Puerto Vallarta (Day 2) - Playa de los Muertos

First full day in Puerto Vallarta, and beach is the order of business.  We could have stayed sand-free on our private roof deck, but then we would have missed out on the people watching and wave-surfing.  So we walked down to the famous Blue Chairs section of the beach and staked out a spot near a couple of guys from Chicago who Randall, Todd and Justin all knew -- small world!

Unfortunately, we had a layer of clouds pretty much all day.  That didn't stop us from making the most of it -- we went into serious beaching mode (tan, swim, snack, repeat ad infinitum), and spent literally the entire day there.  And although I would have much preferred a clear, sunny day, it was probably good to have some cover on the first day on the beach because the rays were still plenty strong, and those among us who hadn't pre-tanned still got burned -- and those of us who had pre-tanned made terrific progress on our color base....
 

My beach reading this year:  A biography of Elizabeth I.  Super interesting.

Joel and Devin (both from Chicago), Jed, Justin

Hats!  Yes, Justin and I had basically matching hats.
They came in handy for those moments when the sun broke through the clouds.

Proving, yet again, that no place is too far for the Peruvian pan flute.
We had to pay him off twice to get him to leave.

Eventually we ran out of beach snacks and the sun got low, so we decided it was time for dinner.  We cleaned up at the condo and went out to a "grown up" dinner at Vista Grill, a restaurant perched on the hillside and famous for its views.  It was literally a hike to get there, and because I was in charge I volunteered everyone to hike there with me instead of taking a cab.  The views were truly spectacular, but the food less than inspiring.  We had a nice time but decided that next time we'd stick with the trusty taco stand.
 

The light was so bad I only bothered taking a picture of the appetizer:
seared scallops with foam

Puerto Vallarta (Day 1) - Vacation!

Okay, so you know how every place has its quirky cultures and traditions?  Like, how Seattleites pretend never to use umbrellas and all have purple-dyed mohawks and electric cars?  Well, one of the Seattle quirks that I'm definitely on board with is using the grey, wet winter as an excuse to take springtime vacations to tropical places like Hawaii and Mexico. 

I'd noticed that trend shortly after I moved here last year, when everyone was just getting back and was all tan and couldn't stop talking about how they'd run into their entire neighborhood on the beach in Maui, and I'd been thinking that I needed to get in on the action.  Then, back in January, I decided to switch wards, and before I knew it one of the guys in the new ward asked if I wanted to join him and a group of friends (all LDS) for a week in a penthouse condo in Puerto Vallarta.  Of course I said yes --  because international travel with a bunch of strangers?  Why not! 

I used the intervening weeks to start working on my tan, getting to know Justin better (everyone else was coming from other states, so they had to remain strangers), and trying not to take over planning the entire trip for everyone.  Fortunately, Justin and I hit it off, and by the time we got to the airport I knew it would be a great trip. 
 

Airport selfie! 
With our pre-Mexico tans and plenty of layers to take off the instant we landed in Mexico.

The flight down was smooth and uneventful.  We spent most of it reading shelter magazines and watching Scott Pilgrim vs The World, which was surprisingly delightful and perfect vacation fare.  We sailed through immigration and customs (an advantage to arriving mid-week!) and met up with Todd (a guy from New York), who had arrived about twenty minutes before us, and Randall (from DC), who had come with the car to give us a ride into town. 

Justin had stayed in the condo last year, and he'd told me that it was spectacular.  Turns out, he wasn't exaggerating!  On the top floor of the Molino de Aguas complex, it was arguably the best location in town.  We had three full master suites on two levels, with indoor-outdoor dining and living areas, a private sun deck and infinity pool on the upper level, and stunning views of the bay and city. 

Residencia Molina de Aguas.  We were on the penthouse level.

Through some sort of negotiation kung-fu, Justin managed to lay claim to the upstairs bedroom
for us.  It was definitely the best room in the unit, with a sliding glass wall that gave out onto the
rooftop deck.

Our private rooftop deck and infinity pool. 
The pool had a bench running along the back, so we could sit and watch the sun set each night.

Looking north across Puerto Vallarta and the bay.

Looking down on the complex's shared pool and public beach.

The view to the south.  The mountains added such drama to the coastline!

After dropping off our bags and pausing long enough to change into shorts and sandals and meet Jon (another New Yorker) and Jed (from Utah), we all piled into Randall's tiny rental car and headed out to Walmart to stock up on groceries for breakfast, beach snacks and late-night munchies.

 

Walmart in Mexico is exactly like Walmart in the US.  Kind of surreal.

With that errand out of the way, we headed out in search of dinner.  Justin and Randall convinced everyone that tacos from Pancho's Tacos were the right answer -- so we placed an order for about forty tacos (4 little tacos per person), and then went to the beach to watch the sun set while the tacos were being prepared. 

 

There was a neat jetty that let us walk out over the water and take in the views.  Naturally it was a great spot for photos of our newly formed group.

 

Justin and me

Jed, Justin, me, Randall, Todd, Jon

Randall, Justin, me, Todd, Jon

We knew that by the time the sun had set, our tacos would be ready.  So we bid farewell to the sun and then picked up our boxes of tacos and brought them back to the beach to watch dusk turn into night.

 

The famous tacos "al pastor", meaning pork with pineapple, cilantro, onions and jalapenos.

Randall and Jed

Jed, Randall, Justin, me

We polished off those tacos in approximately three seconds and still had room for dessert.  So we went to Lix and got frozen bananas on a stick.

I got a frozen banana that was filled with salted caramel, dipped in
dark chocolate and rolled with pecans.

Having thus satisfied our collective sweet tooth, we went back to the condo to sit in the pool and watch the pirate party ship launch fireworks into the night sky.  What a great start to a vacation!

China!

It's official.  The destination for this year's Big Trip (Part 1) is China!  Amanda and I bought our plane tickets tonight for a weeklong trip in early June to Beijing, Shanghai and, well, wherever else we can get to before we have to fly home.  We have done exactly zero research; the only things we know are (1) we'll be able to visit QN and Niko before the German Embassy transfers them somewhere else; (2) Beijing is a Michelin city; and (3) apparently there's some toboggan on or near the Great Wall that Amanda wants to slide down.  Obviously this is going to be awesome.

Oh, and in case you missed the implication of "Part 1" above:  We decided to switch up our travel format this year.  Instead of doing a single big trip over two weeks in the summer, we decided to split it up into two biggish trips; one in the summer, the other in the winter.  That way we can visit places that don't make as much sense during North American summers (I'm voting for an island location in the southern hemisphere that has penguins but is not Antarctica) while also sticking around for the incredible Seattle summer.

Fun fun!

Crossfit, Concertos and Acrobats

It's Monday morning and so far every single person I've met has asked me, "Did you do anything fun last weekend?"  Well, yes, I did. 

For one, I competed in the first round of the Crossfit Open, which is the qualifying competition for the Reebok Crossfit Games.  I obviously have zero pretention to actually being competitive enough to move on past the local level, but I decided I'd give it a try.  I've been doing Crossfit for a couple of years now, and all my friends and coaches at the gym had signed up and were encouraging me to give it a try. 

The competition was on Saturday morning; my round was at 9:50.  I had a taped lane with a pullup bar, a barbell, a bunch of weights and a judge.  My task:  In 9 minutes, complete as many rounds as possible of 15 toes-to-bar, 10 deadlifts (85lbs) and 5 snatches (85lbs).  After that, I'd have 6 minutes in which to achieve a 1-rep max doing a clean and jerk. 

I'm not going to lie:  I was super nervous.  I'm a neurotic perfectionist; I hate failing; I hate looking like an idiot; I hate being weak; I hate not being the best at what I do.  So to go into a competition where I knew I'd be doing really hard things in front of a judge and an audience was way outside my comfort zone.  And that's exactly why I did it.  Thanks to hard work, talent, blessings and, frankly, a lot of luck, I've spent most of my life doing things really well, succeeding with aplomb.  It's good sometimes to go outside the comfort zone and feel those nerves and sense of inadequacy and competition and desire to get better.

And, truth be told, I did fine.  And by "fine" I don't mean in terms of score (my score is here, but I don't know how to interpret it); instead, I mean that I completed the workout with integrity and roughly at the level that I expected to.  I was weaker than expected in the toes-to-bar (my grip was shot after the first couple rounds) but strong in the deadlifts and better than expected in the clean and jerk (I maxed at 125 lbs, which is a personal record).  So overall it was a positive experience, and now I'm looking forward to the next workout at the end of this week.

* * *

If the Crossfit Open was outside my comfort zone, my other weekend activities were squarely within:  On Saturday night, I went to a Seattle Symphony concert, where I saw them perform Mozart's Overture to the Marriage of Figaro and his Piano Concerto No. 22, and Beethoven's First Symphony.  All three pieces were nice and familiar, and I continue to be impressed at the quality of the symphony's sound.

On Friday I went with Justin and his family to see Cirque du Soleil's traveling show, Kurios.  Set up in a giant, multi-colored tent on the outskirts of town, it reminded me of Dumbo -- that opening sequence when the men are raising the tent, and then later when the enraged mother brings the whole place down around their ears.
 

Fortunately for us, there were no enraged elephant mothers protecting their children -- only fantastic acrobats and circus performers.  As with any Cirque show, the aesthetic was elaborate and the acrobatics wonderful.  I missed the large-scale spectacle of the permanent Las Vegas shows, but I also appreciated the authentic circus feel of seeing everything under a big-top tent on a more accessible human scale.

Justin and me in front of the tents.

The Ride: Chilly Hilly

The cycling season starts early in Seattle!  Every year on the last Sunday in February, thousands of cyclists turn out for the Chilly Hilly on Bainbridge Island in the Puget Sound.  It's a short (33 miles) ride and, as you might have guessed from the name, famous for it hills and chilly weather. 

I had heard about the ride last summer from some friends who live on the island but had forgotten all about it (a convenient thing to do when it's cold and dark and rainy outside).  But then last Wednesday, Colin (a friend of mine from law school who now lives here) asked if I was planning to ride -- the weather was forecast to be clear and registration closed that night!  Of course I signed up.

I spent the next couple of days wondering whether I had enough cold-weather cycling gear to survive.  After a quick inventory of my various tights, arm warmers and gloves, I discovered I was better equipped than I'd thought.  One quick trip to the bike shop for some toe covers and a new pair of gloves, and I was set!

Sunday morning dawned crystal clear and super cold (about 36 degrees F).  Colin picked me up and we headed down to the ferry terminal, where we collected our packets and waited in line with several hundred other crazy people.

The Seattle cycling culture may be a little more laid back than what I was used to in DC.
My fancy bike and color-coordinated spandex outfit stood out amidst the locals in their puffy
coats and commuter bikes.  (Colin may or may not have said I looked like a Power Ranger...)

There's our ferry in the distance! Happily, we all made it aboard.

The ferry ride is only about 30 minutes long, and we rode right off the boat.  That's when I realized that I'd forgotten my bike computer at home in its charging station and was faced with this terrible existential question:  If you ride a race without a satellite to track your route and your speed and your elevation gain and elapsed time, HOW DO YOU KNOW YOU'VE RIDDEN THE RACE AT ALL??  You don't.  I stopped on the side of the road and tried to emergency download an app to track all that for me, but alas! no use.  The app didn't work and so I have basically no record of the ride. 

Colin, on the other hand, had an app that worked just fine, so here's his map of the route we rode:

In case you're wondering, I live on the Seattle side right below the "O" in Fremont, a couple blocks up from the water.

It was a terrific little ride.  Although the air was cold, the sun was bright and clear and warm.  And the notorious hills came fast and often, so there was no time to get bored or cold even in the shadows.  The crowd was a little annoying at first -- the ability level was all over the place, and so you'd have people stopping to walk or swerving out into the middle of the road suddenly -- but eventually I passed those people and settled into a good pace that was fun and fast.  At least, I assume it was fast.  Without my computer I can't say what my average speed was; all I know is that only six people passed me in the course of the ride, and more than one spectator waved at me shouting "SLOW DOWN!! THIS ISN'T A RACE! IT'S NOT LIKE YOU'RE GOING TO WIN ANYTHING!!"  To which I said, "Screw you! What's the point of riding up a giant hill if you can't ride fast down the other side?"  I finished in a little under 2 hours (which, by comparison, is about an hour faster than Colin and the other guys I started with).

The best thing, though, was the scenery.  Bainbridge Island is a gorgeous, lushly forested residential community with beautiful homes and by breathtaking views of the Puget Sound, Seattle, and snow-capped mountains all around.  I kind of regret that I didn't stop to take more pictures.  I guess that's what I get for going fast...

By the time I reached the end of the race, my legs had definitely decided that they were done riding hills.  They cramped and spazzed and it was pretty hilarious how painful it was to walk like a normal person.  I thought perhaps a bowl of chili would help the situation, but it turns out chili was not included in the price of my registration, so I stuck with the granola bars I'd brought with me.

Fortunately for my spazzing legs, I didn't have to head back to Seattle on my own.  My friend Justin is from Bainbridge Island, and he had come over on a later ferry to meet me at the finish line.  We threw my bike into Justin's car and went to his parents' house to clean up and have Sunday dinner with his mom and brothers before heading out for a quick tour of the island. 

Mostly we just drove around looking at the homes and shorelines that I'd glimpsed during the ride.  We stopped at Bainbridge Gardens (a lovely little nursery, where I bought a plant but took no pictures) and Bay Hay & Feed (an eclectic general store of sorts, known for its t-shirts and other products with repeating patterns of small animals).

Turns out these animal patterns are super popular on the island.

Then we stopped for photos at the so-called Frog Rock.  I'd seen it on the ride, when it had been thronged with cyclists posing for selfies, so I thought it worth a second pass.  (I hadn't even noticed the ladybug rock the first time around.)



That's Justin in the foreground; his mother took the photo.

We had intended to see a few more things on the island, and had hoped to stop at a famous ice cream shop, but Sunday evening rush hour foiled those plans.  By the time we got back to the downtown area, we discovered that the ferry line was already super long.  We got in line and waited for a couple of hours before we could board -- so instead of ice cream, we bought hot dogs and chili from the ferry restaurant and made plans to go back for ice cream and real food another time.

Playing in Portland: Gardens & Art

We got up early on Sunday morning and headed back out to the Division Street neighborhood where we'd been the day before.  Vanessa had recommended Pine State Biscuits as a good place for lunch, so we thought we'd check it out.  In what began to feel like deja vu, we stood in line for a long time waiting to get in.  

The weather was still clear, but the temperatures had dropped quite a bit,
which made waiting in line outside much less fun.

 By the time we got in and seated with our order, we were more than ready for some delicious biscuits and fried chicken.  They were tasty, but not quite to the level that would warrant the crowds and the waiting time.  I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt and assume that we didn't order the best thing on the menu.

Oh, and we also got fried green tomatoes, which were terrific.

Leaving chicken and biscuits behind, we made our way to the Portland Japanese Garden, which is reputed to be one of the better Japanese gardens in the Pacific Northwest.  It's perched high on a hillside and has lovely meandering paths around the water features and plantings.  Our reactions were mixed:  I thought the general plantings lacked some of the miniature wildness that the gardens we saw in Japan had; they just felt tame.  And the zen rock garden clearly was intended to fall into the tradition of Ryoanji, but we both felt it lacked the abstraction and design sophistication of Ryoanji.  On the other hand, the moss and winter flowers were lush and gorgeous.

Our main critique of this garden is that the orientation of the smaller rocks toward the monolith
felt too literal for us, too easy to impose a meaning or narrative on the scene.  Also, we liked
how, at Ryoanji, the stones were arranged so that you could never see all of them at any given
moment.

I have no idea what this plant is, but it looks like a popcorn tree to me.

From the garden we headed back downtown to visit the Portland Art Museum.  We had passed the museum the night before on our way to our Valentine's dinner and seen that they had a special exhibition on Italian Style: Fashion Since 1945.  We were intrigued and wanted to check it out.

Turns out, the exhibition was pretty interesting.  It looked at the fashion industry in Italy from the end of WWII, when the country was in poverty and ruins, to now, when Italy ranks with France as one of the top fashion powerhouses in the world.  There were lots of lovely dresses (and a few less lovely men's suits), and I enjoyed learning the history.  I didn't see any real standouts, though, among the pieces that were on display, and I found myself missing the really exciting, provocative fashion exhibits that the Fashion Institute puts on at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (such as the Punk exhibit I saw in 2013).

Here's a completed dress (on the left) with a paper pattern demonstrating the construction.
I liked seeing how the colors were clearly mapped out in paper, and I also really like the
silhouette.

On our way out of the museum, we noticed that another temporary exhibition, which we had thought was already gone, was still on display.  This one was a display of porcelain figurines by Chris Antemann called Forbidden Fruit, and I really loved it because it was smart and skilled and beautiful; I came away having had both an intellectual and an aesthetic experience.  Essentially, the artist took the stuffy, kitschy tradition of porcelain figurines and reworked it with a modern sensibility.  It was witty and beautiful and a little inappropriate in its own right, but it also was deeply in conversation with important strands of art history and decorative arts traditions, from the 300-year-old Meissen firm that makes the porcelains to the Rococo French painters Watteau and Boucher to the age-old stories of the Garden of Eden.  And I also appreciated that it represented extremely fine workmanship -- this is the sort of contemporary art that does not appear to be something that any fourth grader could have made.

A five-foot sculpture referencing a 1750 piece called Temple of Love

Detail of the bacchanal going on inside the temple

We used to squirt our cat with water when she tried to get on the table like that

Crumbs in bed!

Here's more about the pieces, if you're interested:


We didn't have time to see anything else in the museum because we were on a tight schedule to get back to Seattle.  I have seasons tickets to the Village Theatre in Issaquah (a suburb of Seattle), and we were on deck to see their production of Around the World in 80 Days -- an appropriate topic, don't you think, for the two of us?

The production was fine, but the play was mediocre.  The plot basically consisted of "first we went to a place, and then we went to another place", which meant it was kind of boring.  And the poor female character suffered from having been written in the 19th Century.  But still, it was fun to see a show with Amanda -- and it meant we had something to discuss on the way back home for the night.

And that was it for our weekend!  Amanda took off the next morning back to Denver, which means it's time for us to figure out our next adventure...

Playing in Portland: N Mississippi Ave & SE Division Street

Okay, so if it's Presidents' Day weekend and you don't get the holiday off of work, it's just a normal weekend, right?  Wrong!  It's time for a road trip to Portland with Amanda!

Amanda flew in from Denver on Friday night and I picked her up at the airport.  We were both on THE VERGE OF DEATH from starvation, so we warned each other of potential orneriness and trained our Google maps on the nearest restaurant we could find.  What we found isn't worth writing about, but it did restore us to our typical selves and got us almost all the way through the three hour drive to Portland (we did stop at a gas station to load up on Twizzlers and Coke, only to discover that we were like a mile outside of Portland -- nothing like a sugar/caffeine high right before bed!). 

The hotel was right downtown and had wrap-around views of the city (thanks Will and Susan!).  We changed into our sleepwear -- a voluminous burgundy nighty for Amanda (I keep telling her that diaphanous white nighties are what all the best heroines were wearing 150 years ago are wearing, but she doesn't listen) and a borrowed hotel bathrobe for me (someone may have left his pjs at home...) -- and discovered something great about road trips:  When you've just talked through the entire three-hour drive, you can go to bed at 12:30am like normal people instead of staying up all night talking!! 

We kind of slept in the next morning but made sure to get out in time to beat the brunch rush at Broder Nord, a Swedish café on the north end of Portland.  I had heard great things and was eager to try it -- and it did not disappoint!

I ordered Forlorade Agg (a.k.a. Lost Eggs):  two eggs on a bed of sliced ham and spinach,
baked under a parmesan-panko crust in an iron skillet

And of course we shared a plate of Aebleskiver (because delicious)
little balls of fried dough, with powdered sugar and lemon curd and lingonberry jam for dipping

Having breakfasted like the hardy Swedes of yore, we set off in search of Hipsters.  Because, I mean, this is Portland, Brooklyn's rival capitol of Hipsterdom.  The New York Times had recently profiled a neighborhood that seemed particularly appealing, so we started there.  We quickly discovered that, while we may not be Hipsters per se, we certainly like buying all the things they're selling.

We started at The Meadow, a shop dedicated to chocolate, salt and fresh flowers . . .

Don't worry, we definitely bought all of the above

. . . which was only a few doors down from the adorable Pistils Nursery filled with succulents, orchids and chickens . . .

Naturally, I bought a cactus.
I needed it for my house, and it added to my Hipster cred to be walking around the
neighborhood carrying a cactus named Agatha.

. . . which, in turn, was en route to a random shop full of witty t-shirts and postcards that help you evaluate how you're living up to social norms.

 

 

Eventually we landed at Paxton Gate, the motherlode of Hipsterdom.  The New York Times said the shop verged on self-parody, and well, that's about right.  It's essentially a taxidermy shop full of odd and beautiful creatures and staffed by odd and beautiful (in a pierced, tattooed, dyed sort of way) people who (with basically zero prompting) will super enthusiastically explain the mating practices of a giant bug pinned in a glass box, or anything else you might or might not want to know.  I kind of loved everything about it.

Not the most artfully compose shot, but it's the only one that (kind of)
shows the extensive collection of mounted butterflies.  They had some
gorgeous specimens and I wanted to buy them all for my bathroom at home.
I did get one lovely one, about which I'll write more later.

I kind of want one of these. I would hang it in a closet.

Seriously people.

And in case you're looking for raccoon penis bones,
just look in the beaker on the second shelf down.

With arms now full of cactus and salt and chocolate and butterfly and witty postcards, we went back to the car and discovered that we were hungry again.  So off in search of food!  We followed Vanessa's recommendation and tried Pok Pok, a Vietnamese-Thai place in south east Portland.  The chef won the James Beard award a few years ago for this place, and there's been a lot of buzz (as well as a second location in Brooklyn -- because hipsters).  The line was long, even at two o'clock, but oh man, IT WAS WORTH IT!  The pork curry, in particular, was really, incredibly delicious.

It only took us about 45 minutes to get a seat; by the time we left, the wait was closer to 2 hours

Ike's Vietnamese Fish Sauce Wings (best wings I've ever had)
Papaya Pok Pok (Central Thai-style spicy green papaya salad)
Kaeng Hang Leh (Northern Thai sweet pork belly and pork shoulder curry)

Once we had finished (and bathed in wetwipes to get the wings sauce off!), we walked across the street to Salt and Straw, an artisanal ice cream shop with unbelievable ice cream -- and by "unbelievable" I mean both in terms of the flavors (tomato water and olive oil sherbet, anyone?) and how good they taste.  When we finally got to the front of the line, we took the same approach to tasting that I took to paint samples:  We tried as many as we could get away with and then still ordered a tray of four different flavors (and if the line hadn't been so long, we would have gone back for another round!).

Sea Salt & Caramel Ribbons
Pear & Blue Cheese
Missionary's Ginger & Tamarind Chocolate Sorbet
Cinnamon Snickerdoodle



We left the ice cream shop delighted and full and without any plans for the evening.  It occurred to us that it was Valentine's Day and that our chances of getting into any decent restaurants without a reservation were basically nil, so we decided to see a movie.  And in the best tradition of JJD/AJW travel movies, we picked the worst American blockbuster we could find: 

Well, given the other movie that was playing that weekend, I guess it's not the absolute worst movie we could have picked

We laughed and rolled our eyes and dozed off for a minute during this sci-fi farce, and emerged from the theater ready for dinner.  By that time it was late enough that we were able to find a table amidst all the people on dates.  The food was fine and the decor eclectic, but the fun part was asking each other a list of questions that are supposedly designed to make strangers fall in love.  We weren't strangers and neither of us was looking to fall in love with the other, but we wanted to see if we would learn anything about the other person that we hadn't already learned through our gazillions of hours of conversations and travel adventures over the past 16 years.  I'm not sure that we did -- although we didn't exactly play the game right; we kept getting side-tracked on tangents that were more interesting, so we never got to the really meaty questions.  But it was fun to think through the questions that we did get to, and also amusing to think of how we must have looked to the other people in the place:  Two people on a first date with so little to talk about that they resort to asking each other questions from a news article to make it through dinner... Oh, how little they knew!