China Freeze

I had the most freakish yet very moving experience when visiting China a week after their devastating 2008 earthquake.  We had just arrived to our hotel from the airport, and I was standing out on my hotel room balcony both excited and exhausted to be in China.  Suddenly loud sirens went off all over Shanghi.  I started looking around scared that it was a warning for an earthquake or something, and then really became freaked-out as everywhere I looked, nothing was moving.  The people twenty floors below weren’t moving; the rickshaws, cars, bikes, and buses had stopped mid-street, unmoving.  Everything was motionless and quiet; even all the vehicles in the middle of the freeway had seemingly become frozen in place. The entire view from our balcony looked like a photograph or picture postcard.  In a slight panic I turned on the TV and gasped in surprise to see the news people just sitting, looking at the camera, not moving or talking! 

The Twilight Zone moment passed after about a minute or two and everything started up and returned to the normal hustle and bustle of a typical large city.  My exhausted emotional freak-out turned into a highly impressed very moving moment that I will cherish for the rest of my life.  I learned later that evening that we had unknowingly witnessed the first ever nationally participated moment of silence in China for the hundreds of thousands of earthquake victims. 

        ---Crystal W.



Fire Falls

I’d hate to admit the number of years ago while tent camping that I witnessed the Fire Falls at Yosemite National Park.  It’s funny how one recalls the cool night sitting with family and a hundred other campers on log benches listening to the Park Ranger’s lecture on the Yosemite’s creatures, vegetation, hikes, and the story of the Fire Fall.  I saw a PBS show the other day on how it was done and on how environmentally wrong it turned out to be before discontinuing the event in 1969.  The Fire Falls consisted of burning a  logs and bark thousands of feet up at the top of Glacier Point a vertical granite parapet for several hours.  Then at a designed time, the Park Ranger would yell out, "Let the Fire Fall!" and following a faint reply, the huge pile of hot coals would be pushed over the edge to plummet like a bright glowing waterfall in the early evening darkness.  Regardless of how it looked on the now vintage films, having seen it in person was a uniquely impressive sight.  In hindsight, I wish I had expressed my appreciation to my parents back then for those wonderful family experiences, verses my adolescent whining and carrying-on during a now historical memory.

        --- PC

Oh-So-La-Me-Oh 

I had the unique experience to travel from Northern California to Southern California with my girlfriend’s family to a family wedding.  The drive down was uneventful and rather boring driving down Interstate 5; however, that changed quickly when we arrived.  You see, I wasn’t given any preliminary notion of what to expect, so I naturally relied on my own family’s past special occasion experiences.

From the moment we arrived, a degree of anxiety equal to that of seeing a car driving towards you on the wrong side of the road, just surged up within me and stayed there. Let me paint it this way, my family is rather conservative and reserve, her’s is Italian!  Envision that movie from a few years back, “My Big Fat Greek Wedding”, Italian style!  My family always stays in hotels when we visit anyone; her visiting relatives all stay packed into whatever local relative’s houses that might have a place to sleep, bed or no bed. My family eats at restaurants except for the particular occasion; her’s all show up and make every meal...breakfast, lunch, or dinner...an umpteen relative all pitch in and cook occasion.  During one of those huge family meals, I took my plate and hid away in another room, as the twenty-one conversations the eighteen Italians in the other room were having just overwhelmed my senses.  To say the least, the long uneventful, boring drive home was a pleasant healing opportunity to my besieged distraught nerves.
            ---JC