New Year

I suppose you will all just have to get used to my infrequent posts... what can I say? Life in America is busy! As always, today I'll be writing about some past events - Winter Break and the New Year, which Greg and I spent with his family.

We started by flying to California to spend a day having a meal with some of the family - Greg's aunt, uncle, cousins, and grandma, in addition to his parents and sister. We met up with a few of Greg's high school pals, and as usual, spent sufficient time in the kitchen. This trip, coming from Colorado, we found the Bay Area to be rather warm (last time, coming from Indonesia, we were freezing!). We ate at an Indonesian restaurant with some friends of the family along with a group of what definitely seemed to be Indonesian tourists in America. Then, almost immediately, we took off to visit the Hatayama extended family in Hawaii. We spent some wonderful days at the beach, body surfing, looking at turtles, and eating sashimi almost constantly! Greg had arranged to meet up with another teacher at the school he works at, the Denver School of Science and Technology, where he regularly puts in 10-12 hour days - who are these people that think teachers go home at 3pm with the students? In any case, the Spanish teacher, whose last name is Wong, came over with her husband, daughter, parents, niece, and a sibling and in-law and we had a great time with them eating sashimi. (crazy sis-in-law with weird native plant)

In keeping with being touristy for a few days, we took a trip up Mauna Kea volcano. The peak, at over 13,000 feet was covered in snow and dotted with observatories that looked like something out of Star Wars. We walked to the summit at sunset and the sky cleared just enough for us to see a sky full of stars. And then our tour's van wouldn't start so we missed the star show and worried about being stranded in the freezing dark since all the other tourists had already left. Fortunately, we were able to see plenty of stars the next night from the national park parking lot - more stars than I think I've ever seen. We came down from the volcano before midnight on New Year's Eve, so we had dinner/breakfast at Al's Pancake House (open 24 hours) and then drove home while the town set off fireworks. We set off a few of our own fountains, then got up the next morning to prepare a New Year's Feast with Greg's grandma. His uncles, aunt, and cousins all came over and we ate wonderful things like a stew made out of gobo (burdock) root that we pulled from the garden, tons of sushi and pickles, tempura shrimp, mochi soup, sashimi, a dish made with homemade sesame butter and cabbage, and apple pie and pineapple cake for dessert, in case anyone wasn't full. We didn't pound mochi, but we did see it being pounded a few days before New Year on our drive to Mountain View. We ate, lit incense and prayed at Grandma Peggy's shrine in the spare bedroom, looked at old pictures, and tried to stay warm near the fire - the rainy side of the Big Island is much colder than you'd expect. We visited Grandpa Jack several times in the nursing home where he's been since his last stroke. We played cards with him, showed him some pictures of Indonesia, and got to hear a few good stories about Greg's dad's childhood. We were able to spend a lot more time with each of the relatives than we had the last visit (except Greg's aunt who was sick), and Greg's uncles and oldest cousin had a last dinner with us (with lots of sashimi) and even got up early to have breakfast with us before our flight out (I had macadamia waffles with coconut syrup).

Greg and I flew out separately and ended up spending the day in Oahu where we met some Baha'is - a girl who's father is Indonesian and her boyfriend from Chile. We went to get coffee and ran into two more Baha'is, then had mochi ice cream in many flavors and had a great time talking. We also got to meet Greg's Uncle Pui (who's actually his great-uncle) who took us to a very good all-you-can-eat Japanese restaurant. It was sort of an all-you-can-eat vacation, but it was nice to have a last taste of sashimi before we returned to Colorado.