Maryland Days 1 and 2
Monday, January 01, 2007
Dave and I arrived at Baltimore Washington International Airport on December 20 on a packed Southwest flight that had stopped at Chicago-Midway. Luckily we didn’t have to stop in Denver, because that airport was completely snowed in that day. It figures that it would take an act of God for the lines at United Airlines to be longer than those at Southwest Airlines for the first time I’ve ever seen at John Wayne Airport.
My dad picked us up and we got home in time for a delicious home-cooked dinner. I had no trouble going to bed on Eastern Time since Dave and I had stayed up late the night before dealing with our first power outage. Apparently some wires got crossed during the construction of our apartment. It took a few hours for the workers to figure it out and by then it was too late for them to be tearing out the power sockets, so we had to trust that they would do it while we were on the plane and before Dave’s parents and brother arrived to stay at our place. It worked out fine, as did the complimentary carpet cleaning we got for extending our lease (blah).
I’m considering December 21 “day one” because the previous day was all traveling. We got up around noon and went to my mom’s gallery, the Asian Arts and Culture Center at Towson University, where she’s worked the past 20 years. My mom is pretty incredible. When she first started working there, it was a one-room gallery with a small permanent collection of Asian art artifacts left behind by a private collector. Now it is a full-fledged nonprofit with a board of directors, a busy and constantly rotating calendar of exhibits and visiting music and dance troupes, and the prime location in the newly renovated performing arts building in a state university known locally for its strong arts and theater programs.
The gallery was full of majestic floor-to-ceiling murals by a Taiwanese painter, Marlene Tseng Yu. She used acrylic paints which surprised me because the luminosity of the paintings reminded me more of watercolors:
For dinner, we went to the home of two of Dave’s high school buddies, Clive and Gloria Hsu. They were each others’ high school sweethearts and were married a few years ago. Clive was one of Dave’s groomsmen. We talked for hours about our families, relationships, marriage; it was a much-needed time of fellowship. I got some things off my chest and really appreciated their advice – the foremost being that Dave and I need to go on “dates” regularly (we haven’t since our wedding). They had a kid a year ago – so cute!:
On the second day, December 22, we again woke up around noon. I accompanied my mom to the Maryland Athletic Club, aka “MAC,” a large gym with one of the biggest aquatic centers I’ve ever seen, at an American gym anyway. There was a warm water therapy pool, a lap pool, a jacuzzi, and a steam room. I went in all of them.
That night for dinner we went to a dinner theater in Baltimore showing “It’s a Wonderful Life.” Dinner theater is where you pay for one ticket for both dinner and a musical and often the actors are also the waiters. I thought it was just an east coast thing, but a quick search shows there is a dinner theater in Tustin showing “Fiddler’s Roof” right now (hmm…date night?). I wonder if it is as good a deal as Baltimore’s, at $50 a ticket for a buffet dinner of prime rib, ham, salmon, beef stroganoff, rigatoni, etc. and a musical with talented actors. This was our table:
The performance was really good. It was based on the film, It’s a Wonderful Life, and loyal to the original. The caliber of the singing and acting was surprisingly good, too – on par with the musicals I’ve seen at the Pantages in LA and the Lyric Opera House in Baltimore. (I’ve never been to Broadway, so can’t compare there.)
The Shieh family (my brother, mom, dad, me):
