Moments with Strangers #3

Papusas and Dow

Whenever there is a "moment with a stranger" that ends in me getting asked out by a man, it does not make the cut to get recorded in this blog.  Those moments with "courters" make me so grumpy, I've never equated them with my happy/funny/interesting moments with strangers I do write about.

Whenever I'm in the U District, I get pupusas.  The only other pupusas in Seattle that I know of are at a Latin Folklore shop in Capitol Hill.

This is my experience with Capitol Hill pupusas:

"Can I have a zuchinni pupusa?"

"We're out," says the server.

"Can I order the pork and cheese without the pork?"

"Oh...we can't make it without the pork..."

...because they are pre-packaged, frozen pupusas?  To be fair, this is predominantly a coffee shop.

But Juanaco's Tacos is a different story.  They're all about the pupusas.  You see them being made by hand in the kitchen while you order.  This is the thing I miss most about D.C.

"You're from D.C.?!" exclaims Carlos, one of my newer students, a refugee from El Salvador.  "There are lots of El Salvadoreans there!"

"Verdad, eso es comó yo sabe hablar español."

Carlos laughs and is forgiving with my rusty Spanish because he's glad I try.  He and I have decided that everyone should know a few conversational phrases in Spanish, but as a teacher, I should learn how to speak it fluently.

So, I go to Juanaco's Tacoas and hope someday I'll be brave enough to practice Spanish here, but it always feels too presumptuous for me to start.

There's a crowd of novices in front of me, who seem to be reading each and every item on the menu a foot back from the counter.  I fidget a little.  "Are you all in line?" I finally ask, as sweetly as possible.

They shuffle forward with lots of questions.  I'm doing my best to look super patient.  "So, you must know what you're doing?" asks one of the group members.

I smile and nod as patiently as I can.

"Tell me," he says, "what's good?"

"Well, pupusas, obviously."

"What's a pupusa?" he asks.

Why are you here?!  I respond in my head.  But out of my mouth comes, "It starts as a ball of dough.  They poke a hole in it and stuff all the fixins in there, whatever you want.  Meat, beans, cheese."

"My favorite things!  I love it already," he says.

"Then, they flatten out the ball and deep fry it, it's kind of like a tortilla but with all the good stuff inside already.  You dip it in the spicy coleslaw or salsa."

This, of course, is the description of the proper way to make pupusas.  Not the description of how Laura Beth and I made them for her school project.  I came into the kitchen and she had already dissolved to rolling out a circle of dough, laying down a layer of cheese and beans, then putting on a top layer of dough, and pinching the sides together.  It was creative, I'll give her that.

"Wow," he says, eyes wide.  He hands me his menu, "Can you order for me?"

"Oh...I don't know."  This has all the suspicion of turning into a pick-up ploy moment with stranger, and I just want some lunch.

"Please," he says.

It's our turn to step up to the counter and arguing will only increase the time it takes to get my pupusas.

"He'll have the #7, one pupusa with meat and cheese, one with loroco."

"What kind of beans on the side?" the guy behind the counter asks.

I look at the orderee but he smiles and holds up his hands.

"Black," I say, not wanting this to take any longer than it has to.  I put the menu down.  "I'll also have the #7, two pupusas with beans and cheese, black beans on the side."

We pay separately, neither acknowledging any other option.  He thanks me and sits with his friends.  He really just needed help ordering lunch.  A truly nice moment with a stranger.

My other recent moment with a stranger was sitting next to the King County Executive at a fundraiser.  "I just voted for you," I told him.

"That was nice of you," Dow said.  Then he told me to pour him more wine.  "Please," he said as an after thought.  At least he's been good for transportation.

A Morning Person's Observations #1

6/12/2012 - First naturalizing in Queen Anne

I heard them this morning, the chickadees!  I'm glad they live on this side of Lake Union too.

slug trail, look close!

As I sip my tea, I look between my feet and see a slug trail that went all over a plant by the back stoop, but the slug was nowhere to be seen.  I hope to find it one day.

There is a gentle coolness in the air, temperature is the low 60s.  It's dry, but feels fresh.  There are partial clouds in the sky.  Basically, Seattle before the Fourth of July.  If I was in D.C. I would swear it was fall and not summer.  My new sit spot is on the back step, below Raffaela's (upstairs roommate) porch, so it's shaded and tucked away in the forest of our backyard.

The chickadees make their namesake noise for me again.  I can hear them and many others, but I can't see any of them yet.  I'm the new kid on the block, and they're not sure if they're ok with me coming out to play.

6/13/2012 - Familiarizing with the neighbors

I was lucky enough to look between my feet, and see the slug this morning!  Somehow it is the ugliest and cutest slug I've ever seen, all at once.

Some of the birds emerged this morning, just for a moment.  I vainly assumed they had come to see me, that after two days I had become a consistent, reliable, and safe presence.  Then I heard Raffaela by the side stairs to her flat.  They had come over because they had been disrupted elsewhere.  Still, once they saw me they seemed curious.  They were probably a type of sparrow.  What one of my college professors, Jay Roberts, would call LBJs (Little Brown Jabbers).  Their brown feathers were a dark, rich brown.  The tail feathers were long and royal looking.

I notice some of the flora characters this morning.  A few Bracken ferns, a Maple tree, Big Leaf I believe.  A few other species I'll need to identify later.  And the familiar morning glory with its beautiful white flowers, crawling all over the horsetail fern with a King Midas touch, choking the life out of anything it comes across.

In the coming weeks, my roommates and I all leave for two weeks, and we return to find Raffaela's bike under the outside stairs, covered in Morning Glory!

6/14/2012 - Nesting Ninja

One of the LBJs made an appearance today, third day in a row and it seemed willing to tolerate me.  The bird looked like a wren to me.  Tiny body with a long, elegant tail sticking straight up.  A white headband cuts across the eyes, making me think of a ninja.

Ninja wren nest

Ninja wren picked up some fluff that looked like dandelion bits.  It shook them against the ground, dusting them with dirt.  I still find it funny the way birds move, such twitchy little creatures.  Ninja wren went to deposit its nest materials in a hole between the house and Raffaela's porch.

I notice today that one of the ferns is bracken, but the other one looks more like Spiney Wood Fern.

6/20/2012 - Naturalizing at Green Lake

I've been staying at Chris' all week, dog-sitting Denali while Chris and everyone are in the backcountry for staff training.  We sat on the front steps this morning, Denali in front of me, just in case the couple across the street walking their toddler tried to attack me (he has some neurotic wolf guarding tendencies).

I've heard naturalists say don't try to do a sit spot with a dog.  This advice makes sense, but I do also like the different dynamics you observe sitting outside with a dog.  The flies were swarming because of a present Denali had dropped in the front yard yesterday that I hadn't cleaned up yet.  The bees also swung by, particularly interested in the purple flowers Ally (Chris' roommate) had planted.  They had giant pouches of pollen hanging off of either side of their abdomen!

E.J. found a dead honeybee once, with a honey bubble still attached to its leg.  She put it in a tiny, clear box, in her car, and I could stare at that bee for hours and the bubble that still hasn't popped.

I try to make my morning sits only about observing, leave the stresses of the world for later, but I can't help but think about all the bees that are dying, and wonder what a world without honey, or pollinated flowers, would be like.

A robin perches on a telephone wire and sends out a call twice.  The robin's ears must be better than mine, because after the second call, the robin flies over George's (the landlord who lives next door) house, presumably to find someone who had answered the call.

Denali and I are done sitting, so we head out on our walk.  We see the rabbits he chased once when I let him off leash in a field before noticing them.  That experience must not have left a lasting impression for the rabbits, or maybe they recognize that he's on a leash, but either way, they barely scooch away as he lunges for them and tries desperately to break my hold.

I head back to my house to get ready for work.  As I sit on the corner of Dexter and Westlake waiting for the 30 to take me to the Seattle Center, the top grass and hay layer beside the bus bench starts throbbing, like a vampire digging through a grave (I watched an episode of Buffy last night), or a critter trying to break the surface (more likely).  The bus comes before I can see what comes out of there.

Unexpected Educators

Wikimedia Commons; Atomic Taco

"Do you go close to Olive Way?"  This, or a similar question, is a common beginning to my interaction with my bus driver, as after two years, I continue to live the lifelong learner philosophy when it comes to navigating Seattle.

Today another passenger on the 30, one of the few routes I actually know extremely well, had some difficulty figuring out where he was and where the bus was going.  As the bus driver started to paint a map of the U District, Ravenna, and Sand Point for him with her words, I thought about what amazing teachers bus drivers are.

I am one of many passengers who often asks our drivers for some help getting around the city.  As the drivers navigate turns and hills with gigantic vehicles, having to keep an eye out for the plethora of Seattle bikers, they never answer questions with a simple "yes" or "no."  They really describe where they go, how close to where you're headed, where you should walk to get to the bus you need, what route that bus will take to get you where you want to go.  One driver described to her passenger how to find the bus she needed, creatively telling her to follow the electric cables suspended over the road that run the electric buses, until she reached the stop just out of sight beyond the bridge.

This morning I rode the 31 with the driver who goes above and beyond his role as an educator.  "What does the German phrase Zebrasteifen, literally translated to 'zebra stripe', describe on the road?" he asked through his microphone.  Although this seemed like a relatively easy piece of trivia, I enjoyed even more what the driver said next, "The point is not to get the right answer, but to exercise our brains, to do a push-up with our minds, in search for the answer."  An educator attempting to make his students more self-aware of their own educations!  (The answer is a crosswalk.  He explained that in Germany, the stripes are diagonal, so that it looks like a giant white line on the road until you get close enough to see the zebra pattern.)

Once I got off of a bus, and before I could walk to the front, the driver let up on the brakes a bit.  "My bike!" I yelled.  He had already slammed on the brakes, the door was still open.  He nodded at me.  "Make sure to always tell the driver you need to get your bike."  It did feel condescending, but a lesson better learned in a patronizing way than from experience of losing my bike to the King County lost and found.

My observations about the surprising teaching qualities in Seattle bus drivers are making me curious about other unexpected educators people have noticed in the world.