Andalucia

Dave, Bowie, and I met the new year in Fuengirola, a resort town in Spain, on the Mediterranean coast. With us was my brother Kostya (Konstantin for the English speakers). Our friends Olga and Ron made a feast of paella, with rice meticulously cooked in broth to perfection and the freshest local seafood. Just before midnight we took champagne and grapes out onto the town square, where the locals and expats and tourists were assembling.

Once our phones announced midnight, we started placing grapes into our mouths, one a second, for the first twelve seconds of the new year. We’d been hearing about this Spanish custom. A few seconds into this, the church clock rang, and the locals started counting the seconds out loud, in a choir, and eating their grapes. We were almost done with ours but gladly took the opportunity to slow down. Then, instead of the fireworks, the town’s official started shooting firecrackers. Bowie, attached to Dave’s chest in a carrier, handled it well: he startled, but didn’t cry. Olga and Ron’s six-month old baby was also awake, and he came out of his stroller to dance and sway in his parents’ arms.

One of the local bars broadcast dancing music. Many families were out and groups of friends with champagne and beer and cigars and cigarettes. A heavily tattooed Englishman whom his friend called John-O and we heard "Turbo" tried to give high fives to the babies and then pinched them on the cheeks. A local family gave out rattles. Two years earlier, Olga, Ron, Dave, and I celebrated a coming year together in Bangkok, dancing and drinking on top of a skyscraper into the wee hours of the night. Now our babies “danced” around each other and tried to poke each other in the eyes.

Dancing with uncle in the square

Sparklers!

Kostya wanted to take a middle of the night swim in the Mediterranean, and I entertained the idea of putting Bowie to bed and then skedaddling to the beach. Once, a few years earlier, on a New Year’s trip to Israel, Kostya and I had shared a late night swim in the Mediterranean—not a bad thing to turn into a tradition, I thought. But this night got a little too late too fast and we were a little too tired, so we let it go. Sometimes just having the idea is enough. The thought alone felt fun and irreverent.

Thanks to Bowie, I’ve been carrying this sense of joyful irreverence all throughout this trip to Spain. We’ve been here for a week already, with another week to go. Kostya returned to Vienna on the second of January, and we took our leave of Olga and Ron and started a road trip in Andalucia. Our first stop is in Sevilla, with Cordoba and Granada coming up on the itinerary. A road trip, across Andalucia, with a thirteen-month old? Why not! It looks similar enough to California and there’s a mountain range here called Sierra Nevada.

Bowie wants room to run around. He’s not walking yet, but he wants to cruise and crawl and climb over things and play hide and seek. On the floor, he'll hide around the corner of a hotel bed and sit there, quietly, until either Dave or I find him. “There’s Bowie!” He laughs. Then, he shoos us off to another part of the room and goes back into hiding. “There’s Bowie!” He laughs. In Fuengirola, Olga and Ron took us to a couple of lovely playgrounds where Bowie tried going up the slides and down the staircases. He spent a couple of afternoons on the beach, eating sand and throwing clumps of sand on his head and hair.

"What's that?"

Let's go UP a slide

Playground/cafe

What Bowie resolutely does not want to do is sit tied up anywhere. He does not want to ride quietly in his stroller. He does not want to sit in a high chair at a restaurant and listen quietly to adult conversation. He does not want to be in restaurants at all, especially the busy and the noisy ones, where we don’t let him get on all fours and explore on his own. He’s been showing his displeasure by loud shrieking, wiggling, and crying. At best he tolerates being in mine or Dave’s lap, staring at lights, into windows, flirting with other babies and little children. He wants to know what everything is. At one restaurant we received a reprimand from a child psychologist. “Are you from Russia?” this woman asked Dave, having overheard me speak to Bowie in Russian. She spoke English, but with a Nordic, perhaps German, accent. “A child should be in a hotel room, resting,” she told him. “I’m a child psychologist and I don’t care about humans, I only care about children. The restaurant is too noisy for children.”

Backup at the hotel, after a late night game of hide and seek, we received a handwritten note from our neighbors slipped under the door. It said, “Idiots.”

Idiots!

Every morning, Bowie wakes up with a question on his mind. His eyes barely open, he extends an arm and points a finger, “Eh?” Which I take to mean, “What is that?” “Window,” I say, “A curtain. A light. Another light. A smoke detector. An alarm clock. A telephone. Blanket. Pillow. Daddy. Bed. Window. Light. Wall. Our bed. Our luggage. Our clothes. Window. Light. Telephone. Daddy. Daddy’s nose. Mustache. Mouth. Lower lip. Beard. Teeth. Large teeth, the easier to eat you up, baby.”

Bowie’s been nursing a lot. For a week, he hardly ate any solids but a few pieces of bread. After the new year’s feast of paella, he’s been trying more foods. Baby eels. Pasta with meat sauce. Rice in squid ink with calamari. That last meal went down particularly well because Dave had him in the carrier and we ate at a bar window, outside, standing up, so Bowie was sort of on the move throughout the entire meal. He could also eat the rice straight from the table, just shove it into his mouth with both hands. Because we were outside, the waiters didn’t care when half of the rice ended up on the floor. Nobody rushed in to clean it up. Picture baby whose entire face, hands, and sweater are covered in squid ink, and who’s got a grain of rice stuck between his eyebrows, and more rice in his hair. Picture his proud parents: baby’s feeding himself. Professor baby.

For another perspective on the trip and great photos, check out Dave's blog.

At the Fish Market

In many ways, the three of us vacationing together is easier and more fun (even more fun :) than Bowie and me on our own. The responsibility is divided, and so risk tolerance increases, as does our mobility and physical prowess. Dave's been carrying Bowie in the baby carrier, but even when he's not, we're able to pick up the baby and the stroller separately and so manage shortcuts to subway and stores. Tokyo subway seems fully handicapped accessible, but the elevators are not always in the most obvious locations.

Each day, as we understand each other's needs better and grow more accustomed to the patterns of life in Tokyo, we're able to stray further from the apartment, to see and experience more neighborhoods and attractions. Olga eats a substantial breakfast in the morning. Dave wants his coffee in the afternoon. Bowie must nap and crawl. It sometimes rains in Tokyo--coming from San Francisco in the middle of a prolonged drought, we forget what that's like. Bicyclists here ride on sidewalks (we see lots of moms on bicycles with one child seated in front and one in back). Pedestrians seem to obey automobile traffic patterns and walk on the left side of the sidewalk, making window-shopping a bit tricky. Stations in the subway are marked differently--on some, arrows for walking point to the right side, on others, to the left. People who wish to stand on escalators and moving sidewalks stand on the left side; those who want to walk, do so on the right. Those who want to walk fast make a weird zigzag between the first and the second.

We've made it to two major tourist attractions so far, the Sensō-ji temple in Asakusa and, this morning, to the Fish Market. Ok, we may have only barely stepped inside the actual wholesale fish market and spent most of our time meandering the entertaining foodie stalls in the outside market area, but we did see a lot of dead fish being chopped to pieces. This is sort of the opposite of what our diving and snorkeling excursions have been about, and so we weren't hugely comfortable on the premises. That didn't prevent us from eating sashimi for brunch (the freshest, most fragrant and finely textured fish I've had anywhere). Of the three of us, Bowie held the moral line the firmest: he refused to have any fish and stuck to the noodle-like shredded radish.

Bowie's been eating noodles almost exclusively this week and breastfeeding lots. As we're approaching his one year birthday and he shows no signs of being ready to wean himself off breast milk, I'm considering my options. KellyMom.com, the website I've been using to answer my breastfeeding questions, suggests that children naturally self-wean somewhere between two and seven years of age, and that health benefits of breastfeeding do not have an expiry date. I'd love to give Bowie the option to wean himself, though I'm not sure I'm prepared to wait seven (or even two) years for him to do so.

Being on the road, if anything, has definitely strengthened our breastfeeding bond--he's been nursing for comfort in unusual places and situations, asking for the breast almost as often as he did as a newborn, every hour or two. Our Tokyo efficiency apartment comes with a full-sized crib and most nights I put him in it. But his sleep is very restless. He's teething continuously (his bottom canines are out now; we're waiting on the last set of molars), and cries out in pain in his sleep, then wakes himself up. So I take him into bed with Dave and me, which means he's nursing throughout the night. He's a strongly attached baby, and I'm starting to worry now about how these patterns will have to adjust when we get back home and I return to work. I nearly cried of joy today at the fish market when Bowie picked off a strawberry from a mochi custard dessert Dave and I shared and little by little munched all of it (he tried the mochi too, but didn't go past one bite). A child could probably survive on noodles and strawberries, right? Right.

On to the Tokyo Dome for the afternoon's adventure. It's a notable concert hall venue (the Beatles played at the Dome two years after it opened, and George Harrison recorded Live in Japan here) and an amusement park. We hear there's an awesome indoor playground there, and we can all ride the carousel too.

In the alleys outside the fish market

Chopsticks are the best part of what you call dining

Ebisu-Tokyo Living

From the palatial halls of the Beijing business class hotel we are delivered to an efficiency Tokyo apartment that we booked via AirBnB. There's a hallway/kitchenette and the main room with the bathroom partitioned behind a glass wall, so that the bed is actually jammed against the bathtub. The three of us, our three pieces of luggage, two backpacks, Bowie's utility tote, a stroller and a car seat, all fit inside, just so. Seen another way, we're severely under-utilizing the space. If we consolidated our luggage and hooked the ladder over the door, two more people could use the bed in the attic space.

The tiny apartment is a thing of beauty. Several things make it so: tall ceiling in the room and the window that admits plenty of light by day; large sink in the kitchenette; a washing machine and an ingenious drying rack in the closet; a small shallow pool outside the bathtub that, when I unplug the tub, automatically fills with warm water--to keep my feet from getting cold while I'm drying the rest of my body with a towel.

I also love the fact that the apartment is keyless. A combination code opens the door to the unit, and the front door opens like the entry booths in San Francisco's subway, with a tap of a plastic card. At least three security cameras monitor the entrance, and I have a feeling that these are not pro forma, somebody is truly watching and monitoring the security of this building. Upon our arrival on Friday night, the card that opened the front door was missing from the agreed-upon location, and so we were milling about outside while Dave texted with our AirBnb host. One of the neighbors let us in (taking pity thanks to Bowie, who was babbling plaintively from his car seat), but wouldn't do so until she confirmed we had the right combination code for the unit.

My first impression of Tokyo? I had no idea how many stereotypes about Japan I'd consumed. My imagination was largely fueled by the few novels I'd read (Murakami, Kobo Abe, Amelie Nothomb) and movies (Seven Samurai, Rashomon, Spirited Away, a recent art film The Great Passage)--in addition to WWII stories of bombings, geishas, and vets, occasional news stories about financial crises, electronics empires, fashion crazes, overcrowded subways, alcoholism, and overwork. As is the case with China (though China's case is more extreme), this media diet now seems extremely one-sided and largely negative (at best, Japanese customs might be represented as "odd"). In short, without thinking about it, I'd been expecting to meet sad and depressed loners (mostly men and young school girls), subservient and prone to suicide. Needless to say, this is like picturing all Russians as vodka-guzzling murderers of old women and prostitutes. Argh.

We're staying in the Ebisu area of Tokyo, a fun mix of fairly gritty bars and noodle bars and a maze of alleys with the yuppiest establishments I've seen anywhere. Think: a cafe that imports beans from Yemen, ice cream topped with honey comb, another ice cream shop that makes its own square cones and serves up vanilla-azuki bean flavor, a flavored canele craze, with competing pastry shops serving up their own versions of this French pastry. Bowie's nap schedule and the weather (o joy! it rained hard this morning) continue to set the pace for our journey, so we're fully enjoying exploring the alleys, the cafes and the playgrounds of our neighborhood. The party sometimes comes to us: apparently, this area is Halloween central; so on Halloween night, Dave and Bowie got into the midst of it--Dave's posting his pictures on his blog.

A novel way to travel!

Yemeni cafe in Ebisu

A preternaturally calm poodle getting a haircut

How about a fistful of noodles

Animatronic Dinosaurs and Other Creatures

Dave's conference is over. It was a success by all accounts, and the ending is bitter sweet; he's already missing the camaraderie and the rush of excitement that went into organizing and running the show. For the next week he is, disconcertingly enough, on vacation. We're flying to Tokyo this afternoon.

After the end of the conference, he and his teammates went through the exercise of naming their favorite parts of the event--no duplicate responses allowed. For me, the highlight of this week was seeing Bowie's reaction to a masked dance, a traditional Chinese performance we watched at a local restaurant. The outing was a part of Dave's conference--an event for all of the employees of his company, to which Bowie and I tagged along. To make it to the show, I had to wake Bowie from his nap, and in his drowsy, jet-lagged state, he was cranky with me. His mood started to change as we entered the restaurant, in response to all the people who were smiling and cooing at him. And then he saw a performer walk by, and in front of his eyes, the performer's masked face changed colors! Bowie's jaw literally dropped. He laughed of joy for the next twenty minutes as the masks danced and played with fans, and then transformed into acrobats and performed feats of strength and balance. Taking Bowie to this show, we had no idea that he'd be able to appreciate it--if anything, we expected him to get cranky and to nurse through another boring dinner. But now that I think about it, the bright lights, the music, the people, the funny walks are all his favorite things. How could he not love the show?

Mesmerized by a masked dancer

And if I were to speak for Bowie and name another highlight of this week in Beijing, it would be yesterday's excursion to the Museum of Natural History, aka animatronic dinosaur heaven. Thank you, travel blog: I don't think I would've dared to take Bowie across the city for it, if not for the way blogging creates pressure to get out of my comfort zone, to have something new to write about. This museum was recommended by Laura, the interpreter at Dave's conference, who advised this instead of going to the zoo (the animal there are kept in sad conditions). As soon as we arrived, we knew we came to the right place because of how many babies of Bowie's age we encountered. For the price of $1 per adult (might be cheaper for locals), many new moms seem to bring their crawlers and early walkers here. What's not to love, especially if allowed onto hands and knees? Broad granite hallways occasionally give way to rock and glass and linoleum flooring. Ramps and staircases lead to different habitats, from the cave-like dinosaur room to a bamboo forest made of real bamboo with bamboo sticks strewn around the floor for the taking. Bowie wants to touch it all and feel it all, and most of the time he can. A roar comes from above--as animatronic dinosaur lifts his head. So what? Here comes the next staircase, and the next one after that. What's this? A rose garden under glass? Thank you, museum designers, for taking such thoughtful care of your roses. Bowie gets it: look, but don't touch. He looks and then moves on to the next staircase. Oh, wait, a new friendly baby. Let's say hi and pose for another set of photos.

Heading into the museum

Bowie vs. the dinosaurs

FYI, nursing nursing in public seems totally fine in China. I've nursed Bowie in a park and at a bus stop, in a yard of a residential building and at this museum. At the museum, around closing time, there were several of us parked on the benches at the exit with the nursing babies. Most of the time people didn't pay us any attention, and when they did, they smiled and walked on--unless accompanied by toddlers, who wanted to know what we were doing and came over to say hi to the baby.

To conclude this part of the trip, here's a list of discoveries we've made in the past week:

-- Trashcans make excellent hiding places for toys
-- Purple dragon fruit leaves purple marks on rug. So do blueberries
-- Yogurt leaves whiting marks on rug
-- Potted plants are tastier than bacon
-- Happy smiling babies are welcome anywhere. Cranky cry-babies will get their business lounge privileges revoked
-- Telephones have chords! Doorbells ring like bells! Elevators have buttons!
-- Trashcans can roll
-- Baby can figure out not only a TV set but also an alarm clock. It rings at five am at leaves a terribly annoying song stuck in your head all day
-- An unplugged ethernet cable will entertain a baby for solid fifteen minutes. So will a shoe-shining box
-- Apples are good for juggling
-- Trashcans make excellent drums
-- No, Bowie, potted plants are NOT food
-- Crawling on rug will give you a rug burn 
-- Looking for that ethernet cable and an apple? Check the upside down trashcan before leaving the room

It's Bowie in a box!

Packing up things

Living it up in Beijing

My friends Anna and Eric recently journeyed by train from San Francisco to Portland and back. Their friend, a frequent train traveler, had amassed enough points on Amtrak to be able to treat them to bunks in a private cabin. On their return to San Francisco, Anna wrote an essay that she shared at the San Francisco Writers Workshop about a man they met at dinner on the train, who was curiously well-informed about all the rail, air, and highway networks in the country. Anna, who is completing an international spy thriller, suspected the man of being associated with the firm. She and Eric clearly felt like spies themselves, infiltrating the world of the eccentric first class train travelers and observing not only the landscape in the window of their cabin and the constellations in the nighttime sky but also their fellow humans and themselves in an unfamiliar setting.

Travel, by way it pegs us to assigned seats, highlights the disparities of wealth and privilege. It also allows us the occasional opportunity to cross over, to intrude and take note of the lives of others. I remember talking to an American woman once who'd been dreaming of making a pilgrimage to Israel, to walk the way of Christ. She could picture the route exactly and had her entire itinerary planned out, down to the places to stop for lunch. The thing that was holding her up? If she were to take a cross-Atlantic flight, she wanted to be comfortable, she said. She wanted to do it in style. She was saving up for a first class ticket.

Here in Beijing, Bowie and I are trespassing as business travelers. We're sharing Dave's room in a comfortable--very comfortable--business class hotel. Clean filtered air, a crib for Bowie, mini fridge, a coffee maker and an electric tea kettle, TVs in the room and in the bathroom over the tub (TV is supposed to be relaxing?), a desk with lots of electric plugs, accommodating various standards, for all of our computers and phones. There's a leg massage machine. The room is on the 23rd floor and when we open the automated blinds, we're entertained by the view of the endless stream of traffic down below and new construction projects.

Beijing construction in the smog

In the forty-eight hours since our arrival, we've had little opportunity and need to leave the hotel. Bowie's got a case of jet lag, which means short drowsy days and then complete alertness at two am. At that hour, we've been picnicking in the bathroom and taking long crawls down the hallways. Then, back to bed until breakfast. The breakfast buffet, a smorgasbord of Asian, American, and European dishes (think: kimchi and baked beans) is just the thing for a little man who's experimenting with solids. There's cucumber and bacon and noodles and buns and watermelon to munch on, or, well, to throw around, yogurt to dip your fists into.

Picnic at 2 am

Sometime after breakfast and before dinner, we did make it to an indoor playground at a shopping center across the street from the hotel. The playground is perfect for crawlers and beginning walkers: a large enclosed padded space with miniature houses and slides and little rocking dragons (why rock on a horse if you could rock on a dragon?). Bowie took to this playground right away--and instantly became the center of attention. The half-dozed moms, nannies, and grandmas (and one grandpa) instantly wanted their babies to say hi to the foreigner. They did, and Bowie did; hands met hands and faces and noses and mouths; there was a little laughter and a little crying and a little hair pulling. Then followed the photo shoot, where we all had to document this cultural exchange. Bowie climbed the slide, rocked on a dragon, hid behind a miniature house, and then, as soon as seemed appropriate without causing an international scandal, we said пока-пока, bye-bye to our new friends and took off. I have to admit to being more scared of friendly babies than of airports and airplanes and cold and traffic jams and bad air. Their mutual curiosity and inability to cover their faces when they cough makes them perfect conduits for germs. In his eleven months, Bowie's had what feels like more than his fair share of colds, and though the docs keep telling me I won't be able to protect him from having another, I do wish I could. I trample on his social life; we return to the hotel.

Friends forever

Taking Bowie on the Road

Between professional travelers and the people who prefer to stay close to home, Dave and I, passionate as we are about experiencing new places and cultures, have not built our work life to accommodate more than a couple of trips a year, and so each departure feels fresh, an adventure, some of them more scary and daring than others.

Baby traveler

Once, on a Greek island of Naxos, we met a French couple with a three-week old baby. The two of them worked for Doctors Without Borders, and never got a chance to spend enough time together. After their baby was born, instead of staying in their hometown, surrounded by well-meaning family and friends, they decided to take the baby to a quiet relaxing place where the three of them would have a chance to bond. These professional travelers thought nothing, nay, found it relaxing, to take their newborn to a small island, accessible by ferry only in calm seas (the ferry we arrived on was able to dock at the port on the third attempt, just barely) and by a small aircraft, equally dependent on weather. At that time, Dave and I were only thinking about thinking about having a baby, and we put this story away as something both thrilling and worth aspiring to.

Sleeping like a rock star

I'm writing this from Beijing, where the nearly eleven-month Bowie and I landed yesterday, to rejoin Dave. Dave's been traveling to China for work; this time, he's helping to organize the company's annual conference happening next week. He's been here for a few days already to see things through (here are his photos from the past week). Bowie and I couldn't miss this chance to watch him do his job magic and to assist by breaking his sleep into bite-size chunks (tastier this way?). We also have our sights set on the following week, when Dave will take a vacation and we head to Tokyo.

So far, we've done little more than arrive, take a brief survey of the hotel and the nearby malls, fall asleep at dinner (Bowie), take a two o'clock in the morning snack of the dinner leftovers (Bowie), have breakfast and take a midday nap (Bowie). I'm hanging out now waiting for an appropriate time to wake Bowie from the nap (jet lag baby!) so that we could try out the perfect indoor playground area Dave had scouted out for us.

Here's the thing I love the most about traveling with Bowie so far: the baby knows how to make friends. In the airport and during the flight, he worked the system better than a priority status. We got seated early and, since the aircraft wasn't completely full, the flight attendants moved the man seated next to us, allowing Bowie extra room to crawl and play. A tireless neighbor behind us spent at least an hour playing peekaboo with Bowie; another neighbor used her fingers to teach him Chinese numbers. Bowie then counted individual grains of rice served to us for dinner--a few did end up in his mouth.

And hey, those baby changing stations on the Boeings? Quite functional with plenty of counter space with entertainment for the busy crawler. From the paper cups and paper towels to the faucet and the mirror, it's all a curiosity to him. Speaking of entertainment, while waiting on that clean diaper, peeing all over that changing station seems just the thing to do!

Overlooking Beijing traffic

Bowie

On November 24, Bowie happened.