Congratulations KG

I’m not a huge fan of the Celtics, but I do loves the Kevin Garnett. So glad he finally got a ring! And it’s just too much to embed the Youtube vid, but I can’t help linking to it: his postgame interview with Michele Tafoya was beyond description. As I was watching it live, I feared for my safety even though the dude was a couple of zip codes away.

Fifty miles

Yesterday I did what was probably the most challenging physical thing I’ve ever done: I cycled a half century (that’s fifty miles to you non-cylist types). It was a crazy day, pretty emotional and not just in the expected ways.

I was really questioning my sanity in the morning when the alarm went off at 7 a.m. That’s an hour earlier than I get up on weekdays, for chrissakes. (I know, I know, I get up super late on weekdays, but that’s just how I roll.) One thing that will forever keep me from being a true cycling geek is my absolute hatred for getting up early, especially on weekends. But this was a special occasion, the Spring Century for the Charles River Wheelmen. And the scheduled start was at 9:30, which meant an early rise.

Now, besides the whole physical challenge, I was pretty concerned about the weather. All week they had been predicting showers, which makes for a pretty miserable bike ride of any distance. But despite the earlier threats, the weather was absolutely perfect. It was totally clear and sunny for most of the ride, and just started clouding up at the end. Thank you, weather gods.

As for the ride itself, it went well except for a some unexpected drama. We were riding along a fairly rural neighborhood road (I don’t even know in which town) when we spotted one of the more dangerous things you can encounter: an unleashed dog. He was running along behind a little kid on a bike. Swami got past the hazard without any trouble, but as I came by I saw the dog start coming right out into the road. I slowed down, but that unfortunately got the dog’s attention and he decided I was something to chase after. And bark at. And growl at. I heard him right behind my back wheel and remembered that it wouldn’t take much to get brought down at that point. Fortunately I had received some good instruction on loose dogs in Vermont last summer: stop and get off the bike, and yell at the dog. Then slowly walk away.

It took a lot of yelling. And I almost forgot the walk away part—my instinct was to just stand there shouting hostile things at the dog, apparently. Fortunately Swami reminded me about the walking. And just as fortunately, I got less interesting to the dog as I walked away. I was shaking pretty hard by the time we thought it was safe for me to get on the bike and keep riding.

The kid, of course, being young and small, was absolutely no help in calling off the dog, and didn’t see any reason to go get an adult to take care of the situation. And that’s who I’m really angry at: the parents who let this young kid go out in the street with an unleashed dog. Yes, even your sweet golden Lab might find a strange person worth snarling and barking at.

But I can’t let that detract from the overall ride. Hey, I survived! And the first 40 miles felt good, too. It was only the last ten that started to seem like a slog. I can actually say that I was sick of being on the bike by the time we finished, which is not something I’m familiar with. And today I don’t feel particularly sore, either.

Now for a bit of time off, including a trip to SF this weekend. And maybe in the fall, we can try for a metric century. Always good to have a goal, right?

Parking enforcement, yo

I made a special trip with the camera to capture this one.

Sometimes I wish I was Catholic

Relax, that’s a line from a song. So I’ve turned the big 35 today, and I got this awesome peep cake from the Swami earlier, so I’m totally jacked on sugar right now. I took the day off work, which was schweet—now that’s a constitutional amendment I could get behind, that everyone should get their birthday off of work. Paid, I might add. Who’s with me!

Buko tarts and final thoughts

I’ve been meaning to write one more post about the Philippines trip, and finally have gotten around to it. Ignoring any sense of narrative, I give you a completely unorganized list of things that I remember the best, now that it’s been a whole month since we got back.

Tropical tennis: One of the most fun things we did while we were there was play tennis with Kaskasero and his parents at their club. The courts were covered with crushed gravel and shell, which was kind of like a clay court in terms of play. It was nice to play some doubles for the first time since last summer, even though my internal clock was telling me it was three in the morning! And as the sun went down, any tennis ball that was hit high in the air was immediately dive-bombed by bats wondering if their sonar was pointing out the biggest insect of all time. So neat.

The ring of fire: My number one goal of the trip (besides seeing Kas get married, of course!) was to see a volcano—a trip to the Pacific Rim wouldn’t be complete without that. So the day after the wedding we drove to Tagaytay, a bustling resort town a couple hours’ drive outside of Manila. The town is perched on the ridge of a huge volcanic crater, at the middle of which is a big lake with Taal Volcano in the middle of it. Totally awesome views.

The town itself kind of reminded me of the Cape around Hyannis, with lots of people and lots of places selling stuff. You could get all kinds of food by the roadside; this photo shows some people selling hot corn on the cob.

But the number one thing you’ve got to eat in Tagaytay is the buko tart. Buko is young coconut, and the tarts come packed in boxes so you can grab a stack to go. Definitely tasty. Here’s a fellow blogger’s account of a buko tart from Tagaytay.


The wedding: Of course, the main reason we went to Manila was to see Kas get married. I’m so glad we did, too. The whole thing was really great, seeing him and meeting his fiancee/wife for the first time. They’re really good together and I wish them all the best. Congratulations, you two!

Beer for breakfast, and other indulgences

It’s high time I talked about one of my favorite subjects in the context of the Philippines trip: food. I consider myself pretty adventurous for an American, which I admit isn’t saying much, here in the land where ketchup is considered by some to be spicy. But growing up, we ate all kinds of weird things: tongue, liver, kidneys, and every imaginable vegetable, including the infamous brussel sprout and ones you ain’t even heard of like kohlrabi. So I was well prepped for Filipino food, which seems to consider just about anything edible, including crickets. (Note: it is damn near impossible to Google anything about the eating, rather than the sporting, kind of cricket, so no link for you.)

First off, let me be clear that I did not try the crickets. And I didn’t cross paths with balut, although I admit that after a beer or two I might have actually tried it if someone had plunked it in front of me. But I was spared. Anyway, having said all this, the food was consistently awesome. Besides the daing na bangus I already mentioned, another seafood standout was inihaw na pusit (grilled squid). Just damn good. I was also glad to have tongue again, which I haven’t had in ages. Yay kaskasero for having it at your wedding! Also great was sisig, which is probably best when you have no idea what’s in it. (Everything is chopped up nice and small, though, which helps with any urk factor you might feel.) You can see the squid and the sisig in the picture below: sisig on my plate, and squid two serving dishes away from the camera.

Don’t forget the rice, of course! Rice with every meal including breakfast. And everything is eaten with a spoon in one hand and a fork in the other; you use the fork to push food onto the spoon. And if you’re paranoid about food safety like I am, you wash everything down with San Miguel, which is a pretty good beer considering that I pretty much hate beer. (Even Jet Li and Stephen Chow like it, so who can argue?)

As for nonnative food, well I have to laugh, because there are heaps of American chains in Manila, and I studiously avoided them all just like I do at home. Shakey’s is apparently popular there, which is amusing because I think they have almost no presence in the U.S. these days. And how funny is it that I traveled almost 9000 miles to eat the first Krispy Kreme doughnut I’ve had in a long while?

I leave you with a link: This article has a lot of interesting stuff in it about eating in Manila. And based on my own experience, I have no doubt that it’s all true!

Crowd control

First off, happy new year everybody! And now back to the Manila report.

I should backtrack a bit from the previous post and spend a little time describing our arrival on Monday night. It was a four hour flight from Tokyo, which definitely qualifies as insult to injury. We arrived around 10:30 pm local time, and you could feel the warm humidity from the jetway, of course. It was probably about 75F/24C and balmy, with a strongly funky overtone. Or maybe funky, with a slightly balmy overtone. Anyway, once we slogged through Immigration, waited an eternity for our bags—I think each person on that 747 was shipping eight boxes full of Christmas presents home—and got through customs, I figured we’d see the smiling face of kaskasero waiting to pick us up.

Not quite. I need to provide a little background on the scene, though, and explain about balikbayans and other overseas workers. Lots and lots and lots of Filipinos work outside the country all year, and then come home at the holidays. By lots I mean gazillions. So the international airport around Christmastime is a total madhouse (although for all I know, it’s like that all the time). For a lot of overseas workers, their whole family will come to meet them at the airport, and so there’s an outrageous mob of people waiting for arrivals at any time. So in order to handle the crowds, all the people waiting to meet arrivals are kept in an area away from the airport, behind a big fence and gate. If you’re the one arriving, you follow signs for the family waiting area and then get sorted by last name. Then you come out into an open area where your family can spot you from a distance, and persuade a guard dude to let you through the gate to meet your peeps. Kind of complicated, but totally necessary, I suppose. Fortunately it wasn’t too hard to figure out on no sleep!

In general, Manila is ridiculously crowded. Apparently the hordes are at their height around the holidays, so we saw the scene at max capacity. Besides the vehicle traffic on the roads, there’s also nutso amounts of people packed in the malls, and pedestrians randomly crossing streets whenever there seems to be a tiny break in the cars. (Or no break at all; I swear people were actually nudging pedestrians out of the way with their cars.) Occasionally the government sees fit to try and discourage people from walking across the faster highways; hence this sign:

Roughly translated, it says “Don’t cross here, you will die.” Of course it turns out that others have noted these signs. Funny, and yet not. People actually do cross any road, any time, even the elevated highways like EDSA, and apparently they don’t always make it.

Another thing I experienced that ties in with this theme is security. It was everywhere. You couldn’t walk into a mall or hotel without opening up your bags and often walking through metal detectors, and there were bomb-sniffing dogs and armed security guards in a lot of places, too. It was somewhat reassuring, given the unrest that the country experiences now and then, but also unnerving, since you recognize it’s all there because there’s a need for it. When we flew out, there were three separate security checks to go through at the airport, including one just to get into the building. Although, that wasn’t what bothered me about the departure. What bothered me was that they charge you 750P/$18 cash before they allow you to fly out. What the heck?! Fortunately we were warned at the hotel. Kaskasero, I’ll pay you back, I promise!

Daing na bangus and traffic

I’m back on the blog at last! First, a technical note. At first I thought of methodically going through each day of the trip, but then I wondered whether it might make more sense to do themes instead. In the end it looks like this first post has a little of both. Anyway, over the next several days I hope to post as much about the trip as possible, and if it appears at all organized, so much the better. If not, well, ya got tags you can use to find your way through.

The first full day of our trip got off to a good start, with what’s apparently a typical Filipino breakfast: daing na bangus at a local chain, Pancake House—yeah, quite the exotic name! Anyway, the dish is a fried marinated fish served with a pile of garlic rice that has a fried egg on top. Awesome hangover food, I imagine, and good jet lag food as well. In fact, after just one plate of this I wish I could have it every morning. (Here’s a recipe, here’s a pic.)

The first day also gave us the trip’s theme song, which is good—every trip needs a theme song. Thanks to kaskasero playing it incessantly in the car, it was track 9 from this disc: “Awitin Mo Isasayaw Ko”, a disco song covered by Pedicab. (Not that the band name means anything to me!) The beat moves a hell of a lot faster than the traffic in Manila, believe me. In fact, if you had to choose one word to describe Manila, it’d be traffic. Goddamn, I have never seen such traffic.

It’s hard to describe. Imagine a four-lane road, with at least six cars abreast. Imagine mopeds buzzing in between all the cars. Imagine a huge fleet of these crazy vehicles called jeepneys, full of people and decorated with all kinds of wacky designs. (Pic below.) Now imagine everything traveling at about 5 mph. Oh, and diesel smoke and pedestrians everywhere. I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that there are people who live in their cars permanently, trying to get to a house they haven’t been able to reach in years because of the awful traffic. In fact, traffic is so slow and heavy that vendors just roll their carts of stuff in between cars and hawk everything from peanuts to cigarettes. Totally insane.

Greetings from Narita

I’m currently sitting in Narita airport in Tokyo, operating on about two hours’ sleep, and my internal clock says it’s about three in the morning, just to keep you all informed. The long flight from Minneapolis to Tokyo wasn’t actually as bad as I thought it could be, though. Swami and I snagged one of the rows right at the back of the plane that has only two seats across, so it was nice not to have to share a row with anyone else. I saw a cool sunset out the window of the plane when we landed—picture forthcoming when I get back home.

Edited on 30 Dec. to add: here’s the photo.


Now it’s on to Manila, an additional four hours in the air that’ll probably seem much more like punishment. And the Great Asian Adventure of 2007 begins!

Nice view

Here are two pics from a recent trip to Asheville, North Carolina, both taken from the parking lot at the top of Mt. Mitchell. It’s the highest mountain east of the Mississippi.

How high is it exactly, you might ask?

Tour de Vermont

At last, a travelogue from our recent trip to Vermont! It was a four-day cycling tour, about 25 miles a day, through some of the most ridiculously hilly terrain I’ve ever ridden. We stayed at two different inns, one nice, the other extra-swanky, and had breakfast and dinner included.

So the day’s routine was: crawl out of bed at 7 a.m., breakfast at 8, start cycling at 9, a sandwich in a tiny Vermont town for lunch, cycle until about 2, lengthy shower and lengthier nap, dinner around 7, collapse in bed and fall asleep around 9:30. It was like being in the bike army, but in a good way—no uniforms or discipline. Also, there was the all-important support van. Driven by one of our two guides, you could flag it down at any time for food or snacks or a rescue. It also came in handy when I bought a quart of Grade B maple syrup from Plummer’s, since I wasn’t about to carry that on my back for the rest of the day. (Speaking of tiny towns, this next photo shows the actual, official U.S. Post Office in Jamaica, Vermont.)

Now for some details. You might be aware that Vermont is kind of hilly; in fact, one might call it downright full of mountains. And just about every day there was a hill of such staggering proportion, with a grade approaching 6 or 7%, that I did end up walking some of the way in lieu of feeling my heart explode. But then on the other side of most of them, there would be a descent for the record books: my max speed was clocked more than once at over 39 mph, which is definitely the fastest I’ve ever traveled on a bike.

The scenery was fantastic: totally bucolic, lots of chattering streams, mountain peaks and valleys, covered bridges, cows, cute little towns with nothing in them except one country store (where you could always get potato chips, the most essential cycling food there is). Not one whisker of cell phone service. And I only realized after we got back that I didn’t see a traffic light the entire time we were there. Another thing which I didn’t know beforehand is that most of the secondary roads there are still unpaved, which made for some seriously hairy moments on my road bike. There was one stretch that was so unbelievably muddy that we had to take the van for a couple of miles because it was just too dicey. Amazingly, I did remain upright the entire tour.

Before we went, I was completely unsure of whether I’d be able to take four straight days of riding, but it turned out to be just right. The third day I was pretty sore in the morning, but the itinerary centered around a three-mile hike to see this fabulous waterfall. And then on day four, I felt great. I think maybe my muscles just gave up complaining when they realized I wasn’t going to give them a break.

All told I logged over 100 miles in four days, improved my mad skillz at climbing, descending, and off-roading, and purged all thoughts of my mundane life. And in a true stroke of fortune, it never rained on us during a ride. I would definitely do it again. How soon can I take another vacation?

P.S. See more pics at my Flickr page.

A turkey runs through it

Here's an action shot of the fabled Kendall Square wild turkey, shot by the Swami with his Palm Pilot (hence a bit of blurriness, sorry). I’ve never seen the turkey in person, so I was a complete skeptic about his existence until presented with this photographic evidence. The turkey’s been around for a couple of years at least, judging from links off Google like this one and this one. Given the total lack of she-turkeys in the area, dude’s got a pretty dull existence. But he’s apparently still pretty feisty, gobbling at people if they get too close. A typical unfriendly New Englander. I still agree with Ben Franklin, though, how cool would it be to have the wild turkey as the national symbol?

Low cloud moving cross the sky

It’s good to know on a cloudy day that the sun is still up there shining.

Drop the thesaurus, pal

That word doesn’t mean what they think it means.

Autumn almanac

Thought I’d share the pics I took this past Sunday on a bike ride. This first one is looking downstream at the Charles River, with the Prudential Center visible in the center.

Thanks to the lovely and talented Erin giving us windproof vests, 45F is not too cold to go cycling, for the record! And thanks to the National Weather Service’s wind chill index, I can confirm that when you’re riding 20 mph in 40 degree weather, it feels like it’s below freezing. Hardcore, baby.

This is the Weeks Footbridge looking downstream, with both the Hancock tower and the Pru visible in between the yoogly concrete high-rises.


And the third pic is looking upstream at the same bridge.

Ten years of bliss

Just like the date-stamp says, it’s September 14, which means it’s the tenth wedding anniversary for Steve and me. It’s a standard assumption that getting married changes things, but for me I don’t think it really changed anything. Steve was my best friend and the most important person in my life before the big day, and he has been the same ever since. Maybe getting married actually changed everyone around us, since the government and the law and the people around us had to acknowledge what I had already known.

Anyway, that day back in 1996 was a great one. A fun party, perfect weather, my stepbrother-in-law taking my sister’s dare to roll all the way down the grassy hill outside the reception site. And of course, the magisterial trashing of one of the crappiest cars I ever drove. I’m still grateful to everyone who took pictures, especially Laura who captured the best one of all, the mobster shot (email me if you want to see the pic).

By the way, silly string harms the finish on auto paint. In case you ever need to know.

I love you, Swami!

Bicycling, blueberries, and booze

With that threesome it can only mean that last week was our mostly annual trip to Maine. If you don’t know anything about Acadia National Park or Bar Harbor, start Googling. This year was the fourth visit, and it was great to be back. Now let’s break down the three Bs.

Bicycling: Most of the cycling potential in Acadia is on unpaved carriage roads, so we usually rent mountain bikes so it doesn’t matter when they get outrageously dusty and banged around. But this year we brought our road bikes with us and had ambitious plans to ride the Park Loop Road. That’s a 20-mile loop that rings the eastern part of the park, with fab ocean views and more than a few serious hills. This is the first year I’ve been fit enough to ride that kind of distance, so I was looking forward to seeing how tough it would be. We tackled it on Day Two, and it turned out to be fantastic. There were three climbs that totally kicked my ass, but they all paid off with amazing views of the ocean or one of the lakes at the top. People driving by us were giving us the thumbs-up and calling out encouragement, which was really great. And I hit my fastest speed ever on a descent: over 33 mph.

On Day Three, which was supposed to be recovery day, we rented the aforementioned mountain bikes and hit some of the more difficult carriage roads. I’d been on some of them before, but we did two sections that we hadn’t done before and that had some great views. It’s really satisfying to dog up a hill and realize that it’s the same one I had to walk the bike up a couple of years ago. And we went much farther in terms of distance than anything we’d tried before.

So all in all, because we had gone on a ride the day before we left for the trip, it was a week with over 60 miles of riding. Boo yah!

Blueberries: It’s not a trip to Maine without those little blue things appearing everywhere. I think the breakfasts at the B&B managed to include them every single day. Then there was the always divine Blueberry Oolius smoothie at Gaucho’s, and the blueberry-lemon tart at Eden that rocked my world. Somewhere in my head I hear Yosemite Sam exclaiming, “New England boiled blueberries!” Of course, right now in the fridge there’s still some Bar Harbor Blueberry Ale—which leads us naturally into the third B.

Booze: The best part about biking (or
hiking, since we did some of that, too) to exhaustion every day is that you have no guilt when it comes to dinner. And man, dinner was way over the top every single night. The mood was international: a South African sauvignon blanc, a New Zealand pinot noir, California merlot, a viognier from that largish country in Europe where they make a lotta wine, and oh yes, the Cuban mojito. There was food paired with all of those beverages, but frankly, the details are a bit hazy. I raise my glass to restaurants that let you recork your wine and schlep it home, by the way. And another toast (hic) to New Zealand for making screw-top bottles, which facilitate schleppage.

So now the real question is, should I quit my job, move to Bar Harbor, and become a mussel farmer? Because as I drag my carcass back to my damn desk job, that’s looking mighty appealing to me...

In Soviet Union, watch winds you

In keeping with the ’80s theme around here so far, I just wanted to share a closeup of this watch. My friend Carla gave it to me long ago—it had no band and didn’t run. I resolved to fix those problems some day, and, well, it’s probably been fifteen years but I finally did it. I found a watch shop that looked like they could handle an odd piece, and they certainly did. The woman there insisted that I go with a red band, which violates my all-black-all-the-time philosophy when it comes to accessories, but you’ve got to admit that it just makes sense.
I loves me my throwback Soviet watch.