locker room

after going swimming tonight, i was brought back to a very strange place in my head--the chinese locker room. i don't think i will go into details, but it is the complete opposite of an american locker room. i always felt like i was at a spa** when i was in the chinese locker room because you can bring and do whatever you want in there. while people would often annoy the crap out of me in the pool trying to chat or get free swimming lessons, everyone pretty much ignored me in the locker room, like i was a chinese person. it is one of my happy places.

**disclaimer, i have never been to a spa before, and my idea of what one is is probably strange and not very accurate. :)

tonight, while a line of sixteen year old girls waited to use the public showers, a small (presumably) chinese woman came in with her toothbrush and spent like 10 minutes brushing her teeth in the shower. i was about to die. imagine all the positions you could put yourself and your toothbrush in while showering and this is what she was doing. at one point she completely outstretched her arm so she could hold her toothbrush very close to the shower head and rinsed it off for probably over a minute, did something else, and then did it again. i also looked over one time and she was facing the shower, gritting her teeth, and the letting the water pour all over her face.  she was trying to rinse the toothpaste off her teeth and clean her mouth, but i think the water was too hot and she had a maniacal look on her face.

i would have thought nothing of this in china, but seeing that in america is hilarious. if i had been one of those 16 year old girls i probably would have been dying of laughter. get your clean on chinese shower lady!

save a gato in san juan

everyone clap your hands, zach and i made it back safe and sound from puerto rico! it was a trip well done. this is the first time that we have done some really serious travelling on our own--getting through puerto rico's interior on remote mountain roads is not easy stuff. zach has apparently been describing our itinerary as "aggressive", which i kind of have to agree with. but it was worth it, and we were smiling on the shuttle to the airport, unlike the grumpy couple sitting behind us who had already botched their trip within 1 hour of being in puerto rico. sucks to be them...so here begins the tale of our one week trip to puerto rico, which had enough adventure in it to fill several trips to puerto rico :)

us in culebra, a small island off of Puerto Rico

DAY 1 and 2: SAN JUAN!

as zach will probably mention to anyone he recounts the trip to, we were up before 6am three times during the trip. the first time was to catch our uber-early, direct flight out of DCA into san juan. because of this, i was very tired on the plane ride. i've found that on most planes i am just about the right size to use my arms as a pillow on the tray table and lay my head on them so i can sleep. i'm not sure if this is considered rude or not, but the only thing i can see that's bad is sometimes my arm slips and hangs over the tray table into someone else's space. however, if i'm not feeling the tray table, i might lean back, take off my shoes, and squeeze my feet in between the seats in front of me--just enough to hold them there but not so much that the person in front of me can see my feet. i'll sit in a number of strange positions on planes trying to get comfortable. if that's rude, then so be it.

this is a good depiction of how i look on a plane, i happened to find it in san juan

so i did the tray table trick on this plane ride and fell asleep, which i know for sure not only because when i woke up my arm was hanging near someone, but also because i had a dream. usually i have pretty unusual dreams, but this dream was probably the most boring dream i ever had. my dream was that the plane landed.   that's it.

view of San Juan from the plane as you land

so actually it really wasn't a boring dream because i had really been looking forward to this trip. especially right after the planning was done, i was so excited to get out of here and go. usually zach and i make all our our plans last minute but this time i made sure to get everything done far in advance so we could have our prime choice of lodging, prices, etc. this experiment worked out perfectly except that i wasn't used to waiting so freaking long for the vacation to come, and that was hard.

but once i got there it was marvelous

san juan is a beautiful city! old san juan, which you can see in the picture above, is small small small. you can easily walk across the entire thing in like 15 minutes, and the tip, which again you can see in the picture above, is an old spanish fort.

el morro, the spanish fort

i ended up booking a hostel in old san juan. i was a little wary about lodging in san juan--i wanted a step up from couchsurfing (which is what we did on our new years vacation to charleston/savannah) but i didn't want to get sucked into the whole caribbean resort thing and pay $300 a night so i could have as many yellow and white striped towels as i wanted. and no i am not just making random things up, that is the deal at the caribe hilton, the resort that zach and i snuck into.

yes caribe hilton, i will swim in your giant pool

it wasn't our original plan to trespass into the resort. in fact, we spent the majority of the day at a very low key beach popular with locals, sharing one very small bath towel from the hostel to lie on. however, after accidentally rolling into the sand for the 5th time, i thought it might be nice to take a walk and check out the rest of the area.

part of the local beach

very quickly we realized that resort heaven was right around the corner from our modest little beach. the receptionist at the front desk of our hostel had already planted the seed in our heads about sneaking in--she had suggested that we do it and told us that caribe hilton couldn't do anything about it.

the balcony was the best part of the hostel

forget you caribe hilton

so we walked up to the gate on the side of the hotel and tried the door, but it wasn't opening. to complicate matters, a hotel worker was coming up behind us with a big crate of towels. zach, being his devious self, asked me if i had the key. not knowing what to do, i stood there and shook my head with a guilty smile on my face. luckily the hotel worker didn't seem to care if we were actually staying there or not, and pressed some button to open the door. suddenly, zach and i were guests at the caribe hilton.  we spent the rest of the day lying in a hammock under palm trees and relaxing in a jacuzzi. the only thing i was worried about was that we were the only people there with out a yellow and white striped towel, which was slightly suspicious given that each person there had like 5 towels all to themselves. i eventually went up and asked for one, and was granted it. when we exited, the towel did as well. we didn't really go into any gift shops while we were in PR, so it turns out that the towel was our only souvenir from the whole trip!

no caption needed

the resort was nice for a few hours, but i'm so happy zach and i didn't spend our whole time there, which i'm sure many people do. there is so much more to puerto rico (and san juan) than the caribe hilton. zach and i took a walk on a mostly deserted beach and found part of the spanish fort crumbling into the water. ever since living in ireland and seeing the old castles there, i am obsessed with crumbling things, especially ones that are just being left to themselves, so i was very happy to find that.

i should issue a word of warning about san juan (and puerto rico in general)--there is a lot of trash, there are lot of stray cats, and there are a lot of dogs that are likely not stray but wander around everywhere as if they were.

the cat issue is an interesting one. on the first night we were there, we unknowingly went for a walk into el gato's prime territory. there were cats EVERYWHERE. at first it was just a few, which we thought was weird, but after a while we realized the place was infested with feral cats. it was really creepy because it was starting to get dark and there were rocks lining the shore, so they were hiding in the rocks and randomly popping out. to make matters worse, zach and i are both allergic to cats, and not really big fans of them in general. it was the most uncomfortable i have felt in a while.

los gatos

it was clear though that these cats were not really feral in the true sense--they were much too healthy and pretty looking. this is all thanks to the most powerful non-profit in puerto rico, the Save A Gato foundation. the Save A Gato has an "exclusive agreement" with the National Park Service to manage the cat colony. according to their website: 

Save A Gato manages the colony of cats on the Paseo del Morro and the rest of Old San Juan. We manage them through T/N/R. This stands for trap, neuter, and release. Cats are first trapped, then with the help of local vets we are able to neuter, vaccinate, and de-worm the cats. The cats are then returned healthy to the Paseo to lounge and sunbathe on the rocks.

painting depicting old san juan's cat infestation
that you can buy on Save a Gato's website

the whole thing is really hard for me. on one hand i understand that this is a very humane thing to do, on the other hand, this organization is expending a lot of energy and capital on a bunch of nasty cats. personally, unless i was working to save endangered animals or something like that, it's really hard for me to imagine working in the non-profit world and trying to better the life of a cat rather than a person. maybe i don't know anything though because they are definitely doing a good job:

non-profit dollars are at least not needed for efforts to revitalize the slums in the city--leave that to donald trump, who is apparently buying a portion of them. that is what a man from the slums told us as we were overlooking them. he said the area was donald trump's "new toy", and ended by saying, "we are going to kill him." donald might want to rethink his new toy. at any rate, these are the prettiest slums i have ever seen:

the last thing i'd like to add is that it's very important to eat some mofongo while you're in puerto rico. if you know the right place to go, which zach made sure we did, it will look like the picture below. mofongo basically consists of fried and mashed plantains filled with your choice of meat or vegetables. it's so yummy, and as i'm writing this i'm getting a mofongo craving...hmmm might have to go to new york for that.

and that is the end of the easy part of the trip where we walked everywhere or took the bus. then comes the car, and the trouble begins...muhahah

so in conclusion...

san juan is a place where you can find giant murals of birds on buildings, and everything is brightly colored. 

if you want to paint your house bright pink, go for it. 

but beware of the park with spiky sculptures, it will give you a fright. 

instead, find the park where the palm trees reflect off the wall in the setting sun. oh wait, it was the same park!

things i hate about maryland

their ugly brown signs

their ugly brown signs with weird city names on it like glen burnie and cabin john

maryland, how i hate you!

feelin free in albuquerque

i hate staying at nice hotels. of course, i like the big, comfy beds and the nice little bottles of shampoo that i can steal for upcoming trips to puerto rico, but there are many reasons why they are no bueno. here is a good one: when i ask the receptionists at nice hotels how i can take a bus to a mountain off in the distance, they don't know.  thanks for nothing.

sneak peak, i didn't need them.

in fact, when i asked them in albuquerque, one of the receptionists thought i meant that i wanted to go to a casino. it was very strange having to clarify- no, when i asked how to get to the mountain, i didn't actually mean to ask about the casino and somehow mountain slipped out. or maybe it was because my arm was acting up that day--sometimes it inadvertently cranks the air from years of playing the slot machines.

but the minute i got to albuquerque i saw the mountain off in the distance and i knew that one way or another i had to go to it. i really didn't want to work at all, i just wanted to go to the mountain. it was so tempting.

painting of the sandia mountains during
albuquerque's annual balloon festival

luckily i had the foresight to arrange my flight out of albuquerque on friday for 3:45pm instead of 6:15am when my co-worker left. since i was leaving so late, i probably should have worked from my computer, but ehhh. there were more important things to do that day.

so i loved the mountain, but i wasn't willing to pay like $80+ to get to it by taxi roundtrip (sorry mountain). that's why i asked the receptionists about a bus option. as they were incompetent, i saw that i was going to have to do this on my own.

so in typical victoria fashion, i looked up just enough to see that it was potentially possible to take a bus to the mountain from where i was, and headed out on my way.

weird chalk drawing on an adobe building

after walking a short distance, i found a bus stop. however, i was so excited about the whole ordeal before i left that i forgot to check my wallet and see if i had money for the bus. luckily, i had a 1 dollar bill and a 5 dollar bill. there was a bank of america kiosk in the parking lot behind me so i thought, "sweet, i'll go get some more dollars." no dice, the machine would only give me money in denominations of $10.

when i got back to the bus stop there was a woman waiting there with a stroller. she asked me something about the bus, and i told her that i wasn't from albuquerque. she asked where i was from, i told her, and she was (incredulously) like, "why the hell did you come all the way out here?" haha.

elementary school we visited for work. their schools are more
like campuses, i like.

a few minutes later the bus came and i saw there was an option to buy an all day bus pass for $2, but the bus driver said they could only take exact change, so my $1 and $5 didn't cut it. i bought a one way pass with my $1. i asked the bus driver about the possibilities of getting to a place where i could hike the mountain via bus, and after thinking about it for a bit, he suggested the same route i thought would get me there. he told me he'd tell me when to get off and transfer buses, so i took a seat and enjoyed the ride.

for some reason after living in china, i love riding the bus and prefer it over all other forms of transportation. yeah it was crowded there sometimes, but it kept me on my toes (no pun intended)--there's always something interesting on the bus.  i like the feeling of watching the world go by outside with of a bunch of other random people, it's very calming. yeah, the bus is a very calming place for me, unless there is a passenger threatening "slim" the bus driver because he insulted the passenger for sleeping on the bus, which as a human being he apparently has the right to do, and wants to go "toe to toe" with the bus driver outside to settle the dispute. fun times on the bus in DC.  i did see a bunch of passengers in albuquerque that looked like jesse pinkman though, and we drove past the biggest car wash i have ever seen, heheh.

adobe restaurant

the ride ended at the bus depot where i needed to transfer to a new bus. the bus driver was so kind, he got off the bus with me, showed me where to catch the next bus and told me what stop i should get off at to catch a trail. he also slipped me an all day bus pass because he said i would need it and he had an extra. such a little thing, but so nice. i hadn't even thought about the fact that i still didn't have the right change for the next bus, and there was nowhere to get change at the bus depot. this was definitely dejavu of china--thank god for random people looking out for me all over the place.

so an hour later (1.5 hours in total from start to finish) i made it! the trail was in a residential area right off the stop. say what you will about albuquerque, but if i can get to a mountain that is 20 miles away via bus, they clearly have an awesome bus system.

i'd like to live in an adobe house by the mountain

of course the day i climbed the mountain was the coldest, grayest, and windiest day there had been since arriving in albuquerque. i didn't check the weather before i left but luckily i had a few layers on. however, besides a pair of running shoes, i didn't bring anything very useful for hiking. before starting, i flagged down a few hikers who had just finished up to see if they had any tips for me. they were decked out with backpacks and walking sticks and legit hiking apparel. they must have thought i was an idiot with my peacoat, purse, and thin cotton pants--the guy actually made it very clear that he thought i was an idiot--he was very concerned that i was going to get lost on the mountain and kept emphasizing a hill i could use as a reference point. aiya.

my designated reference point, the hill

path

made it

the hill and the city as seen from above. i feel like this picture makes
the hike look like an easy, straight shot up, but not so much.

the hike was definitely harder than i thought it was going to be--it was really steep, the trails petered off as you got higher, and the terrain consisted of little pebbles and rocks that tested my balance several times. if i had fallen i probably would have landed on a cactus :( :(  so i essentially meandered my way up, trying to avoid the really steep passes and also trying to avoid places where there were a lot of rocks piled up. i was afraid i might run into a cougar or a snake or something *shivers like a baby*

the mountain was definitely worth the trek out there, my only regret is that i could only hike around for about 1.5 hours because i was nervous about having issues with the bus back to the hotel and really did not want to miss my flight. so i guess that is the downside of the bus. but seriously, $80 vs. $1....the same bus driver who dropped me off on that line and pointed me to the trailhead picked me up and i don't think he was expecting to see me again so soon. everything worked out though!

me at the top in a peyote haze

when i got to the albuquerque airport, i was so hungry that i ate this:

it's a sopaipilla (a puffed bread new mexicans either put meat in for a meal or honey in for dessert)!  it was huge and really tasty, which is good because my flights were a mess and i didn't end up getting home until 3am.

so that concludes my adventures in albuquerque. at some point i'm sure i will return to the southwest and explore it more properly. maybe i can even finish up this mountain :)

ways to start a business trip well:

• spilling a bag of push pins and tacks all over your bed the night before, and after cleaning it up and turning off your light still finding more with your hand.
• setting a silent alarm when you need to be up at 5am to catch your flight. leave it to me to set a silent alarm, i didn't even know that was a thing. thankfully my mom doesn't trust me and woke me up.
• having only a vague sense of what you will be doing on the business trip

 whatever, i'm in albuquerque!!!!

this picture was stolen from the google

sir charles the knight and samantha "sam" the squire

as i mentioned, my parents are moving so i'm going through a ton of my old stuff right now. this has included tons of random stories i wrote in elementary school. we did so much creative writing back then, it's ridiculous. it's a shame that in high school we weren't required (or at least given the option) to take a creative writing class along with english lit and analysis--i feel like in high school we forgot how to write for fun. missed opportunity!

so here is my story about sir charles the knight and samantha "sam" the squire.  i'm pretty sure that if george r.r. martin (author of the "a song of ice and fire" series aka game of thrones) had read this epic tale he would have immediately asked me to collaborate with him on his books. it's got arya written all over it.

also, i love how crass the ending is.

"being a squire was the wrong choice to make." sure was, "sam".

the auditors are in the office this week, and i have to walk past them like 30 times a day. they all have dull, listless eyes...

for peg leg, whoever you may be

the leg is round

the peg is square

i wonder how it fits in there? 

thought i saw you once 

a limping shadow across the wall

ugh, it was just old man snacks

i just wanted to tell you

DON'T DESPAIR

life could be worse--

if you had 2 down there

she's 25 years old, never left her home

the title of the post is (in my head) to the tune of a tragically hip song that no one probably knows. anyways....

so it's officially the end of an era, my parents are moving! i feel like they've been talking about it forever and have postponed it like 10 times, but now that my parents have some potential buyers lined up to see the house next week it's real. how weird that in a few months time if i try to go back to my house i'll get thrown out to the curb by the new owners like a piece of trash. the thought of it makes me want to shake my fist, that's my house! but it's good for my parents--my dad is retiring and they're ready to move on from NOVA. i definitely feel that--while in a lot of ways NOVA is a great place to live and raise a family, it also kind of sucks.

since i need to move out stat, i have spent the past couple weeks digging through boxes from the attic and getting rid of things i don't need anymore- like my cupcake dolls and my crazy bones (why i needed a pencil bag full of crazy bones i will never know). i also found a lot of really funny stories i wrote in elementary school that really make me wonder what was going through my head at that time. some of them are so great, but that will be for another post.

i started thinking about at 8 years old what i thought my life would be like at 25 years old.  your sense of time and what's important is so warped when you're little. honestly, i probably thought i would have grandchildren by this point and be living the good life.

but i never, ever thought i would have lived in my parents house until i was 25 years old. whenever someone at work asks me where i live, i always sheepishly tell them that i live with my parents. because they're always like what's in annandale? annandale is such a random place for someone my age to live.  i actually don't really care that much, but it does probably make it seem like i am unqualified for my job. 

considering that i have had some kind of job for almost the entire time that i've lived with my parents, i must be an outlier compared to other people my age living at home right now. that's special :) 

but here i sit in my room, the same room i have occupied since i was 12 years old when i upgraded from another room in the house. at least i haven't been living in the same room my whole life, good god. who knows how much longer i'd be here if my parents weren't moving soon. 

living rent-free since graduating has surely been the biggest perk of living at home. and of course seeing my lovely parents everyday, except for that 6 month period when they were learning how to use facebook...those were the dark times. but i'm not sure if i would have had the financial luxury to quit my job and pack my bags for china if i hadn't lived at home. after a year of work in dalian, i brought home (like literally brought home, i had it on me all through my plane ride home and my layover in tokyo) 20,800 rmb. that sounds like a lot of money, and in china, it really is--it is more than enough to live there. however, converted to dollars, that is $3,300. i'd like to think that the reason that amount is so low is because i used some of my teaching money to travel to southeast asia, but i'm pretty sure i used a different pot of money for that. i was only making like $1,000 a month there from my company, and just making a little bit extra from private teaching gigs. i have 0 regrets from that year, but i may have felt differently if i hadn't been able to settle right back into my parent's house upon returning to the US, because finding a job when i came back wasn't easy.

the thing is that when i left for china, i didn't really even think about the consequences of quitting a job (aka having to find a new job when i returned). or maybe i did, i just didn't really care. i'm not really one to let such a "minor" detail get in the way of my big plans. when i returned, i realized that i had underestimated how hard finding a job was, especially when i only had 1 1/2 years of real work under my belt, the economy still wasn't that great, and i wanted an upgrade in job responsibilities and salary from my previous job at united way. i had already worked 2 temp jobs before landing my final temp job at pta, which by the grace of all things good turned into a real job after 3 months and met all of my requirements. i think i got the job 10% because i worked my butt off and 90% because i got really lucky with timing. whatever, i'll take it. all together it took me 9 months from returning to the US to getting an offer letter in my hand from pta and it was probably some of the most frustrating months of my life (even more frustrating than the dark times). the whole temp and application/interview process thing wore me out. i got so desperate that at one point i interviewed at a place called JC tumbles. everything must have went well because JC tumbles invited me back for a 2nd round interview, at which point i said JC tumbles you have got to be kidding me and passed on the opportunity. i wonder if the 2nd round interview would have been more physical, like i would have to prove that i could do a backward somersault while cloroxing the mat. oh well, i'll never know, for my own morale, i couldn't do it. (for the record i wouldn't mind doing somersaults all day and may have worked there for a while if i had gotten it on the first go-round, i just didn't want to oblige them by partaking in their little ego-boosting interview game).

so i got really lucky with pta and i don't know what i would have done if it hadn't worked out. for one, the temp at pta was the only temp job i had applied to in weeks--i had sworn off applying to any more temps because i was getting nervous about how long i was going to have to jump around until i  found something and wanted something permanent. the only reason i applied for it was because i thought the pta might be up my ally....so it was a total fluke that i even ended up getting this job in the first place. for two, unlike the other 2 temps, the pta temp was indefinite--there wasn't really a set project that i was coming in and doing and i was kind of building my own work. so after a few months...i realized it didn't really feel like a temp at all and i had ownership of a lot of pieces of work. to think about having to start over and do that again at another job made me feel mentally exhausted, i'm not sure how much longer i could have played the job game before i gave up and called JC tumbles to see if that 2nd round interview was still on the table. 

it's really hard and much more stressful to find a job when you don't one to begin with. i'd much rather be in the position where i was currently at a job and trying to switch. but that doesn't even work for some young people--recently i came into contact with the word "permatern". it is someone who seems to permanently work for free or a stipend because they can't secure a paid position. these are smart people who are doing these jobs, how pathetic. i'm way too lazy to look up the exact statistics right now but obviously there is a huge gap between the number of young people in the job market and the number of (good) jobs that actually exist. and i feel like a lot of these jobs are never coming back. it kind of makes me think that going more towards a welfare state is a step in the right direction. if someone takes all the steps they're supposed to, and still can't make it (or make it in a timely manner), what are they supposed to do? do we say tough luck and let them fail at a chance of having a good life? i think some people just don't like the idea that their hard-earned money would be going towards supporting someone else. well, i also think about it this way-- if i was struggling financially and had no one to support me, i would be much more inclined to engage in alternative activities to bring home the bacon...and those would likely be illicit activities if you didn't catch my drift. impoverished areas are always the most dangerous ones, and poverty is a cycle. i'd rather pay a little out for social welfare to ensure that my country was a good place to live than sit inside clutching my piggy bank tight to my chest because i was afraid of going outside. 

point of the story--maybe i would be a drug lord right now if my parents had not been around to house me. i learned some pretty good bartering skills in china :)

so it's another one of my classic rambling posts. i'm writing a book right now, and i'm going to need to hire a really good editor. sigh...