From Sevilla to Granada

"From Sevilla to Grenada" Professor Preobrazhensky hums obsessively in Mikhail Bulgakov's 1925 short story "Heart of a Dog."  The line is from a well-known Tchaikovsky tune, "Don Juan's Serenade." Preobrazhensky hums the tune because that's who he is: a man of high culture, attending opera and theatre instead of the meetings of the housing committee that's trying to appropriate his apartment. "From Sevilla to Grenada" is European civilization, all that is beautiful and valuable in the world, according to Bulgakov. In the early 1990s, when I read the story, "From Sevilla to Grenada" came to mean all that was beautiful and inaccessible, the world of knowledge and culture from which we'd been cut off by the Soviet Union's iron curtain.

The names of these towns evoke oh so many romantic notions formed on misleading cultural stereotypes. (Don Juan, the trickster of Sevilla, is such a trope in Russian culture, a burrowing from Spain long detached from its roots and used by countless writers from Pushkin to Vysotsky through A.K.Tolstoy who wrote the play that formed the basis of Tchaikovsky's serenade.) What becomes apparent traveling from Sevilla, through Cordoba, to Granada is to what extent the European civilization in these parts is built upon the remnants of the Islamic kingdom Al-Andalus; so much so that a thousand years later the main attractions in these towns are the old Moorish buildings that have been built upon and re-purposed but never quite destroyed. Cordoba fell to Christians in 1236, Sevilla--twelve years later, and Granada held on until 1492. Today it takes about two hours to drive between these cities, a convenient triangle for tourists with a baby napping in the back seat. We brought our own car seat with us, and this part went perfectly according to plan: each time we got on the highway, Bowie fell asleep and slept until we rolled into the next town.

Road tripping!

On his blog, Dave outlined the highlights of our road trip. The two hour naps were about half of what Bowie needed, and most of the days we weren't able to provide the other half. Whatever museums, palaces, mosques, synagogues, and cathedrals we wanted to visit had shortened their hours for the holidays, and Dave and I also needed food, coffee. Bowie humored us most of the time. Only when we got to Granada, his need to sleep outweighed all else. We have just finished our morning rituals, getting dressed, taking the medicine, tinkering on our devices, and Bowie yawned so hard and so plaintively that we relented. Instead of going out for breakfast, we returned to bed and took a nap.

Somewhere between Malaga (where the ocean scared him) and Sevilla, Bowie developed a feverish love for running water. Be it in a hotel sink, at a Moorish fountain in the Alhambra, a medieval open sewer in the middle of cobblestones, he wanted to get close to it, to touch it, to taste it, to figure out where it was going, to capture it with a cup or a glass. Several of the hotels greeted us at the reception area with carafes of drinking water flavored by fresh fruit, and at our comings and goings Bowie asked for this water, dunked his hands into the glass, licked his hands, drank more, tried it with his hands again, spilled it all over himself and the floor. What a wealth of joy and information captured in one carafe of water! (One of the hotels also provided an aperitif of anisette, a treat for mommy. On our last morning in Granada and in Spain, mommy also got to enjoy coffee with a cognac. A perfect morning drink, it wakes you up, smoothly.)

Bowie studies a glass of water

The highlights of hotel-living: a massive nativity scene under the floor of a hotel lobby

 

We flew home through Paris, where we stopped for the night. Dave and I have a history of funny overnight stays in Paris; the highlight of this one was seeing Marie Houzelle. She played along when we proposed this late night middle-of-nowhere CDG meeting, and as we collected all of our ten pieces of baggage (the number of bags had started out sanely in San Francisco and grew unreasonable during the road trip), there she was meeting us in the lobby! I've written about Marie's novel Tita, and now she says she's days away from finishing edits on a new novel--something to look forward to this year.

And then--and then--some number of hours and a few unsatisfactory naps later--we were entering our home in San Francisco. The cab dropped us off on our street. The look on Bowie's face was that of recognition, yes, but also of wonder and a kind of disbelief. Was it possible that he was recognizing the garage door, the tree in front of our house, the front steps? On a Saturday, our neighbors who had seen us off on the trip two weeks earlier were greeting us and welcoming us home. He knew these people. He knew this house. Was Bowie dreaming this? Or had his adventures up to now been a dream? After waking up in four different hotel rooms in the space of two weeks, was it possible that he actually had a place of his own to come back to, a home?

We entered the hallway. Our building is over hundred years old, and after two weeks away it develops a very particular odor--Dave and I picture a prim Edwardian-era lady who in our absence moves in with her scents and powders. It was this concentrated scent that hit home with Bowie, and then seeing his room with his play rugs and toys. He took in the impossible familiarity of it all--and cried. Bowie was home.

He had a good cry, and then wanted to get down to the floor. Bowie was home. There were blocks to stack, books to organize, boxes to unpack. He was suddenly oh so very busy.

Feeding his pony with a carrot

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.

Wrapping up Tokyo

We flew home from Tokyo on Saturday and spent the weekend unpacking, working around Bowie's jet lag. Sleep is such a skill. Over the years, Dave and I have developed practices that allow us to barely feel the aftereffects of time travel, but the little guy is an innocent. He stayed up till two in the morning on Saturday night, and then on Sunday slept until three in the afternoon. Sunday night was rougher: having gone to bed at midnight, up again at two, wanting to play, which we did for two hours. Today, I'm planning to wake him at one in the afternoon, and expecting crankiness. The baby will sleep!

Yesterday Dave posted his round up of the remaining photos and stories about Tokyo; I have some, too. First of all, a series of photographs from the efficiency apartment.

 

The main room, with the view to the kitchenette and the front door. Observe the ladder that would lead to the alcove (and additional bed) in the attic had it been moved to the ledge over the door.

The main room (picture taken from the same spot at a 180 degree angle to the one above), with the view towards the crib, the bed, and the bathtub behind the glass wall. 

The all-important feet warming pool by the bathtub.

Every efficiency apartment needs a balcony -- for drying clothes on warm days or, say, growing plants.

This is how clothes drying happens on wet days -- in the closet.

The front door of the unit. The closet with the washing machine, next to which (not pictures) the clothes closet above, with the drying rack. Bowie's stroller fit nicely into the walk-through space.

The large sink in the kitchenette with all the wrapping from one afternoon's lunch (see story below).

Every day, after nap, Dave, Bowie, and I picnicked on the floor of our room for lunch. We made cucumber and tomato salads, fruit salads, finished leftover noodles, bought take out sashimi at the grocery stores, pastry from the local cafes. Each of these lunches generated a heap of packaging, as pictured on the photo of the sink above. San Francisco outlawed plastic bags a few years ago, and we've forgotten what it's like elsewhere. The packaging felt overwhelming. Often, individual fruit, say, pears and apples, came individually wrapped. (Postcards I bought at a corner store too came individually wrapped). Grapes came in plastic boxes. At the supermarkets, if I bought two bento boxes at different stalls, each vendor would give me a new bag, regardless of how many bags I already held in my hands. I habitually carry a cloth tote with me; showing it to the cashiers helped little. (Of course, there was also the language barrier.) Each pastry was wrapped thrice: first in paper, then in a tiny plastic baggy, then in a thicker to-go bag, especially when two or three pastries were purchased at once. At the end of the trip, I brought all the extra plastic bags home--Dave takes regular trips to Safeway, where they collect and claim to recycle plastic bags.

By the way, the perfect tool to clean an efficiency apartment? That's right, a lint brush. Our apartment came equipped with one. I watched the lint brushes in use at an indoor playground at the Tokyo Dome. At closing time, employees scrubbed all the play structures with different appropriate solutions, including the carpeting with lint brushes. That's the way to keep a place clean.

Tokyo Bookstores

Dave and I love downtowns. The shared energy of millions of people, the bold physical, spacial way in which this energy manifests itself, the chance encounters to which it leads. A common complaint about cities is that they alienate people both by pushing them up against each other and separating into individual units. But few among city residents are true loners. Making friends in a city takes some skill and patience--or a very cute baby, who will talk to anyone and will get anyone to talk to him. I've seen the most dour-looking middle-aged men light up when Bowie babbles in their direction or pokes them in the knees, elbows, or shoulders. True, in Tokyo rush hour even a cute baby will get tossed around and moshed with the crowd.

Getting ready for the trip to Tokyo, we asked around for a baby-friendly neighborhood where to book our accommodations. Our friends Megan and Ted, parents of baby Ella, recommended Shibuya-Daikanyama area. They'd spotted baby strollers and carriers here, cute baby stores and playgrounds, baby- (and parent-) friendly cafes. Megan, a fellow writer and book person, sold me on this neighborhood by describing and forwarding an article about a must-see bookstore, a location of a Japanese chain, Tsutaya. We booked our apartment as close as we could get (Ebisu, in Shibuya, next to Daikanyama).

Bookstore culture appears to be going strong in Japan. In one of our sightseeing afternoons, we explored an entire bookstore neighborhood, Jimbocho (for more in-depth view, see this and this English-language blogs). Located between several major universities, this area houses dozens upon dozens of used bookstores, manga comic book stores, book publishers, and multi-storied locations of national bookstore chains (there are several). Each of these stores, we assume, must own its specialty area. I spent some time in a foreign language bookstore, Kitazawa, that shared a building with a children's bookstore, giving me an opportunity to browse while Bowie and Dave played downstairs. Looking at the shelves of dusty hardcovers, I imagined I'd found Haruki Murakami's reading list. Toni Morrison, Nabokov, Salinger, Ezra Pound, e.e. cummings--doesn't this sound just right? Yes, and Scarlett--Alexandra Ripley's fan fiction to Gone with the Wind (I was a big fan in my teens). Downstairs, Dave and Bowie located a whole shelf of Cheburashka and Crocodile Gena toys--popular Soviet cartoon characters, rights to whom had been purchased by a Japanese company a few years ago and successfully merchandised. I'd read of this; nevertheless, the encounter seemed surprising.

Kitazawa bookstore entrance

Murakami reading list??

Cheburashka!

Towards the end of our vacation, feeling more grounded and comfortable in Tokyo, Dave and I decided to split up during Bowie's nap time and venture out on our own. This allowed me an evening of browsing at that Daikanyama Tsutaya store (T-site) Megan had told me about. The bookstore consists of three cube-like two-storied buildings, connected to each other by a "magazine row"--an enormous collection of Japanese and international magazines. I spotted issues of MIT Technology Review and Lucky Peach, among others. Most of my allotted time I spent studying the shelf dedicated to English-language translations of Japanese authors. I wanted to take home a book by a female author. This criteria narrowed my choices to half a dozen books (sigh). I ended up with Kuniko Mukoda's short story collection The Name of the Flower and Hiromi Kawakami's novel Strange Weather in Tokyo. I suppose, a book report must follow one day. The stories from The Name of the Flower I've read so far are as good in Tomone Matsumoto's translation as anything one might read in The New Yorker. The first few are stories about wives and lovers and sad businessmen who, though they might excel in their jobs, are cut off from their emotions, which causes family strife and general unhappiness.

The selection of books by Japanese women in English translation

Besides bookstores, cafes, and boutiques, there are several interesting cultural sites in the Shibuya, of which we visited Meiji Shrine in the Yoyogi park and a 1919 traditional house of a local politician Kyu Asakura. After the firebombing of Tokyo (an extensive series of bombings at the end of WWII), much of the city was destroyed. What we see today was built after the war. These historical sites seem to be popular places of pilgrimage for the tourists and for the locals, who take the opportunity to dress in national costume and take pictures here for special occasions--like weddings. Dave has a photo on his blog.

The inner yard of the Kyu Asakura traditional house

For us, Shibuya turned out to be a great choice of a neighborhood to stay. Not as busy as more central Tokyo locations, it provided lots of things to do with Bowie. Twice more we visited T-Site, the Tsutaya bookstore in Daikanyama: a good place to write our postcards while entertaining Bowie with pop up books. Though, it seems that good Japanese babies don't climb bookshelves while they are at it--and good Japanese parents don't let their babies climb the bookshelves. Bowie and I got reprimanded. The employees of the children's sections also seemed disturbed by Bowie's desire to nurse in public, so they showed us the way to the "baby room"--many stores, especially department stores, in Tokyo provide private places for nursing. I know, I know, "When in Rome Daikanyama..." Tsutaya, by the way, is a part of a larger conglomerate that goes by the name of Culture Convenience Club. I can easily imagine finding this name in a Murakami novel.

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

Visiting Marburg University

Many towns have universities, Marburg is a university—or so according to one town slogan. Of 72,000 residents, 25,000 are students and additional 8,000 teach and work at the university. Philipps-Universität began as the first Protestant University in 1527, and over the centuries graduated a number of illustrious students. The most notable, perhaps, are brothers Grimm who studied philology here and collected tales from the local society women. In the 19th Century, the University boasted one of the most prestigious philosophy departments in Europe; T.S. Eliott, Ortega y Gasset, Boris Pasternak, and Hannah Arendt studied there. This particular bit of history brought Dave and me to Marburg for a few days. My novel-in-progress is set during the summer semester of 1912, just before Professor Hermann Cohen, the head of the philosophy department, retired.

The door of the Marburg's medieval
Rathaus opens automatically

If you thought you could simply waltz into this ancient university and be directed to its archives, you’re more or less right. Within an hour of arrival on campus, I held in my hands the microfilm of the local newspaper for the year 1912 and was able to scan in the pages I needed and save them to my USB card, all free of charge. No one had asked for any form of ID or even as much as my name. The miracle repeated later when I wished to browse the stacks of the Philosophy department library. The young man working there asked me to leave my backpack on the bench by the door and led me to the stacks, explaining their organization system: books were shelved according to the author’s date of birth and then alphabetized by the last name. Instantly I had access to the most obscure tomes that seemed impossible to locate from the US. As a reader who for years had been intimidated by Stanford’s and Berkeley’s library access policies, I nearly cried from happiness.

With equal ease I made appointments to speak with two university professors, a third was out of town but promised to answer my questions via email. One of the professors met me at a charming riverside café, Am Grün (On the Green), connected to a bookstore, Rote Stern (The Red Star). Unlike most cafés in Germany where it’s customary to pay for food and drink at the table, "kollektiv" Am Grün requested that customers paid for their purchases at the counter and stayed for as long as they liked: the cooperative disapproved of consumerism and didn’t want to force it on their guests. The professor led me to a terrace on the riverside, and as we talked, he drank black coffee and rolled cigarettes. A philosopher and a musician (he plays classical guitar), he combined the two in his work, writing extensively on the philosophy of music. He named a few people in the history of philosophy who played instruments and composed music, among them professor Hermann Cohen, who wrote pieces for piano and violin.

Beach bar

Students taking lunch break

The university blended with the town, and on nearly every block we encountered yet another administrative or academic building. The medieval castle, once the seat of the local princes, now housed the university’s ethnographic collection. Nearby a boxy building from the 1970s housed the physics department. The Old University, a 19th Century neo-Gothic building where Professor Cohen taught, now housed the theology department, and the adjacent 16th Century Dominican church, now Protestant, is still used for services and exhibit space. The main library and the humanities department stood across the river, in the buildings known colloquially as “the elephants’ legs” for their characteristic 1970s and 1980s plain functional architecture, odd-looking next to the medieval old town. The lower floors of these contemporary buildings, minimalistic in their design and smeared by angry and humorous graffiti, provided ample study benches and some plugs for the students’ laptops and phones; at lunchtime, a cafeteria truck stopped in front of the doors to offer coffee, sandwiches, and sweets. The upper floors were orderly and clean, the entrances to the hallways enclosed by doors, presumably locked in the evening.

Ice cream line

The students dominated the town’s social life. They boated on the river, studied by the riverside,picnicked and played badminton and Frisbee in the parks, practiced juggling and some kind of variation of skittles, relaxed at the beach-style bars on the river, ate at the cafés and ice cream shops (a couple on every block!), rode bicycles down every conceivable alley, shopped at the bookstores and at the grocery stores. Dave and I mixed in as much as we could (though we didn't eat at the Mensa, the student cafeteria, or sought out to the late night discos) and enjoyed a few days of perfect tranquility and intellectual and epicurean pursuits.

Last day in Rio

January first in Rio was a day of rest. We woke up after noon and whiled away a good part of the afternoon at Marcelle and Davog's, blogging, packing, having a leisurely breakfast. Marcelle made eggs and heated more cheesy puffs--our daily nutritional requirement of pão de queijo. Marcelle had lived in San Francisco before, and she mentioned that there's a store in the Mission that sells Brazilian staples. We googled it immediately: Mercado Brazil, ten blocks down Valencia Street from our house. The word is that the cheese that goes into these cheese balls is unavailable outside of Brazil, but Parmesan, cheddar, and maybe even feta can be used to achieve a close texture if not flavor.

The shopping for edible souvenirs was one of the things we'd hoped to do on our last day in Rio, but every convenience store and supermarket was tightly shut after last night's festivities. Some luncheonettes, juice bars, and regular bars were still open (one per neighborhood), but I'd hoped to stock up on manioc and tapioc flour goodies and fruit and nut products in some kind of packaged variety. The modern art museum we'd been hoping to visit was also closed. Our friend Alex had better luck--he'd gone to the Sugarloaf that afternoon, and not only were the cable cars running, but also he encountered very little lines and spent a lot of time hanging out at the top, enjoying the view. Dave and I meantime made our way to Leblon beach, where Dave disappeared into the sea for a while, and I hung about watching the sun set behind a mountain that looked like a Saint-Exupery drawing of a hat (or a python who swallowed an elephant). Later, we met up with Alex for dinner. He had been considering traveling on to Ilha Grande in the next couple of days, but decided to stay in Rio: Rio's huge, and there are lots of things to see and do. Dave and I had a flight to catch that night (for some reason, most of our flights in South America had departure times in the middle of the night) and were parting with Rio with a feeling of many things left to be explored, to come back to.

As I'm writing this in the series of flights and airports on the way back to San Francisco, here's a partial list of things I will miss about Brazil: the one hundred degree heat that makes it Ok to drink three or four servings of crazy cool tropical juices a day, and eat fruit with every meal; the slovenly pace of pedestrian traffic downtown Rio that reminds you that you're on vacation, and--what's the rush?; reading in the hammock on the veranda at Marcelle and Davog's (there's really no better way to read than in a nice, sturdy hammock); the ease with which we made new friends despite the language barrier; the Amazon, of course--I can already tell that the Amazon will form the bulk of the narrative we'll be telling about this trip; seeing Dave wear his white straw hat, dance samba, and sip juice from the coconut.

New Years in Rio de Janeiro

Happy 2013, everybody! A mathematician I know, once upon a time my brother's classmate in grade school, shared this nerdy fact on Facebook: 2013 is the first year since 1987 to have all digits different from one another. "So there's something special about this year," he wrote. Possibly because its lack of repeated digits, the number looks odd in every sense of the word, like making fire by striking a piece of iron against a flintstone. The lack of symmetry is slightly off-putting and at the same time feels exciting and daring.

Dave and I met the New Year at the beach in Copacobana with about two million people who flocked to Rio from Brazil and all over the world for the occasion. It was at the same time the most laid back and festive New Year's party we'd experienced. We spent most of the night lying around on the warm beach, surrounded by the bright lights of the beach-front hotels and cruise ships facing off with the hotels from the ocean. Dave took a couple of dips in the warm water; I abstained until after midnight. We sipped our drinks and chatted, half listening to the music that carried from the stages set up to our left and right, and messaged friends scattered in various parts of the beach, making vague plans to meet up later. Between all the electric lights, we could see the stars; I recognized the easily identifiable Orion's Belt, and looked for but did not positively find the Southern Cross.

Dave called his parents from the beach--it was still a few hours till New Year's in Philadelphia, and they were getting ready to go to a party. Earlier in the day, I'd called my parents, catching them about half hour after New Year's in St. Petersburg, where they were partying with their friends. My brother and his girlfriend, they reported, were celebrating New Year's in Sochi, in the south of Russia--the place hosting the next Olympics (the winter Olympics before the summer Olympics coming to Rio). Dave's brother and his fiancee celebrated in Seattle, Washington. 

My mother, when I called, was excited to hear from us, and asked if in Rio everyone was wearing white--and they were. Most people weren't wearing all white outfits, but rather something white--a shirt or shorts or a skirt, but many local women wore white dresses clearly reserved for this occasion. White in Brazil is the color of peace; other colors of the rainbow mean different things: yellow is for money, red is for passion, green is for good health, and so on. Vendors in the city and on the beach that night sold color-coded flowers, cotton candy, hats, glow-in-the-dark drinking glasses. Even the color of the underwear you pick to wear for New Year's carries symbolic significance. The tradition of throwing white flowers in the sea at midnight is an offering to the goddess Yemaja of the Yoruba religion, the goddess of the sea, who looked over the African slaves as they were brought to the Americas. Her worship is very much alive in Rio alongside the Catholic traditions.

After midnight, we met up with Alex, a friend of my Israeli cousin Jenya (who now lives in Germany). Alex and his wife Tanya live in San Francisco, not far from us, but he was spending his holiday in Rio, and after texting back and forth for a while we met up and walked over together to a party on a small beach between Copacabana and Ipanema. The crowd there was mostly in their twenties and thirties, the music was low key, and at three am many started drifting off to sleep right there on the beach, tired but yet unwilling to return home before sunrise. Dave and I met up with Marcelle and Davog (our hosts), had another drink, and chilled until we couldn't chill anymore. We left the party before everyone else and still didn't get to sleep before the sun was up.

The local superstitions around how to properly welcome in the New Year are elaborate and varied, but one of the few that we tried to follow was to jump over seven waves in a row, making a wish each time. We had changed into our flip-flops for this (after my adventures with footwear this week, my feet are still plastered with band aids, and I'd been sticking to wearing tennis shoes with socks). On the second jump, I managed to lose both of my flip flops in the water. Dave leaned down and fished both of them out of the tide. We continued jumping the waves and making wishes, and later, in better lighting, we saw that the pair was mismatched--the two flip flops were of different colors, although of the same brand and size. We took this for a good sign. In the words of Kozma Prutkov, a Russian 19th C equivalent to Monty Pythons, If you want to be happy, be that.