Since I live in Las Cruces, one of the highlights anytime I visit a big city is eating food. Thai food, Indian food, whatever flavor of Mexican food is there… so imagine my surprise when I began searching for restaurants to visit and stumbled across one called Casa Chapala.

Mom and me at Casa Chapala for my 17th birthday

You see, while growing up in Richland, my favorite restaurant was unquestionably Casa Chapala, in neighboring Kennewick. A bean burrito, or sometimes chicken! With rice and beans on the side! This was the best. For pretty much every birthday between 1990 and 2003, you could find me at Casa Chapala, wearing a goofy sombrero and eating complementary fried ice cream for dessert.

In 2004, I began college, and ate there when I came home for winter break. Same story in 2005. Then in 2006… I learned the owners had moved away. To somewhere in Texas. (Because clearly Texas didn’t have enough delicious Mexican food.) I was devastated.

Now, back to 2012. As it turns out, two friends from high school recently moved to Texas in the last six months (thanks, stalkerbook! er, facebook!). One to Austin and another to the Dallas area. So I had the best idea ever: eat lunch with both of them at Casa Chapala.

So after a long conference, brain overloaded with astronomy, I walked two blocks to the restaurant and reunited with two lovely ladies and their significant others over lunch.

Mari, myself, and Laurie: orchestra pals reunited!

As usual, Casa Chapala did it right. Still one of my favorite restaurants.

But wait, how complicated can it be? Tortillas, chips, beans, rice, meat, salsa, cheese, and you’re done. Pretty much all Mexican food is combining these in slightly different ways, and perhaps throwing in some cilantro or chiles or avocados for good measure.

That’s what I thought, too, until I tasted otherwise. I can’t fully explain it, but there is a definite difference between “New Mexican” food, California Mexican food, and Northwest Mexican food. Surprise: all of them are delicious! (We’ll leave chains such as Taco Bell and Chipotle out of the discussion for now, as they are constant across regions, and are arguably a separate genre of food entirely from traditional restaurant-style Mexican.)

Here’s what I’ve observed so far.

Northwest (mostly based on WA): Heavily influenced by tomatoes and tomato paste. Unique way of melting cheddar cheese with tomato-based sauces on/next to entrees. Characterized by smooth rice and refried beans, mild spice, and tomato salsa that is neither too chunky nor too blended. Green tomatillo salsa is an option. Chips are served warm, thin, and crispy. I grew up with this style of Mexican food, so it is my reference.

California (mostly based on southern): Often influenced by fish, and fish tacos in particular. Salsas tend to be “pico de gallo” style, or in other words, chunky with lots of cilantro. Delicious, creamy guacamole is prevalent. Rice and beans are likely to be healthier, and cooked with mild but distinct spices. Jalepenos are the preferred way of adding spice if desired. Chips vary, but are often thicker and salty, to pair with guacamole.

New Mexico (based on Las Cruces): Chile is king – the state question is “red or green?” Everything is smothered in red or green chile sauce, which is often full of meat or cream and melted cheese. Spicy isn’t an option; it’s a requirement. Salsas tend to be watery with some roasted chile chunks and lots of kick. Enchiladas are stacked instead of rolled, and offered with an egg on top. Chips are very deep fried and best eaten with chile con queso.

These three regional variants aren’t enough to define a true spectrum, however. So, when on a road trip from California to Washington, I ate at a Mexican restaurant in Oregon. Darned if it wasn’t an exact mashup of what I classified as “Northwest” and “California” Mexican food! Similarly, when I visited Arizona, I was amazed to find Mexican food that epitomized a crossover of “California” Mexican food and “New Mexican” food.

Clearly this calls for more experimental followup. I’ll get back to you on that.

I seem to have missed Thanksgiving, but it was awesome, as it usually is. Even just a short trip to Seattle reminds me that the world is bigger than my daily commute and that family is one of the most important things. It is a fitting way to start the Season of Advent.

Oh yes – Happy Advent! The season we all tend to skip over in a rush to have Christmas.

Personally, I enjoy waiting to put up the Christmas decorations until we’re well into December, and I prefer to celebrate Christmas when it is actually Christmas: December 25 – January 5. That puts me in the minority among Christmas-celebrators, but I really don’t think seasons should be rushed. People don’t wish you “happy birthday!” until your actual birthday, or perhaps a few days before. Churches don’t celebrate Easter early, because it’s still Lent. And try as you might, you can’t make it summer in April.

Seasons of all kinds are an invitation to live in the present moment. You simply can’t create them on a whim – the right amount of time must pass first. It’s an adventure, because you aren’t in control. Which of course brings us to the present season: Advent. Adventure.

Whether or not you celebrate Christmas or church seasons, I invite you to take some time and enjoy the many different kinds of seasons you are celebrating, here and now.

Yeah, that’s pretty much how I felt when I saw this opportunity existed.

(OK, so this is only for US astronomy graduate students. How convenient – that’s me!)

As you know if you’ve been following this blog, I was lucky enough to have my husband along for this adventure, which we embarked on quite soon after getting married. We did of course have to pay out-of-pocket for his plane ticket and other expenses.

But can I just say what an awesome summer it was?? My particular research project wasn’t as relevant as I’d hoped, but the list of potential projects for next summer looks quite good. And research notwithstanding, just the experience of visiting India was outstanding.

So, have a look at what it was like last summer. Read my cultural essay. And if you’re an astronomy grad student, seriously consider applying for this program! I’m happy to answer any questions you may have.

*Technically, our food wasn’t paid for. But food is much cheaper in India than the US, unless your grad school diet is 100% top ramen.

Edit: since originally publishing this post, there has been some discussion via email among the astronomy grads at NMSU as to the merit of this program from a research perspective. I readily admit that there are better ways to spend your summer if your sole pursuit in life is accomplishing research. I further concede that as a graduate student, my main priority is research toward a PhD. However, I like to think there are other important things in life, and that one of those things is gaining a wider perspective by stepping outside of your comfort zone. Perhaps I am deluding myself, but I don’t want to live in a world where we isolate ourselves in favor of grinding out as much work as humanly possible. We are too easily divided when one individual cannot comprehend another’s perspective, and I believe experiencing wildly different cultures firsthand can help. For me, a summer in India was a beautiful way to combine three things close to my heart: exploring the world, having my husband along for the journey, and yes, continuing to study astronomy. Other, “better,” more research-heavy programs in other countries may well exist. Whatever your goals and priorities, I encourage you to seek out ways to broaden your horizons through travel.

I think Lily and Sirius would agree that life is good.

Lately our weeks have been full yet fulfilling; our weekends lazy yet adventuresome. It’s a fine mix. Mike began a new job in Las Cruces at Sunspot Solar Energy, and he is also starting his own consulting business on the side. I am enjoying my second year of the astronomy PhD program at NMSU and continuing to play viola. I also recently expanded my musical horizons into electric violin when prompted by some musicians at church! It is remarkably easy to produce a good sound, but challenging to correctly place my fingers and transpose on the fly. Don’t worry, though – my heart is still in the viola.

Some other highlights from the past several weeks…

• I celebrated my 25th birthday and Mike helped me throw an awesome pool party with pizza and ice cream cake for all my astronomy grad student friends.
• I passed my fifth “cume” exam. My PhD program requires students to pass six exams in your first 2.5 years (there are 4-5 exams each semester). You keep taking them until you pass six. Only one to go!
• Our good friend from camp randomly drove down to visit us for a weekend after I heard he was in Albuquerque for a few days. We played lots of Settlers of Catan, and went to White Sands.
• Mike and I attended a retreat weekend with our new church family at a truly bizarre camp run by Nazarenes north of Ruidoso, called Bonita Park. We had a good time, punctuated with a lot of strange reminders about both Episcopalian demographics and how progressive my Christianity is.
• We drove to Tucson over a long weekend to visit Mike’s grandmother on her 93rd birthday. We had a lot of fun with Mike’s parents, aunt, and uncle (who flew in from Holland!). We also squeezed in lunch with some of the folks who run the summer program in India that I participated in, and visited briefly with Mike’s friend Simon.

And now you are all caught up on our lives! Next weekend, Mike and I will celebrate six years of being together, just a few weeks shy of six months married. The Time, It Flies.

First: Good Lord is it hot outside.
And: It is a joy to have Mike here.

Our travel from Paris to the shores of Lake Coeur d’Alene earlier this month was not for the feint of heart. Hell, nothing we’ve done this year was really for the feint of heart! But it is difficult to express how long a 33-hour day really is. One where you wake up at 7am at a hotel in Paris, haul your luggage down the concrete steps to an RER train and ride to the airport, play terminal labyrinth 2E edition, race to the boarding area because the luggage and security lines took forever, endure a 10.5 hour plane ride with two meals and many movies, land in Seattle shortly before noon, juggle your luggage again, eat some Ivar’s, scrounge up some fresh boarding passes, take a puddlejumper to Spokane, lose your luggage, meet up with a friend driving the Camp Cross van, wait for the next flight that has 3/4 of your luggage, explain to Alaska Airlines how to drive the missing 1/4 to a dock two hours away in Idaho, ride said two hours to camp yourself, reunite with friends – some of whom have had an unknowingly large impact on your life and who you haven’t seen in ten years, eat dinner (again?), haul your stuff up a hill, sit through two hours of rules/expectations/program for the upcoming week, retrieve the missing suitcase from a thoroughly lost driver, sit through probably one of the most epic set of songs at campfire in many years, and finally fall asleep at midnight.

Yeah, the day was at least as long as that sentence. The week that followed was… well, it was camp! Mike and I both counseled small groups of high schoolers and helped facilitate a killer program. We got to go tubing together, and we donned some Indian attire for the fancy, “classic Hollywood”-themed dance on the final evening.

We spent a lovely couple of days with friends in the Spokane area, and then flew back to New Mexico on August 15, precisely three days before fall semester classes began.

Our cats are alive and well! Our bedroom was overrun with boxes – some we shipped to ourselves mid-journey, but most were wedding gifts that have been piling up since the day we left in May. We’ve finally settled back in to what I guess one calls “normal life” in these parts, and it is great fun to have a bunch of astronomy friends living in our same apartment complex.

Life lessons:

1. It is nice to be done living out of a suitcase.
2. I still think the western world needs paneer, but then, the eastern world also needs burritos.
3. Creature comforts are not overrated.

Now if someone could just crank the temperature from “inferno” to “reasonable,” we’d be all set.

Do you know what we’ve done so far? Walked around, mostly. And eaten food (big surprise, right?). I posted a solicitation for suggestions of what to do in Paris on facebook and Google+, but have been deliberately lax about making any concrete plans. We have been marveling at the walkability of this city – the sidewalks are extant, clean, wide, and even; there are myriads of free and beautiful gardens; there are no hordes of honking buses, trucks, and autorickshaws. After spending two months in Bangalore, I am simply refreshed to be in a place that has emission controls, crosswalks, public transportation, potable water.

That’s not to say Bangalore was all bad, though. Not by any means. For one, I dearly miss omnipresent vegetarian food. Last night, in Paris, we went to a hole-in-the-wall pizza joint and ordered a salad and pasta to share. The salad came covered in ham; the tortellini was filled with some kind of meat (though I was assured the cream sauce was meat-free). In India, virtually every restaurant dish is categorized under “veg” and “non-veg” headers, and all packaged products have a universal green or red dot to indicate the same. But in Paris, you’d think nobody had ever seen a vegetarian (or, heaven forfend, a crazy person who eats chicken and fish but not beef and pork and happens to dislike mushrooms). It doesn’t help that the menus are in French.

Yesterday afternoon, though, we had a lovely time exploring the area near our hotel. We are staying at the Hotel Elysa-Luxembourg, near the Latin Quarter. We stumbled upon the Pantheon completely by accident, crossed the Seine, glimpsed Notre Dame, and sampled sublime gelato. This morning, we enjoyed one of the best brunches ever (hot chocolate! omelette with side salad! OJ that was literally squeezed from an orange! pain au chocolat!) and strolled around the Luxembourg Gardens.

It began to rain as we continued walking around the neighborhood, and we ducked into a beautiful old church for lack of a better idea. The distant smell of incense was welcoming and statues depicting various saints were familiar. The hushed silence was palpable as we gazed upon vaulted ceilings. It contrasted strongly with our recent visit to a huge temple in Madurai, where one must go barefoot and endure any number of unpleasant odors amidst a cacophony of sound and oppressive, humid heat. Both structures are gorgeous, magnificent holy sites, manifested in strikingly different ways. To me, these two places of worship really embody their respective cultures.

I suppose that is at the core of this. My experience in India was so vivid, yet so fraught with confusion. Now in Paris, things feel more muted, yet relatively easy to navigate and understand. I lack any grand conclusion, other than to say definitively that Paris is most certainly not India.

In brief, though… six of us piled into a Toyota Innova (kind of like a minivan) on Saturday morning: myself, Mike, and Brandon, along with our guide from the IIA, Sankar, his friend’s son (roughly my age), and of course our driver. We visited the Vainu Bappu Observatory in Kavalur, explored a nearby wildlife refuge, sought shelter from an evening downpour, and slept on a very… firm bed. Unfortunately I was denied a hot shower the next morning due to a combination of “India’s showers are weird” and “why is there no hot water?” But the day improved markedly after that, beginning with dosas for breakfast – kind of like a big pancake that you dip in coconut chutney (among other things). We then set off for a tourist place of sorts called Yelegiri Hills. Check out their website – it has lots of words but very little information, save a comedic litany of driving directions with a sidebar of “useful tips.” This sort of thing is typical, it seems. Anyway, we took a boat ride around a man-made lake and walked around a bit before returning to Bangalore on Sunday afternoon. It was quite the adventure.

Before all this, we had quite the time getting to see the final Harry Potter movie. It officially released on Friday, July 15, and here is how it went down in India.

• Nearby Theatre 1 kind of advertises  HP festival, culminating in showing movie 7, Part 1 on Wednesday followed immediately by Part 2! Wow! Let’s get tickets for that.
• Theatre 1′s website SUCKS and tickets aren’t apparently available in advance. We visit Theatre 1 on Tuesday and are told to come back later to buy a ticket for Thursday, because Part 2 isn’t showing on Wednesday. Oooookay.
• Theatre 2, meanwhile, advertises a showing at 6pm on Thursday on their website that apparently is easy to navigate and allows tickets to be purchased online without too much pain.
• Mike and Brandon venture back to Theatre 1 on Thursday morning and attempt to buy a ticket for that evening. Now they say there aren’t any showings until Friday evening, and we couldn’t buy tickets yet for then, anyway. Suck.
• We give up on Theatre 1 and decide to book tickets to Theatre 2, mildly annoyed that most of the good seats are already filled (assigned seating is the norm here at cinemas, it seems).
• None of our credit cards work with Theatre 2 online. So we call them, and they inform us that only Indian credit cards can be used to book tickets in advance. Joy.
• We venture to the IIA, and make friends with an Indian grad student who is willing to use his online bank account to pay for the tickets if we give him cash. (Credit cards aren’t as prevalent here, and it’s for the best, since the cinema insists you show the credit card used for purchase.)
• Theatre 2′s website has an option for “Net banking,” so he proceeds, only to remember that… it won’t work in Firefox.
• We switch to IE and it still doesn’t work. I feel bad for wasting his time, but he insists we come to his office and use his computer, so we do. Apparently an un-signed javascript plugin must load in order for him to sign in to his net banking account.
• Finally… success! Confirmation in hand, we head to the cinema in a cab booked by Brandon at 5pm for the 6pm showing. The evening monsoon hits, and we are thankful to not be in an autorickshaw.
• The driver has no idea where the cinema is and drops us off a few blocks away, so we have to walk through a super narrow, smelly, half-flooded alley of sorts to find where we’re going.
• We stand in line outside (under an overhang, thankfully) until the movie is about to begin, at which point doors open and everyone rushes inside. (Mike and Brandon managed to turn our purchase confirmation into actual tickets at an outside ticket booth near the entrance while I held our spots.)
• Popcorn is mostly a fail… they don’t have a popcorn machine and are selling tiny, cold, kiddie-carnival-sized popcorns for about $1 each with no extra butter and too much salt. I buy two, and Mike gets a falafel burger we saw them carry in from across the street moments before. We get two cokes because they’re out of sprite. (Tiny, no lids.)
• The movie begins late, and for every single preview and whenever anything happens in the actual movie for the first 20 minutes, the entire theatre erupts in screams and cheers. It’s in English, but there are also distracting English subtitles, and the 3D is OK but doesn’t add much. Lots of people are constantly talking to one another and using their mobile phones.
• But you know what? The movie was awesome. (And I saw it before you!) People eventually stopped screaming, mostly. They cut off the credits before they were done, which was annoying, but we caught a rickshaw back home for pretty cheap.
• Verdict? Adventure success!

And now we are about to embark on another adventure, this one to Kodaikanal and Madurai. We are – get this – flying. On Kingfisher Airlines; a puddlejumper to Madurai that takes about 1 hour. You’d think it would be sensible to drive, yes? Well, they claim the drive is at least 12 hours, and trains apparently are booked well in advance. So flying it is. We’ll spend two nights away this time and undoubtedly come back with even more stories.

Things that end well:

• Harry Potter
• A summer spent abroad

Things that don’t end well:

• Funding for the James Webb Space Telescope
• Human space exploration

And to harp for a minute on the lattermost point, here is a lovely excerpt from The Pain Comics. (note: some NSFW language)

I know a lot of people will raise the objection that the space program is a pretty frivolous and costly enterprise; shouldn’t we be spending that money on health care/education/poverty, etc.? To these well-meaning people, who do make a valid point, I would respectfully submit that you please go take a flying leap off a low-gravity planetoid. We weren’t ever going to spend that money on health care/education/poverty, etc. because no one in power in this country actually cares about those things. And as long as we’re not going to spend it on that stuff, why not spend it on science? So what if manned space exploration is frivolous? It’s harmless and beautiful and inspiring. It contributes to human knowledge and elevates our estimation of our own species. At least it’s not lethal. The Department of Defense, on which we blow a fifth of our Federal budget, is a gigantic and inefficient engine designed to kill people. So how come we always hear this argument made against the space program instead of the military? It’s like picking a fight with the class geek instead of the class bully. As my instructive chart shows, we’ve blown like three times more accomplishing it’s not clear exactly what in Afghanistan than we spent putting men on the Moon. I am not even counting Iraq, for the cost of which we could probably build a floating pleasure-dome on Io. So how about knock it off with the why-are-we-spending-this-money-on-space horseshit already and do something useful with your pipsqueak pious outrage instead?

Mike and I are taking a daily Malarone pill to prevent malaria, since all of India is a malaria risk zone. There is nominally less malaria in the area around Bangalore than in both northern India and the more rural parts of India, but the prophylaxis was highly recommended, so we went ahead and got it.

I learned a lot about malaria while researching the various prevention drugs. Essentially, they work by keeping a constant level of malaria killing drug in your bloodstream. Malaria is caused by a parasite that is carried by mosquitos, and no vaccine exists. It is of course still possible to contract malaria while taking Malarone or another similar drug, but it is much less likely.

We went with Malarone over two typical alternatives, Doxycycline and Mefloquine, largely because it has fewer side effects. (Of course, it is also the most expensive, at around $8/pill. Thankfully my program reimbursed the cost and Mike’s insurance let him pay about half that.)

Now, for the fun part: I can’t swallow pills. Never could. And yes, I’ve tried. I swallowed a tic tac once, after trying for some time. Thought I was going to choke and die, and gagged on water (thus spewing it everywhere) for a minute afterward. My gag reflex is just super twitchy. I chew my food into teeny bits and can’t swallow anything without swishing it around in my mouth first. So naturally, my first question was: do they make Malarone in a chewable or liquid form? Answer: nope. Wait, really? Virtually every drug I’ve ever needed to take, from benadryl to antibiotics, has come in either chewable or liquid. You just have to keep asking. I worried that this meant it was a time-release capsule, and seriously researched the other two drugs to see if they came with a chewable or liquid option. No dice. But the Malarone literature (even for the pediatric version!) says that the tablets may be “crushed and mixed with some condensed milk” for anyone who has trouble swallowing them. Shoot me now.

So every evening around 7:30pm, I unveil my new trusty pill crusher and pulverize a Malarone tablet into a nasty neon yellow powder (think turmeric, but disgusting). I then mix it with a single serving of Nestle “Real Mango” or “Real Strawberry” Yoghurt and enjoy. Mmmmm, bitter yellowish-tinted yogurt, with an h. (Mike takes one gulp from his water bottle and kindly helps clean my pill crusher.)

But then the fun begins. We hadn’t really noticed any side effects from Malarone, but travel will wreck havoc on anyone’s system without the help of drugs. We’ve had our share of upset stomachs and lengthy bathroom visits, but nothing too terrible, and usually these seem correlated with a periodic overindulgence in spicy curry rather than a daily pill. But after being here for some three weeks, it hit us: we are having Malarone dreams.

You know those nights when you sleep reasonably soundly, but all night long your brain is actively playing back one epic, jumbled saga after another? That is every night on Malarone. It’s like the dreams run back to back in snippets, never really connected; essentially they’re an amplification of what my normal dreaming is like. It’s hard to explain. All of the snippets are very vivid, and make sense as they occur, even though on hindsight they’re largely nonsensical. Normally I might recall having one or two dreams like this per week, and they would last for what feels like the majority of the night. On Malarone, there are upwards of a half dozen of these each night, and while I may not remember what they were all about, I always remember that they happened.

The worst of it is that these dreams are genuinely fun. It’s like I’m starring in my own set of movie trailers that play one after another! None of them have been disturbing or violent or even really frustrating. Why is this so terrible? The problem is that I really don’t want to get out of bed in the morning. Another 20 minutes of shut-eye means another mini movie trailer of awesome. Pretty much every time. It’s worse than when you have to drag yourself out of bed at an ungodly hour on a frigid morning.

So if you’ll excuse me, I think I’m due for a nap.