I'm Dreaming of a Canary Christmas

"The sun is shining
The grass is green
The orange and palm trees sway."

I had those first few lines of "White Christmas" in my head every time we walked past a palm tree decorated with Christmas lights. We have just returned from 10 days in paradise, and though it's mild here in England, I'm missing the sun and warm breezes from Tenerife.

Before we left, we opened presents from my side of the family (for that was all that had arrived yet). A tangential story: when Lena turned 3, we secretly bought for her a Radio Flyer tricycle, and had set it up at the park at which she was going to have her birthday party, festooned with balloons. When we arrived at the park, Lena jumped out of the car, ran up to the bike and shouted enthusiastically, "Balloons!" This year, my father had given the girls convertible pants (the kind with zip off legs to become shorts), and when Livia opened her box, she erupted with glee and shouted, "I got a whistle!" Which was attached to the pants. Livia then went on to wear those pants in some form every day that we were in Tenerife. They also scored MP3 players from my mom, My Little Ponies from Dana, and stylish designer bags from me to hold everything (whistles became zipper fobs). Then we tidied the house and headed for Birmingham. An uneventful 4-hour flight over the Atlantic (which we She-Wolfers hadn't seen in years) put us at the tiny airport that evening where we found the weather a balmy 20°C which caused us to giggle all through dinner.

Monday was also sunny and warm, and we staked out some lounge chairs by the pool and just let the girls play. That was why we came. Livia did water aerobics with the old ladies, and Ariel and I marveled about the concept of sunbathing topless. Boobs are nothing special in Europe. We see them on TV all the time. After the 2004 Superbowl halftime show uproar (Nipplegate), the English were baffled what all the fuss about it, saying things like, "That's not football!" Also they couldn't understand why people would be appalled about an almost completely covered nipple. There's a makeover show here called, "How to look good naked," and no, not a single person on the show looks good naked, before or after. But at the commercial breaks they talk to assorted real (and by "real," I mean "real ugly") British women about fashion and self-image, et cetera, and they are all topless and shameless and in dire need of clothing. In Europe, they're just boobs. There are no topless beaches; there are just beaches. Same goes for pools. So we spent the first sunny day getting adjusted to seeing women topless. And not good-looking women. The attractive women wore cute bikinis. There was one poor lady who we first mistook for a man because her breasts had gone so southward that when she reclined, they disappeared completely into her armpits (and she was built in body and face like a trucker). And then there were the men in Speedos. Big men with big man-boob (moobs). The pool area was an androgynous sea of tiny little swimsuit bottoms and big boobs.

We grew accustomed to the frontal nudity, but we never could quite get over the dinner fashion of many of the women which we called, "Hookers on Holiday." Most of the guests ate dinner at the hotel which was a large dining room with a extensive buffet of hot and cold foods. It wasn't a restaurant for which people from off the street might come and make a reservation. We dressed evening casually. There's nothing like seeing a woman self-serving veggies over by the sneezeguard while wearing a black bustier, micro-mini, and 6-inch heels. Maybe she was grabbing a quick bite to eat before she went off to put that outfit to work. I don't know.

View Larger Map The next day we woke to find it partly cloudy and decided this was perfect weather to explore the island and visit an animal-themed park -- overcast but dry. So we rented a car for three days, and off we went to the other side of the island. Geography lesson: Tenerife is the island on which we stayed that is part of the archipelago of the Canary Islands. It is formed by the eruption of a few volcanoes, namely El Teide, the highest mountain in Spain as the Canaries are still part of Spain (like Hawaii is part of the US). El Teide is still an active volcano though she hasn't erupted in a few years. We stayed in Playa de las Americas on the south side of the island. Back to our story. We had to drive northeast up the coast because earthquakes had wiped out the roads to the west. We should have taken this as a sign. But we continued on, through the dust, rocks, and cacti that are so characteristic of the south of the island. Then we got to Santa Cruz, the capital and far eastern point of our trip and curved onto the north of Tenerife, which I would swear was a different island altogether if we could have seen past the fog and driving rain. (Driving rain sounds like it would be good to drive in.) When we arrived at Loro Parque (Parrot Park), our destination, the rain had diminished a bit, but not enough to get out of the car and pay money to stand in it. So we drove on to Icod de los Vinos, the former capital of Tenerife. "Former" because in the 1700's it was eaten by a bit of lava flow. The town is still there but people just cleaned up and built around the lava, so there was no Pompeii-coolness about Icod and the rain increased. At this point we were 25 miles from our hotel, but we had to turn around and drive the long way around, 75 miles the other way. In the first 10 miles of this return journey, we encountered two rock slides that impeded traffic, one of which we swerved around, the other blocked all traffic until the rock slide maintenance authorities could get in and clean up the mess. When we finally made the turn to the south side of the island, the weather cleared again, and we declared the day a glorious adventure (it was too early in the trip to declare it a bust).

The following day had real and unquestionable rain there at our hotel, so we spent the morning teaching the girls how to play the card game Duck (AKA "Oh, Hell," "Pshaw," and "Screw you.") After lunch, everything cleared to the most magnificent weather and we still had a car, but instead we played 18 holes of mini-golf which I would have won if Math Man hadn't been cheating with the scorecards.

Last day with the car was clear skies, and we drove to El Teide. We went from palm-lined beach to desert to pine forest to lunar landscape to snowy mountain. It was surreal. The final ascent of the peak is by cable car, but when we arrived, it was closed due to ice. Of course. The girls had a snowball fight, and we drove down the other side of the mountain, back to Puerto de la Cruz to try to go to Loro Parque again. The moment that we were officially on the north side of the mountain, we encountered fog and rain, and had to go down that winding road through the cloud-bank. It was then that we saw how verdant the north side of Tenerife is, and when we got to the Park, the rain had subsided. The park was magnificent. Mostly it was a zoo with lots of animal shows. We came to the conclusion that the animals there are paid to pose. Each creature was perfectly situated for photo opportunities. Livia adored the dolphin show (which I thought was the best), Lena loved the orca show as she loves all aquatic predators, and Ariel favoured the sea lion show. The girls finished all of their mad-money on softies and we braced ourselves for the grueling drive back which would have gone a lot better if 5 miles from the hotel, Livia didn't suddenly burst in hysterics that she lad left her bag -- the groovy pink camouflage bag I had made for her which contained nearly every one of her beloved Christmas presents. It nearly ruined an otherwise great day.

Ariel called the park the following day on the off-chance that they had found it, though we promised Livia that we wouldn't drive all the way back to get it, and even if they had it, there was no guarantee that it would still have her stuff in it. Turns out that it was sitting in lost-and-found and that the park personnel were due to come to our very hotel to drop off promotional material, was Monday too late? Not at all. Monday morning when it was supposed to be there, it wasn't and my heart fell, but Livia kept the faith. After dinner, it was waiting for her at reception with everything still inside (including the whistle).

Friday I awoke with a head-cold, and after the Loro Parque adventure, we needed an off-day by the pool and at Magic Park. We picked this hotel specifically for the Magic Park. From 11:00 to 4:00, we could go and drop off the girls at an inside playland where entertainers made balloon animals for them or let them watch movies or draw or just lounge in the ball crawl. Every night was a mini-disco for the kids (but we had to stay for that, and only did it one night). The next day was the one I was most excited about.

My children have never been to a waterpark before, and Ariel and I love waterparks. I'm not a strong swimmer, but waterparks aren't about swimming. I bought a decongestant from the farmacia, but the real medicine was the park itself. In the Canaries, pools (and waterparks) don't use chlorinated water. Water is at a premium on an island, so instead they just use sea water, filter and treat it, but not desalinate it. So the swimming water is clear and clean, but just as salty as the Atlantic from which is was born. After a few good face-plants at the end of the waterslides, my sinuses were completely irrigated. Livia and I each were mildly sunburnt -- the only casualties of the whole trip. The next day we lounged again and taught the girls how to play Spades. Lena showed a need to work on her bidding as she would enthusiastically declared she would take 6 or more tricks, even if she had no Spades or face cards. Despite this, the girls both show a lot of promise with cards, and Ariel and I are tickled to finally have people with which to play.

Christmas eve, we played another course of miniputt, and I let Ariel win this time. Right. Livia lost her shark tooth, the baby tooth that never came out because the adult tooth grew in right behind it just like a shark's teeth do. She wrote a note to Santa asking if he would pass it along to the tooth fairy. That night, Santa came and left presents (and a Euro for Livia) and because I had obviously been naughty and hadn't been punished enough by having a skull-crushing head cold, Santa left for me the stomach plague. Ariel took the girls out to explore while I watched "National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation" in Spanish and stayed close to the bathroom. While they were out, Ariel had a fun experience. A few days earlier, we had warned the girls not to get in the habit of running ahead out on the sidewalk because we're soon moving to Mexico City which has a reputation of kidnappings. Well, on Christmas day, while out on a busy street, Livia skipped ahead and Lena called out to her, "Livia, don't run ahead; there might be Mexicans!"

On the way home, Ariel stopped by the farmacia to buy me the best Christmas present ever -- anti-nausea medication. At least that's what the pharmacist said it was for based on however Ariel described it in Spanish. I went ahead and took one immediately, and then I let Ariel translate the indications (which were in Spanish) for me. Whatever nausea the tablet might have cured was negated by the feeling of dread as he read me the potential side effects, "Discontinue use if you show signs of anaphylatic shock, sepsis, or eruption." I don't even want to know what "eruption" means. But it didn't kill me, so I let my family take me down to the pool where I sat in the sun for some Vitamin-D therapy and I even made it to dinner where despite the huge Christmas spread, I could only stomach a piece of veal, some carrots, and a few Jordan almonds. Lena and Livia were told that they could eat as many desserts as they wanted, and I think that in addition to ice cream and little pies, they each had two slices of Yule Log. They were thoroughly stuffed with sweeties.

Our day of departure, we had a evening flight, so we went to the Jungle Park. This park had an emphasis on raptors, and during the raptor show, Lena was chosen to wear the gauntlet and a big black bird landed on her arm. It was a hoot. After the show, the trainers had the task of gathering the birds back into their cages or their perches. We spied one fellow trying to coax a large owl out of a tree, and the bird would call down to him (in owl-speak), "Yeah, right." When we left a few hours later, there were still falcons and eagles seen flying overhead with their tethers dangling down (that sounds dirty). The animal enclosures were rather low-tech with a height of seven feet of glass between us and the animals, and then fencing above that which was open enough for you to stick a hand through. At the jaguar enclosure, the first four feet of the seven foot wall of glass was artificial rocks, so technically, you could climb on the rocks and reach into the enclosure. They had signs up recommending that people not hold their children up to the fence where the cats could reach them. But the real deterrent was the jaguars themselves. One was really antsy and as you stood there, he would run at you and attack the glass. Even knowing the glass is there, it's still pretty scary to see an angry jaguar charge you and get within a few inches. He did this a few times, but always seemed to know when I was taking video of him and would only pace, and though it was scary and funny, you'll just have to imagine it yourself.

This was a red-letter trip -- we didn't visit anything even remotely historic and I didn't take anyone on a forced march. We are now safe and home. Happy to have gone and happy to be home.
Feliz Navidad