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.

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?

para bailar a medianoche...

Just add el espíritu colombiano.

Santa Marta, Colombia

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."

"no pain, please."

Peter taught us this phrase in Thai on Saturday morning and I scoffed at it, like the naive child I was at that point.

We thought we were being sooo clever with our plans for the day. What a wonderful way to unwind together, we thought! Who could resist meditation in the park followed by an hour and a half of hot yoga and two hour Thai massages? Why wouldn't people ALWAYS spend their Saturdays like this?

24 hours later, it dawned on me, when I mysteriously woke up as a hobbling 90 year old woman with the flexibility of petrified wood. I spent the entire next day loudly ruing the moment I ever thought I could handle intense yoga followed by a small Thai woman putting her whole body weight on my poor, unsuspecting individual muscles.

Luckily Peter is really nice and in an effort to shut me up, took us to the State Building overlooking Bangkok and bought us dry martinis. This building is PHENOMENALLY BEAUTIFUL and to prove it, will kick you out if you aren't up to dress code (case in point: a man was turned away on the first floor for wearing Crocs. Now I am of the mindset that unless you are a surgeon or an elderly gardener, you shouldn't be wearing Crocs anyway, but that's neither here nor there).

Peter really made us love Bangkok, but since he took off for Manila like the fancy businessman he is, we followed suit and headed north on a sleeper train to Chiang Mai. This is us rounding out a lovely weekend by basking in the glow of the city from it's most impressive building and taking too many dorky pictures that didn't turn out anyway.

three glorious days in washington.

No work. All play. Three days of my favorite kind of travel-- at home, with people I love.

Poulsbo and Port Gamble with dad. Coffee, books, and laughing like we used to when things were a little different... a little time capsule of being happy and simple together.

Oh, yes please.

Seattle dinner with three of my favorite girls. Lots of wine, lots of food, lots of love.

Mukilteo with my best friend at his new condo. Big windows with nothing but water and mountains and the ferry behind them. Ice cream like in elementary school. Diamond Knot brewery growlers. Magenta sunsets. Picking out midnight constellations from the hot tub and late night poached eggs before bed.

Puyallup with the boy. Sunny day reading in the park, Mexican cervezas at dinner, and tricking him again into antiquing with me.

I am so, so home and it feels so, so good.

martinis, round two

Here are some things that can get tiring after a while:

*hostel rooms shared with handfuls of other loud douchebags and occasional thieves

*trying to survive on set menus every day ($2 for lunch is so cool, but the human body can only handle so much white rice and fried fish. It's like a science experiment)

*bargaining for beer. Colombian inflation is fairly absurd, so we set our beer range at $1,500-2,000 for a domestic. We refuse to pay more. Since $1,000 pesos equals 50 cents, this is totally reasonable.

After having bread and cheese for dinner on the walls of Cartagena and gazing across the drawbridge to a fancy wedding party, we felt SO. POOR. and realized it was time to start living outside of our means yet again. So we pulled the old Buenos Aires maneuver of finding the fanciest place in town and crashing it.

This time it was a beautiful hotel in the center of old town, where riiiiiiich old people and possibly "ladies of the night" go to drink expensive scotch and wipe their butts with our monthly budget. Acting like we belonged there, Mar ordered a whiskey on the rocks and I got a "martini biche," which I discovered contained mango and black pepper, and let me tell you, those drinks were like nectar from the heavens. Our kind waiter came over to make small talk and asked us what we would be having next. I laughed.

"Abject poverty for two, please."

Sometimes you just have to admit to yourself and the world that you cannot afford even the first drink, let alone another. But have I mentioned that Colombians, with the exception of some select FARC guerrillas and the ladies on Playa Blanca who kick sand on your towel when you refuse to buy a massage from them, are the world's COOLEST PEOPLE? Our waiter laughed at us and then whispered to the bartender, who promptly sent us over two more of our exact drinks, but with more expensive alcohol, on the house.

AH MANG. 72 hours left in this dream world of black guys with blue eyes and more generosity than Ireland and Mother Theresa combined. I'll be over here whimpering the Colombian national anthem in the fetal position if anyone needs me.

tacoma: the elephant in the room

We have finally reached the Mecca of all Colombian voyages: Cartagena is the most beautiful city on the continent. I'll post some pics soon to prove it, but first, a dose of reality from a portly Italian gentleman we met in the bus station on our way out of Medellin.

Jaime is a big guy, speaks English well enough to incorporate phrases like "butt-ass naked" into his vernacular, and has lived all over the world for business. This includes Mexico, Colombia, Japan, Germany, Texas, and everyone's favorite All-American City: TACOMA, WASHINGTON. I almost launched into my old high school debate standby of how underrated my hometown is, but he beat me to the punch with his own opinion.

"For all the dangerous places I have ever lived, and all the warnings people have given me about Central and South American cities, I have never ever lived in a scarier place than Tacoma. Oh my gott, is it terrible there."

*I want to point out here that my poor father's nerves are absolutely frayed this year-- with one daughter in South Korea (thisclose to Kim Jung-Il, that crazy a-hole) and the other traipsing around FARC-filled jungles without a man to protect her, the man has been stressed out and just wants the whole family back at home where they belong. Once he hears that the most dangerous part of our lives, statistically, was actually when we were at home as kids, his whole paradigm is going to shift majorly.

The Italian then went on to tell us that his house got broken into and his car got stolen on two separate occasions during his stint in TacTown. "I would rather live in Bogota or Mexico City than Tacoma any day," he added.

This makes me feel two things: a sudden affection for the place I was born, and a feeling that the world is way, way smaller and less scary than a lot of people think. Tacoma's like the younger sibling with a learning disability in the Puget Sound family... and darnit, don't you just love it all the more for that?

nutrition, volcanoes, and chicken trucks

Our last stop in Ecuador has confirmed that we absolutely love this country. We were fortunate to spend the weekend watching another friend of a friend, Kenji, work his PeaceCorps magic with a group of native kids from the outskirts of his village of Cotacachi. He runs roughly a million programs aimed at environmental education and protection, and we tagged along with his gang of teenagers to see Volcan Cuicocha and one of the only crater lakes on the continent.

We rode in the back of a truck up the mountain and made friends with the kids with questions like "If you could eliminate any one food from earth, what would it be?" Food is a universal, right?

Not really. Here is Jefferson, age sixteen. He wears clothes that would fit the average American 5th grader and before we made him our pet, guessed him to be about 9 years old. Kenji gazed at him sadly when we asked about his story.

"He's from a wonderful family from one of the communities but his growth has been majorly stunted by poor nutrition. He has been raised on rice, potatoes, and water. They don't have milk or fruit, and very rarely meat, to supplement their diet, and it shows." Kenji brings the kids fruit to try to combat their malnutrition, but it can't replace widespread education about how to grow the area's original crops again.

Here are some really beautiful faces. I think the kids (and for that matter, the parents) in the Otavalo area are some of the most amazing-looking people we have seen so far.

Jessica carries the heavy solemness that seems to characterize so much of the countryside. The girls are shy ("Feminism does not exist here!" insists Kenji when we make a joke about having a girls-only truck to head to the volcano. Machismo isn't always obvious, but Betty Frieden definitely hasn't yet hit the bookshelves). They were tired, and seemed to be inside their own heads for a lot of the day. I wondered how much was due to their personalities and how much

could be because there were two gringas around.

We've loved Ecuador and could spend months in any one spot... but "the road north" calls us...

cheap beer and good faces.

My favorite bar in Seattle is King's Hardware, because I like $2 Rainiers, Skeeball, and taxidermied wildlife.

Our favorite bar in Barranco was Juancitos, because we like sawdust on the floor, sandwiches like the day after Thanksgiving, and funny old men who just want their Cuzquenas, thank you.

There seems to be a universal, inverse relationship between the price of drinks and how interesting the clientele are in any given location. Give me local beer over fancy martinis any day!

death road; or, how i almost fell off a cliff

La Paz began on a rocky note, but after I got over the fact that I was entirely without my winter wear, I decided that I was in heaven (ie. finally back in civilization) and spent the rest of the week sitting in a hot tub with hilarious Israelis, continuing the attempts to breathe normally at 3600 meters, and eating quinoa soup. Once I regained my emotional capacities after the vomit chorus on the way into town, I made the executive decision to mountain bike the most dangerous road in the world in the spirit of pretending to train for a triathlon. I find this quite impressive considering the only biking I've done since middle school was to and from yoga class this year (a straight shot on Latona, and sometimes I cheated and rode on the sidewalks even then).
Death Road takes you through waterfalls, through overflowing rivers, nearly careening off cliffs when you get too cocky and start going really fast, and descends 3000 meters from freezing, foggy La Paz into balmy, jungly Coroico. I had a couple of Aussie friends with me on the trip, and the rest of our group was either Brazilian or deaf, but almost dying together really brings people together and I left the mountain with a new arsenal of ASL signals and Portuguese phrases. Additionally, I somehow got the entire relationship history of a sweet guy from Rio who spoke English like I speak Hebrew and discovered a butterfly the size of my bike wheel.

The day ended with a buffet lunch and a pool overlooking the mountains, which I'm not sure is normal for triathlon training, but something I'd like to incorporate into my normal routine either way. Death Road conquered, check please.

just deserts.

4 days in a Jeep in southwest Bolivian desert.
3 bloody noses from dust inhalation.
5 lagunas.
100s of flamingos.
12,000 square km of salt flats.
2 cases of severe altitude sickness.
1 llama that enjoyed eye contact.
This is how we spent our Thanksgiving: getting as far from the city lights as possible.


Salt mound ballet











Say hello to my leetle friend.












4:30 am wakeup call for a hike through thousand year old cactus? FINE, I'll get up.












Nope, it's not water. Just salt until the ends of the earth.











Sunrise! So that's what you look like! Our little group of two chatty American girls (whose politics were deemed liberal European), one good-natured Montevidean (our wee Urux), and the coolest Belgian couple outside of waffles and chocolate had a hard time splitting up.






Call me creepy, but ancient Aymara mummies with skin still on is called a jackpot of archaeology (they only found them nine years ago! Talk about great timing!). They all had EXPRESSIONS on their skulls, I'm not kidding! Ahhh, I love mummies, could someone send me that National Geographic with the Kennewick Man?







Dear flamingos: you are so rare and so magenta, I can't help but love you. Also, your legs bend backwards, and I have a lot of respect for that.










Standing on the tracks and waving at Chile on one side and Argentina on the other, but keeping it strictly Bolivia, thank you.









Arbol de Piedra, thanks for allowing me to realize my dream of walking around in a Dali painting.











Something about lava, geysers, and semi-active volcanoes makes me feel like I'm living in the Triassic Period. Don't tell my 8th grade science teacher I don't really know if that's the right period or not.









This was the highest we got, and could feel the air blowing in off the Pacific. When you haven't seen your favorite ocean in 6 weeks, that air feels GOOD.









Llamas are now good for the following things: cholesterol-free steak, prolonged eye contact, earring ideas, really soft sweaters, and sassy substitute best friends.












If you guys need me I'll be down here exploring this kick-ass canyon.

That little hut was home sweet home, where Marlo battled altitude sickness on a cement bed and an old Quechua lady made us the provincial version of elephant ears over an open fire.

Oh, hello, Wonder of Creation. Fancy meeting you here.

Long story short: I'm the luckiest girl in the world in the most beautiful country in South America. Mike Moe, you made me promise to come here, and I owe you big time.