Traveling again

It turns out I do have access to my blogs when I travel, so here I go.  I'm in beautiful Monterey, CA to officiate my niece's wedding.  I've come a few days early because I used to live here and still have friends in the area.  When I left Los Angeles in 2000, I moved for two years to nearby Pacific Grove to live in the little beach cottage that had been my family's vacation home since my childhood.  After an intense romance with a bitter ending, I moved on a whim to Seattle, where I immediately felt at home.  Soon after, my parents had the cottage remodeled, modernized, and expanded, and this was their home 'til their last days.

Even though I was only in Pacific Grove for two years, I came away with some very close friendships. and am happy now to have a reason to come back to visit in person.  The wedding will take place in a park just across the street from what was our parents' home, which is now a vacation rental owned by others.  In fact, six of us in the wedding party will be staying at that house for the next few days, which will no doubt be both familiar and strange.  So much of my family's life was lived in that house; so many memories, mostly good, of holidays, vacations, honeymoons, gatherings of all kinds.  I'm feeling very nostalgic for my mom right now.

But on to Something New.  I have a confession to make.  I'm very disappointed in myself.  The day before I left on this trip, Sweet Hubby and I went to a new (to us) Chinese restaurant, a place so authentic, we barely recognized anything on the menu.  There were, on the back page, some dishes listed as "standard" Chinese food, meaning food Americans would recognize, and my confession is that I ordered from that page instead of daring some of the more, shall we say, ethnic and colorful dishes.  So I am determined that we will go to this place again and I will order one of the pig ear/beef tendon/black fungus/I've-no-idea- what-this-is dishes.  Most of them look pretty chili-fied, though, and my little white bread tongue doesn't always do well with a lot of spicy heat.  But I'm going to give it a try.  I'm so embarrassed that I didn't the first time.