Xotic Xmases
Over at theinferior4, Lucius Shepard recently posted ten excellent capsule stories of exotic Christmases past -- although I guess jail isn't an exotic location for everybody. It got me thinking about my own Xmases in foreign lands. There are only three I can remember, not counting the four we spent on Yap when we were living out there (besides which I don't remember those).
1) 1989, Schwäbisch Hall
In 1989 I was in the small town of Schwäbisch Hall in southern Germany. I was visiting my long distance girlfriend, Nahid, whom I had met in May of that year when she and a friend came through Seattle at the end of a cross country trip around the US that had started in San Francisco. We stayed at her mother's apartment in Schwäbisch Hall for a week, then headed up to Berlin, where Nahid was going to the Freie Universität. Nahid's mom, Frau K., had a Hungarian weightlifter boyfriend named Laszlo. Laszlo, who didn't speak any English, was very friendly to me and shared bottles of the local beer, which he thought (and I agreed) was quite good. (When Nahid got back into contact with me a couple of years ago, she said her mom and Laszlo were still together, twenty years later, which made me happy.) I don't remember much about Xmas itself, except that Frau K. talked me into calling home, and my dad answered the phone. I told him he'd love the spätzle, which is a German noodle dish. We'd had Frau K's homemade spätzle that evening, and I was an instant convert.
The other thing I remember about that visit to Schwäbisch Hall was that Nahid took me to a party. Was it on Xmas itself? The weather was freezing, and the party was a surreal "beach party" with sand and fake palm trees in a hall or gymnasium of some kind. I had one of those lonely-in-a-crowd times, since I didn't know anybody (including Nahid, really), didn't speak the language, and was at least nine years older than anybody else there. I mostly drank beer and played wallflower, although there was at least one awkward conversation with one of Nahid's friends. Nahid asked me to drive home, because she'd been drinking too and the roads were icy. Great! The first time I'd ever driven in Europe. Better than that, we got stopped at a roadblock by the cops. Nahid did all the talking, and somehow she talked us through it. Maybe she explained that I was a poor, innocent foreigner who was driving her home because she was tipsy, I really have no idea.
2) 1998, Yap
In 1998 my family returned to Yap for the first time since 1970, with many additions in tow. Actually my brother had gone back in 1985 with his wife, but for the rest of us, it was the first time we'd been there in almost 30 years. On Christmas we went to the village home of Bumoon (prounounced BOO-moh-oan), who had taught with my dad back in the '60s in the village of Kanifay. We ate traditional Yapese food and mingled somewhat awkwardly with Bumoon's family. Bumoon gave an extremely moving speech about how our two families were united over a great distance by our shared history and by this shared Xmas meal, and my dad got choked up as he acknowledged the generosity and graciousness of Bumoon and his family. Of course, when some of us went back out to Yap in 2002, Bumoon almost never came around, so who knows what it really meant. A gesture to my father, probably, rather to my brother and me. Or maybe Bumoon, of lower caste, didn't feel he could visit us in the higher caste village of Kaday, where we lived in 2002.
Less wonderful than the Xmas Day village feast was our attempt to create our traditional Xmas Eve cioppino in our apartment in Colonia. We had some fresh seafood that had been given to us, but we also had some terrible frozen seafood to supplement it. (Who knows how long it had been sitting in the freezer. The Yapese mostly just eat what they catch. Or eat canned tuna and mackerel, I guess.) We also didn't have the proper herbs. It was a sad little meal, and my mom was not happy. She never did like Yap much, and neither did my sister.
3) 2004, Melbourne
In December 2004 I went to Australia to visit Sharee, and we spent Xmas at her sister's place in Laverton, a working class neighborhood just outside of Melbourne. My job was to keep their father out of their hair. (Sharee's stories about her father rival the one that Lucius tells about his in the first capsule story.) Going on Heather's advice, I bought a bottle of Chivas Regal and kept feeding Lyall (and Heather) a steady diet of drinks while he regaled me with various stories and theories. Since I was drinking the Chivas too, it was all good, and Sharee and Heather happily cooked and kept their own company. After Lyall went home, the three of us looked at old family photos and watched Baz Luhrmann's Strictly Ballroom, which Sharee had never seen. She loved it, which surprised her, because she had (foolishly) hated Moulin Rouge.
On Boxing Day there was a big rave-style party at the old factory building where Sharee's best friend in the world, Andrew, was squatting with a bunch of anarchists. It was pretty groovy, by golly, and we all stayed up till dawn. Here's a picture of Andrew (in the middle) and two other folks (the guy on the left claimed that Nick Cave -- the bastard -- still owed him twenty bucks from a drug deal back when they went to school together thirty years ago):
Around two in the morning somebody came by and said they'd heard on the radio that there'd been an enormous tsunami in Indonesia. None of us was in any state to digest the horrible news.
1) 1989, Schwäbisch Hall
In 1989 I was in the small town of Schwäbisch Hall in southern Germany. I was visiting my long distance girlfriend, Nahid, whom I had met in May of that year when she and a friend came through Seattle at the end of a cross country trip around the US that had started in San Francisco. We stayed at her mother's apartment in Schwäbisch Hall for a week, then headed up to Berlin, where Nahid was going to the Freie Universität. Nahid's mom, Frau K., had a Hungarian weightlifter boyfriend named Laszlo. Laszlo, who didn't speak any English, was very friendly to me and shared bottles of the local beer, which he thought (and I agreed) was quite good. (When Nahid got back into contact with me a couple of years ago, she said her mom and Laszlo were still together, twenty years later, which made me happy.) I don't remember much about Xmas itself, except that Frau K. talked me into calling home, and my dad answered the phone. I told him he'd love the spätzle, which is a German noodle dish. We'd had Frau K's homemade spätzle that evening, and I was an instant convert.
The other thing I remember about that visit to Schwäbisch Hall was that Nahid took me to a party. Was it on Xmas itself? The weather was freezing, and the party was a surreal "beach party" with sand and fake palm trees in a hall or gymnasium of some kind. I had one of those lonely-in-a-crowd times, since I didn't know anybody (including Nahid, really), didn't speak the language, and was at least nine years older than anybody else there. I mostly drank beer and played wallflower, although there was at least one awkward conversation with one of Nahid's friends. Nahid asked me to drive home, because she'd been drinking too and the roads were icy. Great! The first time I'd ever driven in Europe. Better than that, we got stopped at a roadblock by the cops. Nahid did all the talking, and somehow she talked us through it. Maybe she explained that I was a poor, innocent foreigner who was driving her home because she was tipsy, I really have no idea.
2) 1998, Yap
In 1998 my family returned to Yap for the first time since 1970, with many additions in tow. Actually my brother had gone back in 1985 with his wife, but for the rest of us, it was the first time we'd been there in almost 30 years. On Christmas we went to the village home of Bumoon (prounounced BOO-moh-oan), who had taught with my dad back in the '60s in the village of Kanifay. We ate traditional Yapese food and mingled somewhat awkwardly with Bumoon's family. Bumoon gave an extremely moving speech about how our two families were united over a great distance by our shared history and by this shared Xmas meal, and my dad got choked up as he acknowledged the generosity and graciousness of Bumoon and his family. Of course, when some of us went back out to Yap in 2002, Bumoon almost never came around, so who knows what it really meant. A gesture to my father, probably, rather to my brother and me. Or maybe Bumoon, of lower caste, didn't feel he could visit us in the higher caste village of Kaday, where we lived in 2002.
Less wonderful than the Xmas Day village feast was our attempt to create our traditional Xmas Eve cioppino in our apartment in Colonia. We had some fresh seafood that had been given to us, but we also had some terrible frozen seafood to supplement it. (Who knows how long it had been sitting in the freezer. The Yapese mostly just eat what they catch. Or eat canned tuna and mackerel, I guess.) We also didn't have the proper herbs. It was a sad little meal, and my mom was not happy. She never did like Yap much, and neither did my sister.
3) 2004, Melbourne
In December 2004 I went to Australia to visit Sharee, and we spent Xmas at her sister's place in Laverton, a working class neighborhood just outside of Melbourne. My job was to keep their father out of their hair. (Sharee's stories about her father rival the one that Lucius tells about his in the first capsule story.) Going on Heather's advice, I bought a bottle of Chivas Regal and kept feeding Lyall (and Heather) a steady diet of drinks while he regaled me with various stories and theories. Since I was drinking the Chivas too, it was all good, and Sharee and Heather happily cooked and kept their own company. After Lyall went home, the three of us looked at old family photos and watched Baz Luhrmann's Strictly Ballroom, which Sharee had never seen. She loved it, which surprised her, because she had (foolishly) hated Moulin Rouge.
On Boxing Day there was a big rave-style party at the old factory building where Sharee's best friend in the world, Andrew, was squatting with a bunch of anarchists. It was pretty groovy, by golly, and we all stayed up till dawn. Here's a picture of Andrew (in the middle) and two other folks (the guy on the left claimed that Nick Cave -- the bastard -- still owed him twenty bucks from a drug deal back when they went to school together thirty years ago):
Around two in the morning somebody came by and said they'd heard on the radio that there'd been an enormous tsunami in Indonesia. None of us was in any state to digest the horrible news.