What We're Doing. What I've Done.

What we're doing these days ...

we had some corn for dinner last night (along with tomato and chèvre salad).

The bounty is just raining down on us (literally - you shake the plum tree and you're sure to get hit in the head).  After fresh plums and plum tartes and plum cobblers wore out, I made plum applesauce.  However, I tried to de-pit and de-skin the cooked plums in a juicer with no lid.  It's lucky the painters haven't started on the walls (and ceiling) yet.

We've been welcoming people a lot lately, but not perfectly at all.  Tiredly.  On Sunday, I left the guests at the barbecue and went to take a nap.    Peanut too.

Every year I swear I'm not going to be caught unprepared again and be the only Parisian (or Paris suburbian) not on vacation.  And every year, here I find myself.

When I graduated from college, I taught English in Taiwan for a year.  Our visas were not correct so we were forced to leave the country every two months to get the proper stamp.  For my first visit, I went to Seoul where I was too afraid to venture out by myself since I had barely gotten accustomed to living in Taiwan.  Asia was still so foreign to me, and now I can visualize almost every airport.

Two months later I went to Tokyo and stayed with my brother's college friend.  After that I went to Singapore and had a great time enjoying the cleanliness of it all after living in the quite dirty city of Taichung (which is even cleaner than Taipei).  I remember going to Sentosa island before it was built up into a resort.  I lay on the pristine beach with my friend, and sat in the gentle waves staring up at the sky with not another soul in sight.  They were already beginning the construction of the hotels far off.  For my last visa trip of the year, I went to Hong Kong and shopped myself lonely on GAP castoffs, staying in the since-condemned Chung-King Mansions in a room so small you had to take a shower over the toilet, and you could touch one wall with your feet while sitting on the bed against the opposing wall.

Then I went to New York.  I wasted my time there for a year, before deciding to go back to Taiwan.   With a proper resident visa, I only traveled once while there, again to Hong Kong, again alone.

After Taiwan came Paris, where I decided to au pair for 5 children, thinking it would be easier than if there was only one child, because they would entertain each other.  It was easier.  I studied, I dated (but not Mr. Perfect-For-Me), I broke up, I moved back to NY.

This time I decided I wasn't going to waste it so I got a proper job with insurance.  After only one year as an assistant, I convinced them to let me be the Regional Director for Asia so I could travel around selling ad space for the financial newspaper - that after having yawned my way to a "C" average in "Intro to Business" in college.  I traveled again, almost always alone, unless we were going to the Bank Meetings as a team.  I doodled my way through sales pitches, listening to the Central Bank Governor of Indonesia talk about his country's economy and waiting for the pause so I could ask him how many pages.  When we went to shake hands, he had six fingers on one hand.

There was no travel vacation in these years, only one or two week trips every few weeks to Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Beijing, Shanghai, Singapore, Manila, Jakarta, Kuala Lumpur, Bangkok, New Delhi, Mumbai (Bombay), Karachi, Islamabad, Lahore.  There were late night phone calls from the office or from home.  There were World Bank and Asian Development Bank Meeting trips to Fukuoka, Washington D.C., Geneva, Hong Kong and ... I don't remember where else.  It all blurs together.  I remember being so blasé about traveling that I was only packing for a two-week trip an hour before the car was supposed to arrive, only to realize I had better stop chatting on the phone and start seriously looking for my passport.  I never found it in time (it was in the pocket of the company laptop) and I ended up having to reschedule my two-week trip to four countries at the last minute.

I remember arriving in Islamabad and being stunned to see a blond-haired, blue-eyed woman who seemed somehow faded to me ... she didn't seem to have the same vibrant complexion a Westerner has.  She was wearing a Muslim veil and I learned afterwards that the nearby Afghanistan was the origin of the Caucus race.  I remember catching my breath as I drove in the long taxi ride from the Lahore airport to the city center, marveling at the lush beauty everywhere I looked.  I still think this is the most beautiful place I have ever seen.  And I would never want to live there.

Then calm.  Dating Mr. Perfect-For-Me.  Working 9 to 5.  Getting married, six months of bliss.

And the whirlwind started again with a year in Africa - off to Hargeisa, then Djibouti, then Nairobi, then back to Somaliland again with little stay-overs in Ethiopia when the two neighboring countries (with the same clan and religion, that is Djibouti and Somaliland) weren't getting along. At those times, instead of a 50 minute flight from one city to the other, we had to go way out of our way and cross Ethiopia or Berbera to access the other country.  I remember all the Russian pilots because the aircrafts were old Russian models and no local could read the controls.

I remember the time we stopped the plane in Berbera in the middle of the desert (but next to the sea), and watching everyone start ducking under the wings of the plane as soon as we heard automatic rifle fire - I wondered if I should duck too.  I remember the bomb shaking our house - the one that went off next door -  and I had slept through it.  I remember the ghosts that woke two of my teammates up at night in our compound, and the skulls the hospital construction team dug up from the 1989 civil war.  I remember the little 8-seater plane ride from Nairobi to Hargeisa that took two days to get there as there were two emergency landings.  And I remember the soft feet of the camels and the aloe vera plants that were bigger than me, and ...

I remember, I remember ...

So often all I wanted was someplace to call home, and a family of my own.  And here I have all that - a different me, a same me.

But I'm stuck home for the summer and I wish I could learn how to have adventures as a mom too.