Christmas in Portland, Michigan

In this post, I take a break from writing about Asia to detail Christmas in the USA (because no one wants to hear about Christmas months after the fact).

Context for those not familiar with Portland (which until recently, included me). Source for map.

The last time I traveled to the USA was for a school band trip in 2013 when I went to LA with 40 other excited teenagers. This trip was (thankfully, now I am not a teenager) very different. Eric and I headed to a town called Portland in the state of Michigan (shaped like a mitten), to spend Christmas with his family. We traveled from Toronto by bus through sleep-inducing, snowy Canadian fields, arriving at a border processing centre in a city called Windsor (where Americans cross the border to drink on their 19^th birthdays). 

Immigration is never a fun experience but it is an especially un-fun experience when you are trying to enter a country which is under constant threat. I focused on holding on to the philosophy that it is a privilege to be allowed into another country as we were aggressively instructed by agents wearing bullet-proof vests, in an underground tunnel facility, to place our bags against one wall and line up against a separate wall for inspection.  

Burr. 

Coming from NZ, I had never in my life really imagined spending any time in a bus station in Detroit. Especially the night before Christmas eve… but that is where we ended up for a short time. If I had put my mind to it, the experience would have been in line with what I had expected. Not great. On the plus side, we did not become a crime statistic. On the minus side, there was no sight of Eminem and the actual peanut M&M’s were in a vending machine that did not work (it was dinner time – the timeless mystery meat sandwiches within the “warm” vending machine did not appeal).  After a few more hours of busing through snowy darkness, we were picked up by Eric’s dad, Bill, at a bus stop in a town called Lansing for the final part of our journey to Portland.

Spot the deer blind - a comfortable box equipped with carpet and a heater, used for hunting deer.

Arriving in the States after the successful election of the Western World’s most questionable leader (in my lifetime), I partly expected to be greeted by some chaotic, post-apocalyptic scenario in which I was immediately identified as a foreigner and deported. Instead, I was greeted by friendly faces, offers of cinnamon rolls, and the most comprehensive collection of Christmas decorations I have ever seen, including a shiny green pickle ornament. Bill generously hosted us for the week, providing every snack, meat and condiment available (heads up to my NZ friends: check out cheese dip). 

Eric, Christmas Grinch, attempts to steal the only pavlova in Portland. 

It was too cold to go out much so most of our time was spent indoors eating, napping, watching childhood home videos and, in my case, losing at cards. During short adventures (we could survive approximately 1 hour a day in the wilderness before losing all feeling in our noses, fingers and toes), Eric and I set about to smash as much ice as possible. With two rivers running through it, Portland has the best and the most ice. As a person who hasn't seen much ice, this was the ultimate playground (smashing ice and stomping through snow piles gave away my non-local status).

The best ice. 

One of the greatest things about Michigan is that everything is available. Kiwifruit from New Zealand, strawberries, mangoes, 2L bottles of vodka (in supermarkets!), red velvet beer (?!), 8 billion types of cereal and of course, peanut butter candy. Anything one could want to consume is readily available (accessible and affordable).  The down side of this is of course the negative environmental impact of procuring and consuming all this awesome stuff. Fortunately for those in the USA, there is so much usable space that environmental impacts of this consumption have a minimal impact on most people’s daily lives. Michigan is so vast you can hide rubbish anywhere and transport an infinite amount of goods without noticing a build-up of exhaust. (Compare this with Phnom Penh, where people live in piles of their own rubbish because there is nowhere to put it, or Bangkok, where the air is awful due in part to the exhaust of millions in a small space.) When you can't see the environmental impacts of driving a truck the size of two elephants, buying out of season fruit imported from the other side of the world (guilty), or a bag of individually wrapped mini Reese's peanut butter Christmas trees (guilty), how can anyone say no?

Next stop (actually a previous stop), Vientiane, the capital city of Laos.