Easter Funday

To celebrate Easter Sunday, Eric and I did a little mini-vacation-style outing to Angel Island and Tiburon. I feel confident this is how Jesus would have wanted us to spend the day.

We boarded the ferry to Angel Island with our bikes at 10:30am and had fun watching the birds fly along with the boat as we crossed the bay and docked at Ayala Cove on Angel Island. Angel Island is "the Ellis Island of the West" and still has the old immigration station buildings where they detained primarily Chinese and other "Asiatics" looking to make a new home in San Francisco. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 provided the grounds for refusing or delaying entry to these would-be immigrants, as did a variety of medical conditions including hookworm and "liver flukes" which sound funny but are probably not.

I feel compelled to mention here, against my better judgment, that literally everyone on Angel Island except for us was Asian. And most of them were Asian Asian, not Asian American. It was hard not to notice, especially given the immigration station and its history as the backdrop. And it got a little weird. For example, there were white boards as part of one of the exhibits that had writing all over them, mostly in Chinese. When I tried to write something in English the Chinese curator beelined over to me and was very clear through a tight smile that only comments in Chinese were permitted on the boards. I don't know why I feel like I shouldn't be saying this. I'll stop now.

After exploring the island by bike on the 5 mile perimeter road and by foot up to the 788 foot summit of Mt Livermore, we were ready for lunch. Rather than helping ourselves to the colorful Easter eggs that we came across while exploring one family's picnic area, we took the 2:20pm ferry over to Tiburon for fish sandwiches at Sam's, a restaurant on the dock complete with dive-bombing seagulls and opportunistic pigeons. What they did to that onion ring....man.

We finished lunch at 4:15pm just in time to go home for an afternoon nap and were discouraged to discover that the ferry departed at 4:10pm and then not again until 6:20pm. We made the best of it, though, laying in the grass along the water and watching people walk their dogs, children and elderly parents up and back. It was a fascinating parade of humanity: old folks sporting matching sweats, a fair-skinned blond woman in a light dress walked hand in hand with a swarthy coal-haired fellow dressed all in black, a mother and daughter who looked like the same person living 25 years apart sashayed by, and quite a few young humans flaunted their Easter finest.

Sitting there watching and listening* as people strolled by, I once again had the distinct and unexpected sensation that I was in another country or maybe several other countries: these passers-by were speaking Russian, French, German, Spanish, Chinese, Korean and something that sounded like Hungarian but who knows what it actually was. No English.

I guess the nice part about our unexpectedly international day in the Bay Area was that it made it feel more like a real vacation away from home. Which made getting home, finally, that much better, too.

*and judging