Tales & Trails of a Traveling Wiseguy

Panama Travelog #20
El Valle, Panama - Wed, 25 Dec 2024. 4pm.

We've continued taking it easy today as I recover from overextending myself on a hike yesterday. It's Christmas day, anyway, so a lot of things are closed. Even some hikes are closed. For example, there's a small hiking loop behind our hotel called Square Trees (árboles cuadradros) but it's closed today. There's a locked gate on it. Well, if we can't go hiking, then... as a notorious 1980s Barbie doll would say... let's go shopping!



Okay, it's not shopping, it's sightseeing. But now that we're not focusing on going somewhere we have time to stop and smell the proverbial roses here. Then we went shopping.

"Shopping" in El Valle means going to the Sunday market. I'm not sure why they call it Sunday market, as it's open 7 days a week. It's a combination farmers' market and arts and crafts vendors selling stuff for tourists. Places like this usually scream "Tourist trap!" and so I avoid them. But as I looked more carefully past the bright colors and touts and shills I noticed that in many of the stalls the vendors were crafting their crafts. Like, they were hand-painting wood carvings to hang in their booths for sale. That's huge, because it turns this from a tourist trap— where crap made in factories in China is sold at ridiculous prices to ignorant foreign tourists— into an actual artisans' fair.



We eyed a wood carving of a Harpy Eagle perched on a branch. We'd seen it the other day, too, but we're sure if it was worth the price. Now, knowing that it was hand carved and hand painted by local in the valley, we were ready to buy. And we did buy it— though at the end of the day so we wouldn't have to carry around a carving nearly 3' tall all afternoon!

The Harpy Eagle is a bird of prey native to rain forests in Central America. It is the national bird of Panama. I believe it had that designation long before the Bald Eagle was the official national bird of the US— which just happened, officially! Anyway, the Harpy Eagle, or águila arpía, lives high in trees in the rain forest and feeds on other rain forest animals like sloths and monkeys. It literally yanks them out of trees with its powerful talons, drops them to the ground, then flies down to eat.

I also decided to buy a Panama hat. Yes, the one I previously said makes me look a bit colonizer-y. There seems not to be a hangup about that like I imagined there would be.

In one of the artisans' stalls we noticed a Star of David on the wall.



The artist was cutting designs into metal earrings and pendants as we visited. Hawk noticed that several of his designs portrayed letters of the Hebrew alphabet. She noted aloud, "There are a lot of chais here"... and the artist responded, "Because nothing is more important than life!" showing he was purposeful about his artistic design. (Chai, spelled חַי in Hebrew, means "life" or "living".)

The man confirmed (when Hawk asked) that he is Jewish. He's a single parent with two sons who are also Jewish. They've had bar mitzvahs. "And today is not just Christmas, it's also Hanukkah!" he pointed out. He's right: Hanukkah, the Jewish festival of lights, starts this evening at sundown. In fact, we noticed that when we came back around to buy that eagle from another artisan at 4pm, the jewelry crafter had already closed up his workbench and gone home to ready for celebration with his family.

My birthday was this week. Yay, another year older.

I've tended not to do much for my birthday the past... oh, 30+ years. I just don't care. One might say I take after my father in that regard. But it's at least as much because, when I was growing up, my birthday was often lost in the Christmas rush this time of year.

I didn't have a party or get presents. I didn't even buy myself a present this year. (Last year I bought an iPad.) All I did to make the day a little different than any other day was treat myself to a delicious, slower paced lunch at a casual restaurant I haven't been to in months. Then Hawk and I went out for dinner together at one of our favorite Mexican restaurants. It's a place that we think of as treating ourselves nowadays, though in the past we used to eat there a few times a month.

Oh, but there will be a party. Hawk and I celebrate our joint birthday in early to mid January each year. We're looking at probably Jan 18, or possibly Jan 11, for that.

Another Valentine's Day has passed. And for me, at least, another Valentine's Day has been ignored. I even had a good excuse this year.... I'm in Las Vegas for a mandatory sales conference— this year's SKO.



This isn't even the first time my company's SKO has overlapped Valentine's Day. It did last year as well as in 2019, for example. In 2019 my department managers even made fun of it with "Valentine's Day is a Fake Holiday Anyway" menus at our team dinner.

Thus it's a good thing my spouse and I don't care about Valentine's Day. Bah, humbug!

Australia Travelog #4
Sydney CBD - Sun, 24 Dec 2023, 2pm

As we've toured around through downtown Sydney today you could barely tell it's Christmas Eve— by US standards, anyway— and that's a good thing. Here's the Christmas displays, trees, and various other festoonery are minimal. We saw just two decorated trees today— and one was at a church. Christmas music was at a minimum, as well. We only heard it playing in obvious tourist traps.

Compare this to Christmas in the US, where the Ghost of Christmas Presents is shoved down your throat for 10 weeks straight. That's really part of why I use the tag Bah Humbug for Christmas. In the US we've taken the wrong lesson from the classic story A Christmas Carol. It's like we've answered the the old question, "What is the true meaning of Christmas?" with no sense of our own irony by rehabilitating Scrooge into the hero. The new meaning of Christmas is spending money and enriching merchants.

Speaking of the true meaning of Christmas, we did visit or historic church. Or, at least, we tried....



St. Mary's Cathedral in Sydney is a few block from our hotel. And at this Catholic church, on Christmas Eve, there were guards at all the doors informing there was NO ROOM AT THE INN. Visitors were not welcome.

I don't think I can even spell out the irony of this without going crazy. I'm going to hope it's obvious.

But just in case it's not, here's another hint in the form of more unintentional irony.



This manger scene was one of the few public displays of Christmas stuff we saw in Sydney. At least unlike in the US, where it's a hot-button issue whether displays like this should be sponsored by and positioned in front of government offices, this one's actually on the grounds of a church.

But let's talk about what's going on here. It's the classic nativity scene of baby Jesus. He's surrounded by animals. Because he was born in a barn. Do you know the story of why Jesus was born in a barn?

Uh-huh.

And you don't think guards at the door of the building turning people away on this day, of all days, is just a little ironic?

As we headed back to our hotel just a few blocks away we visited a Jewish synagogue, too. Or, once again, we tried. The synagogue was all closed up for the day. Apparently the members of the temple had all begun their Christmas Eve tradition— of going out to a Chinese restaurant for dinner. 🤣

Saturday night we had a belated Hanukkah dinner at our house. We made it belated because that allowed us to host it on Saturday evening, when we and our friends had time to cook and we had time to clean the house a bit. It also wasn't a super formal party. We prepared 4 things and asked everyone else to bring something.

The dinner party wasn't very large. We invited a 8-10 friends who either are Jewish (practicing or not) or are married to Jewish people or just like to hang out in the spirit of celebrating culture and faith. Two came for dinner, two came late due to a prior commitment (they told us they would) and joined us for dessert afterwards, and the rest sent their regrets.



Hawk texted this picture as we set the table to one of her friends who lives 1,000 miles away. "Chaag Sam... wait, something looks not kosher there!" she responded. 😂

That was also part of our informality. We served a platter of chilled cooked shrimp, which is tref (not kosher/not fit to eat under traditional Jewish dietary law), for those who wanted it. It was a concession to the fact that some people at dinner (a) have food allergies and have needed to branch into non-kosher meats to find reasonable protein choices, and (b) are not Jewish and found the foods matched to respect all religious and allergy prohibitions too limiting.

Well, after taking the picture I had to put the shrimp back in the fridge... because nobody came until an hour. It turned out to be a good thing that we planned dinner to be informal.



Finally one friend arrived, and we declared the party started. We lit the candles on the menorah and said a prayer and sang and song. Well, those of us who know Hebrew at least well enough to fake it said the prayer and sang the song. 😅 Another friend arrived partway through dinner, i.e. two hours late at that point, which was ironic because he brought the appetizer.

After dinner (and an appetizer as the 3rd course) we enjoyed dessert. I offered my sizzling brownies, which were surprisingly not as much of a fail as they looked when I took them out of the oven. Everyone tried them, except Hawk who's allergic to chocolate, and pronounced them still edible. Hawk had made a honey cake, which was also made with the flax seed egg substitution I used in my brownies but didn't experience a spectacular failure mode.

Later in the evening the other two friends joined us. We hung out together in the living room and chatted. Given the nature of our friends circle we expected we'd be playing games after dinner but, strangely, no games were played— or even suggested. Frankly that was a nice break, just relaxing and talking instead of having to "do" something otherwise to occupy ourselves.

We called it an evening when it felt late at night and multiple people were flagging. And it was late at night— after 11pm! That was another thing I didn't expect given the nature of our friends circle. As we all get older people are starting to bow out earlier. Our parties don't always make it to 11pm anymore without losing at least half the crowd.

Lately you might have noticed me posting with the tag Bah Humbug. It's a tag I've been using for many years on my posts about the Christmas season.

A quick bit of backstory: when I was in graduate school the preeminent technical conference in my field had its annual submissions deadline in early January. Late December was crunch time to finish up our research and writing. One year I was working on not one, nor two, but three papers for the conference. It was mega crunch time. I recall I went to the lab sometime around 1pm on December 24th, worked straight through the night, and left to go home at 7am. It was one of many all-nighters I pulled back then. (And not the only one with a memorable vignette to it. See also: my girlfriend sleeping on the floor of my office and smashing a window to get into my own apartment.) As I settled down to sleep at 8 on Christmas morning I chuckled, "I'm part of the Bah-Humbug Brigade!"

Of course, "Bah, humbug!" connotes more than just, "Oops, I skipped Christmas revelry that one time because I was in a deadline crunch trying to launch my career." As the memorable refrain of Ebenezer Scrooge in Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol it conveys a certain disdain for such revelry. Am I disdainful of such revelry? Well, okay, yes... but not like Scrooge. 😅

Unlike Scrooge I get the idea of the holiday. It's one of the most important celebrations in Christianity, a religion practiced by an estimated 2.5 billion people around the world. If I were a boss I wouldn't begrudge my workers wanting to take the day off. Heck, take a few days off and spend them with family at this joyous time of year, I'd say. And BTW I'd pay those workers enough to afford a turkey dinner every week of the year, too; not just as some self-important act of largesse.

Thanksgiving Travelog #12
Camp Hill, PA - Sat, 25 Nov 2023. 11am.

Yesterday I quipped that Black Friday 2023 was no worse than Medium-Gray. It turns out I wasn't the only one who arrived at that opinion— although the colorful turn of phrase remains uniquely mine, AFAICT. Various news articles in financial and mainstream media noted the same thing.

"Shoppers are tired out; Black Friday deals started last weekend," some explained. "Shoppers are choosy and not seeing great bargains," others opined.

I see both from my own POV. Though I'd note that Black Friday deals actually started before last weekend. Stores were decked out for Christmas sales over a week before Halloween. My email has been full of "pre-Black Friday" sale spam since at least mid-November. And sales while we were out visiting various stores yesterday were hit-or-miss. Some seemed like just the normal level of everyday discounting. Bigger-than-usual deals were mostly the kind that have been available for at least a week. Truly door-buster deals, where current-model electronics are on sale for, like, half price, were extremely few. In fact, I saw just one. And I'm kicking myself now for not scooping it up! 🤣

Today is Superbowl Sunday. The Superbowl, probably the most-watched event in the US— more than 208 million people in the US watched it last year, vs. a paltry 27.3 million for the State of the Union address earlier this week— engenders all kinds of traditions. Our tradition is not to watch. Bah, humbug! Instead we try to go hiking on Superbowl Sunday.

The weather was great today, with clear skies and forecast high of 65° (about 18° C) around us. All signals were "GO" for hiking! We set off early-ish in the morning. The temperature was still in the 40s but we put the top down on our convertible anyway to enjoy the fresh air, sunshine, and views.



On a clear winter day like today everywhere in the SF Bay Area is nice. Even the views from the superhighways are nice. The pic above shows stunning green hillsides in the Sunol Pass as we climb the grade on I-680.

Our destination for the day was Donner Canyon on the north flank of Mt. Diablo. A trail there climbs through a narrowing canyon and loops around past several waterfalls. With all the rain the area has gotten the past 7 weeks we looked forward to seeing good flow.



The trail up Donner Canyon begins in a slightly odd place. It's at the end of a road in a suburban neighborhood in the town of Clayton, on the eastern edge of the SF Bay Area. It was a 60 mile drive from our house. And not only is it in a quiet suburban neighborhood full of 5-bedroom houses, there's an open quarry in the distance. Not too scenic!

Fortunately all it takes is a glace to the left, looking up Donner Canyon, to see the beauty of the great outdoors.



In the distance, at the left of the frame, is Mt. Diablo's North Peak. The main peak is not visible from here. (It's hidden behind North Peak). For a glance at what North Peak looks like from the other side (and considerably higher) see my blog from hiking the Mt. Diablo peak a year ago.

I'll skip over details of the hike at this point except to say we had a great time and took lots of pictures. I'll share those in a subsequent blog— likely two blogs.

The 5+ mile hike took us a bit longer than we planned. We started hiking at 10:45am and returned to the car at 3pm. By the the temperature was 70° (21° C). Not bad for February! Of course, it was 80° when we went hiking on Superbowl Sunday last year!

5 Days in the Desert travelog #9
Barstow, CA - Sun, 25 Dec 2022, 7:15am

Okay, I'm running behind on getting pictures from this trip ready to blog— as always. I'm going to pull this entry forward since it's topical to Christmas and I don't want to leave it in the queue until the 27th or whenever.

Let me start by saying Christmas isn't a big deal to either me or Hawk. Hawk is Jewish, so she never celebrated Christmas. I grew up in a Christian family but have been atheist for... decades now. As part of my atheism I have no interest in celebrating Christian holy days... of which Christmas is one, despite modern American society's efforts to redefine it as a weeks-long secular holiday all about having parties, drinking, and exchanging gifts. ...Which is basically what the ancient Roman celebration of Saturnalia was, BTW.

So we don't celebrate Christmas. We do other things with our time off from work instead. Like, travel! That's why we're doing this 5 Days in the Desert thing. Traveling over Christmas means, though, that lots of stuff we might otherwise depend on shuts down for a day or two. We don't begrudge businesses shutting down to let their employees enjoy the day off. We just plan around it.

For example, we shopped for groceries ahead of time to stash in our hotel room so that we could eat dinner on Christmas Eve and all day on Christmas out of our own supply rather than depend on finding restaurants that are open. Not everything is closed, though. As we drove back to Barstow from a beautiful hike at Hole-in-the-Wall and the Rings Loop (links to come when I publish these entries!) Hawk phoned ahead to several restaurants to find out if anyone's open. Mostly she called Chinese restaurants. It's a Jewish tradition from her upbringing to eat Chinese food on Christmas Eve.

Chinese food is not exactly plentiful in desert towns. It's also not exactly good. We did find one Chinese restaurant open... and as you might expect from the category of "Chinese restaurant in a desert town" it was basically pan-Asian food cuisine plus burgers, steaks, and fries. And it was... edible.

This morning for breakfast we ate in the room. Hawk had leftover chow fun from last night. I didn't bring home my leftovers because they were... no better than "edible". I ate some sliced meat, cheese, and crackers from what I stashed in the room's fridge. As a plus, eating in the room means breakfast has been fast. We're looking to hit the road by 7:30am so we can get in a full day with at least two hikes before dusk.

Monday was Halloween. I could barely tell. I'm not one for most holidays (Bah, humbug!) and Halloween wasn't big in my circle of friends or community anyway. I think it also helps that Halloween was kind of on hiatus for the past 2 years due to the pandemic. That helped get people out of the habit of celebrating.

Hawk did dress in a costume this year... at her office. Her company had a costume theme for the day. That works for them as they're mostly in-office. My company is almost 100% distributed so having a dress-up day doesn't work for us.

There were no trick-or-treaters in our neighborhood. There haven't been for several years now, even before the pandemic. I figure that stems from several factors. One, we're a townhouse community, and I'd estimate that fewer than half of the households include minor children. Two, of the children who do live here, more than half are infants and toddlers— too young, really, to go trick-or-treating. And three, the families with kids skew to immigrants— meaning that the parents grew up not celebrating the US tradition of Halloween and thus are less likely to teach it to their kids.