cool

I don't know if the Oxford Dictionary or Encyclopedia Britannica keeps a category for the "chic-est" words used in the world for the day. If they do, I think "cool" should be right up there. 

Say, 

You wear a new suit to a party, and people compliment you: "Cool outfit!"

You talk arrangement or business with a friend or partner, and to consummate the deal, you say "Are you cool with it?"

You give a fancy new toy to your kid, his/her eyes round up, mouth opens wide, and cheers out "Cool!", and you are the coolest dad in the world at that moment!

Just like a group of children, we expect our leaders to be cool, level headed, like they knew what they were doing all the time, so we feel secure. Witness General Haig's quivering "I am in control" statement right after President Reagan's failed assassination, or compare Richard Nixon's nervous appearance vs John Kennedy's calm demeanor during the presidential debate, and their political outcomes, you'll understand that the appearance of uncool can be detrimental to a politician's public life, just like some say the appearance of stupidity, more than stupidity itself, can hamper one's career advancement in the corporate world.

At the risk of seeming politically uncool, I'll say in general men are more cool than women. How else to explain that we always look for "the coolest man in Hollywood," (George Clooney, for that matter, for now, perhaps) but no woman in that category. (Instead, we have the "hottest woman" category we like to focus on). The flip side of this is jerks are always men, none woman.

One easy way to achieve coolness is to put oneself in a neutral position, like a TV anchorman/woman, for example, posing questions to their interviewees, jarring or intriguing as they might be, they are all asked on the audience's behalf, so he/she can stay above the fray and watch--as we audience do--their interviewees squirm and turn in their answering.

But once in a while, an interviewee might fire back an edgy jab towards the interviewer themselves, unexpectedly, then you might see that anchorman/woman get visibly disturbed, become defensive, and lose that professional calm air they've been wearing. It's not cool any more when things get personal, is it?

Probably because coolness is such looked-upon quality in our society, many try to fake it, or "play cool", even when they don't have it. Or they at least try to play it passively, to hide their uncoolness by following that "Never let them see you sweat" motto. Coolness over-or-mis-played can become downright cold-heartedness, or deranged mental cases like those zombie-like killers we see in many of Hollywood's violent movies. 

Like meekness that comes from reined-in strength, I think true coolness comes from a very warm heart, that can still cry and empathize, but with great wisdom and wit, humor and humility, that combined so enchants us we want to be surrounded by it, or by that person rather, all day long.

There was a guy born a couple thousand years ago, who didn't go with the "in" crowd, cried for the death of his friend, took all things personally, and sweated profusely in his last petition to his father God for life. Yet his magic brings life and hope to all people ever since. That's a very cool guy in my book.

Happy Easter!

mayday in march

Though we have been living away from Taiwan for over 30+ years, my jolly girly wife has never lost her adoration of anything Taiwanese or missed following every move of every entertainment celebrity she can keep track of there. So I was not totally surprised when she so excitedly announced to me a couple months ago "the great 'Mayday' (五月天) rock band from Taiwan is coming to LA for a live performance" and wanted me to buy tickets online for her, her nephew and his girl friend, and the mandatory companion driver husband myself, altogether 4 tickets for a whopping sum of $600 or so.

Came last Saturday, the day of the concert, the plan was to first go to a restaurant in Beverly Hills for an early dinner with an auntie of hers and her son, who had also bought tickets for the concert once they learned about it from us, then head for the concert at Sports Arena, the erstwhile Clippers basketball court near USC.

The dinner reservation was made for 5 PM, we left our house a little over 3:30, thinking that should be plenty time ahead. But a couple of slow-and-go's and the usual snarl on Fwy-405 when nearing West LA made it past 5 already when we finally got off the freeway onto the busy surface streets. Adding the parking look-around and last-block pedestrian walk, we ended up about 15 minutes behind when we entered the restaurant.

This is an upscale Vietnamese/fusion style restaurant, famous for its "tiger prawn garlic noodle" and crab meat, so we ordered some and more. It's all good and delicious, but pricey as well--I honestly think we can get same quality food for half the price at somewhere else in LA or Orange County, but this is Beverly Hills, as you know. 

My wife's auntie Winnie's son, Sean, picked up the tab for his mother, who was the one suggested the place and said she'd be the hostess for it in the first place. I have known Winnie and Sean and his brother and sister since I came to the States over 30 years ago, when they just started their new lives in America as well. From swap-meet booths to doughnut shops to used car sales, and now owners of one of the largest AT&T wireless chain stores in the US, plus a couple of bakery stores Winnie herself owns, theirs is a rags-to-riches, another great American-dream-coming-true story that I undoubtedly feel proud of and happy for.

The drive from the restaurant to the Sports Arena again reminded me of the treachery of LA traffic that I almost forgot after years of cushy driving in Orange County. Again, when we finally pulled into the vast, flat, but well packed parking lot of the Arena, it's 15 minutes past the scheduled concert start time already.

Fortunately, the concert hadn't started yet and it took us only a few minutes to find our seats, ones right facing the stage, even though it's a distance away and on the upper level. This is a big arena that can seat up to 16,000 people, and one thing that much surprised me was the overwhelming majority of the near capacity crowd I saw here were young mainland Chinese in their early 20's, many of them recent immigrants/students from China, I supposed.

The concert blasted out with a couple of big smoky cannon bolts and all the kids went wild, cheering, yelling, jumping, flash light waving, one song after another, just like a typical rock concert crowd would do. My wife's nephew got an LED flash light ($15 per stick) for us and she started waving and jumping like the young kids were, while I sat and enjoyed the scene and the music in most gentlemanly way. 

Other than hearing my wife mentioning their name a couple times before, I really had no idea who this "Mayday" group are or what their songs sound like until tonight. And they weren't too bad, frankly. The rhythms were soothing and melodramatic, at times rapt and at times subdued, captivating and "resuscitating"--meaning worthy of savoring over and over again; the lyrics were earthy and poignant, ebullient and titillating, circling around love, friendship, dreams of their lives, etc.

Granted, their stage props (and fireworks) were not as grand, and their vocal and instrumental skills not as over-the-top as a couple of big old vintage Western rock bands such as Pink Floyd and Fleetwood Mac that I've been to, and I sure wish I were familiar with their songs so I could sing along with them, like I did with those groups whose music I grew up with.

But herein lies the point, this is a group of their generation, singing songs for their generation, a generation of young Chinese all over Asia, from Taiwan to mainland China, Singapore to Tokyo, whatever dialect they speak, society or political system they live in, they seem to communicate perfectly well in this music, that touches their hearts, tells their dreams, and vents their frustration in trying to break away from whatever chains they feel themselves are under.

Somehow the song "Give Peace a Chance" from the hippie generation keeps reverberating in my mind, seems to say "let's give these young people a chance, to make a better world they know how themselves..."

It took us about half an hour just to get out of the log-jammed parking lot after the end of the show, and then just as we were finally cruising along in light late night traffic on the 405, Caltran completely shut down a major freeway transition and forced us all down the freeway to go through a bewildering detour route for another extra half hour. It was well past midnight when we finally got home.

I think I'd done a masterful good job chauffeuring my wife and had a great time myself for the night!

* Here's a video clip for one song I recorded at the Mayday concert:

http://youtu.be/wIKsk7SS_88

that we can't see

"Are you thinking what I am thinking," there are moments in life when our thoughts for some mysterious reasons coincide with others'. Did it ever occur to you this might be just the tip of an iceberg, semblance of something fundamental at work that we consciously know little about?

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955), a French Jesuit priest who was also a prominent paleontologist involved with the discovery of Peking Men in China, believed in an upwardly moving cosmos that had gone through several breakthroughs in its eons past--progressing from inanimated matter to organic biosphere, single cells to complex life forms, then the advent of mankind and their "thought", that invisible "within" that makes them the crown jewel of the evolution so far. Further, following the same mysterious force that unites all things throughout the process, these thoughts don't live alone by themselves, but form a connected world of consciousness that de Chardin dubbed "noosphere" (from the Greek word "nous" that means "mind"), and continue to evolve towards a maximum level of complexity called "Omega Point" that he believed is the ultimate goal of the cosmic evolution.

Carl Jung (1875-1961), founder of modern day analytical psychology and on par in prestige and achievements with the other psycho-analysis maestro Sigmund Freud, also believed in the existence of universal consciousness, and hidden elements of human unconsciousness he called "archetypes", which are the accumulated patterns and forms of the collective human psyche inherited from the past.

Have you ever experienced some fleeting images of some places and times that you know you have never been to but feel like you have lived there before, like in your previous lives?

If the universal consciousness and collective human mind do exist, modern day information technologies help spread and cultivate them at micro-electronic speeds that's never been seen before. Besides "going viral", another bio-infected term "meme" (pronounced "meem", from an ancient Greek word meaning "imitate") is now used to describe the essence of an idea, behavior, style, or cultural phenomenon that can be transmitted, varied, mutated, duplicated throughout cyber space, just as a gene's DNA does through living bodies. Thus, a street dance in LA posted on YouTube can be instantly seen by kids in Tokyo and mimicked with some adaptation and re-posted, then mimicked and adapted again by another group of people on the streets of London or Paris and re-posted, etc., in a matter of days or weeks. Also, a video clip with a cute cat doing funny things can inspire many "copy-cat" postings of the same theme, thus the popular "cat-meme" phenomenon, that may rage on for months or years.

Or you might say this is just a "varied, mutated" way of saying the good old term "fad" in cyber lingo, a "vernacular meme" by itself, so to speak. 

If the uncovering of collective mind and hidden unconsciousness itself is not fascinating enough, some go even further to allege and try to prove that such metaphysical force fields can and do interact with the physical world we live in. The Global Consciousness Project (GCP), conducted by Princeton University since 1998, uses a distributed network of Random Number Generators to register, compute, and verify if certain dramatic, emotionally-charged world events create anomaly to the supposed randomness of the numbers generated by the machines. The GCP claims that, as of 2009, the cumulative result of 300 events, including those of the September 11, 2001 attacks, does support such hypothesis. In another example, a study conducted during the peak of the Lebanon War in the early 1980's indicated that the more people gathered together to meditate for peace, the better the peace movement seemed to progress (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yVFa6Wtuxu8).

Not that these allegations and their supposed proofs are concrete and indisputable already, but the fact that you have read this writing through this point, able to follow the thought and reasoning, even though we may be thousands of miles apart, from different cultural or ethnic backgrounds, these words written hours or days before you see it, proves that we are somehow on some same tracks, that are intelligible, universal, and transcendental. That's amazing enough for me!

"All things are implicated with one another, and the bond is holy; and there is hardly anything unconnected with any other things. For things have been coordinated, and they combine to make up the same universe. For there is one universe made up of all things, and one god who pervades all things, and one substance, and one law, and one reason."
-- Marcus Aurelius (121-180), Roman Emperor

club med

It's probably triggered by my curiosity-driven hunt for new things in a new environment after I moved down to our new residence here in deep south Orange County some 20 months ago, but also for a long while I had been looking for a meditation group where I might be able to share the meditation practice I had been doing by myself for years with like-minded people. 

Based on my previous experiences, I knew Catholic churches are the most likely places where such "contemplative prayer" groups might gather. I browsed through a couple websites of Catholic churches in south Orange county, didn't find one. However, I did find a small Episcopal church, which–based on my limited knowledge on Christian church history–is a Protestant denomination that's closest to Catholic practice, in San Clemente. It says on its website: "Please consider this your invitation to join us for our Monday Meditation Class.... We are a small, understanding group of friends who would love to have you with us..." (http://scbythesea.org/content/meditationgroup.html)

So on one late August 2012 Monday evening I went, and I have been going there basically every Monday evening ever since.

Out of the 7 regularly attending men and women I met there, Annie was probably the one I got most impression with right from the beginning. She's a tall, red-hair lady, very intelligent, knowledgeable, witty, and articulate--I can learn quite a few things just by listening to her talk, be it about movies, books, people, places, spiritualities... they all come so episodic and off-handed from her it's mesmerizing for me to hear. I also sense she's got a great, tender heart underneath her swift talking and she can sense people's feelings and needs fairly well and care for them in a considerate way.  

Evelyn is the wife of the group's founder, Randy, who started the group about 11-12 years ago (just about the time I started doing meditation on my own, that's how I remember), who passed away about a couple years ago, before I joined the group. A Japanese American born and raised in the Southland, she is our faithful meditation "gong striker," keeping the 30-minute time period for each meditation session for us. She's a little reserved, but articulate as well (they all are articulate, I find out pretty soon), and makes great cookies and innovative desserts like a "yin-yang" cake she once brought to the group for someone's birthday to share.

Brigitte is a German American who emigrated to this country when she was a little girl with her parents, who are still living in the East Coast. She's an avid reader and would occasionally bring up some spiritual verses from the books she read for the group to share. Although she looks like only in her early 50's, she's just recently become a grandmother for the second time, we have learned. And she's a fantastic foodie, who likes to learn and try new delicacies and cuisine of different kinds. She once invited us all to her house for a full course Indian food try out, which she self-taught through some cook books just a few weeks before and everything looked and tasted so professional and greatly delicious! She's a "Wunder Woman" in my book.

Grace is a lady from Pasadena married to a Belgian man and now lives here in San Clemente, with grand children in San Diego she occasionally would baby sit for her children. Don't be fooled by her tiny frame and very genteel and gracious manners, she's been an anti-nuclear activist for a while and had been rallying and attending seminars and conferences throughout the fight against Southern California Edison for the closing of the San Onofre nuclear power plant that finally happened last year. I once joked that "she was the lady who single-handedly shut down the nuclear power plant here in San Clemente" when introducing her to some new member to the group :)  

Matt is officially the leader, or contact person, of this very democratic group of meditators. He's a handsome looking fellow with charming smiles whose day time profession is an industrial designer. We once went to his house for his birthday and I was impressed by the artworks hanging on the walls that I heard were all his own doing. He's also our official sommelier (the wine server) because he's the one who always brings wine to the group whenever we have a little celebration (for birthday, holiday, or just Evelyn or Brigitte having some new cookies or cakes for us to try out) at the church's little library room where we do the meditation.

Mel and Joanne were the late comers (after me) to the group. Mel is probably the most senior person in the group--in his late 70's--but in very good physical and mental shape. Me and my wife once went hiking with him over the back hills between their home and ours, and he walked and talked at a pace that we had to play catch up with. He and his wife Joanne came from Catholic backgrounds, have 4 grown-up children and a handful of beautiful grand children, as we can see in the pictures at their cozy home we once visited. They are both actively involved with a homeless shelter ministry they co-founded as well.

So every Monday evening we meet at the homey library room of the church, chat a few minutes, then sink into a 30-minute silence, "wake up," chat some more, then leave. We have also tried a couple different forms of meditation over time as some of us would propose and we agreed to. For example, Joanne once led a "visual meditation" session where we picked and cut pictures from various magazines she brought as they caught our mental eyes and pasted them on a board to form a theme or story that we then shared with each other. Annie facilitated another one where we all lay down on the floor listening to spiritual music and meditated on things that happened through our lives that we remember most vividly, then shared them with others at the end if we wanted to.

Though I am probably the least articulate among them all (English not being my first language, for one thing), I feel comfortable there, probably because we speak the same "spiritual language," that I don't feel I have to "hedge" my expressions so not to offend some people or make them feel uncomfortable, not knowing where those words or thinking of mine came from. Going deeper, even more important than that "like-mindedness" that might have attracted me in the first place, is "loving kindness," a loving heart combined with an open mind that tries to understand, engage and include--not label, mark off, or block out, that's the sign of true Christian love and fellowship, and that's what I see in Annie, Evelyn, Brigitte, Grace, Matt, Mel, and Joanne, at what we call our Club Med(itation)!

  

     

        


Brigitte and Matt holding the "yin-yang"            The full course Indian food Brigitte

cake Evelyn made for their birthdays                  made all by herself at her kitchen

         

Evelyn, Matt, Joanne, Mel, Grace, Brigitte         Annie and her cat at her apartment

at the library

Here's the link to the picture and news article of a public hearing on San Onofre nuclear power plant where Grace served as a panelist :

http://www.ocregister.com/news/nuclear-374117-plant-san.html

One thing I introduced to the group and they all like is using my smartphone timer app to play a "wake-up" music instead of Evelyn watching the clock and "hitting the gong" at the end of the meditation for us. The music I use nowadays is "Be Still My Soul" by Libera: 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LbAuTB8uLaQ

tour de south

I am not a sport-biking fanatic, but my very athletic friend Tim from Northern California left a peachy road bike of his at my garage earlier this year and encouraged me to ride it as often as I want. I leave it laid idle there most of the time as I can't figure out where I would ride it other than the harbor/coastal highway area Tim and I had been to a couple of times already. I did use it once to a local bank that's one freeway exit away from my home, meandering through residential short cuts to get there in 15 minutes that would normally take me 5 minutes by car through freeway. I also rode it to a home in nearby community across one major parkway and up a coastal mesa a few times for some men's group meetups in early Saturday mornings--the toughest part of the ride was not in going up hills, but charging down a steep slope from my home when the early morning cold combined with the howling wind created a wind-chill factor that cut right through the bones of my bare hands.

Then one Sunday morning my friend Brian, who I knew had picked up riding with a group of bikers in Irvine for a year or two, called me and said he and a couple of his riding companions were heading toward my home for a venture ride and thought he might stop by and visit me, since he's been wanting to see my new home for a while. So I welcomed them and when they arrived and found out I had this fine French-made bicyclette piece lying in waste in my garage, they started proselytizing me all the great benefits bike riding can bring to the health of my body and soul, until I agreed to give it a try with them.

So I went out and bought some biking gear--suit, helmet, gloves, etc.--and started biking with them, for a couple of times in the past few months. The reason I didn't go more often than that was because their Sunday morning riding schedule usually conflicts with mine, and Irvine is a bit too far a place for me to drive to--burning a couple gallons of gas just so that I can burn off a few hundred calories of mine doesn't seem that altruistic or green to me, to play the role of an environmental activist for a second. 

But this past Thanksgiving weekend they decided to have one of their annual long trips to Oceanside, a little seaside town in north San Diego County right off Camp Pendleton, and the ride would start from Dana Point Harbor, right down my alley. So I decided to join them, even though I knew the distance would be a stretch for me and I was not as physically well tuned as a regular biker would be.

We met at the harbor's parking lot. Besides Brian, there were 4 others, all but one I had known and ridden with before. Brian brought me a right-size water bottle that snugged tight in my bike's bottle holder so it wouldn't jitter out during the ride, and a hood liner for my head for comfort and wind protection. I also found out my bike's tires were low on pressure and the air pump I brought would not work because its air cap didn't match the tire's intake pinhole, but they helped me hold down the air cap so I could successfully pump my tires to the right pressure.

Off we went then. It's a sunny day, and the first few miles were along the beach and the coast highway that I had ridden a couple times myself before, so it all seemed nice and easy. Then we turned into the city of San Clemente, still on the coast highway, but now right through its downtown district, along with some climbing up that gave us our first physical checkup of the day. "That was about the only up-slope we are going to have for the trip all day today," said the team leader at our first rest stop. Right, that was about the first of 3 or 4 such remarks I heard all day that day.

San Clemente is not a big town, so it took us about 15-20 minutes to traverse through, then we turned into a bike trail of San Onofre State Beach. It's an old trail, but wide and clean, with no city or highway traffic to compete with, only a few fellow bikers and occasional picnic tables scattered along the way. I took peeks at the scenery as much as I could steal time to--we were riding at the average of 15-20 miles per hour so if I dawdled I immediately got left behind and would need to play catch-up to rejoin the team.

We then headed into the Marine base territory, first breezing through a wide, long runway, then roaming inside the heart of the camp, barracks on one side and target practice ranges on the other, all along the Pacific coastline. This is probably the largest training camp for the US Marine Corps in the West Coast (many troops were sent to Iraq or Afghanistan from here), yet other than the check point that inspected our ID when we entered and those beach head structures, there is nothing really unusual here that makes it look much different than a quiet little town somewhere in midland America.

And the light traffic on these country roads made our ride safe and easy. After a couple of the usual toiling slopes and winding turns, what do you know, we were there already!! A small shopping center near the southern end of the Marine base was our destination point. It's been 27 miles, 2 hours, since we left Dana Point Harbor this morning, according to our team leader's meters.

We parked our bikes outside a McDonald's and went in to relax, chat, and have lunch, for about 45 minutes, then headed back. 

The ride back was easier, mostly because mentally we were familiar with the road (or I should say I was the only one that became familiar with the road, the rest of the team had all ridden this route before), therefore didn't feel pressured or as high-strung as when we came. The only thing a little different on the way back was when riding through downtown San Clemente, there were more traffic on the streets than in the morning, and we had to stay really close to each other so we wouldn't get broken up by the traffic or cut off by the light. But the cars were all very friendly with us and the traffic signals seemed well synced to accommodate exactly speeds like ours that we hardly needed to stop at the lights at all. 

We got back at Dana Point Harbor around 3:30. The sun is still shining bright, and other than sore legs and painful butts, every one was still in high spirit for an after-ride coffee. I didn't join them because I needed to rush home. But hey, now that I know the route, maybe next time I'll just ride casually down San Clemente pier and have a morning coffee there myself! 

Anyone wanna join me?

At the beginning of the off road trail                        On the runway tarmac of Marine base

      

Destination McDonald's                                           Brian fixing disengaged gear chain

Returning to Doheny Beach, Dana Point Harbor in the background. The bike to the right is mine, or actually Tim's, and is the second one he left in my garage because it fits my height better than the first one he left. (Yes I now have two fine bikes sitting in my garage).

* This is one of my favorite songs, happens to have something to do with bicycle riding: Les Bicyclettes De Belsize by Engelbert Humperdinck, 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-g5M5YhB4IQ

blah blah.. blog

It all started about 7 years ago, when after attending a men's ministry seminar at the church, I was "set up" to form and host a men's fellowship group. After a year of wandering in the wild, meeting at cafeteria outdoors, church patio, park gazebo, etc., haphazardly and lackadaisically, I decided to open up my home so to have more regular, permanent-sited get-together every other Saturday morning at my backyard with my brothers in exile.

And I started sending out those reminder emails every other week for the meetings. Being a person who hates receiving machine-generated, lifeless emails myself, I tried to suit up my notices with personal notes and opportune comments, things I found interesting or worth sharing at the time, on top of that boxed announcement of time and place to meet.

People didn't seem to object. As a matter of fact, I soon realized open-letter writings like these could be a good way to keep in touch with people I care to. So I gradually enlarged my mailing list to include friends and family, men and women, old buddies and new acquaintances, cousins in Canada and sister in Taiwan, etc., people who I thought might be interested in what I think or do from time to time, and vice versa, even though we may live far apart or have little chance to meet, in this so-close-yet-so-far digital day and age.

And that's been a span of 6+ years by now. Last week I finally spent some time assembling these past emails, organizing them into chronological order, assigning them subject titles if none were there, and then posted them to a Google blogger account that I had registered long ago but never used. 

Going through these writings, I myself am a little surprised by the variety of things it covered, from spiritual and intellectual musings (holy wholesome, wiggle room), to travel journals (PEACE trips China, trip to northern california), events of my life (father, transition), books I read (wooden, karamazov brothers), things and people I recalled (japan, all my boys), jokes and fun pieces (adam's wish, valentine stories, word play) ... etc. 

So, my friends, if you do like my writings, and like to take a second look at them, or catch up on those "past issues" that passed you by before you were included in my mailing list, then feel free to go to http://cdwong.blogspot.com/ at your leisure, and maybe leave some comments after you finish reading them if you like--that's one benefit blogger site offers, making this a true two-way communication between you and me, and maybe all of us.

Hope you'll enjoy it.

* From the first (shy particles, 7/31/2007) to the last (where the rain stays mainly in the plain, 10/28/2013), the total number of postings comes up to be exact 100, no more, no less, no design. If I put this one up there, it will be Posting #101 ... interesting!

where the rain stays mainly in the plain

We took a two-week vacation to Spain with a tour group recently. As a believer in "vacation is for fun, not work," I stayed away from studying the itinerary or reading the tour guides before we got on the plane (well, I printed out the guides for my wife and planned to read it on the trip only to find we lost it). We landed on Madrid, the geo-center of the country, then galloped through a few cities to its northwest,Toledo to its south, then further south to a few historical/cultural heavy-weights such as Cordoba, Granada, Seville, as well as a bull-fighting town, the Don Quixote country, a wine factory, and a couple Mediterranean coastal cities, then flew all the way to big town Barcelona in the northeast, before coming back to LA. All told, 13 cities in 13 days we whizzed through!

So how can I remember them all, like which cathedral sits in which city, or from what town did we buy those "local flavor" souvenir cookies, etc.?

Through "categorize and conquer," I am going to try:

Regions & History

From the outset, Spain looks like a fair size country occupying the lion's share of the Iberian peninsula in southwestern Europe, and with that powerful colonial empire it built in the early Age of Discovery, I imagine it be one contiguous, well integrated country at least. I was surprised to learn, then, the country is actually divided into 17 semi-independent, autonomous regions, each with its own political and cultural identity. So, Madrid and its neighboring country form one autonomy region, those cities to the northwest belong to another autonomy region (Castile-Leon), and Toledo and the central high-land that sports windmills for "Man of La Mancha" Don Quixote belong to yet another region (Castile-La Mancha), and those famed, Muslim influenced old towns in the south belong to the Andalusia country, while Barcelona, the big, modern metropolis in the northeast, is the capital of Catalonia which, like the Basque Country to the north (yet another autonomous region), is trying to break away from Spain for good to become a fully independent country of its own.

Historically, starting early 8th century, the southern half of Spain had been invaded and reigned by the Muslims from North Africa (the Moors), and it took the Catholic kings and queens from the north almost 800 years to "re-conquest" the south back to Christendom. As a matter of fact, modern day Spain owed its formation to the unification of two major kingdoms of the north in the year 1492, when King Ferdinand of Aragon married Queen Isabella of Castile and together kicked out the last remaining Moorish resistance in the south. It was also in this same year Queen Isabella sponsored Christopher Columbus for his exploration to New World, thus starting the great Spanish empire that dominated the world through 16th and 17th centuries.

Castles & Cathedrals

Castles are everywhere in Spain. Here is a castle nestling on a cliff, like one in a Disney movie where a princess is incarcerated on the high chilly tower waiting to be rescued; there is another that is a city all by itself, its watch towers looking exactly like the "castle" (rook) piece made for the chess game. And Toledo viewed from the mid-hill of the hotel we stayed was the most picture perfect, beautiful classy old city I've ever seen!

 

           

Cathedrals are everywhere, one grander, shinier, or older than the other. One thing unique about some of those in the south is they started as Christian churches, then got converted into Muslim mosques when the Moors came, then converted back to Catholic cathedrals after the re-conquest. That's property time-share at historic proportion, you may say.

Arts & Architectures

Museums and palaces are everywhere, each hoarding houseful of paintings and art works of its own. Back in the days when there was no print or mass media, and the worshiping mass were illiterate anyway, paintings and sculptures on the church walls and ceilings served as educational tools to tell the stories of Virgin Mary and baby Jesus, angels and demons, while those hanging in the palaces displayed the life and portraits of the rich and the royalties, with hardly any one smiling.

We also visited the modern art museums for Picasso and Dali, and architectures of Gaudi in Barcelona. I had not been a fan or enthusiast of modern art, but after seeing these works up close and personal and hearing their interpretations, those abstract "cubistic" drawings of Picasso's don't look that wacky to me any more, and the mishy-mashy, holographical pieces of Dali's do look quite innovative even today. And Gaudi was yet one other lucky guy who got to realize his artistic talent in the commercial world, whether it be a failed planned community in urban Barcelona, or the grand Church of Holy Family that is still under construction today.

                           

I also enjoyed the statues, fountains, arches, and grand old Romanesque buildings around Madrid and other cities. I remember on the first evening in Madrid, walking through downtown thoroughfares, seeing those majestic old buildings and statues lime-lighted against the lively crowds, the tall trees, and the wide roads, I felt buoyant and optimistic, and somehow got the sense how empire and artistic minds were inspired here...

                    

     

Tapas & Wines

The food in Spain is in general good. They have plenty of farm produce, great tasting pork, and fresh sea food from the surrounding Atlantic and Mediterranean oceans. Our tour package included all meals, that means typically full course big plates for lunches and dinners (that stored up fat in my body fast), but I was most impressed by those small plate dishes they call "tapas" that exemplified local specialties and were most delicious.

  

And they served wine with every meal. The Spanish wines we had were blended instead of vintage stock as we usually get in California, therefore tasted smoother and fruitier, to my liking. The wine factory we visited is in the city where the world's first Sherry wine was created--the city name Jerez was Anglicized to "Xeres," then "Sherry." No need to buy the wines there and lug them all the way home with you if you like them, though. I found out later that you can get them at local liquor stores such as Bevmo here in Southern California. 

Guides of All Feathers

The guides we met in Madrid were pretty grand-motherly and spoke with heavy accent; the one in Toledo was an energetic hearty-laughing woman who was a devoted Catholic but didn't mind making a joke about some dead cardinals buried underneath the cathedral she was showing us; the guide in Cordoba was a dark, heavy-build man who I suspected may have some Moorish blood in him who always started his session with "ladies and gentlemen"; the guide at Seville was a witty, articulate English speaker who's a seasoned world traveler himself; the guide in Ronda, the bull-fighting town, was a short, stodgy man with Frank Sinatra-ish smiles; the lady who took us around Alhambra palace in Granada spoke slowly but with a mesmerizing Euro-woman charm; and the young girl who guided us through the wine factory was so sweet and bubbly that I should have given her a hug at the end!

                                       

  

New is Old, Old is New

While meandering through one of those Mediterranean towns, seeing its up and down city streets lined with red roof and white wall buildings, back-dropped with bright sunny skies and calm blue ocean, it dawned on me "Doesn't this look just like San Clemente, the city where I live by, whose founding fathers set out to build a 'Spanish village by the sea' on Southern California coast?" And while strolling down downtown Barcelona, the tour guide told us one of the busiest streets here is called "Las Ramblas", which, surprise, is exactly the same name of the major roadway (a Freeway exit, actually) right next to my community! It's not a far-fetched idea that some early Spanish settlers to my city might have come from Barcelona area some 200 years or so ago then.

                                      

  

Have Friends, Will Travel

Our tour group was organized in Taiwan, for the alumni of the mountain climbing club of my college in Taiwan. As non-members, we tagged onto this group through our friends Ray & Jenny who are members and have been enjoying the outdoors ever since their college days, as well as most other members on this trip. I was quite impressed by the camaraderie and the inbred outdoorsmanship of these "mountain people" along the way. They always seemed able to find a little hill to climb or a new place to explore wherever we went, and some of them woke up early to do their daily jogging even during our busy traveling schedule. Doing outdoors surely is a worthy hobby to keep that'll keep you physically and mentally healthy for life, judging from what I saw in these people.

We also met people of various backgrounds: doctors, scholars, media workers, fund manager, art performer, etc. Talking to them and traveling with them expanded our life perspectives and struck up new friendships. As they say in the Chinese proverb: "Rather travel ten thousand miles of road than read ten thousand reams of book." (讀萬卷書不如行萬里路). We all should get out more!

And note it down, so when I look back in five or ten years, everything won't be just a blur!