The ten day travelogue-among other things

I am just back from a 10 day vacation. I visited my cousin in Portland. I left Stanford on 20^th August, Saturday. During this weekend, I was in three different states – solid, liquid and gas. Hahaha. Gotcha! I was in three different states of the USA – CA, OR and WA. The weekend started with an early flight to Portland, OR. My cousin picked me up.

That evening we went to downtown Portland. A pretty lazy place. Nothing much to see. A walk along the waterfront of the Willamette River was enjoyable. We then watched kids enjoying a cold bath in a fountain. The smile on the kids’ face was priceless. I have no words to describe that smile. I couldn’t exactly get a picture of that smile, but got something close.
I don’t know what is with me and kids. I just totally lost myself for a few seconds looking at that kid smile. One has to really see and experience that smile to understand what I am talking about. The purity of heart, the total happiness the smile showed was so precious.

Sunday we went to Mt St Helens, which is an active volcano. Well, we didn’t actually go into the volcano, but observed it from a safe distance of 5 miles from an observation center. You can see smoke coming out of the crater to prove that the volcano is still active. The last time it erupted was on May 20, 1980. But it had a smoke and ash eruption last Fall. I was listening to the tour guide explain about the eruption in 1980. She went saying something like this. “Volcanoes normally have harmonic earthquakes inside them before an eruption. Before May 20, 1980, there were a few harmonic earthquakes noticed in Mt. St. Helens. But they subsided and nothing else was noticed. But unknown to scientists, the volcano was growing at an inch per day in the beginning and at a rate of 5 ft per hour on May 19 1980.” You could make out the dramatization in her voice, which I assume was for evoking interest in the listeners. Her face showed boredom. She has gone through this like million times and yet her voice had that dramatization. This made me think. Isn’t this how school should teach kids? Isn’t this the way Geography should be taught? I remember Mr. Sivanandam’s “Jhaw-gara-fie” class during my seventh grade. He drones in his monotonous voice with no voice modulation “Canada is the second largest country in the world. Can you name the largest country in the world?” This is why I hate geography even today!

During the week, all I did was eat – sleep – chat. This cycle repeated itself every 4 hours. I made new friends through Orkut Iyers and started having conferences with them and some chatting sessions too. 24 hours was spent in front of my laptop everyday. I had home cooked food after a long time. Man that was heaven.

The last Saturday we drove along the Oregon Coast Route. This is the road in which Lance Armstrong hones his cycling skills. We visited different capes namely, Cape Meares, Cape Lookout, and Cape Kiwanida. The view from Cape Meares was merely breath taking. You will see the Three Arch Rocks and the vast expanse of the Pacific Ocean. I for one second felt like Truman Burbank when he sets out on his boat in the movie The Truman Show. True awe and admiration of the beauty of nature. I jut shut up and stood there admiring it for quite a while.

Out and out, it was an enjoyable vacation. Now I am home wondering how the past 10 days went past so fast. As a matter of fact, it has been 367 days since I came to the USA and I wonder how the past one year flew away without me ever noticing it.