give me the first shot (he called back later to suggest I wait until arrival in Macedonia as they had the international grade serum for the US troops stationed there, rather than the Bulgarian-made serum). I also remember meeting the US single mom traveling with her seven year old son; they were also staying in the hostel and interestingly enough I would meet them again, six months later, on the north shore of Bali. It’s funny what you remember.

On our last day the Aussie and I visited Rila Monastery. Then the following day we parted ways as I headed to Macedonia.

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