Melissa in Hampton, Virginia, then back to New York

Next stop was Hampton to finally meet Snowdon’s ex-girlfriend (from Snowdon’s Singapore army days - now a decade ago!) and good friend, Melissa.  We arrived to find out that she currently lives in an apartment building that's in the middle of a mall!

We met Melissa's cats Nutty and Needy (her husband Gene is still back in California), and then went out to dine on some great Thai (on the way Melissa pointed out the location of a space shuttle launching pad).  I had a nice time getting to know Melissa. Melissa works for NASA as an atmospheric scientist.  I had a lot of questions for her! She measures and monitors the levels of pollution in the air in various locations around the world, including Antarctica recently. She can even gauge which location the pollution is coming from.  She confirmed that NZ is doing well with low levels of pollution production, but getting all the impact from other places, and that currently China and India are creating the most pollution.  She also said that on a recent visit to Antarctica that she found pollution in the 4^th level of the atmosphere (Thermosphere - I think she said 4th), which has not been seen before and is a scary sign of how bad our impact is getting.  Seems to be the message at the moment…(I hope I've quoted you correctly Melissa?). Watch this space for the next update when we visit Roz in Germany (also studying ozone, as an atmospheric chemist).

Later that night (while Snowdon was busily writing up his blog) I sat up to watch the USA news again, and just when it was time for bed this great 'energy' programme came on.  I found it very educational.  This is what I’d been wanting to know and had began drilling Melissa about that day to find out.  My question had been – so yes we’ve got this problem with oil (which, in addition to the obvious problem of various wars raged over it, is currently lapping up on the shores of Louisiana, killing wildlife for miles and miles, ruining businesses etc).  So what is the solution?  My perspective was eeeek nuclear power, please no way that just can’t happen.  Anyway this program covered many of the possible alternatives to oil; wind, water, natural gas, nuclear, solar?  It showed the benefits and problems with each, including visual year 2015 disaster/terrorist scenarios of natural gas and nuclear power being transported through heavily populated areas, and dams failing and causing carnage (which Snowdon noted was designed to instill more fear..).  I now have a much clearer understanding of why someone hasn’t just magic’d up a replacement for oil.  There are issues to be managed!

The next morning I tried out the apartment gym (so great to get some exercise).  That day we watched the movie Oceans.  It is wonderful.  It creates a beautiful picture of what the ocean is under the surface (that the majority of us never really realize).  Watching this movie reminded me of my wonderful year of studying Marine Science.  I sat just as enthralled in my lectures that year as I did in that Hampton cinema.  The movie was very well done.  It gave a picture of how wonderful and beautiful and special and important the ocean and it’s inhabitants are, with the very subtle but very clear inference of:  THE OCEAN IS WORTH PROTECTING/CONSERVING. ACTUALLY WE MUST LOOK AFTER IT, AS WE HUMANS NEED WATER TO LIVE AND TO HAVE WATER WE NEED OUR OCEANS IN GOOD WORKING ORDER.   They did this with only a very small section of the movie focusing on the many detrimental impacts that we’re having on the ocean by trawling and polluting it.  So I thought that it was wonderful and will make a difference (although maybe not the amount of difference that the ocean needs – I guess that needs to happen from a lot of different angles).

Melissa had brought back boxes of Singaporean Hainanese Chicken mixture from Singapore.  So that night Snowdon and I cooked up a feast.  Man it was good!  Apparently it tastes just like the real thing (I have yet to sample the real thing).  Melissa very thoughtfully gave us a box to take with us, so we  cooked it up for Paul, Steve and Gina on our first night back in New York.

That night was a curious night!  We managed to fit in a puzzle of things. A trip downstairs and around the corner in Melissa’s mall to a huge bookshop called Barnes and Noble (two shelves of books on education), me having some nice girl talk with Melissa without Snowdon around, Melissa and Snowdon having several conversations to recreate their friendship after a decade (without me around!), Melissa fitting in making us some choc chip cookies for our road trip back, and for me some time spent hanging in the local town square people watching then with my new mate Nathan from the military who entertained me with some very interesting accounts of being photographed with an emperor scorpion, after taking a bite from an elephants medicated apple, being tackled by a lion and narrowly missing the kiss of death of a cobra.  Snowdon and I retired relatively early to rest up for our big drive back to New York.  But alas were woken up by screeching alarms that shooed us all outside for an hour only to find out after several fire trucks and the police that some pipes had overflowed.


The next morning we left Melissa and the happy little town of Hampton.  Melissa was very hospitable (spending all weekend and Friday night with us even though her job is incredibly demanding), and very generous (she insisted paying for our meals and the movie as a Wedding gift).  And then sending us off with freshly baked cookies and Singaporean cuisine!  Thanks Melissa see you again (and hopefully Gene) soon (in Singapore or NZ)!

The next day we drove back to New York.  We stopped at ‘Bob Evans’ a typical American diner, for lunch.  This place was packed!  And the menu was pretty fabulous.  Snowdon loves it, I miss my veggies (althought that’s usually the case for me with food on the road).  I keep looking for the clues behind the obesity problem.  Snowdon's view - the food is so good, so tasty!  My view of the 'big company' American food is that I’m sure it’s not so nourishing and I wonder what else has been added to it that I don’t know that I’m eating (one brand of peanut advertises that it’s 80% peanuts – what the heck? What else do you need to put in peanut butter, 100% peanuts would be something worth advertising I would have thought).  Some of our observations are: American food is tasty, there’s a huge amount of options, it’s got all kinds of extra things in it, most of it is packed with sugar (very sweet), it is everywhere you go, and the serving sizes are very generous/actually gigantic.  The amount of choice here has blown me away.  The book ‘The Paradox of Choice’, now that I’ve spent a few days in the US of A, has new meaning.  There are sooooo many options of anything/anywhere.  So whilst it’s wonderful and quite captivating to visit, and gaze at all the different products, as the book suggests, I think I’d find it hard to live with all these options all of the time.  Sensory overload!

As Barbara Kingsolver said in her book 'Animal, Vegetable, Miracle' that there are a lot of problems with big company government funded agriculture, but that there's some really great successful small farms, farm coop's, and local restaurants that support the small local farms.  She spoke of farmers markets popping up all over the place, and we saw a huge one in Philadelphia - good, nourishing local food, and so much of it!  Then the label of the Murray's chicken (free roaming, drug free) that we brought from a pretty average (I mean an everyday one not a special one) local supermarket here in Brooklyn to make the Singaporean Hainanese Chicken said that we could track the farm where it was raised (which I got quite excited about but unfortunately the number had fallen off).  So things are on the move towards health by the looks - come on small local business farmers and small local business consumers!!!