Cannon Beach Oregon

The day I flew in from China, Walker and I headed for Cannon Beach, Oregon where a friend of ours from highschool was getting married over the weekend. The scenery is spectacular there and the wedding was absolutely beautiful. The wedding was held on the beach and the groom and groomsmen opted to take off their shoes. The shot (below) was too interesting to pass up.

The weather was fabulous

And I got to see Walker in a tux for the first time (our wedding was far less traditional, being held on my lunch break, at the courthouse...)

This was a wedding I wouldn't have minded having, if we had had the money and the time to plan such an occasion back when we tied the knot... All in all, it was a very nice way to spend a weekend.

Singapore - Heavenly Beauty, Hellish Heat

Singapore is a land of infinite exotic varieties of orchids and fascinating carnivorous plants.

But Singapore was HOT! Seriously hot. Turn your oven to Broil. When it reaches about 500 degrees open the door and stand as close as you can without crawling inside. Now imagine approximately 100% humidity added to that so that no amount of sweating can possibly cool you, but the air will gladly transfer every bit of heat to you very effectively. To go running in beautiful Singapore during the week I spent there would have meant certain death. To even step outside of air conditioned buildings felt as if you would melt to a puddle on the scorching hot sidewalk.

The zoo and night safari were incredible and well worth withstanding the heat for a long day of walking. With deer the size of chihuahuas,







baboons with technicolor faces and asses to match,










monkeys the size of squirrels (one tasted my finger with its tiny mouth and decided I held no appeal, choosing instead to spare my life...heh),


and proboscis monkeys (the name says it all),



Singapore was one fascinating place!

Hong Kong, Shanghai, Shijiazhuang, & Beijing, China -

It was a whirlwind tour of China the last week of August and first week of September. I flew into Hong Kong Sunday night, having left Seattle Friday morning, then got up early Monday morning to start an intense work week with our distributors first thing. Thank goodness I managed to stay awake for most of the 20 or more hours of the travel time so I was easily able to fall asleep on their time Sunday night. The first week in Hong Kong was pleasant with the exception of the stifling heat. I went running a couple of early mornings during the work week, each time returning to my hotel completely drenched in sweat and so redfaced that the locals probably though I was about to collapse and die right there. The air quality was not too bad as far as air quality in large cities goes. I even managed an 8 mile run on Saturday morning, before continuing another day of work (unfortunately no time for tourism...this trip was ALL business). I ran up the ridge behind Causeway Bay where my hotel was located in the city, to where I could get a good view of Hong Kong, including seeing over the other side of the ridge (below, left).

It was incredible to see how tall they build the buildings in Hong Kong. I was told that they do not have earthquakes which is why they can build super tall skinny buildings, even for their condos and apartments.

Monday night I ate at a Chinese restaurant in Hong Kong where the menu had some highly amusing Engrish...(not that I can complain as I was very lucky there was any English at all on the menu, and they certainly know far more English than my Chinese, which is minimal at best). Note the Bastard Mullet on the menu. Rather than a fatherless child with a terribly redneck hairstyle I am guessing they meant a type of fish which had been basted...

Above: the Hong Kong skyline is quite a site at night.

Next I flew on Sunday to Shanghai (below).

I would have 2 days in Shanghai, very packed with work. The person showing me around Shanghai in the evenings showed me the location of the very first communist party meeting, a very famous place in China apparently. They are curious to know if we Americans know of Chairman Mao, and of course I did. I asked what they think of Mao, while trying not to convey anything about what I knew with tone of voice. I was told by my guide that evening that Mao was a great man who brought about great change in China. I asked "but didn't Mao cause the death of more people than Hitler and his Holocaust?" (knowing the answer). The uniform response across China apparently is that what Mao did was 70% good and 30% bad (I later heard the same answer repeated with only a slightly different 80:20 ratio from a friend in the US who had lived in China for a couple of years). It was a bit creepy in an *answers this similar can only come from brainwashing* kind of way. I couldn't help but think that the 70% good would have to be quite miraculous indeed to make the deaths of tens of millions of people amount to only 30% of his cumulative influence.


After a busy 2 days in Shanghai, I flew to Shijiazhuang (don't even ask me to pronounce it...even when I thought I finally had it right people would still try to correct me), which is near Beijing. I stayed in the Xiemei Business Hotel, which was touted to be a 5 star hotel and when I arrived after midnight from my flight, I plopped down on the bed exhausted only to find that the bed was rock hard. I sat there in shock for a second then pulled the side of the sheet up enough to investigate what was underneath. It turned out that the bed only had box springs, but no mattress. I went down to the front desk and asked if there was a mistake as my bed had no mattress and was therefore less comfortable than the floor. After trying to speak to several different hotel employees, none of whom spoke English, they said all rooms were that way. I was stunned. I spent a miserable, sleepless night on the box springs then had the hotel put a few more mattress pads on the box springs for the next night. To add insult to injury the hotel allowed smoking so throughout the night I had a constant stream of smoke wafting into my room from the adjacent rooms. Early the morning after my 2nd night there, we hopped on the train to Beijing where I spent a pleasant night in a swanky holiday inn express in downtown (I have to say that Holiday Inn Express is really a great option throughout Asia for those of us who like mattresses on our beds). My day in Beijing was very busy and the extent of my sightseeing was a quick glimpse of the bird's nest olympic stadium from the freeway. To be fair, our distributor employees tried that evening to get me a closer look, but all was blocked by police for the paralympic games starting up.

Rochester, NY - home of the world's friendliest cabbie

I spent 2 days in Rochester New York for a flow cytometry meeting. I really didn't get time to get out to see much of the area, but I did meet the world's friendliest cabbie. The first morning he took me from my hotel to University of Rochester, and when we arrived I tried to pay by credit card as I had no cash. He said he could not take credit cards, but "not to worry, you can call me to pick you up again later when you go back." He didn't charge me and trusted me to simply call him for a ride later after I found an ATM. He was an Indian man and had that delightful singsong Indian accent and very calm demeanor. I tried to call him back later that day, but got no answer. I lucked out that a van came by the University of Rochester with my hotel chain's logo on it as no other cab company in the city of Rochester would answer their phones either.

The next morning I called the cabbie from the previous morning and he showed up on time, and was extremely chatty. I think he was so happy to see that I was one of the honest ones (he told me that sometimes people don't call back so it seems he is this trusting on a regular basis), that he chatted my ear off the whole way to the campus. When he found out that I was from Seattle he insisted that he would like to stop at Starbucks to let me "try Starbucks in Rochester" since he had also discovered that I had not yet had breakfast or coffee that morning. So we stopped to pick up a coffee and a Top Pot Doughnut (I told him I also routinely go by the original top pot store in downtown Seattle on my way to work). He asked how the Starbucks coffee in Rochester compares to the Starbucks in Seattle and I told him it was just as good. He seemed very proud of this as if he were at least partially responsible for the characteristics which made Rochester a nice city. I have definitely never met such a nice cabbie in all of my travels.

Canada - Motorcycling the Canadian Rockies

top: Lake Maligne
2nd: the disappearing lake on the road to Lake Maligne
3rd: Lake Louise

What an amazing ride! This was my first motorcycle road trip, and I have to say that winding roads are growing on me. There was at least one hairpin corner that I was certain I was going to go down on when it suddenly turned to gravel halfway through due to a recent landslide, while I was still very much leaning into the turn (a motorcyclist's worst nightmare), but incredibly the bike pulled through it smoothly. whew...

The scenery was spectacular. Breathtaking.

Riding through the ice fields in the top of the Rockies I got VERY cold, just in time for us to meet up with an old friend from highschool who was on his own 34 day trip on a BMW touring bike with heated grips and plug-in thermal underwear. I so wanted to kick his ass ;)

The stay at Lake Louise was great and we were upgraded to a room on the gold floor simply because I was a member of the Fairmont hotel chain's President's Club (their points program) after having stayed there a few nights for a scientific conference. We had a private concierge on that floor as well as an honor bar and canapes served in the private lounge for our floor. I took a little hike/jog around to the end of Lake Louise in the morning and befriended a marmot along the way.

I saw 5 black bears along our route (1 was a tiny cub standing on the side or the road on his hind legs munching something he was holding in his hands/front paws, 2 looked to be yearlings, and 2 were much larger). We also enjoyed getting to see a baby big horn sheep with its family (including his angry father who very much disliked the asian tourist woman who wanted to have her toddler's picture taken with the baby sheep...she nearly had his head and horns up her behind as she ran from him holding her baby in the air...duh).

At Jasper we took the boat trip out toward the end of Lake Maligne (the top picture with me in it). What an amazing place. The water was completely milky turquoise due to the glacial rock flour (rock ground to powder by the glacier then deposited in the lakes and rivers) lending a very surreal quality to the scenery. The canadian rockies look absolutely photoshopped when you see the lakes and rivers and lush green patches mixed in with blue-white glaciers and stark rocky peaks. I dream of going back to hike trails and see more of that scenery.

Tokyo - land of Kushiage, ultra high tech toilets, and Godzilla-proof signage

Above is the *control panel* for a toilet in the Tokyo Narita airport. I am sure every American blogging about a visit to Tokyo shows this picture, but it truly highlights a giant cultural difference. Everywhere you "go" they typically have heated seats, then there are 2 types of wash, front (for women, and rear...self explanatory), these washes then have a control to adjust the water pressure, there is a deoderizer button (with varying levels of deoderizing power depending on how many times you push the button!!), many toilets also include a couple of flush levels (little flush and big flush...both characters I actually know!), and most amusing/befuddling to an American is the Flush Sound button (pictured with musical notes on it) complete with volume control! Apparently if your body is about to make noises you don't want others hearing, you would push this button and people would think you are simply flushing the toilet (of course it sounds like the toilet flush has been recorded on a FisherPrice tape recorder from 2 decades ago then played back on a cell phone or cheap laptop speaker...you are fooling nobody if you use this sound.

I did get to practice my very limited Japanese and learn several more characters (for fire, exit, etc). At this rate I may be able to read more than the various instructions on my hotel room's high tech toilet soon.

Another interesting quirky cultural difference...The lab I was working in all week required that you remove your shoes when entering the lab, then put on a pair of bright green, plastic slippers from a little UV sterilizing cabinet. I am not sure the purpose of this as it was not a "clean room" so to speak and half of the users of the lab went in and out freely in their street shoes, defeating the purpose entirely.

Mmmmm...Kushiage. This is something I have not yet found in America, but given our penchant for all things deep fat fried this is a shocking absence. Our Japanese distributors took me out almost every night for wonderful meals. Kushiage is loads of fun as long as you are adventurous. The people behind the counter keep deep frying bits of anything and everything on little bamboo skewers then handing it to you until you can take no more. There were bits of cheese wrapped around trout eggs, whole baby octopus, various veggies and meats...all of it delicious.

My hotel was located a block or 2 from Ginza street which is the Times Square-like shopping area in downtown Tokyo. One of the things I found amusing on first jogging down Ginza street (beside the funny looks people gave me for jogging down a shopping street...not something the Japanese do apparently) were all the Godzilla proof signs on the buildings. They keep the signs tall, skinny, close to the building front, very vertical advertising. It is my assumption that this signage is intended to be Godzilla proof. I think my theory is quite plausable.

Pictured to the left is the Kirin beer company tower in Tokyo. I found this building quite a clever piece of mega-marketing. Nearby is a very famous buddhist temple in downtown Tokyo (shown on the right.

Singapore May 18-25

Singapore was HOT. Seriously HOT. I ran in Scottsdale Arizona no problem, but Singapore...nope. I was fairly certain that even jogging 1 mile would likely have cooked me through. The "feels like" temperature hovered between 100 and 110 all week due to the damn near 100% humidity. It's no wonder their favorite dessert is Ice Kachong (a mountain of snow heaped over red beans, and cubes of mystery gelatin, drizzled with sweet and condensed milk, and fluorescent red and green syrups).

We walked many miles on Sentosa Island, through the zoo (which is amazing), the night safari (even more amazing than the regular zoo), through orchid gardens with thousands of types of orchids and carnivorous plants, through the shopping district, and through chinatown for the buddhist holiday where we visited an amazing buddhist temple. The zoo and night safari were probably the most striking part of the trip. It is quite possible that there is nothing on this planet as cute as a lesser mousedeer (literally a deer the size of a small chihuahua) or the little fluffy monkeys as pocket-size as squirrels. I will post pictures when I can get them from my husband's mac.

Texas: Houston area & College Station

This week and a half is different from my usual work trips. It is a mixture of experiences from the painfully poignant/heartwrenching (staying part of the week in my grandparents' empty house full of happy memories while my grandma lies miserable in a hospital bed wishing she could just leave this world and my grandpa sits alone in his lazy boy in an assisted living facility nearby) to the scientifically challenging and interesting work I am getting to be involved in at the large animal veterinary medicine clinic at Texas A&M. I spent many long hours trying to comfort and distract my grandma and grandpa, then had to transition suddenly in a matter of minutes into scientist mode.

The smell of star jasmine will always remind me of my grandma's kitchen... This picture was taken in my grandparents' backyard. Early in my week here I clipped a bunch of the star jasmine (top half of picture) and took it to my grandma's hospital room to bring a tiny piece of her garden to her. This morning I clipped the stalk with the easter lilly (and buds) and brought that to her room too. I managed to get out for a couple of runs so far in the steamy Texas heat, but somehow running just can't take the edge off of a week this intense...

This Week: Scottsdale Arizona

I left for sunny, warm Scottsdale AZ after a weekend spent trail running in snowstorms back home in the Seattle area. This week should help me get back on track with my running in the mornings provided I don't encounter scorpions, rattlesnakes, or fiercely protective mama javalinas (I am told they can be feisty if they have little ones). Vicious pigs...not something you encounter when trail running the pacific northwest!

Below: If you run in enough new settings occasionally you find that nature (or a rock hauling prankster) has a pretty good sense of humor. This one made me burst out laughing in the middle of my run.

Next stop: San Diego & Santa Monica

No time to write...busy enjoying the warm temperatures and the presence of photons in the air. There is a very long and inviting running/cycling path along the Santa Monica beach which I enjoyed immensely.

Next stop: Seoul Korea

What an incredible week. I was whisked around Seoul at very very high speed in traffic that made Manhattan seem like country roads... I left Seattle Saturday afternoon, arriving in Seoul Sunday night. Monday I gave scientific seminars to two very high profile institutes, and did I mention I had just been getting over a cold? I lost my voice officially on the flight over, resulting in my seminars being presented in the voice of Kathleen Turner smoking 6 packs a day :|
On the way to the seminar, the distributors were desperately trying to help me recover my voice by offering hot tea and coffee nonstop. They pulled to the curb at one point, ran into a convenience store and brought out canned coffee. When I was handed the can I discovered that it was HOT! I mean really really scalding hot. I threw it back and forth between my hands like a hot potato for the next half hour wondering why thermodynamics had managed to fail when I most needed the coffee to reach a less dangerous temperature in order to open and eventually drink it. I later learned in another convenience store visit that the cans sit on a normal, innocent looking shelf which somehow keeps the cans heated to an alarming level.

After the first seminar we came out to find a car parallel parked behind our vehicle, blocking it in. The three men I was with were in very posh business suits and proceeded to push the car out of the way. I thought they were crazy until the car very kindly rolled right out of the way for them...This was my first lesson in the brilliant methods Koreans have for dealing with their overcrowding problem.
If there is not a spot left in a parking lot, they simply parallel park behind others leaving their car in neutral to allow it to be pushed gently out of the way. After backing their vehicle out, the distributors then kindly pushed the car back to its original location.

As for the food... I ate small (~1-2 cm) objects in seafood soup that looked like brains. When you bite into them they squirt warm liquid into your mouth, then you spit out the slightly tough shell. I attempted 20 questions with them regarding these objects (Is it plant or animal?) and it turned out that they too could not identify the objects but had been eating them all of their lives. Every meal included kimchi (spicy fermented bok choy) which was fine with me as I was very much enjoying the kimchi, and every meal was spicy. They boast a high rate of stomach cancer in Korea due to consumption of so much spicy food. While I like spicy food, I must admit that I was relieved to eat something bland after a week of Kimchi and other intensely spicy foods!

Regarding the language... I had learned a little conversational Korean on the plane ride over (using a Pimsleur set I purchased the week before the trip), and promptly found that I could understand a few words when they spoke, but correct pronunciation is far more difficult than Japanese. I started to learn to pronounce some of the Korean alphabet, as well as the names of several key alcoholic beverages (those Koreans are quite enthusiastic about their alcohol!).

After a week of extremely hard work training new customers and giving a total of 4 scientific seminars the distributors took me out for "bomb liquor" on Friday night to celebrate a productive week. Bomb Liquor consists of Cass (a pale Korean beer made by Coors) with an empty shot glass floated in it then filled with Soju (20 proof Korean rice liquor) until it sinks to the bottom of the beer. When we were all good and buzzed they proceeded to teach me how to cuss in Korean. It was highly amusing and definitely a piece of the language you don't get from Pimsleur!

My hosts were very enthusiastic about taking me through the Korean National Museum as well as to Changdeokgang Palace, shown in 2 pictures above, to learn about Korean culture and history. It was really fascinating. I got to attend the 1 year birthday party of my Korean colleague's first baby which is given the importance of a wedding with maybe 100 or more family members attending. During the party the baby is presented with an array of trinkets which each symbolize a different potential career path for his future (coin for banker/businessman, etc). This is quite likely a superior system to the school guidance counselors we so foolishly trust our fate to in the US.

The air pollution in Seoul was far worse than I had ever seen during my years in Chicago (my maximum pollution experience prior to Seoul), and I didn't dare go running for fear of damaging my lungs further as Chicago had done. I would wake up and look out the window of my five star hotel room and feel compelled to hold my breath for the duration of the visit. The city has huge networks of identical high rise (50-60 story) apartment buildings built of bare concrete, the only distinguishing factor being a giant painted number near the top of each building (e.g. 106). That's right, there were hundreds of identical high rise buildings to house the 15 million people concentrated into Seoul. It felt like a computer generated scene from a dark, doom and gloom, futuristic movie, and it certainly made me feel like the luckiest person in the world to live in the woods at a lake outside of sparkling clean Seattle (sparkling in comparison anyway).

All in all it was a great cultural experience.

Running around the world - First Stop Los Angeles

Over the next 7 years or so I plan to run enough miles to more than circle the globe for my Nike Plus challenge so I thought in the spirit of that goal I would begin posting pictures from my runs on business trips to various exotic and not so exotic locations. This was a 7 mile run up to the Griffith observatory. The view was spectacular that morning and the temperature was dreamy for a Seattle girl running in early March. Note the view of the Hollywood sign shown below, hard to read due to the iphone camera, but it was closer than it appears in the picture.

My Enchanted forest

To test the camera on my iphone I took it with me on my trail run on Saturday. Now I can post some pictures of the forest I trail run every weekend lately. It's really spectacular. Running through sections of forest with giant old growth stumps covered in moss, and trees hanging with moss. I just can't get enough of it lately. The dogs and I ran 16 miles in our enchanted forest this past weekend.

Hello Lover...

User Friendly is an understatement here. I bought the 16 GB iphone last night, and I have to say that this is the dreamiest piece of technology I have ever owned. It doesn't even come with a user manual in the box because it simply doesn't need one. Everything I have set up or tried to do with the thing this morning worked within seconds of starting to play with it. This is in stark contrast to the old blackberry I had for nearly 2 years. That thing was an accidental-emergency-call-placed-from-inside-your-bag, good-luck-ever-getting-email-set-up, extra-ringtones-are-for-sissies, I-sync-with-nothing nightmare! The iphone on the other hand, forget user friendly, this thing is user-loving.

It's not about the mileage...

I have gotten off to a somewhat slow start on my Marathon Monk challenge as I had a cold for over a week and didn't dare run until it was officially gone (colds don't play well with asthma). I'm finally picking up the mileage again and have done a few incredible trail runs between 6-10 miles in the forest behind the lake I live at. So far my nearly 10 year old rottweiler mix, Mildred, has toughed out the complete mileage on these trail runs. That is one spry golden girl! My 2 1/2 year old border collie mix rounds out our little pack.

My approach to my trail runs with "the girls" has simply been to randomly take whatever trails and branches look enticing, burying ourselves deeper and deeper in the maze of heavily forested trails that blanket our ridge. It can easily take a couple of extra miles to come back out at a familiar location, but the sense of adventure is great. We have happened on some really interesting little spots; perfectly clear little ponds in the middle of a trail chest deep on the dogs, an old logging cabin completely blanketed with several inch thick moss, chunks of forest where every branch is completely draped with long strings of fluorescent green moss to the point that it looks like a movie set from an Ang Lee movie, rolling ravine floors covered with giant ferns under the forest canopy, and every once in a while we pop out to an edge of the ridge where the view opens up to the cascade mountains across the valley far below. This marathon monk challenge is certainly giving me much needed time out from the world. It is becoming very meditative, this running without paying attention to the mileage or the route...