stockholm syndrome.

Weekend was a flurry of pink champagne, electropop and skipping sleep.  Woke up at 4 am in our hotel room at the Jupiter with ringing ears, throbbing feet and a throat scratchy from singing because

this girl. is. phenomenal.

We now measure time in B.R. and A.R.: Before Robyn and After Robyn.

Portland and our current girl crush plum tuckered us out, but once I come down from this high I might be able to put some words together about the whole unreal experience... life is so sweet.

tomosexuals.

The lure of Tomo Nakayama really knows no bounds these days. 

It was enough to drag us out of the CD last Monday, into the rain, to Patty Murray's pre-election concert at Neumo's, where a lineup of watered-down folk awaited us (btw, guys, I'm really gonna need more help with understanding the appeal of folk music.  Just, why?  Ashton tried to explain the story aspect, the way they use their voice, the way they blah blah blah, but all I know is that as soon as Scribes came on and a ray of hiphop sunshine broke through, I felt physically relieved). 

But Tomo... on whom we both have minor crushes and who I've mentioned after his band Grand Hallway played at Squeak and Squawk over the summer... well, the man is seriously, seriously talented.  To the point where mid-set, Ashton was overcome with emotion and cried at the stage, "I'M A TOMOSEXUAL!"

Heat of the moment and all.  We're making t-shirts, get on this before it gets too big.  This one's the gravy train to Pop Catchpraseville.

little bavarians.

Happy 27th, Marlo A. Hartung!  As usual, you are full of great ideas: escaping the rainy city for the vibrant leaves and peaceful fog of the mountains to celebrate your old age?  Sign me up.  A girl could really get used to sleeping in a beautiful cabin all snug as a bug and waking up to this view with her coffee:

Yes, PLEASE!

I would also not complain, not one bit, about drinking wine all night and espresso all day, wandering Leavenworth and practicing our German (but only amongst ourselves, let's not get too cocky here), visiting the cheesemonger and the antique vendors and spending autumn time with the laaaadies.  I don't ever want to leave, but someone must return to civilization to introduce lederhosen and 10 foot horns and Ricola to the unwashed masses.  Das sigh.

sometimes.

Sometimes it's Friday at midnight and you need to go play.

 Sometimes you end up on the Jose Rizal Bridge taking too many jumping shots because you are overjoyed at the view.  If you live in Seattle and haven't played on the Rizal Bridge, what are you waiting for?  It's the most breathtaking view of the city one could possibly imagine, especially at sunset.  Just look at how happy Dower is!  Look!

Sometimes you end up getting 1 am dim sum in the middle of the International District, the only whities in the whole place, wondering if it's better to order pig skin or cow intestine or both.

 Sometimes your "friends" wake you up at the crack of dawn to go for a walk, only to reward your efforts with even more cracks of dawn.

 Somtimes you just need to keep playing, because it's autumn and the leaves are all waiting to be scooped up and thrown somewhere.

 And sometimes you decide that even though it's only been 7 hours since you last had it, you need more dim sum for breakfast.

Sometimes I wish all days could be sleepless, uneventful, and somehow exactly what I want to be doing.

expats.

A Vancouver birthday weekend with the girls is just good clean fun, and the mere fact that we aren't in college anymore, heading up with frat brahs for morning boozing and "formal dances," completely revolutionized the experience.  Three cheers for trying to be grownups!  We stayed right downtown in the fancy Westin like big girls, ate good sushi like big girls, spent too much money on clothes and booze like big girls, and had an incident with a crow at the border that will become our new meal ticket once the video goes viral. 

Things about Canada that have changed since we were heading up there for countless fratty trips in college:

1.  Added stress of now having to show your passport at the border, like Canada thinks it's a different country or something and not the 51st state.  It's like sorority rush because you reeeeeally want the border guard to like you, even though HELLO, you're CANADA; it would be your great honor and pleasure to let us in.

2.  There are things to eat there that aren't pitchers of beer or street cart hot dogs at 3 am (even though those items still haven't lost their luster).  In fact, they have entire other food groups available for consumption, some of which are even on the food pyramid!

2.  They have daytime in Vancouver!  I literally never knew this.  Previous experiences led us to believe there is only rainy nighttime spent trying to avoid your date, who is geting a leeetle too handsy after the aforementioned pitchers.  Observe, the city from a sunrise walk on a lovely bridge:

  We crossed back into the US of A with renewed hope for our northernly sisters.  A beautiful autumn weekend in one of the world's most gorgeous cities, surrounded by maple leaf paraphernalia at every turn?  We don't mind if we do, happy birthday Shauna! 

vogue.

Oh man you guys, here's what happened a couple weeks ago when I skipped across the UVillage to meet Ashton at Starbucks and this creepy dude was WATCHING OUR EVERY MOVE.  I had to hiss at Ashton to check him out, but poor boy never could figure out where creeper even was, probably because the guy was sooo good at being "sneaky."  Seriously, I thought he might be the next up and coming Green River Killer, especially when we got into the car later and he ran after us. 

Fortunately, he ended being our friendly local photographer who wanted to "shoot us for a new ATT phone ad" (as you can tell, the phone is the opposite of fancy).  At first we could best be described as skeptical, because when someone tells you they like your "energy," you feel a little like those poor midwest girls who move to the Big Apple and accidentally get into the porn industry because they think people are just being nice to them.  Next thing you know, BLAMMO, innocence lost.  However, he sensed our hesitation and chose that moment to drop the financial stats on us.  I've previously mentioned that we have the combined income of two people who should be living in a grass hut, so we couldn't say no.  We just could not say no.

So here we are, shots stolen straight off some dark corner of the ATT website that I won't even try to explain since it's so far down the rabbithole.  This is after three solid weeks of apartment hunting, living on couches, and wearing the same outfit three days in a row (he asked if we had a change of clothes and we could barely contain the church giggles).  Thanks, Creepy Starbucks guy who ended up being a total delight to spend an afternoon with, and who then let us make a week's worth of cashola on the spot without even taking our clothes off!  Three cheers!

PS. Ashton would actually murder me if he knew I put the "casual glasses in mouth" shot of him on here, let's keep that our little secret, k?

*All photos courtesy of Marc Carter, thanks Marc!

a corner of the cloak.

"...and conclude, for the thousandth time, what a wild and blessed gift,

What a bloody and magical machine it is, what a slather of stories,

What an endless thicket!  You really and truly could be issued fifty

Lifetimes and spend each of them addled and muddled in wonder

And never understand or even see more than a corner of the cloak."

-Brian Doyle, from A Corner of The Cloak

Well, look who just had a half dozen strokes of kismet fall upon their poverty-stricken shoulders! Ashton (grad student), Amy (currently unemployed) and I (sugar mama non-profit employee) somehow found ourselves the world's most beautiful townhome in the Central District (that's the view of Quest Field from my deck!), and I couldn't be happier.  Like, granite countertops, 3.5 baths and hardwood-to-die-for happy.  I love coming home at the end of the day.  Love it. 

We're definitely in a different world than our Wallingfords and Greenlakes of yore.  A trip to Starbucks becomes a mini-UN meeting as I am surrounded on all glorious sides by Eritrean women with gorgeous scarves, old black men playing chess and tipping their hats at girls who walk past with espresso, the occasional lost-looking Latino teenager, sweet-faced retired Asian couples with matching sweaters, perky Garfield students with braids and magenta tennis shoes... the faces hold stories, and the lips are more willing to speak them to a stranger.

In the parking lot, inevitably, Omar comes to sell me incense.  "It's handmade, home-made, it's only a dollar!" he encourages me, his hands reaching from his pristine alabaster robes to extend an offering of his wares.  "I'm allergic, remember, Omar?"  (This is only a small white lie.  I just despise the scent of incense because it reminds me of middle school, when my theater friends wore too much black eyeliner and listened to grungy music, and I secretly wanted to listen to R&B and throw everyone's blown-glass incense holders out the window)  He backs away instantly.  "Baby, baby, I would never want to do anything to hurt a woman like you!  You are so beautiful."  (Flowery prose that leads me to wonder if it's not just incense that Omar lights at home...) "Oh, thank you Omar, I hope business is good today!"  I hop into my car to arrange my coffee and my files and my sanity before work, and Omar taps on the hood to call through the windshield, "Because of you, I WILL have a great day."

Our first Saturday in the new dream house, Dower and I abandoned all the moving boxes and went on a walk.  It was all I could do to drag my exhausted body through the neighborhood but I was revived by the echoing ululations of what sounded like a party-- a big one-- and we followed the billowing smoke through the sidewalks.  As it turns out, Ethiopian churches really do know how to party.  A few hundred beautiful people (what is UP with East African bone structure?  Could they be any more perfect?!) were chanting, dancing, and celebrating a holiday that was unknown to me (I have since looked it up, and let me just say that Meskel sounds WAY more fun than Labor Day).  I was pretty thrilled when I realized we were about three blocks from my new house, and hoped the smoke would sweep its way over our rooftop to impart some of its intrigue on our home too.

But ok, the neighborhood is a little hood.  Frank's friend got shot in the middle of someone else's drug deal at Parnell's, the corner store 2 blocks up from us.  Our landlord chastises us for not keeping every lock firmly secured on the gate to our yard.  Hardly a week goes by without witnessing some dude getting apprehended by the po-po, or hearing some racially charged argument at Subway, but there is nothing boring about living between MLK and Jackson and Rainier.  And really, no matter where you live or what you do with the long hours that create a day, is there any substitute for wonder at the world, for seeing new constellations under every leaf and fully expecting beauty and strangeness to leap out from every corner and catch you off guard?

classy joint.

You'd think that when you buy a fancy condo on the water, you'd really experience a step up in signage.  Dower's place proves this theory totally correct.

Some thoughts: what are cupons, and are they as painful as they sound?  Will Bobbi be compensated for her trauma?  And did the people at the engraving shop even notice? 

para bailar a medianoche...

Just add el espíritu colombiano.

Santa Marta, Colombia

godchild.

Sucre, Bolivia

waiting.

Boredom and beautiful bling.
Angkor Wat. Cambodia

good morning, vietnam.

Some shots from our last days in 'Nam. As you can tell, I just really like saying,
"our days in 'Nam."

Heading home in Mui Ne

Hauling in the nets

Biking along the coast of the South China Sea, sweating against the breeze and finding neighborhoods where no other tourists seemed to have discovered. The adults all gave us sidelong glances, wondering what we were looking for in the small fishing town, but the toddlers and kids burst from excitement and yelled "HELLO! HELLO!" from the sidewalks.




I included this shot because right after I took it, a security guard grabbed my arm and growled at me "NO PHOTO OP HERE." The house behind this wall was really fancy... I wonder what famous person lives here?

Intense game of chess on the streets of Saigon

The streets are a constant, chaotic mess of motorbikes on all sides, none of which seem to obey a single traffic law. Upon sighting a driving school, my sister mused, "What do you think they actually do there?!"

Rollaway gas stations for tiny motorbike gas tanks! This same kid helped me the day before when I needed aspirin and he needed to practice his English. "If your head hurts, you should see a todoc!" he insisted. "A todoc!"

"I should see a doctor?" I asked, and his rubbed his head sheepishly.

"Yes, a doctor I meant!"

irish beers and fam time.

Just because we're not in Asia anymore doesn't mean we can't still play. Dad's got his girls back!

the kids are all right.

I've been very confused lately. We flew from Saigon at midnight last Wednesday, had a 12 hour layover in Seoul, a 10 hour flight to Seattle, and somehow landed at noon on the same day we left?! My body responded in what I thought was a charming manner: like I'd had an adrenaline injection right to the heart. I cooked a couple of dinners and baked cookies, went running, got beers with some friends, read a whole book, cleaned and unpacked, went back to work on Friday on 3 hours of sleep (waking up at 4 am makes you feel like a superstar CEO or something)... until the weekend, when I totally crashed and slept til 1 pm both days. I think I might be back on track now, but I don't want to count my chicks and whatnot.

The truth is, a lot of my busy-ness has been a thinly veiled effort to avoid processing some of the things we saw in Asia. I've been having a stare-down with my journal because I'm not interested in discussing child labor and war atrocities with it quite yet, and I can't really think of anything else to talk about because those things have consumed my mind the past few weeks.

It's cliche to talk about the grinding poverty in a place like Southeast Asia because it's kind of like, "Duh. Find a new soapbox." It's obviously one of the least developed areas of the world, so what can you say about it that's unique? I don't have a new angle on it, but I was just totally struck anew by how the poverty in any given place is made so much more vivid when it's being lived by children. A few mental images that stand out in my mind:

Hmong girl selling bracelets in Laos: "You can buy 5,000."

There's no escaping child labor in Cambodia.* If you're white, you'll get swarmed by men lounging on motorcycles calling out "tuk-tuk, ladyyy?" and kids selling copied books and dime-a-dozen bracelets. They're relentless, because poverty makes people relentless. So many parts of Siem Reap and Phnom Penh were just cacophonies of garbage on stilts; huge teeming masses of people and stray dogs and dirt. There is a 15 km road from Phnom Penh to the Killing Fields, which is a chaotic study in development. As we scooted along in our tuk-tuk, a factory opened its doors for lunchtime and hundreds of face-masked young girls streamed out, having finished their morning stitching or gluing and preparing for an afternoon filled with more of the same. I wondered what they were making in the factory, what expensive items were being created cheaply so people like me can buy them for less. But I was soon distracted by a new olfactory assault, rising above the old fish and urine smells. We were driving over the river, into which was gushing forth a broad stream of aparently untreated sewage. On the shore, a garbage dump, on fire. And wandering amidst all of this, a shirtless 13 year old boy. What an apocalyptic scene this was, unpleasant for eyes and ears and heart. But our tuk-tuk zipped past all of this, leaving the tottering houses and shops on stilts above the river to fend for themselves.

"Being a baby is sooo BORING sometimes."

Later, after a long day scrambling up the wats, Amy and I set out with a mission to find margaritas at the Mexican restaurant in Siem Reap and ran into a couple of the same boys twice in a row, each time begging us to buy postcards from them. We chatted with them for a while and learned that Hou, age 14, and Phi, age 16, were a couple of the sweetest kiddos in the country. They had been selling bracelets all day without eating, so we took them to the restaurant with us and taught them the word "happy hour" and how to eat tacos. They had never had Mexican food before and Hou practically bathed in the salsa, he loved it so much. We asked them what they wanted to be when they grew up and Hou said "tuk-tuk driver!" while Phi chose, "teacher, and I want to start an orphanage as well." As we parted ways later, Hou said "thank you so, so much for dinner. Here is how we say it in Cambodia: Akhun, akhun, akhun." Later, they ran after us and pushed the little woven bracelets onto our wrists as a parting gift.

The next night, we saw them again. We had been drinking a bit of Angkor draft at dinner and feeling lighthearted, but that quickly faded as we wandered into a street food alley to buy the boys dinner again. We got swarmed by about a dozen other kids, and two girls holding a naked baby, begging for food and money. Fine, easy enough, we can buy noodles for ten kids and spend less than what we would have spent on a round of beers at home. The baby, though, was another issue. He slept peacefully throughout the turmoil, but his sisters gripped our hands with surprising tenacity and begged us for milk. Eventually they clung neatly to our torsos, all four limbs wrapped tightly around our waists, after they handed the dozing baby (who had long since learned to sleep amidst noise and motion) off to Amy. We had a 20-second span in which we thought, "OH MY GOSH, this is what Angelina Jolie felt like before she stole** Maddox!"

We eventually pried ourselves away from the group but felt silly as we walked away. So some kids got dinner-- big deal. What will they do for breakfast?

Today she may be a toothless Vietnamese girl, but she's leaving this one-horse town for Hollywood.

This brought us to the last, most disappointing thing we saw in Cambodia. Having made friends with another kid selling books, we bought "Buddhism Explained" from him one night in Phnom Penh. He rushed over to a middle aged man with a money basket on a bike to toss his cash in. Mom beckoned him back over to our table to ask what would happen to that money later. "That man buys my school uniform and pays my tuition and buys me dinner," our new friend insisted. Essentially the guy was a pimp reminiscent of the newspaper barons who were the source of the newsies strike (historical fact courtesy of Christian Bale). Shortly after, as we lingered over dinner, we heard a shouting match and saw another kid, whose block was being infringed upon by our friend and his pimp, trying to regain his book-selling territory. We watched wide-eyed as a grown man and a kid no more than ten fought loudly in the street, which ended with the man hitting the kid and throwing him to the ground. Wiping away furious tears, the kid regained his footing and kept screaming. All this, just so they can sell a few photocopied books for a couple bucks a pop. I am as speechless now as I was at that moment. What can you do, as a foreigner who doesn't speak the language, when you see such a thing happening? There really is no such thing as childhood when people fight as equals for the right to work.

*I've long since left behind the idea that it's terrible to let kids work. In most parts of the world, it's just a fact of life, and something that often provides education for them rather than preventing it. Although it's not ideal to let kids wander the streets at midnight trying to sell postcards, a better question than "how can we stop poor kids from working?" is "how can we make it safe and profitable for poor kids to work in order to attend school?"

**"Adopted."

our days back in 'nam.

How we made it to this happy point, giddily frolicking by the South China Sea, was one of those travel days that really made us wish we weren't the hoi polloi and could travel by jet instead of with the riff-raff.

By the numbers:

Three (3): botched cab rides in which one of the parties left angry and/or shafted

Fourteen (14): hours on a bus getting from Phnom Penh to Saigon to Mui Ne, listening to terrible Vietnamese pop (which has replaced Bolivian pop in my mind as officially the worst music ever created)

One (1): French gentleman with overwhelming body odor on our bus

Hundreds (100s): minutes wasted at the Vietnam border, perhaps the world's most inefficient system EVER created for entering a Socialist Republic

Three (3): hostels attempted before landing in paradise

What up, Vietnam. Let's party. Also, I'm aware that I resemble Lieutenant Dan in this photo, but let me remind you what an adept swimmer he was, so it's not at all dangerous to jump in a pool in such a condition.

love from angkor.

I'll let a recent email from Peter Fotheringham handle this post, because describing a wonder of the world like Angkor Wat seems to be beyond me at this moment. Here are his words and a few shots from the hundreds of phenomenal ones that basically took themselves:

"Visiting Angkor Wat and the surrounding temples made me so happy to be a human being living in a time period where witnessing physical beauty is so accessible. Think about it, in the same year you witnessed Iguasso Falls and Angkor Wat. We are so lucky."

malaria: like, totally the best diet everrrr

That's a joke I used to tell before I started getting cold sweats and throwing up my first day in Luang Prabang, Laos, at which point I examined the mosquito bite on my ankle, remembered that malaria has the potential to multiply in your body until your brain cells explode and kill you, and thought, "BALLS. Not funny anymore."

So in a futuristic and surprisingly Big Brother-esque maneuver, Laos takes your temperature at the airport with a little ray gun to make sure you aren't bringing the White Man's Burden of Smallpox back into their country. Since they let me in, I assumed I was a healthy individual. But I think we all know what assuming does, and I spent most of the time in that delightful country laying helplessly on my bed, sicker than I've been since Bolivia and watching the only two English channels I could find: BBC and CNN, who played the same 3 hour loop of depressing reports all day long ("everyone is dying in Pakistan because of flooding!! Everyone is dying in Russia because of fires!!", leading me to wonder if we could somehow meet in the middle here and solve everyone's problems). I felt supremely lame while Amy and Mom were gallivanting around, and forced myself to rally enough to ride a tuk-tuk an hour out of town and see a gorgeous waterfall. I'm not including shots of the waterfall because you know what they look like, but here are my dear family members wading through monsoon water to sit at a picnic table. They're so cute.

Later we rode a boat across the little Mekong tributary that runs through town and had dinner at a restaurant barely carved out of the palm tree jungle. We ate surrounded by crickets and geckos and stumbled through mud under a thunderstorm to paddle home.
And since street food is one of my most favorite things about traveling, here's Ames on the first night, selecting from a huge cart of the world's best noodle/tofu/veggie combinations on the side of the road. A dollar a plate, please. Don't mind if I do.

I still wasn't quite up to par on our last day in town, so as Ames and Mom did some intense hike to the top of a hill that probably would have seemed like an IronMan in my weakened state, I wandered around with my camera to see what I could find. I was rewarded when I came across the same man I'd seen a couple times before, who liked to kick aimlessly at the air and kind of lunge at passerby. "Ohhh, the town crazy," I thought affectionately, thinking of that guy in Seattle who lives on the corner of Boston and Lake Union who always yells about how Satan infects us through the radio. Luang Prabang's resident mentally ill person always seems to have a prop, though: sometimes a boulder, sometimes a full-blown Soviet Union flag. I didn't have the heart to tell him the Cold War was over, but I did enjoy wandering the market with him for a while.

If anyone cares, I don't actually have malaria I don't think, so we can still hang out safely without my body imploding and ruining the festivities. And I won't be doing anymore joking around about malaria being a good diet, I missed eating SO MUCH this last week. Still love you though, Laos!