NEW MEXICO, DAY 4: VALLES CALDERA NATIONAL PRESERVE AND LOS ALAMOS

 June 28, 2021

This post covers two places that at first glance appear to have nothing in common other than that we visited them on the same day: the Valles Caldera National Preserve and Los Alamos. Read through the post and see if you can find the common link.

After our trek through Bandelier National Monument, we headed into the Jemez Mountains to the Valles Caldera National Preserve, which contains one of three supervolcanoes in North America, the other two being Yellowstone and Long Valley (eastern California, the central Sierra Nevada Range). A series of volcanic explosions here a million years ago was 500 times larger than the Mt. St. Helens eruption in 1980. The resulting caldera is 13.7 miles across and is crisscrossed by streams that give it a lush green hue.

This panoramic camera shot just doesn't do the vastness justice. The valley is ginormous.

More shades of green than I knew existed carpet the flat caldera floor, and dramatic clouds provided a nice backdrop for photos.

CAPE TOWN, SOUTH AFRICA: JEWISH SYNAGOGUE AND MUSEUM

The oldest Jewish congregation in South Africa, founded in 1841, is Gardens Shul (formerly Cape Town Hebrew Congregation). It is considered the "Mother Synagogue" of South Africa. It includes two buildings, an 1863 synagogue and a 1905 synagogue. (The originally 1849 building is gone.)

A guide told us that this orthodox synagogue seats 1,100.  Since there are only 800 Orthodox Jews in Cape Town, it's probably never hard to find a seat.

I loved the stained glass windows, not something I usually associate with Judaism:

Close-up of two of the panes:

PORTLAND, OREGON: JAPANESE AND CHINESE GARDENS

Portland has both a Japanese Garden and a Chinese Garden. My daughter and I thought we would only have time for one or the other, and so we read the descriptions and reviews of both gardens and tried to choose just one. They both got rave reviews, but as my daughter had lived in Japan twice, we opted for nostalgia and the Japanese Garden. The evening before we flew home, however, we discovered that our flight had been changed, giving us just enough time to add the Chinese Garden.

So which was better? Having been to both, I still can't make a recommendation of one over the other. 

THE JAPANESE GARDEN covers 5.5 acres in Portland's West Hills neighborhood, a nice break from the noise and commotion of the city, which is important as traditional Japanese gardens seek to unite the visitor with nature and provide a sense of peace and tranquility.

We visited the garden at the end of the day when there were very few other visitors, and it was definitely peaceful and tranquil.

JAPAN: A NEW CHRISTMAS TRADITION

While reading about Christmas traditions, I ran across this interesting tidbit:
"Christmas in Japan means one thing: Fried chicken from KFC. Poultry is a rarity in Japan, and the custom of ordering from the fast food chain likely started when Americans on the prowl for a traditional Christmas bird had to settle for the Colonel’s golden-fried alternative. In the 1970s, noticing an uptick in sales around the holidays, KFC saw an opportunity to start a new Christmas tradition and began to advertise its chicken as an integral part of the holiday season in Japan. Now, several decades later, the Japanese have embraced fried chicken at Christmas with an almost maniacal devotion. Customers reserve their buckets months in advance, and those foolish enough to wait until Christmas Eve have to wait in lines that snake for blocks to get a taste of the Colonel’s secret blend of 11 herbs and spices. But I’m sure the wait is worth it, because there’s nothing more magical at this time of year than gathering the family around the chicken bucket."  (Found on this site.)

I laughed and thought to myself, Surely this is someone's stretching of the truth.  I emailed Rachael and asked her if she had ever heard of this tradition, and she replied, "Yep! In fact I vividly remember seeing a special stand outside one KFC during the first Christmas we were married [and living in Japan] that was manned by a female KFC employee dressed in a Santa outfit...with a short skirt of course. KFC also makes sense because of the colors. Red and white are auspicious."

A quick search of the internet yielded hundreds of supporting statements and pictures:

Yeah, I know he doesn't look Christmas-y, but I just couldn't resist.

Time to scrap the Southern California tradition of tamales on Christmas Eve.  I'm all for trying a year with the Colonel in his auspicious red and white suit!

How about you?  Do you have any culture-based Christmas traditions?

JAPAN: HIROSHIMA ANNIVERSARY

"The world is a very different one now. For man holds in his mortal hands the power to abolish all forms of human poverty, and all forms of human life."

-John F. Kennedy, Inaugural Address, 1961

On August 6, 1945, sixty-four years ago today, "Little Boy" was dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, killing as many as 140,000 people, the majority of whom were civilians, and completely destroying almost 70% of the city's buildings. It's easy now to look back on that horrific event, and the one that followed three days later in Nagasaki, and pass harsh judgment. However, my birth was still almost fifteen years after this occurrence, and I know only what I have read of the horrible, unending days of war, the seemingly intractable and cruel Japanese government, the mounting deaths, and the fear that haunted most of the world. I don't know that I can fairly judge something I did not live through.

Two years ago we had the sobering experience of visiting the Hiroshima Peace Park. We were there during the off-season, and so there were many Japanese visitors but view white-skinned tourists. I must confess that we felt a bit uncomfortable, perhaps what mid-Easterners might feel when visiting the World Trade Center Memorial. When we signed in at the guest book, it was almost tempting to put "British" as our nationality, so overwhelming was the view before us.

However, we were soon put at ease because of the "Savvy magnet." The Japanese girls swarmed her wherever we went, touching her blonde hair and commenting on her piercing blue eyes. The girls' attraction to Savannah definitely helped us to feel a lot more comfortable.
The museum has some very interesting displays and reproductions, with written narration in multiple languages:
My favorite thing outdoors was the Children's Peace Monument:
The Children's Peace Monument has a display of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, of paper cranes. The crane is a symbol of happiness and long life in Japan. This monument mourns the tragic deaths of many children in the atomic bomb explosion, and was inspired by 12-year-old Sadako Sasaki, who believed that if she could fold 1,000 paper cranes, she would be cured of her leukemia that was a result of the fallout radiation from the bomb. She died before she completed them, but thousands of Japanese school children have honored her with their own contributions of Japanese cranes. We saw several school groups making presentations, including this one below (uncharacteristically NOT in school uniforms):The Children's Monument includes this statue, a Japanese girl holding aloft a folded paper crane:The focal part of the Peace Park is the "A-Bomb Dome." It is the building closest to the hypocenter of the bombing that remained standing. It is an eerie site:
Today there will be a special ceremony at the Peace Park to remember the victims of the bombing and to pray for world peace. Some day I would like to attend one of those ceremonies, although I think I would like to have along a blonde, blue-eyed baby with me to ease the awkwardness.

READING

Pulitzer-prize winning author John Hersey tells the story of Hiroshima through the eyes of six people who survived the dropping of that atomic bomb there in 1945. Published in 1946, it is an amazingly objective account that should be standard reading for anyone interested in understanding the impact of the decision to unleash atomic power.

As a reporter for Time and Life magazines, Hersey covered both the European and Asian theaters during World War II. After the war he was assigned by New Yorker magazine to cover the reconstruction of Japan. Additional material from a 1985 return visit to the city has been added to the original material.