Snails Triumphant: Asian Garden Night Market, Westminster, CA, USA

On a search for balut, a Filipino delicacy consisting of a fertilized duck egg, Rick stumbled across the Yelp page for Asian Garden Night Market in Westminster, CA.  That Friday night, we drove to Westminster, commonly known as Little Vietnam.  We knew we’d arrived when the scent of smoke drifted through our open car windows.  Strung lights shimmered in the dark, illuminating the three or so rows of stalls set up in the parking lot of a larger shopping center.  We parked on the street and wended our way through the crowd gathered around the stage, Vietnamese music drifting in the air. 

We’d come in search of dinner, so, aside from snapping a few photos, our feet headed straight to the food stalls along the perimeter.  So many choices.  Such limited space in our stomachs.  How could we choose?  Unable to resist the glorious combination of meat and grease, we settled on pork skewers as our amuse bouche.  The older men manning the grills barely spared us a look as they shoved two pork skewers in a folded-up paper plate.  A younger man took our money with a distracted smile.  The skewers were burnt black on both ends and oil spots dotted the paper plate.  The pork tasted like sweet marinated heaven, warm and savory against my tongue.  While our teeth finagled all last remaining morsels off the stick without impaling our throats with the pointed end of the stick, we browsed the other non-food stalls.  Many sold discount clothing and sparkly discounted jewelry.  A large toy stall at the end provided children with boxes of tiny paper-wrapped packets that, when thrown on the ground, made loud cracks of sound.  Throughout our whole time there, not once did the symphony of sharp sound-bursts stop, the ground littered with discarded white papers.  A stall full of elegant bonsai stood near another one demonstrating a lemon juice spritzer, the owner watching each passerby with speculative eyes. 

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Harry Potter Dinosaurs and Space Monkeys-Discovery Science Center, Santa Ana, CA, USA

My phone buzzed with a text message in the middle of the day stating "…any plans this Sunday?  BofA free museum weekend this weekend!".  My eyes lit up.  Free.  Museum.  Uh, yes please!  Through the flurry of ensuing texts and a phone call from A.Y. when he took pity on my pathetic text messaging plan, we decided on the Discovery Science Center.  That second Sunday in July, after church, A.Y. drove over to our apartment to pick me up.  Rick declined our grand scientific exploration in light of his recent ocular surgery, lying with sunglasses in our dark living room like some mysterious vampire. 

When we arrived at the parking lot, we goggled at the huge black cube hanging off the side and the rocket pointing straight up the sky.  Then further shocked when we discovered the free parking, normally $4.  Free admission ($15.95/adult) plus free parking.  A savings of practically $36.  Our Asian hearts wiggled in glee.  We passed a large contraption clanking in perpetual motion on our way to the front counter.  Whipping out our Bank of America debit cards, we compared old pictures taken a decade ago and told each other we hadn’t aged a day.  The woman at the front barely glanced at the pictures before handing us our tickets. 

Waist-height kids ran every which way, narrowly missing our legs.  A science presentation started off in the corner and we stayed to watch for about five minutes before all the other displays around distracted us.  We busied ourselves building fortifications for an exhibit of castles sponsored by Lego, then wandered through to the Leonardo Da Vinci exhibit.  There, we poked and prodded everything we could touch and peered closely at everything we weren’t allowed to touch.  I became motivated to work harder, surrounded by the physical manifestation of a single man’s thoughts.  If he only had twenty-four hours in a day and lived a normal lifespan (by our standards), then I had no excuse for whining about how little time I had to accomplish my dreams. 

We climbed to the second floor, the stairs guarded by a fascinating harp with invisible strings.  The second floor contained all the year-round exhibits.  We pinballed through all of them, exclaiming over each one, then distracted by the next.  A large sphere hung in the middle of a corner room, video projected on it so that it changed from moment to moment, from Jupiter to Saturn to the hurricane patterns or the turtle migrations of Earth.  For a long time, we sat on the benches set along the perimeter, watching the globe change color and resting our aching feet.  

A.Y. herded me towards the huge dinosaur land outside, and we braved the hot afternoon sun walking through the innards of a brontosaurus.  We watched children rushing around to various objects set around the area, tapping them with a plastic wand.  Sometimes the object moved, revealing the delicate tracings of a fossil or a hidden crystal.  Sometimes, the object blared out, "This is not part of your quest," startling the poor child into dashing off again.  I wondered if the students at Hogwarts would’ve studied dinosaurs in a similar manner.  Finally, the hot sun took its toll on me and we took shelter inside the big black cube surrounded by the explosive whooshes of water rockets shooting high.  The walls of the cube were perforated, so we could stare out at the busy patterns of the freeway. 

Near closing time, we made our way back inside.  A.Y. laughed as I created a stop motion film involving two astronauts and a space monkey a la 2001: A Space Odyssey.  Ending our adventure through a fake plastic supermarket, we found it a good transition back into the real world. 

Details: 

Bank of America Museums on US
First FULL weekend of each month
Museum hours vary

**This Travel Tale is part of the Summer California Series, where we try to enjoy all the goodies Southern California has to offer before we take off on our trip.

Geeks Galore: the Zelda Symphony of the Goddesses Concert, Los Angeles, CA, USA

On a balmy Los Angeles night, we drove up the winding path to the Greek Theater for what promised to be a unique combination of geekdom and high culture: the Zelda Symphony of the Goddesses concert.  Rick, a big fan of the Zelda franchise, having played many of the Nintendo console games while growing up, was super excited when he heard there was to be a one-night-only concert of Zelda music in Los Angeles.  Before the concert began, we sat outside at a picnic table chowing down on crisp Chinese chicken salad and sweet teriyaki buffalo wings, watching clumps of people make their way towards the theater.  It was an unusual mix of clothing choices: suits & little black dresses, jeans & t-shirts, and self-conscious cosplayers. The cosplayers, dressed up as Links in his signature green and pointy ears or Zeldas with her elaborate gowns or other minor characters, preened and posed in the crowd of people milling about, eyeing each other’s costumes and taking pictures with the rest of us without the inclination or courage to dress the same. 

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Discovering Ghosts: Yermo, California, USA

The wind slammed the car door shut, almost amputating my hastily-withdrawn fingers.  I tied my hair back, blinking back moisture from my stinging eyes.  The words "Calico Ghost Town" swung back and forth.  Squat wooden building clustered together, huddled together as if to shield each other from the howling wind.  There were very few visitors that day.  I wondered how many were like us, unexpected explorers stumbling upon some hidden place fallen out of of time. 

The one main street down the middle was deserted save for one elderly couple posing for pictures.  The wind snatched at the woman’s hat and she clutched her head, smile pasted on.  We peered through doorways of the small handicraft shops and marveled at the dust-glossed train.  A man clad in worn western gear hailed us, "No tours today due to the wind, except for the one I’m giving soon."  It cost another $4 each, so we turned him down.  He shrugged, and settled back down on his wooden bench, shoulders hunched and still.  I barely resisted poking him just to see if he’d turned into a statue. 

We climbed atop a giant pink-hued rock, my high heels scrabbling for purchase, Rick’s breath huffing next to me, his dark fingers stark against stone.  As we looked down, the buildings shrunk to the size of my hand, we could see no movement.  The whole town, indeed, felt abandoned as if we’d truly uncovered this time capsule ourselves in the midst of the empty desert, instead of following the signs to what was advertised as a bustling attraction.  The sun beat down on us, heat alternating with chilly bursts of wind.  We were epic for one unlimited moment. 

To celebrate, we treated ourselves with mugs of hot chocolate, burgers oozing with cheese, icy water condensing in ball jars, and agreed we’d most definitely have to come back on a future camping trip.  The door tried to amputate my fingers again as we flung ourselves, laughing, back into the car. 

Dead Salmon and Epic Poetry: Ketchikan, Alaska, USA

The drive down was not unlike, at first, the drive up the mountain.  The old bus taking the turns on the close mountain paths just a little too fast to be cautious, just a little too slow to be reckless, creaked comfortably, filled with the murmured silence of the tired.  However, halfway down, our bus driver broke the silence, the quiet détente we had all silently agreed to in order to snuggle down into our own little bubble of space. 

We had a little time, he announced with far too much cheer, so would we be interested in seeing the salmon spawning?  At first, the wall of silence seemed too strong, but the bus driver’s voice had already cracked it, and the walls came crumbling down.  Yes, yes we would like to see the salmon spawning. 

We stumbled off the bus next to a gully cut out of the ground, whether by nature or artifice I could not determine.  Peering into the murky depths, we saw nothing, at first, nothing but dirty water and concrete.  Look!  Someone pointed and soon we could spot them, their wriggling exhausted bodies struggling upstream.  The salmon.  We watched as they swam and swam until they disappeared from our view.  Only one, too exhausted to swim much longer, too weak to persevere, drifted lazily downstream, dead. 

We climbed dutifully back on the bus.  I thought of that dead salmon.  Empathized with it.  Sometimes, it was tempting to drift downstream instead of struggling up it. 

But before I could immerse myself in such dreary thoughts, the bus driver’s incessant voice cut into the now-contemplative silence undercut with the buzzing murmurs of burgeoning conversation.  Would we like to hear an epic poem?

An epic poem?  A strange request and we had no response for him.  He smilingly took that as assent and regaled us for the duration of our trip back to the cruise ship, words extracted and spun from his mind only, his booming voice filling up all the empty spaces of that old bus, the rhythmic cadences lulling us to a state of pleased repose. 

When we arrived at our destination, he thanked us for coming.  I thanked him for driving.  I watched him drive away in the growing darkness, perhaps to regale another entranced group another day with dead salmon and epic poetry. 

Sanctification–Tintern Abbey, Wales, UK

The chatter of the other tour participants faded behind me as I walked into the embrace of the ancient stone walls arching high above me.  A hush seemed to settle upon my shoulders, enclosing me in a container of silence.  I raised my eyes up and up and up and stone transformed into the freedom of sky.  I later learned that Cornwall and his men had ripped the roof off Tintern Abbey, because it was valuable, as they had methodically stripped every last decoration from every surface they could reach.  They thought they had reduced the building to nothing, and maybe in the eyes of man, Tintern Abbey had become nothing but a remnant of the past.  Instead, I believe they sanctified the area, opening it up to the holiness and incalculable riches of God’s realm. 

The only thing Cornwall left behind, besides crumbling stone, was a small milky-white pane of glass, too high to reach and too common to make it worth their while.  I stared up at the glass and fancied that if my eyesight were as a hawk’s, I would be able to see the reflection trapped in the pale material.  What would I see?  Stone?  Hundreds of years trapped within?  Or the face of God?  I had a sudden urge to kneel, on the mud and grass trampled by dozens of my fellow tourists that day.  To kneel and turn my face towards the unfathomable sky and bask in the holiness infused into the very air.

I Dare You To Move: Highway 395, California, USA

Three hundred miles stretched out ahead of us with only my beat-up old car to take us the distance.  No cassette player, no air conditioning, and the backseat piled high with sleeping bags.  The odometer clicked past 180,000.  We rolled the windows all the way down to catch the rush of the air, barely cooler than the ninety degrees of sun blazing down on us.  Our elbows stuck out in sharp angles and when the radio stations all inexplicably switched to commercials at the same time, we switched it off, content to sit amongst the flow of our own conversation.

It was a two-lane highway most of the way there.  Every so often, the solid double yellow lines gave way to the dash-dash-dash that signaled to the intrepid that they could brave oncoming traffic for a chance to pass the lumbering vehicle in front of them.  For the most part, we stayed timidly put, but as the hours creeped on and the heat dragged trickles of sweat down our faces, our impatience won out over caution.  Once, twice, a third time our car inched over the dash-dash-dash, only to quickly jerk back into our lane in the face of an onrushing truck, its passing causing our whole car to tremble in its wake.

Finally, we took a deep breath, exchanged a look, then swung into the other lane, speeding up and up and up.  A dark speck resolved into another car, growing larger with every passing second.  We were too far forward to switch back into our lane, too far back to pass in front.  Faster and faster we pushed until finally, we swerved back into our lane, the car in the other lane swooshing by us, the car behind us shrinking in our rearview mirror and we were laughing, laughing until our breaths caught in our throats.

I stuck my head out the window, the heat blasting into my eyes, my hair whipping out behind me, and whooped as loud as I could.

We felt young and free and utterly ridiculously wild.

I Put the Stares in their Eyes: Louisville, KY, USA

I’ve been Chinese-American all my life but it was always just a fact, like my hair was black, like my eyes were brown, like I was short, something that was but always forgotten until it mattered.  The kids I grew up with were a mix, Korean and French and Japanese and Irish and Indian and Spanish and Thai all tangled up until you couldn’t tell where one started and one ended and it didn’t matter anyways.  Their ethnicity had no bearing on me.  It was a non-issue, something that floated in the air around us but not explicitly acknowledged.

Yet as I walked down the streets of Kentucky, I felt their eyes upon me, the people passing us by.  Their stares brushed over my skin like the worst kind of paranoia, that indescribable tenseness that only comes from being constantly watched. When I finally gathered the courage to meet their eyes, I was met with a particular expression: a confused bemusement as if something inexplicable had entered their midst, some strange creature that had ventured into the daylight.  I had never felt my ethnicity so vividly, a mirror held up to my face, surrounding me until all I could see and feel was my differentness. 

No one mentioned it out loud though, no crudeness or rudeness, just the stares.  Instead, they said "Good day" and "Welcome" and "This is the bus stop you wanted to get off on".  I responded with "Thank you" and a smile tacked on for good measure.  They always smiled back.  In the end, their hospitality, their slow-drawled kindness was what finally penetrated through to my heart, melting down my reserve.  Even though the mantle of my Asian-ness still obscured my features, I lifted my head high, pushed my shoulders back, and joined in the revelry.