When I last left off, my friend G and I were flagging down a cab in the Santa Ana neighborhood of Panama City after having our passports, credit cards, camera, and money stolen by some teenage punks. Yes, it was stupid to be wandering around the hood in PC at night (especially when you are a group of two or more women, which attracts unwanted attention no matter where you are). However we’d been sketched out by our previous cab ride, and we were staying in an area that was not our first choice, due to every other cheap hostel and hotel being booked that night. I consider myself a savvy traveler and an unusually cautious person, so the fact that we fell prey to this hurts my pride a bit. I get over that feeling quickly when I realize that this kind of thing happens to everyone, and I’m just glad we made it out of there alive.
After telling off our creepy cab driver and stumbling out back into the night but into familiar territory, we wandered back to Mamallena, the first hostel we’d stayed at, aka home sweet home. The Australian dude who runs the place, Stuart, has got a dry sense of humor and has undoubtedly seen his fair share of American and European backpacker douches, even during his short tenure as a hostel owner. However he couldn’t have been nicer to us in our hour of need. We had no cash, no ID, and no means of making a phone call. G was scraped up from her scuffle with the three punks whom it took to steal her bag. We would have been royally screwed if we’d have had to have gone back to our hotel in Santa Ana.
Stuart let us make a long series of phone calls to banks to cancel bank cards, and to family to have some money sent to us. He insisted we have a drink. He let us sleep on the couches, and even offered to lend us money. The kindness we experienced that night seemed miraculous to me, and makes me rethink my preference for staying in locally-owned, off-the-beaten-path establishments. Sometimes being plugged in and having the resources of a trendy hostel is a godsend. In short, if you’re a budget traveler going to Panama City, do yourself a favor and stay at Mamallena. In addition to being awesome, they can also hook you up with an amazing trip to the San Blas Islands, which is nearly impossible to do yourself.
After a short night of sleep on the couch cushions of Mamallena’s patio, G and I embarked for the police station once more, to finish filing our report. As stupid as filing a police report seems, it was totally necessary in our case, especially since we were to get emergency passports that lacked an entrance stamp. Our police report answered the quizzical looks of more than one airport security professional.
We had a fairly good experience with the interpreter at the police station, and were soon on our way to the US Embassy. We had a flight booked to Bocas del Toro (western Panamanian archipelago) the next day, but neither of us had high hopes for getting documents immediately. We didn’t have any sort of ID on us. We took a number, sat in the waiting area, and hoped for the best.
It turns out that losing your passport in Panama City as an American ain’t that big of a deal. Two hours and $100 later, I had a brand-new emergency passport, complete with the worst-ever passport photo (taken in a passport photo truck outside the embassy the morning after being mugged, on about 3 hours’ sleep). Our trip to Bocas would actually happen!
From here on out, it was remarkably smooth sailing. With passports we could get money wired to us, and instead of stressing about the money we had lost, we just tried to keep a strict budget. We’d already bought our tickets to Bocas, and we had another week to enjoy being in the tropics.
Though watching the dogs run through the snow kept me entertained for most of the nearly two weeks we spent in Bozeman, we also spent the time cross country skiing (me and my husband), downhill skiing (me and my father-in-law, who is such a badass that he takes the lifts that require you to carry an avalanche beeper – I stuck to the easier stuff), visiting my father-in-law’s farm and seeing his horses, and generally hanging out in my in-laws’ cozy abode.
The farm. Trooper and Jewel have dozens of acres to roam around on. Apparently the few feet of snow doesn't bother them.
My in-laws' cozy place, nestled in among the trees. The larger building is the shed; the smaller one is the actual house.
Trying to stay warm at Bridger Bowl
Having too much fun on my FIL's new snow mobile. We tipped over moments later.
Plans have been made, tickets have been purchased (though as we know, plans sometimes get canceled — I’m looking at you, South Africa vacation). This January a friend and I will be traveling to…
PANAMA!
That’s right, a full-time grad student and a barely-employed, soon-to-be student are throwing fiscal caution (er, and reality) to the wind, and taking an almost two-week excursion down to the “crossroads of the world.” Sure, there is some major flooding going on right now, but hopefully that will clear up in the next month. At any rate, there are a number of different areas to explore, including rainforest, beaches, and islands. Panama City is supposedly the most happening metro area in Central America, so we will be sure to hang there for a few days. I’ve been to Costa Rica twice before, so I have a little Spanish and generally feel comfortable traveling in that part of the world. And as the Moon guide says:
It’s hard to think of a single country on the planet that has so much to offer visitors, yet so few actual visitors. Just for starters, it has incredible natural beauty, a modern infrastructure, good roads, clean water, year-round warm weather, a peaceful atmosphere, and a rich history.
This is Nina. She’s a rescue mutt from the SPCA. Though she’s come out of her shell considerably since we first got her three years ago, she’s still paranoid about many mundane occurences and is outright terrified of things like men walking on the sidewalk and trucks of any kind — especially garbage trucks. Her personality type is likely an INFJ: “gentle, caring, complex and highly intuitive individuals. . . they live in a world of hidden meanings and possibilities.”
High on life
This is Maude. She’s also a rescue, though she never ended up in a shelter. One of my husband’s students found her outside of a liquor store as a 3-month-old puppy. Considering what a friendly and adorable fluffball she was when I first met her, she probably wasn’t waiting there very long. Maude is most definitely an ENFJ — the type whose “main interest in life is giving love, support, and a good time to other people.” Maude is ALL ABOUT people, whether they are neighbors, prostitutes, crack addicts, or friends of mine. She’s not about judging, just loving. She does enthusiasm better than anyone I know.
Opposites in many ways, yes. When a bottled water delivery truck driver stopped me on the street during my morning dog walk the other day to ask for directions, poor Nina thought it was the end for her. Maude, on the other hand, was doing her ecstatic happy-to-meet-you dance, wiggling and wagging with her entire body, smiling with her eyes more fiercely than Tyra ever imagined. I just held on to their leashes, trying not to fall over.
I went to see The Mother Hips at Café Du Nord on Friday with a friend I’ve known since high school. We’ve been seeing this Northern California-based band in clubs around San Francisco since we were sixteen. It’s hard to describe exactly what has drawn us to the Hips over the last ten years, but I usually ascribe it in equal parts to the following:
1) The hotness of frontman Tim Bluhm:
Can you guess which one I'm talking about?
2) Some of their music is really fun to rock out to (in my opinion, their best albums came out in the middle of their career – Shootout, Later Days, The Green Hills of Earth – but anything earlier than that inevitably gets the crowd moving).
3) Nostalgia + a guaranteed good time. A typical Mother Hips holiday show, which is always a week or two before Christmas and almost always at the Great American Music Hall, involves me, my older brother, and a gaggle of friends meeting at my parents’ house in San Francisco, imbibing coffee and then whiskey, and piling in a bus or someone’s van to go downtown and arrive at the GAMH hopefully right before the Hips go on – usually around 11pm. They play the favorites and never disappoint, nor interrupt the music with too much banter. And they almost always play one long satisfying set with minimal jamming and noodling around.
The Hips don’t draw a musically sophisticated crowd – indeed their audiences tend to be dominated by former Chico State frat boys – but it’s a fun crowd nonetheless, and one that I am proudly a part of. By Friday I had spent the better part of the week representing my company at a tech trade show, on my feet all day and exhausted from talking, but once Tim and Greg and the rest stepped on stage and played the first notes of an instantly recognizable favorite, a big smile spread across my face. As one of my brother’s friends (one of the Christmas show crew and a near-doppelgänger of Tim Bluhm’s) put it: they are musical comfort food. If you’re interested, here’s a sampling.
Speaking of my recent wedding, my husband and I have yet to go on a real out-of-the-country honeymoon. Ages ago we’d conceived of a month-long trip to Vietnam (one of the few regions of the world that neither of us has been to and both of us are interested in visiting). However that plan quickly got derailed for numerous reasons (e.g. photographing a friend’s wedding exactly a month after ours, not being able to picture what we would do with our dogs for an entire month, etc.). When we discovered an excuse to go to South Africa this fall, we jumped on it. We’ll be meeting up with friends who live in London but have family/roots in South Africa, as well as a Swiss friend with whom my husband traveled across Africa ten years ago. It will be a reunion of sorts for them, but also hopefully a fun first trip abroad as newlyweds.
My husband has been here before, and tells me it’s paradise:
In planning this trip, I realize it’s been more than two years since my last international adventure. I *finally* uploaded the photos from that trip (a week in Beijing and three weeks in the Mongolian countryside) to the internet, so even though it’s not ‘news,’ I thought I’d post a few of my favorite photos from that trip:
Lately I’ve been feeling like I could use some more goals in my life, so I enlisted this guy to kick my ass into gear:
For those of you for whom the words pronate, fartlek and Body Glide mean nothing, Hal Higdon is a well-respected long distance runner and writer, and, as I’ve just discovered today, painter.
Back in 2004 when I decided to run a marathon, I used his online training program for novices. It served me well, and though I feel like I’d be crazy to put my body through 26.2 miles of torture again (albeit at 10-and-a-half minute miles), I would recommend Higdon’s training plan to anyone who’s considering running a long distance for the first time. The gradual build up of mileage over 18 weeks both helps guard against injury from overtraining, as well as discourages the laziness that a self-made program can sometimes slip in to.
Like I said, my mere mortal body may never again withstand the cruelty of running a full marathon, but I’ve always toyed with the idea of training for a smaller distance. As with other amateur runners, finishing fast is not the goal so much as getting into the right shape to complete the distance comfortably. The race itself is rather arbitrary to me – I picked a super low-key one in San Francisco – but having a date by which to complete training is key. I’m now in the second week of Hal Higdon’s eight-week 10k program, shooting for an October 12th race. Again, it’s the process and not the race itself that ultimately matters: Hal’s got me working out six times a week (including three runs, an easy day of stretch & strength, and two cross-training days). Having a date in mind keeps me going to the gym after work and running on hot Sundays when I’d otherwise just give up on moving all together.
Lately my husband has experienced a renewed (morbid?) interest in Ayn Rand.Like nearly everyone else in the universe, we each read one of her ponderous novels in high school (Atlas Shrugged in both of our cases), but wouldn’t be caught dead with her work on our adult book shelves.However my husband came across an old copy in someone else’s classroom at work and soon he was sucked in.
I don’t know what it is about Rand’s books that captivate the average 17-year-old – maybe it’s that Objectivism seems to cut against everything we learn from a young age about sharing and the ultimate good of putting others before oneself.As flawed a philosopher as she is, I do appreciate where she was coming from (literally – i.e. fleeing during the Russian revolution of 1917) and I was utterly fascinated by the movie we watched last night, The Passion of Ayn Rand.
Helen Mirren, half-Russian fox that she is, is one of the top reasons for watching, (even if in real life she has some questionable views on rape and coke ).The totally effed up love quadrangle between Rand, her husband Frank O’Connor, Rand’s protégé Nathaniel Branden, and Branden’s wife Barbara (who wrote the book upon which the movie is based) is another.I try to see public figures’ sex lives for what they are – namely private and ultimately separate from their public persona and deeds – but Rand and Branden used the logic of their budding philosophy to influence their spouses into accepting their affair.In the film, Rand tells her husband and Barbara Branden that “lesser people” wouldn’t be able to accept their illicit arrangement.
Whether you love her or hate her, there is enough soap opera goodness in The Passion of Ayn Rand to keep anyone transfixed.Oh, and it came out in 1999, so it’s readily available on Netflix.
I came to the conclusion, after a few solid weeks of feeling bleak about the world, my skills (or lack thereof), and my day-to-day life, that it was time to consult a professional about my career crisis. I set up a noon appointment for an initial phone consultation with a career coach and found a quiet place at work to talk – i.e. I parked my car in the parking garage across the street.
I was impressed with the guy’s demeanor, and the fact that he had recently gone through a similar phase of not being happy at a job and finding a way out. For some people, getting advice from someone in their immediate age group might not seem appealing, but I feel like I can get in to this. He says his methodology involves determining strengths, values, and personality traits and finding careers that will match. I strongly believe that my personality (ISTJ last time I checked) plays a large role in how I experience the work world, so I’m eager to see how this all turns out. Once I formally decide to work with the coach, I will write more about it.
In other news, my husband made elk burgers last night. His dad is very much into bow hunting elk and deer – in fact in he grew up eating mostly meat his dad had hunted – and on his visit this month back home, my husband brought back a freezer’s worth of last winter’s bounty. I consider myself 85% vegetarian (the years I spent being vegetarian as a child and vegan as a young adult have left their mark on my eating preferences forever) but I’m open to the idea of wild meat (none of the evils of factory farming to atone for, right?) so I suggested we try some. Although drier than I imagine a beef hamburger to be, I found them surprisingly palatable and non-gamy. The heirloom tomatoes, aioli, cheese and home fries that accompanied the elk meat didn’t hurt either – it was a gourmet version of burgers and fries to be sure.
On a final unrelated note, I was surprised and hugely amused to find out on Saturday night that my mother (whom I have never known to like any popular music, outside of the Beatles and my brother’s band) has a bit of a secret obsession with this guy:
I think I get it. He’s from Utah (as is my mom), is innocent and cute, and has a nice voice to boot. I don’t watch American Idol but I understand the appeal. It’s all about the making of a star, and he seems to have that je-ne-sais-quoi that goes beyond looking and sounding nice. As an added bonus he’s got a very positive, not-yet-jaded vibe (I suppose that comes with being seventeen). So much so that a 50-something who doesn’t normally like anything more popular than Steve Reich can be found rocking out to his single while cleaning the kitchen. I personally think it’s adorable.
