expat life

The Sights of Tours

/ Gallivantrix / Leave a comment

Although I only spent 5 weeks in the city of Tours, France, I feel like I managed to squeeze in quite a lot of sightseeing around my French classes and cheese eating. In an attempt to organize my adventures there, this is the 2nd of 4 posts about Tours and it features attractions which are close to the city center, such as museums, gardens and interesting tourist attractions.

Musée Compagnonnage (The Companion Museum)

This was the first museum I visited in Tours because it was right next to my tram stop. I don’t know what I expected from a place called the Companion Museum, but this was not it. The Companionship (Compagnonnage) were any and all artisans and craftsmen who made things with their hands and then passed the knowledge of their crafts through apprenticeships. As you may imagine, that’s most of professions. It’s something between a secret society and a very strong union. In fact, given the amount of masonic imagery, I’m surprised to find that the museum denies any connection beyond the coincidence of the compass and square.

According to their own legends, the Compagnonnage dates back to the construction of the temple in Jerusalem, known as the “Temple of Solomon”, in the 10th century BC. The colossal project, under the direction of the architect Hiram, would have been led by Soubise and Jacques. Different legends also make these last two monastic and chivalrous characters. Salomon, Father Soubise and Maître Jacques are the 3 legendary founders of the Compagnonnage. However, there’s no archaeological evidence of the Compagnonnage until the 13th century. Incidentally, the Free Masons are not found until the 18th century so if they are linked, the French did it first.

The Compagnonnage includes any industry in which people work with their hands directly to produce things. I was going to try to list them, but the museum website takes a whole page to do so. It’s… a lot. Excluded careers were things like merchants, academics, doctors, architects and engineers (presumably the later because they design things rather than build them. Carpenters and stonemasons, people who implemented architectural and engineering designs, were absolutely included in the Compagnonnage.)

You can read more about the historical ups and downs on the museum website (thanks Google Chrome for auto-translate), but it went fairly strong until WW1 dealt it a near fatal blow. It didn’t really recover until after WW2, and it’s worth mentioning that although they claimed to welcome anyone wishing to improve in their profession, they didn’t agree to admit women until 2004(!) and didn’t actually accept one until 2006. Even though many of the trades historically included into the Compagnonnage were industries which had many women workers including sewing, weaving, laundry, and baking, it seems the society was about more than just teaching skills and protecting workers. Quelle surprise! (by the way, all of the art pieces below are sugar and pastry!)

Despite the overwhelming presence of misogyny throughout the history of Western civilization, I still enjoyed seeing the craftworks and tools of the various trades included in the Compagnonnes. I also believe that the centuries-long tradition of protecting the rights and wages of these workers has likely influenced the French cultural value of workers’ rights and collective bargaining. Did you know that striking is protected under their constitution? That not only can they not lose their jobs for striking, their employers must continue to pay them during the strike? That’s a big accomplishment for the same culture that produced Versailles.

The Hôtel Goüin

This is what happens when you don’t plan in advance and just wing it. You get weird stuff. This hotel is on my walk from the tram stop to my school and I got curious about it, and noticed it’s opening hours were only on Wednesdays and Saturdays. I looked at it very very briefly online and saw that inside was an art gallery with rotating exhibitions. I thought, well I like art galleries, and it’s free, so why not? 

First, let me say, I do think it’s worth it to poke your nose into any free museum in your vicinity. Heck, even any museum under 10$ is likely to be worth a stop to me. I have gone into unexpected museums before, things I ran across that were adjacent to another stop on my journey, and it’s roulette. Also, since I had totally failed in the planning phase of my stay in Tours, I was eventually bound to suffer the slings of ‘wing it”, and only not mind too much because a) it’s 5 weeks, and b) my goal in Tours was not sightseeing – it was French Living.

If you or someone you know is headed to Tours and you happen to be in Old Tours on a Wednesday or Saturday, sure, drop in. However, there’s no need to put it on your bucket list. This summer, the Olympics are being held in Paris, so all of France is in Olympic fever. The Hôtel Goüin being no exception, they decided to offer an exhibition on the Paralympics. In large part, the exhibition was mostly very beautiful and inspiring photographs of paralympic athletes, but the upstairs (no elevator, btw, way to accommodate the athletes being celebrated!) contained not only documentaries, but interactive displays where visitors could “try on” a disability and attempt a sport. … I don’t even know what to write about that, other than, yes, I’m sure that’s what they were for because a museum employee told me about it and smilingly encouraged me to try.

If you are not cringing with me, or are wondering why I am, please check out some videos on YouTube by following this link.

The Musée des Beaux Arts

The third and easily most impressive museum I visited was the Tours Museum of Fine Arts. You can go to France and not visit an art museum, but why would you? I spent about 2.5 hours inside the museum of fine arts. I only took photos of things that struck me in particular, but it was room after room of beautiful stuff. I love looking at oil paintings up close. There’s some things that no photograph can ever capture, the quality of light, the ability for a part of a painting to seem like it’s glowing, the way the brush strokes move the eye, the size (both the enormous paintings and the tiny details). Seriously, even gallery-pro photos rarely do them justice, but if you want to see the museum’s own photographic collection, click here. 

Nonetheless, I cannot paint a picture of a gallery with only words, so I hope you enjoy the pictures I took and that maybe it can inspire you to visit an art gallery in or near your own town. Galleries often have wide collections, and even trade around highly desirable artists so that everyone can get a chance. The Tours museum is not anything so grand as is found in Paris, Lyon, London, or New York, but it still had a Rubens, a Rodin, a Rembrandt, and a Monet alongside many lesser known but still very talented artists from the 14th to 21st centuries.

Garland of flowers and trompe l’oeil, Jan-Philips van THIELEN, mid 1600s
Anonymous copy of the Mona Lisa painted mid 1500s
Mary Magdalene, Matthieu FREDEAU 1642
The Virgin, the Child Jesus and Saint John the Baptist, Eustache LE SUEUR, early 1600s
Portrait of a woman in spring, Workshop of Nicolas de LARGILLIERRE, early 1700s
Diana and her companions resting after hunting, Louis of BOULOGNE 1707
Allegory of the Times, Wealth, Power and Love; Claude VIGNON, mid 1600s
Nude study, Léon BELLY, 1857
Sarah Bernhardt in her Belle-Ilea garden, Georges CLAIRIN, late 1800s
Leaving mass on Easter Day in Labastide-du-Vert, Henri MARTIN, 1915

I recently had to try and explain Queer Coding to some folks and I found myself returning to YouTube to shore up my own understanding and references. One of the videos I watched pointed out that a lot of artists who painted under the totalitarian glare of the capital “C” Church used secret signs in their paintings of religious icons, and imagery out of Greco-Roman mythology to be able to portray scenes of queer love, romance, and eroticism that they could otherwise have been turned over to the Inquisition for. It was a perspective that made looking at many of these paintings from the 14-17th centuries much more entertaining.

I had to put this painting on its own. This is “Panoramic view of Tours in 1787” by Pierre-Antoine Demachy. When I turned a corner and saw this view, I was absolutely stunned because that’s the bridge I ride the tram over every day too and from school and my apartment. It’s actually fairly easy to regognize the major landmarks like the Cathedral on the left, the large white buildings with black roofs along side the road which is the Rue National (those are still holding shops today), and the Tower of Charlemagne as the tallest structure on the right. The artist was able to make the buildings in the distance look larger than they really are, and there are too many trees and new buildings for me to exactly replicate this view with my camera, but I gave it a go.

The lower floor of the museum is where the rotating and seasonal exhibits live. When I visited, it was an exhibit about the history of women called “THE SCEPTER & THE DISTAFF. BEING A WOMAN BETWEEN THE MIDDLE AGES AND THE RENAISSANCE“. Although it did have some generalizations, it mainly focused on France and it’s neighboring European countries and offered examples of illuminated manuscripts and artistic renditions of women as visual aids to the historical records. Anyone who has studied the history of women in the West will be well aware of the issues, but for those who are not, may I recommend the recent re-translation of Simone de Beauvoir’s eminent work, The Second Sex. If you’re on this website, I assume you like to read and so recommend the book, but there are plenty of YouTube videos reviewing and analyzing it. I don’t claim it’s the authoritative book of feminism (it’s got issues), but she does a very good job of assessing the historical condition of women in Western culture.

After I finished inside the museum, I headed outside to look for the pickup spot of the hippomobile. I didn’t make up that word. “Hippo” isn’t just a big African water mammal, it’s actually the ancient Greek word for “horse”. “Potamus” is Greek for “river”, which is how the hippopotamus got it’s name – river horse. Thus, the hippomobile is simply an ancient Greek way of saying horse-car, or horse drawn carriage. I don’t know why the one in Tours uses this name instead of the wildly more common French word “calèche“, but the first time I saw it on the website, I fell in love with the word and I refuse to relinquish it.

The internet further told me that I should catch this wonderful ride in front of “Fritz the Elephant” outside the Musée des Beaux Arts. When I arrived at the museum, a sign outside advertised the ride as picking people up at Fritz the Elephant as well, yet by the time I finished my museum tour, I still had no idea where (or really what) Fritz the Elephant was.

The Story of Fritz the Elephant

In my mind, Fritz would be a statue, or maybe a mural, adjacent to and clearly visible from the museum. Upon exiting the museum, I took a quick walk around the gardens (lord do I love the way the French put gardens everywhere). I found a little food stall, and a playground, and a trombone quartet (very unexpected), but still no elephant. Finally, I went over to a building off to one side that looked like it had been (or might still be) a stable. Lo and behold, there was Fritz in all his taxidermized glory, sheltered from the elements by a roof and plexiglass.

TW animal cruelty: because western civilization didn’t figure out animals had feelings until really recently and this is a story out of history. But also, there’s a silver lining at the end? If you want to avoid it, skip to the Hippomobile section where the animals are treated with kindness and respect.

Around the turn of the 20th century, the Barnum and Baily’s Circus was at its height. You may have been exposed to a glorified version of this with a singing Hugh Jackman, but the real circuses relied heavily on exotic animal shows, and the treatment and training for those animals, including elephants, was cruel and violent. Fritz was in captivity for 35 years, which would have been most of his life considering Asian elephants only live into their late 40s. He was purchased by Barnum in Germany in 1873 and shipped by sea to the US. Sea voyages were especially hard on animals then, since they took a long time, had terrible conditions, and there was no medication available to help the animals with anxiety or seasickness. Many elephants died on such voyages, including several of Fritz’s companions. 

In 1901, the B&B circus headed over to Europe for a continental tour. While in Bordeaux in May of 1902, Fritz began to show signs of agitation and aggression, and so was chained to two other elephants to keep him in check. When the circus reached Tours in June of the same year, the circus offered a parade through town as a way of attracting visitors to the shows. Though the parades were difficult, they were also often the only time the animals had any real freedom of movement. 

For reasons unknown to history, Fritz became enraged during this parade. 35 years of captivity and violent treatment cannot have been without consequences, and whatever the reason, Fritz freaked out and terrified all the local parade attendees. The handler was able to get Fritz under control and on the ground (laying down), but director on site still ordered the elephant put down. As horrible as that is, the method of execution was worse, and yet it’s inhumanity may have been the reason why Fritz became such an important historical symbol. The method used was strangulation with chains and rope. It took more than three hours for Fritz to pass. 

The remains of Fritz were sent off to a naturalist for preservation, and within 8 months the skeleton was installed at the natural history museum, and the taxidermized hide was placed in the former stables at the Musée des Beaux Arts. The press latched on to the story, framing Fritz as a gentle giant and a victim. Wild speculation abounded as to the cause of his rage. Some posited it must have been a lit cigarette burning him, but there is no evidence to support this claim. Regardless, Fritz became a beloved mascot of the city of Tours, and the tragic incident became a pivotal talking point for a growing movement acknowledging animal suffering and animal rights. 

As of my visit, more than 100 French cities ban the use of wild animals in circus shows, and the French government at the federal level has decided to completely ban all use of wild animals in travelling circuses by 2028. If that sounds like a small and late change, you aren’t wrong, but France isn’t behind the times. Most developed (rich) nations are still in the process of passing similar laws, often in patchwork and piecemeal ways, and of course developing nations are struggling enough with human rights, that it is difficult to get them onboard with eliminating animal exploitation which can mean the difference between feeding their own children or not.

I have talked about ethical animal tourism before and how important it is to patronize businesses that prioritize animal welfare because that needs to be seen as a viable economic model in order for more people to follow suit. 122 years have passed since Fritz was strangled to death on the streets of Tours for simply being a wild animal, and that seems like a long time, but we were still going to circuses with mistreated elephants when I was a kid. As short a time ago as 2008 I watched a tiger jump through a ring of fire in China (I didn’t know that would happen when I sat down for the show). Kids on the streets in Africa and SE Asia use baby monkeys they took from the mothers in order to lure tourists into taking and paying for cute selfies. There are still plentiful places that offer swims with captive dolphins or rides on captive elephants as tourist attractions. We love looking at and interacting with animals, but all too often that love is toxic.

Horse-drawn carriages are another great example. I’ve been to developing countries where the horses are near starved, dehydrated, and forced to work without a break in the scorching sun. I recall at one point in Egypt seeing a sign near an area with shade and water troughs that an animal welfare organization had fought to have installed for the horses which carried tourists around the ruins. It’s hard to convince a person who lives in a state of desperate poverty that they need to prioritize an animal when their own children may not have enough. A shorter work-day means less money, and is a big barrier to enforcing any kind of animal rights. Thus it’s up to tourists who take the rides to express a firm requirement that the animals be treated well. Stop paying for rides with badly treated animals and the drivers will change.

Please check your sources. Look for the zoos that have habitats of comfort and preservation (lots of zoos these days are changing their habitats to protect and serve the animals, and they rely more on rescuing animals that wouldn’t have survived in the wild or breeding programs rather than capturing healthy wild animals). Look for animal interactions that protect the animal ambassadors. They exist. Animals that for one reason or another don’t mind interacting with humans on their own terms can be great species ambassadors and inspire humans to better protect the environment, but we have to respect their boundaries and needs. Even the pet cafes can have better treatment of their animals, such as creating spaces where the animals can retreat when they want to, and having highly trained staff around to make sure the animals are safe and comfortable at all times, even if that means disappointing a customer.

We may be past the era of such tragedies as happened to Fritz, but we still have a long way to go to restore the balance between our love for interacting with animals and our ability to respect them.

The Hippomobile

Thankfully, in France, the labor rights are strong, even for horses, and these chevaux have restricted work hours, mandated breaks, days off for extreme weather, and nice digs.

“Our equine friends are given a day off every Monday. The horses that draw carriages in the morning are replaced by another set in the afternoon. The animals take breaks in the shade of the magnificent cedar tree outside the Museum of Fine Arts. The carriage driver decides which route to take depending on the time of day, weather conditions and/or the horses’ energy levels. When the weather is unfavorable to horses, the timetable may be modified or suspended.” — quote from the Filbleu website regarding this service

I joined the first afternoon tour (3:30pm) and although I was a bit disappointed that the weather plastic remained down (it had rained heavily a few days before), I was seated right at the back and could look out the open rear for clear views. I didn’t see a lot of new things because by this time, I’d lived in Tours for over 3 weeks and had done a lot of exploring on my own. However, Old Tours is endlessly charming and the weather that day was simply stunning, so for the price of transit ticket, I happily enjoyed the clip clop of horses hooves while I admired the scenery. 

The Cathedral of Saint-Gatien

This stunning cathedral is right next door to the museum and makes an easy side trip. I may have a love affair with gothic architecture and stained glass. I can’t seem to stop going into cathedrals which are all generally of a similar blueprint, and staring in wonder at the scale and scope of human achievement in terms of really big, really complex, and emotionally moving buildings. I took far too many photos of the different types of stained glass, but I admit that I’m more interested in the colors and shapes than I am in the catechism represented therein, so I can’t tell you what they are supposed to be depicting (though there were dozens of signs explaining each window inside the church).

When I was in the Fine Arts Museum, I found a painting of the cathedral, and did my best to replicate the angle in modern photo form. It may be a silly American thing, but we simply aren’t used to buildings which have stood for centuries, and despite knowing how old the building is (800 years), seeing a 200+ year old painting of the cathedral made it’s age somehow more real.

While I was in the church, the trombone quartet that I had found in the gardens outside the museum showed up to practice with the organist. I love listening to the giant pipe organs! It started out quiet enough so you could hear the trombones, then the organist pulled the stops out (that’s where that phrase comes from, right?) and wham!

The Botanical Gardens

Another thing to love about France is the ubiquitous nature of nature. I mean the public gardens. Although what the French call a garden may be anything from a highly cultivated botanical display to an asthetically designed artistic movement, to a grassy place with a water feature, they are all clean, safe, and well maintained, and above all free to the public.

I wrote about my three gardens in Paris earlier this spring, so while experiencing the long weekend and excellent weather in Tours, I decided to pop in to the Botanical Gardens. I was not disappointed. The bus lets passengers off right at the main entrance to the gardens (although there are multiple entrances because it is such a huge area of land). I started by walking to my right into a maze of botanical specimens. The plants are arranged in pleasing beds and trellises and I suspect at least part of it is in bloom in every season except winter. There were three paths with three different points of view and experiences, and at the far end sat a grand glass greenhouse. Unfortunately, that was closed during my visit, but it was a fairly small part of the overall parc.

As I turned around and headed back towards my entry point along a different pathway, I was treated to entirely different scenery and the sounds of very vocal frogs. I managed to sneak up on one in the water feature and snap a photo before he plonked into the depths. I walked for a while simply admiring the plants and small streams, watching families and couples enjoying picnics in the grass, and then suddenly I came upon the menagerie. Here in the middle of this garden were a small number of animal habitats. I recall seeing the same thing in the Jardin des Plants in Paris and being generally surprised that any free-to-all style park could afford the staff and upkeep for that. 

It is by no means a full zoo, but I feel like it added a layer of beauty but also entertainment and diversion (especially for children). There were some wallabies, peacocks, flamingos, turtles, tortoises, and a lot of farm type critters (chickens, geese, ducks goats, rabbits, and even a pig). Most of the animals were fenced away, but there was a mini-farm where people could go in and get a bit closer. 

At the opposite end, there were two playgrounds with equipment for children to climb and play on, and still more beautiful lawns of grass for people to picnic and nap on underneath the enormous sprawling trees. I left the park feeling tranquil and refreshed with the satisfied feeling that my last weekend in Tours was extremely well-spent.

A Brief Introduction to Tours

/ Gallivantrix / Leave a comment

This is part 1 of a 4 post series about the city of Tours and the 5 weeks I spent there in the spring of 2024. I didn’t set out to come here specifically. At the time I decided what I needed was to go to France, I wasn’t up for the intense labor involved in planning a vacation. Instead, I decided to use French language classes as a way decide where to go and what to do, and then I just searched the internet for a good school with a flexible start date and decent accommodations. That’s how I wound up more or less randomly spending 5 weeks in Tours, France on the banks of the Loire river.

Tours is the largest urban area of the Loire Valley, but even at the most generous standard of counting census, it’s still less than half a million people in the city and all surrounding areas. The city has a well preserved historical district called “Vieux Tours” (old Tours) which is full of old churches and half-timbered buildings giving it a very provincial town / quaint European village aesthetic. Yet, it is also equipped with a very robust and affordable public transit system and a wide array of shops, restaurants, and other entertainments. It even has an IKEA.

On the day I arrived, I went straight from the train station to my accommodation (thanks to my school). The apartment is on a quiet street adjacent to the tram line (convenient), but doesn’t have much around it except other modern blocky apartment buildings. When I looked up the photos on Google maps before arrival, I was very hesitant. I didn’t want to live in an industrial complex, I wanted to experience the quaintness of Vieux Tours! I need not have worried. Although the rows and rows of housing can seem a bit Orwellian at first glance, the reality is that there’s still immense amounts of greenery all over. My balcony overlooks a nice garden and there’s a sports field across the street. The main road is lined with trees and the tram line is grassy. While there isn’t much in a stone’s throw, a quick 10-15 minute ride on the tram drops me in Old Tours, and the lack of restaurants and bars in the neighborhood means it’s quiet when I want to rest.

My first day in Vieux Tours, I was distracted by trying to find the entrance to the school, yet I was still charmed by the half-timber buildings in the Place Plumereau (Plume Square). The building my school is in is actually part of a structure that dates back to the 11th century! Despite the fact that many new additions have been built, you can still clearly see the original masonry and timber in some parts of the classrooms.

This combination of old and new is all over Old Tours. There is a church across the street from my tram stop called Église St-Julien, and although the interior was closed to the public, I was able to walk around to the courtyard and see how the old structure merges with a new shopping complex.

A couple of tram stops down the Rue National from my school stands the Hotel de Ville (the City Hall) and a wonderful place to stroll down tree lined pedestrian avenues. 

Twice, I’ve headed to the outskirts of town, all the way to the IKEA. It was an interesting experience to see the parts of town which are not so quaint and historical as Old Tours, but I still felt like the people living in them could easily head to the cute areas of town for an afternoon whenever they liked. Neighborhoods we passed along the route varied between older building that had been refurbished or repurposed and newer apartment and shopping complexes. Everywhere did a fair job of maintaining green spaces (though perhaps not as lushly as the town center). The demographic changed starkly once I left the touristy areas, but that is hardly surprising. However, at no point did I feel like anything was dirty or unsafe.

One outing, I tried to go to the local fair, but it turned out to simply be too crowded for my liking. On the other, I was heading towards the giant box store complex next to IKEA. I think most countries now have some kind of big box store. The USA has Target and Wal-Mart. South Korea has Home Plus. In many EU places it’s CarreFour. I had been shopping at small local CarreFour Express or CarreFour City shops closer to home and to my mind those shops were plenty big. However, I needed to replace my waterproof phone case in preparation for my visit to Marseille and the only shop in the area that claimed to have any in stock was all the way back IKEA way in the biggest of big boxes. I was honestly shook by how big that store was, and it wasn’t even the only one in the complex, there were restaurants and a home appliance store as well (and the IKEA across the street). It felt like it took 10 minutes to walk from one end to the other without even going up and down any aisles! Yet, there was a bus stop right at the parking lot, which means that you don’t have to have a car to go. A nice touch.

Life in Old Tours felt slow and people seem to focus on enjoying things. Most shops are still closed when I head into my 9am class. Lunch is generally seen as 12-2 when most businesses that aren’t serving food close for at least 90 minutes to allow employees to eat. Every restaurant, cafe, boulangerie, and brasserie has sidewalk seating where people can linger over lunch and a glass of wine. There’s a glacier (ice cream shop) on almost every street. After lunch, businesses reopen between 2-3pm while restaurants close or limit service to drinks only. Dinner hours begin around 7pm when the boulangeries finally close. Even in April the sun wasn’t setting until after 9pm, giving the days a languid summer feeling. There’s simply no need to rush anything.

Unlike other tourist destinations in France where people might feel the need to run around to see all the best famous sights, the main attractions in Tours involve ambling around Old Town or strolling along the river. Although just walking through Tours on a sunny day can feel like you’re in a theme park, there’s more!  There are several museums in the town, and several château (castles / really fancy mansions) in the surrounding countryside. (both to be explored in more detail in future blog posts).

My Life in Tours

Since I’m learning the French Art of Living, my life in Tours is slow paced with a focus on relaxing and enjoying. Most days, I woke up early, had some coffee and a pastry, then went to my class at 9am. The classroom lessons were very casual, and frequently we spent more of the class time conversing in French with small side explorations into vocabulary and grammar as the conversation brings them up. There were activities, worksheets, and games, but no one was pressured to “get through a lesson” or hit target learning goals. I don’t know if that’s helpful for the long term students who are trying to pass official French language tests, but for me as a casual learner, it was ideal. My confidence in speaking French increased massively, and as a result I ended up actually using the vocabulary and grammar that I learned in class.

In just a few weeks, I went from being so obviously nervous at speaking French that every shop clerk took pity on me and spoke in English to being able to have detailed conversations about the differences of certain types of bread or cheese in the shops, and place all my orders at restaurants and shops in French without the vendors feeling the need to switch. I’m by no means anywhere near fluent, but it’s been a real boost of achievement to see my progress. Hopefully when I go to other (larger) cities in France, it won’t all fall apart.

I chose to take only the morning classes so as to have my afternoons free. Most places that are not serving food are closed until 2pm, so I tend to linger over lunch and often socialize with other students. After lunch, I wander around town, possibly to run an errand such as shopping for groceries at Les Halles, or visiting a museum or part of town that seems interesting.

In the evenings and on at least one weekend day, I rest at my rented apartment. I assigned myself a YA novel in French with the help of my dictionary for extra “homework”, and I watched Drag Race France on the France national television website, entirely in French with French subtitles. I also had boring maintenance chores like cleaning and laundry, and of course editing my photos from the day, writing in this blog, or just zoning out to YouTube videos because sometimes you need a good zone.

In addition to learning French and enjoying Tours, I have had to take part of my time to plan the rest of my French holiday. Usually I plan vacations before I get on a plane, but this trip has been … unusual. The reason I generally prefer to plan before leaving is that it’s a real struggle to tear myself away from the experiences to sit down at the computer and do research. This may seem ironic since I’m obviously sitting down at my computer to write this, but a written account of my experiences is a big part of how I process the memories and savor them. It’s a wholly different experience than researching and planning for a future adventure.

Planning vacations is hard work, but something I used to enjoy doing before COVID. I started feeling better about things in general within a few days of arriving here, but it took me about a month to be able to sit down with Google and a spreadsheet and really PLAN. Every time I tried it before, it just felt overwhelming. My friends with ADHD tell me this is their life all the time, and I honestly can’t imagine. I’m so used to being able to do what needs doing, especially if it’s also something I want! It was so frustrating, but once the damn broke, I had one 12 hour marathon day at the computer and I got it all done.

I have hotels, trains, busses, and attraction tickets (where needed in advance) for a week in Marseille, Lyon and Paris each. It may sound like a very “entitled person” problem, struggling to make plans for a vacation, but I’ve said before the only reason I can afford the trips I take is that I spend hours and hours searching for deals and researching free/cheap things to do and see. I’ve seen how much “we’ll figure it out when we get there” costs and I don’t make that much. I was watching a YouTube about the economy, and one of the guests was discussing what it was like to be a person who moved economic classes (from poor to middle) and that there’s aspects of her life now that are “normal” to those raised in the middle/upper middle class that she could never have imagined as a poor person, like being able to change your flight plans, or handle even low level emergencies.

Although my parents were middle class by the time I was born, they themselves were raised poor and changed class. And though they were both college educated, doing better than their parents, there were some years of one-step-away-from-the-trailer-park with my mom as a single parent, and some jobless-homeless-sick years for myself after I moved out. There were ups and downs, but in some ways the repeated downs only served to solidify the idea that the ups were not stable. I spent combined decades living hand to mouth, worrying about the ability to pay rent if my car needed work, needing to stand in line at the food bank, and even begging my friends for a place to stay when I lost mine.

I am still shocked at myself when I can just afford something without stressing about it, and even when planning my holidays I still carefully weigh the cost of an activity against my budget goal (perhaps even too critically). I’m getting better at giving myself permission to have nicer things, but I’m still going to be staying in (all girl) dormitory hostels for three weeks because it saves me something like 900-1,200$ total. Planning and budgeting are essential to make your money go as far as it can whether you’re on vacation or at home. 

At the time of writing this, I am hours away from leaving Tours. I feel content that I’ve seen a good amount of the best Tours has to offer, and even a chance to explore what life is like outside the charm of Old Town, providing some contrast and perspective. Stay tuned for my next 3 posts which detail the sites I visited within the city of Tours, the château of the Loire Valley, and the foods and wines of Touraine that I was able to try while staying here. À la prochaine!

I Want to Learn the French Art of Living

/ Gallivantrix / 1 Comment

Why are you going to France?

It was astonishing how many people asked a version of this question. While it is true that I often travel for a job, I’ve visited 5-6x as many countries for pleasure as I have for work, and until this spring when I decided to stop working in order to take my holidays at a nicer time of the year, no one asked me why. “Because I want to”, was the real answer, but it seemed to confuse people. Other times, I told people I was going for the food, but most who have never been to France simply can’t imagine the food here being that much different. I once counted myself among them, but after my first meal in France, I thought that I had died and gone to food heaven. 

Now that I’ve been in France for a couple of weeks, I know that what I was struggling to find the words to say was that I wanted to go to France to learn the French art of living. The French call this “Joie de Vivre” (Joy of Life), but it is perhaps better translated as “The Art of Living Joyfully”, and it’s a very deep rooted value in French culture. Joie de vivre isn’t about parties or euphoric joy, it’s finding happiness through living. Since arriving in Tours, I have been receiving a swift and enlightening crash course.

Musée des beaux-arts – “La Joie de vivre” (Victor Prouvé, 1904)

Practicing Kindness

I will say again that French people in general are more likely to be kind than rude (I’m sure they can be rude when called for, and that there are some percentage of rude people everywhere, but rudeness is not the default way of life). My first week in town, I had to run errands and do shopping while jet lagged and after my 3.5 hour French immersion class which left my brain feeling like a wet noodle. I could barely make comprehensive sentences in English (my native language) let alone in French. Despite my overt disorientation, every shopkeeper was kind and patient with me, most were even happy to use both French and English with me when I explained I was learning, giving me a chance to practice but also helping when the language was outside my skill.

I have not formally studied French since middle school. I came into this language program with a hodgepodge of random vocabulary and grammar that does not conform to standard learning levels in any way. I am not a quiet student, but I also felt that if I asked about everything I didn’t understand, I would derail the whole class. On my second day, I experienced an intense moment of frustration, and the teacher worked very hard to find out what was confusing me. I wanted to shut down and look it up later in private, but she worked it out with me in class. In the moment, I wasn’t happy to be the focus of so much time and attention, but in retrospect, it was a glorious act of kindness and support on her part. I’ve done the same for my own students, and it’s eye-opening to feel it from the other side.

I also had some disappointment in the apartment when I arrived –the washing machine was broken, and there was no Wi-Fi. In most other places I’ve lived, these kinds of problems were dismissed and I was left to handle them on my own or forced to nag the property manager (my last apartment in Korea was a nice exception, those people were great). I didn’t feel any animosity at the lack of amenities. I had of course emailed ahead of my flight to be sure that I would have access to a washing machine and Wi-Fi (among other things), but my response to the absence of promised resources while traveling abroad is less often anger and more often resignation. 

To my surprise and delight, the owner of the school arranged for me to get 120gb of data for the month so I would be able to do things like make video calls, watch YouTube, and write in my blog. His efforts were above and beyond what he needed to do to meet his obligations to me as a paying student. The landlady came the next day with a repair man to fix the washing machine, so it was working again before I had a full load of laundry. While we waited for the repairman to finish his work, she engaged me in conversation, despite not speaking any English, and was patient and kind with my poor French, repeating things more slowly or finding simpler phrasing. She told me about several beautiful tourist attractions around the area that I look forward to exploring.

It’s hard to believe, but even panhandlers on the street here are nicer. I don’t speak French well and in any case have fallen out of the habit of carrying cash. I have nothing to give them, but even after I tell them this, they smile and ask where I’m from, try to speak some English with me, and wish me a good day.

Receiving Kindness

This is all in stark contrast to my experience in Sénégal where I was promised support and given none, treated brusquely by shopkeepers, and viewed as a walking wallet by most. Even in the US, my job had offered support and fallen short, resulting in an overabundance of stress, and my co-workers (who are nice people) still took a couple months to really warm up to me.

My knee-jerk response to this level of kindness and support was shock. For the first several days, every time it happened, I gawped like an idiot, stunned for a moment before a part of my mind went, “it’s ok, relax, trust, let yourself be supported by your fellow humans not because of prior relationships, not because of obligations, but merely because we are humans together.”

Photo Credit:  www.semtrio.com/

It wasn’t until later when I went to write about my experiences that I realized how much I craved this kind of human connection. I love my friends and family, I enjoy forming relationships with my coworkers, but there’s something deeply healing in looking up from our bubbles and saying “hello fellow human, this world is tough enough, so let’s do our best to make it softer for each other while we’re here”.

A Culture of Joyfulness

By the middle of my second week, it was apparent that the effect of joie de vivre is exponential. When everyone is focused on enjoying the little things, it’s easy to be happy and kind which makes everyone happier and kinder. Joie de vivre isn’t at its best when experienced in isolation, it’s something that needs a majority of people to buy into in order to reach its full potential. I can feel it soaking into me, too. I don’t need or want to run around looking for one exiting experience after another because the everyday life here is good. Not ecstatic, or overflowing with awesome, just persistently good.

Photo Credit: https://www.flickr.com/photos/alicepopkorn/

The other day I gave my seat on the tram to a mother with two younger girls. I enjoyed watching them interact on the trip. The girls were talking about my blue hair, and when they got restless, the mom played “find that body part” (where’s your nose? touch your ears!, etc.) which was also fun for me because I’m not the best at French vocabulary. I was able to relax and enjoy the experience. It made me smile to see their small delights. No one was giving the mom dirty looks for her kids being kids, and the mom didn’t have to be self-conscious about playing with her kids on public transit.

Joy and Other Feelings

Joie de vivre could be compared to the practice of mindfulness, in that one of the goals is to be present in the present. Lingering over a meal, sharing an afternoon with friends, and watching kids on the tram are all wonderful examples of the everyday, but international vacations and once in a lifetime experiences are not excluded. The definition of joie de vivre isn’t what you are doing, but how you are doing it: a lunch without an agenda, a hangout with friends for no reason, an international vacation without the stress of focusing on what could go wrong, or what is waiting for you when you get back.

Joie de vivre also isn’t about being happy all the time. Obviously the French have “negative feelings”, I mean, have you read Sartre? But a range of feelings is the normal human experience. The impression I get is that “pretty good” is the baseline here, and feelings of more extreme happiness, sadness, anger, boredom etc. are all coming from and returning to that. In contrast, when I look at people in the US and a few other places I’ve lived, I see them defaulting to a baseline of “meh” (numbness or boredom) or even a baseline of anxiety and sadness. Image Credit: https://sketchplanations.com

Regardless of what culture they are from, people are capable of feeling a full range of emotions, and a normal human will experience most of them in a lifetime, but living in a culture that forwardly values kindness and everyday joy makes a difference in everyone’s quality of life.

Can Americans Live Joyfully?

My initial answer to the question “Why are you going to France?” was often greeted with the suspicion that anyone going to live in a foreign country and not work for a couple of months just to enjoy things was dangerously decadent. This happened so often that I began to become suspicious of myself. Was I leaving my students and co-workers in the lurch? Would they be ok without me? Could I really justify the expense, not only of the vacation but of the time spent not working? The regular messaging of the culture around me made it harder and harder to be sure I was making the right choice.

There is a tendency in (but not exclusive to) American culture to view any action that is not productive (making money) as frivolous (selfish, useless, a drain). For me, joie de vivre is more likely to involve things that make you happy but don’t make money, nor lead to making money in the future. These are things that you do just because you like them (and that don’t hurt anyone else). I rate this kind of joy as sitting from tier 3-5 of the Maslow’s hierarchy. It’s hard to go after it when you don’t have basic needs met, but I would argue that it’s integral to love and belonging, self-esteem, and self-actualization.

Side Note: money, privilege, poverty trauma, and first world problems. I could write entire essays on these topics, but I am not doing that here. TLDR; I know I have privilege; I know a lot of people genuinely do not have money for travel; I know poverty trauma (for those of us who were either raised in poverty or spent years as adults in poverty) has long-term effects on our spending and sense of worthiness; and I know that being able to afford a luxury that you don’t feel like you deserve is a first world problem. I am using my trip to France as a stand-in for a wide variety of frivolously enjoyable experiences in order to examine why many people struggle with letting themselves fully enjoy things. 

When I started telling people instead that I was going to France to study French, they seemed much more comfortable. Once there was a cultivation of skill involved, it wasn’t just frivolous happiness, it was productive, and that was more socially acceptable. One day as I was hand-wringing about whether I needed to justify my trip to France, someone said to me, “Why are you beating yourself up about this? You deserve this. You can do this without going broke or wrecking your life, so go enjoy it.” It was an extremely succinct account of the two most important obstacles to frivolous (non-monetizable) happiness:  Can you afford this? Have you earned this?

Can you afford this?

Credit: FreePix.uk

It’s a valid question, but I don’t think it’s the only hurdle to frivolous joy. There are many people who do not have travel money, or have other challenges to travel such as health and children, and I’m not suggesting (as I have seen other travel bloggers do) that one can simply manifest global travel with enough bootstraps. Maybe they can’t afford a trip to Paris, but what types of joie de vivre can they afford but are held back from doing because they feel guilty about it?

During my experiences in developing countries where almost no one has enough money, the social values writ large tend to be more focused on “slow living” and finding joy in daily experiences such as community, shared meals, nature, children, and expressing creativity – things that don’t cost much if any money. While people in these cultures may feel guilt about spending money on themselves instead of their family or community, they don’t seem to have any trouble enjoying themselves when it’s not a question of money. Even in Japan and Korea, wealthy countries famous for overworking, I still noticed people placing importance on these types of low cost joys.

Have you earned this?

American culture is embedded with an exchange rate of work for pleasure. You must burn x number of calories to “earn” dessert. You must work x hours to “earn” a break. I talked to people in my income bracket and above who can absolutely afford to travel, but felt that they could never possibly, because they haven’t hit the ever-shifting goal post of “enough work” to earn the pleasure.

The earning in question isn’t financial; it’s the unspoken moral economy. Many Americans have internalized the idea that we don’t really deserve to feel good (at least until we’ve suffered enough to “earn it”, which may mean never). But because we are human, we sneak around with minor infractions we call guilty pleasures while lacking the ability to fully feel the delight these activities should bring because we are too busy feeling guilty and wondering how we’ll be judged.

What will people think? If I eat a second slice of cake? If I skip mowing the lawn to have a nap in the afternoon sun? If I take my kids out of school for a day to drive up to the mountains and splash around in a glacial river? If I leave my spouse to feed themself and the kids and they end up eating Cheerios and ice cream while I have a nice dinner with my friends? If I leave the office when there’s a big project (and there’s always a big project) and my co-workers all have to pick up my slack while I’m tasting wine in the Loire Valley?

Look at the horrible social media backlash that middle and lower income people get for having nice things deemed by society to be “too luxurious”. When they use food stamps to buy steaks instead of rice and beans, or dare to have a new phone, a nice laptop, play video games, drink frilly coffee, eat avocado toast or anything else that might make life bearable, the internet loves to pile on. Grind culture tells us that the one true path to financial success is to have nothing that brings joy, and only to work as much as possible until you can earn your way to a house, a car, and a (maybe once yearly) family vacation to a theme park.

Let me be clear, none of these examples are likely to result in anything bad actually happening, but the real world consequences are not reflected in the imaginary consequences of people who are held back by these thoughts. The extreme version of this is called “catastrophizing” and people who suffer from this type of anxiety (as you might guess) imagine catastrophic results of actions they perceive as risky. The less extreme version is a bunch of people who don’t critically examine what is likely to happen, they just feel the guilt and shame as a gut-level reaction.

A New Way of Thinking

I don’t take these internalized feelings of guilt and shame lightly. They are deeply ingrained in us from childhood, and can feel like an irrefutable pillar of reality. But they need to go. Maybe in the way black mold or an insidious termite infestation needs to go, or maybe in the way a cavity needs to go: knock down a wall, drill a hole, excavate the rot and repair the damage. It isn’t something a person can just do –wake up one day suddenly be free of the pressure of guilt induced by unproductive pleasure. However, I suggest that everyone reading this start the long and difficult process of releasing the weight of these fears and finding the freedom to do things just for fun. 

“[Joie de vivre is] revolutionary because for work-driven, vacation-and-long-lunch deprived Americans, it almost requires brain surgery. Why? Because to make that lunch a moment with a French touch it has to be just for fun, no rush, no agenda. An American [said] that her French women friends, who are physicians, ‘work long hours but find time to meet their friends, take vacations, and indulge in the life part of life, which is as important or perhaps more important to them than work.'”
— Huffington Post, “What is joie de vivre, and why are the French so good at it?”

This isn’t “run away with the circus” advice. I do not advocate joy at the expense of security or community. We still need to be able to answer the question “Can I afford it” with “yes”. Please do not go into debt chasing a consumerism driven idea of happiness (been there, done that, regretted my financial choices). It’s important to balance joy and responsibility, but until we learn what things are truly our responsibilities and what things are the weight of other’s expectations and demands that we have taken on unnecessarily, we won’t be able to say “yes” when asking “Do I deserve it?”

Once we are able to accept that we deserve to enjoy things without having to earn the moral currency to do so, there is a different way of life ahead. 

They Say You Can Never Go Home

/ Gallivantrix / Leave a comment

“When I’m talking and someone else is listening, I am invariably left with the uneasy suspicion that I’ve made myself quite tiresome. If one is really bursting with things to say and has no one to say them to, perhaps the only recourse is to go forth and accomplish earth-shattering deeds, so that when the time comes for an autobiography, one need no longer be concerned that no one will take any notice. This is a childish fantasy, of course, of which I have been disabused as I have slowly come to realize that I have scant hope of becoming a celebrated public figure worthy of a best-selling autobiography. Better, then, to write a little about myself and let off some steam, so that I don’t become an insufferable chatterbox when I get old.”

Written on Water by Eileen Chang,  Chinese-born American essayist, novelist, and screenwriter
— written in Japanese occupied Shanghai and first published in 1944.

My last post was more than 8 months ago as I left Senegal to return to the US. I always seem to have a hard time writing when I’m in the US because it doesn’t feel like “travel” or “adventure” to me the way being in other countries does. When I return to Seattle, I focus on enjoying my time with friends and family, having quiet daily experiences of shared meals or parallel play, and even when blog-worthy things do happen, the stories feature people who trust me not to share their private lives online. So, I end up not writing at all.

When I made my plans to return to America in 2023 I told myself and others that I would stay for at least 6 months and not more than 12. I looked forward to it. I felt that I had been away for so long that a quick pass wasn’t going to cut it. I wanted to “water my roots”. I wanted to bask in the everyday mundanities of my friends’ lives, to see the seasons change, to celebrate the holidays of my childhood. Being a long term expat means never giving up on the idea that our country of birth is our true home, while also never quite being as comfortable there as once were.

I wanted to work in the US, not only for income, but also to give my days structure. COVID era Korea and the schedule nightmare of Senegal left me for years in a state of temporal blur where days ran together and there never seemed to be a good enough reason to do anything. During my sojourn in the US, I neither wanted nor needed to work full time. My goal was to soak up my community, not to sink into a daily grind. A part time job would keep me from decimating my savings, and give me a regular routine, but leave me with plenty of free time to enjoy being home.

In reality, I accepted a full-time position teaching an English immersion course for immigrants and refugees. The position came with a lot of challenges, but possibly more rewards. Being back in a physical classroom with a regular schedule and the ability to form a relationship with my students was so good. Learning the bureaucracy of the WA state college system… less so. (drawing of me teaching courtesy of a student’s daughter. I was wearing a floral patterned mask, not speaking with a mouthful of marbles, lol)

Meanwhile, when it came to housing, I knew I didn’t want to rent my own apartment since that would mean committing to a full year lease, and likely cost 1500$+ a month. Therefore, I arranged to move into the spare bedroom of a former roommate. After just 3 months of living together, it became clear that whatever had changed for us since our last cohabitation made a reprise totally impossible. I moved in with some other friends of mine who agreed to let me stay at least through my current work commitments. (pic of the backyard below) That beautiful home with a healthy family and 2 bright and loving kids was an absolute balm to my soul after the back to back combo of the pandemic isolation and the Senegal experience.

Nonetheless, it was always destined to be a short term solution, and I had to start seriously considering my options: renew my contract at this reasonably good job and work on finding a place of my own in the USA or bounce?

Reverse Culture Shock

Coming back to a life in the USA isn’t as simple as it sounds, and however much I may love my home and my community, there is no going backward when it comes to the march of time which wreaks changes in both society and personal growth. When you travel, you leave your familiar surroundings and go to a place where you are shaped by different forces and grow into a new version of yourself. While you are gone, the place you left behind also continues to evolve, shaped by local and world events, so when you return, you no longer fit. It is uncomfortable, and often more unnerving than the experience of not fitting in with a foreign culture. Abroad, you know you are the alien, but at home a part of your brain is constantly telling you that you are SUPPPOSED to fit here. It’s a dysmorphia of the whole sense of self.

But Kaine, you’ve been back to America since you left in 2014, you saw the changes as they happened! Yes and no. I saw America during my vacations the same way any tourist might see a country they visit for only a few weeks. I focused on excursions and experiences, the only real difference was that I made excursions of visiting friends and family rather than visiting tourist attractions. I planned sailing days and camping trips and cookouts. I went to house parties and dragged people out to karaoke nights. I didn’t pay a lot of attention to the cost of groceries or what was happening in politics. For those few weeks at a time, America wasn’t my “home” it was my holiday, and it wasn’t until I was back in my home abroad that I returned to viewing the US economy and politics through the lens of the internet.

This is an excellent article about the experiences of long term expats returning home, and honestly reading it made me feel both seen and called out.

“Americans often develop new attitudes, values and perceptions as a result of their travels. These can often cause stress on reentry.

  • I see America through a sharper lens, both its strengths and weaknesses. I no longer take this country for granted and I really resent unbalanced criticism by Americans who haven’t experienced the rest of the world.
  • I see the validity of at least one other culture. That makes me realize that the American way is not always “right” or “best.” I am impatient with people who criticize other countries and blindly accept everything American causing them to never question anything.
  • I have an unclear concept of home now.
  • I place more value on relationships than other Americans seem to. People here are too busy for one another.
  • Everyone in America is always so stressed and frantic. They never relax. I feel like I can’t relate to others

The Economy

It’s normal to become critical during the second phase of culture shock. I’ve published about these effects before, and the article above is great for explaining how it manifests in reverse culture shock. Nonetheless, even while I was still in the first (honeymoon) phase during August & September, I started feeling the negative impact of some big changes in the US.

I needed a car because it’s almost impossible to navigate American cities via public transit, but I was absolutely shocked at the prices, even on used cars! In 2015 when I was in the US for a few months doing the paperwork for my Korean work visa, I bought a car for $1,750, drove it while I was in country, then sold it for the purchase price when I left. In late 2023, I couldn’t find a used car for less than about 7k$, and those were very sketchy.

My plan to buy a clunker for under 3k and sell it on to a poor college student went up in smoke. I ended up buying a used car from a dealership and hoping that the good gas mileage makes up for the loss in sticker price when I sell it back.

Then there are the grocery stores. I can’t say exactly why, but sometime after I moved to Korea in 2016, American grocery stores became increasingly overwhelming. I can’t even say it’s the size, because I have successfully gone to large box stores like Home Plus and Carrefour in other countries and not felt the pressure that American stores give me. I remember walking into a Safeway in 2019 and just staring at the wall of ice cream for a full 5 minutes, totally flummoxed by the array of nearly identical products. 

When WA grocery stores became liquor sellers (2012), they had to figure out how to add new products without removing existing ones. The eventual solution was that many stores made the aisles smaller so they could incorporate more shelf space in the same square footage. The aisles got narrower, but stores didn’t replace their shopping carts with smaller versions. By 2023, the sensory overwhelm had gone from merely being too many choices and no way to choose, to a feeling of being totally lost and crowded in by impatient and frustrated shoppers in narrow aisles with giant carts which made passing an Olympic sport.

The products and packaging were unfamiliar, I struggled to assess healthy and frugal choices. Products that I did know had somehow doubled in price, overtaking average inflation at light-speed. In 2008, a person could buy a whole roasted chicken for $5, eat it for several meals AND make soup. An organic bird would be $7-9. Now the conventional chickens are $10+ and the organic/farm raised $12-18. In the end, I found that the only store which didn’t make me want to run away screaming was Trader Joe’s, and I did 99% of my shopping there.

Not only grocery stores, but the nature of in-person shopping had changed across the board. In-store service and options had become extremely limited. Once 24 hour shops had become practically European in their hours, and stores were chronically understocked and underserviced. Several times when I popped into a shop to pick up a small item or to look for something I could touch, measure, handle, or try on before buying, I was told plainly by the clerk that it was out of stock and I should look on Amazon.

Eating out was another huge sticker shock. My favorite Seattle staple food is pho (the Vietnamese noodle soup). At my graduation lunch in 2007, we could get a big filling bowl of rich meaty pho for about $5. Now a bowl of pho is $12-15. I went to a couple of what I would call mid-range independent (not chain) restaurants and dropped $80-100 on a single meal (after taxes and tip). Many places I lived and visited abroad, you could get a high-end meal out for between $25-40 (inclusive of taxes and service).

mahalie from International District, Seattle, Washington, CC BY-SA 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

The Food

Food remained a contentious issue for me the whole time I was in the US. In the past, I have had food intolerances which contributed to chronic inflammation, pain and fatigue. I stopped eating dairy and wheat back in the early 2000s and it made a huge difference. Starting in 2008, I experimented with eating wheat and dairy in other countries as compared to in the US. Country after country, as long as I avoided imported US foods, I could eat what I liked and feel fine. However, in the US, it seemed my body only tolerated organic wheat & dairy products, and conventional ones still resulted in inflammation (a general flu-like bleh feeling all over). I thought as long as I managed my bread and milk, food in the US would be easy enough. My body laughs at me when I think like this.

It has been widely discussed that the quality of food in the US is very different from that of other countries. There are hundreds of articles about pesticides, hormones, preservatives, and processing chemicals out there you can read, and I’m not going to recap that here other than to say it is a well documented issue that food in the USA is problematic and contributing to many health problems for her citizens. (pic below, my first and only experience with Chicago deep-dish pizza)

After a couple of weeks of eating novelty junk treats and processed frozen meals, my body protested loud and clear. I had to be pickier and pickier about what I would eat and eventually, food that was too sugary or over-processed simply stopped tasting like food. I remember taking a slice of a cake that looked so delightful, then on my first mouthful wondering how it tasted so awful. The cake was sugary and vaguely spongy, while the frosting tasted like it was actually made of melted plastic. The people around me seemed to enjoy it. I visited a friend’s house where they made a meal I would have made myself 10 years ago and been happy with. I took a small amount to be polite, but again, my body made sure I knew that what I was eating had only a passing resemblance to food. 

Not only did I feel constantly disgusted by the majority of US food, I felt bad about complaining or even abstaining when others around me were eating, enjoying, and offering to share. Sharing food is one of the most fundamental social bonding activities humans can engage in, and my friends, many of whom are still in financial struggles, wanted to share their food with me. How could I tell them that my body didn’t think what they were eating was food? (pic below, a Thanksgiving “turkey” made of Baskin Robbins ice cream and frosting, just one example of the absurd food-options that abound in the USA)

And, despite my caution around eating, and reintroducing an exercise regimen, I GAINED weight in the US. It is my belief that the food itself was the bigger part of the problem, but I also tend to overindulge in sugar when I am stressed, a condition that pervades the life of any American trying to achieve work-life balance. I don’t know what it would really take for me to be food-healthy in the US long term, but I expect it would require a LOT more work and money than would be required to eat a basically healthy diet almost anywhere else.

The People

I had to confront the feeling of failing to fit not just in the larger cultural sense, but also among my own friend/chosen family community. I changed and grew, and so did they. Most of them for the better, thankfully, but in all cases they weren’t quite sure where to put me in their lives when I was in town for months rather than weeks. When I was only available for 12 days, it made sense for people to rearrange their schedules for a unique event, so vacations were filled with revelry and reunion. However, I feared that living there would make my presence mundane, banal, and that my friends would think there would be time later, so they wouldn’t make time now. Thankfully, that fear did not come to pass. Although some people I saw only once or not at all during the 8 month stay, many others made time for me or invited me to planned events at least once a week. I treasure my community.

“General Challenges

  • People at home aren’t as interested in hearing about your foreign experience as you are in telling them about it . 
  • You aren’t as interested in hearing about what has happened at home as they are in telling you about it. 
  • You miss the tight-knit foreign affairs community you were a part of.

I have learned over the years that people stuck in one country (especially Americans) have strong feelings about listening to my adventures. Some of them love it, they see me as their own personal documentary, and it’s delightful. Others are busy comparing their lives to mine and dislike hearing about what I’m doing abroad. I try to respect everyone’s wishes in this, but it can be hard since 95% of the last 10 years of my life has been abroad and I can’t tell stories about my life experiences without involving travel.

Whichever way it goes, it’s massively different from talking to other expats. I had almost forgotten how much I loved swapping stories among the expat community when I ran into another long-term expat at a party in early April. I realized that it was the first time since coming back to the US that I felt comfortable talking about my life abroad for more than a few minutes or in any detail.

It felt like I was holding my breath around my friends and family. I talked about my American experiences with them all the time, shopping, work, things happening at the home I lived in or with other friends’ lives, but I minimized my expat-self, trying to fit into the shape that was left for me. I don’t think my friends consciously asked me to do this, and many would be shocked or saddened to learn that I had been suppressing a part of myself for their comfort. I know they love me and I chose to change the way I interacted with them to make them comfortable because I love them. Call it masking, call it code switching — choosing to focus on a different part of my life and activities when I’m with different people is normal. However, it has made me realize that I can’t live with ONLY this kind of interaction. I need the expat community too, which makes long term residence in the US challenging.

The other difference I noticed in people was more general, society at large. I don’t mean the blatantly obvious “us vs them” divide in America that you cannot help but see if you follow any news at all, but a quieter and less politically motivated change. The shared trauma of COVID changed everyone in some way. I cannot speak for the whole country, but in and around Seattle, people were more closed off, less trusting, less willing to be open.

It’s part of my mental health journey to notice nice things and to make the world around me better than I found it, so I trained myself in the habit of talking to strangers, offering compliments and help whenever I can. I made a game of my daily commute to see how many drivers I could be nice to each day as a way of fending off road rage. (strangely, the commute was one aspect of American life that didn’t bother me) Yet I found that often my overtures of friendliness toward strangers elicited a mixture of confusion and even suspicion before giving way to acceptance and relief.

I am far from the first or only person to notice this trend. A simple Google search will reveal many think pieces searching for reasons why Americans are becoming less social and more isolated, most stressing the dangers for our collective mental and physical health.

My friends who had regularly exchanged hosting dinner and game nights had stopped during lock-down and never re-started. The feeling I got was that the inertia of staying home was so strong that going out required a more special occasion than “dinner and board games”. I also tried for a little while to make some new friends or even (gasp) date. I met people who seemed nice, who I was happy to spend time with and get to know, but they had no ambition to do anything different in their lives. They wanted a new friend or a partner who would fit seamlessly into their existing lifestyles without necessitating a change of habits or hobbies.

People know they crave connections, but seem unwilling or unable to sacrifice even the tiniest bit of safety and comfort for the privilege. People who have been isolated for long periods of time can absolutely suffer increased social anxiety. When I floated this theory past an expat friend of mine who has been back in the US about 18 months longer than me, she said it wasn’t exactly social anxiety, but that everyone felt “tight”, and I understood exactly what she meant. I sympathize with how difficult and uncomfortable they must feel, but it’s both sad and horrible to see.

The American Dream?

Americans are also feeling a lot of financial anxiety. Almost all my coworkers were working overtime, some as much as double time (two full time class loads!) and felt completely unable to stop, either from the weight of their financial obligations (high cost of living) or from a fear that setting any boundaries for work-life balance would cost their job. I had coworkers who were astonished (and envious) that I simply didn’t read work emails outside the office. Others who fretted and stressed that their quarterly contracts might not be renewed despite the massive teacher shortage and high demand. The insecurity was so strong that even though everyone I talked to had noticed certain problems, no one wanted to speak up about them. (Did I? Yes, but it was neither easy nor consequence free. Still glad I did it.)

It was also hard for me to reconcile the gulf between online calls for social justice with the fear people experienced of getting personally involved. Having watched the struggle for civil rights and equity in the US take place almost entirely online for years, it had seemed to me like more people were getting involved, but after living in the US for a few months, I am concerned that the involvement is performative. People can safely speak out online and issue company memos to make themselves feel involved (or if you’re more pessimistic, to make themselves look better to others), yet when it comes to real practical solutions for enacting these policies, no one seems to want to take action. The college that claimed the top ranking for social justice, equity, and accommodation in the region had completely failed its non-English speaking students in this regard and when it was pointed out, they simply changed the subject. Only one person in the whole administration ever actually admitted to me they were failing in that area, and they still didn’t know what can be done about it.

To me, the fear of getting involved in social issues seems like an extension of the same fear that is preventing people from forming deeper social connections, and that fear feels to me like the fear of a child who has skinned a knee falling off their bicycle and doesn’t want to ever ride again. “No, no, walking or being driven is safe and comfortable, the bike is too risky, too painful, I don’t really need it anyway.” Yet, we tell our children to get back on the bike because we know that the better part of life isn’t about falling, it’s about getting back up, and that while it may not be strictly necessary for a safe and comfortable life, the joy of riding a bike with the wind in your hair, and the feeling of freedom it brings is worth the risk of a skinned knee.

Get Back on the Bike

The decision for to strike out again was unexpectedly difficult. My emotional and mental state had become a mélange of post-Covid insecurity, second-hand PTSD, and of course – reverse culture shock induced depression.

My “secondary trauma” (also called second-hand trauma and compassion fatigue) came close on the heels of all the work I did to process my own primary trauma. Secondary trauma is what happens when you are repeatedly exposed to other people’s primary trauma. It’s usually care providers like doctors and psychiatrists who treat trauma sufferers that get this, but it turns out aid workers in developing countries and teachers of students fleeing violence are 100% exposed to secondary trauma. Oh look, it’s me.

This combo meant that my overall resilience was lower, my anxiety was higher, I was less able to focus on new ideas, got tired more easily, had brain fog, and difficulty generating enthusiasm. Even after I decided that what I needed was to travel for joy (rather than work), I had trouble feeling excited or engaging in research and planning. This was especially devastating since prior to COVID, one of my favorite activities was researching and planning my global vacations. (the color coded spreadsheets brought me joy!)

One of my friends also pointed out that I was likely reluctant to make plans to leave because I was in a safe and comfortable place. There simply wasn’t anything uncomfortable (enough) for me to run away from anymore. What a wild notion. I’ve known for several years (thanks therapy) that when I started this journey I was running away from who I was in the US at least as much as I was running toward adventures and experiences in other countries. On this visit, armed with the new tools of my COVID-isolation induced therapy work, I was better able to be a person that I liked while in America. And due to quirks of fate, I found myself living in a home that had the kind of “good enough” parenting and comfortable easy love that I dreamed of having in my own childhood home. Who would want to give that up?

Yet as I cast my gaze across the sea once more, the idea of going to France for the spring took root in my brain. The lack of enthusiasm and general feelings of ennui made implementing any sort of plan quite challenging. I dragged my feet on making any decisions or booking anything for so long. People would ask me if I was excited to go to France, and I would lie and say “yes”, while inside I had a nightmare vision that I would do all this work and spend all this money and somehow arrive in France but be just as unenthusiastic as I was in Seattle. It was an act of faith on my part that I would do the minimum needed to embark, and that my sense of adventure would catch up to me at some point. And now, here I am in Tours, in the Loire Valley, taking French lessons and eating at a boulangerie every day. 

Although it took weeks (maybe months?) for me to imagine and enact my plan, it only took a few days after my arrival for the fog to lift and my enthusiasm to come rushing back, but I don’t think it was the change of scenery (or quality of food) alone that performed this seeming miracle. Every single person I have met and interacted with in this historical French city has been open, kind, generous, and trusting with me. At first, I too was surprised, suspicious and even resistant, but when I let myself relax into it, I found that I could take joy even in the simple act of ordering lunch.

I may not be able to change the economy or the political landscape of my country, but I do have the power to change myself. I can decide to take risks and to be open to new experiences, even when I don’t feel like it. My favorite part of all my adventures has always been the people, and yet the people I love most are suffering in isolation. Perhaps the way forward is to put in some work towards rebuilding openness, connection, and wonder, and trust that the absence of an instant reward is not indicative of failure. Thanks to a combination of the support of my chosen family, my willingness to work toward a goal in the absence of enthusiasm, and the relentless kindness of a whole bunch of strangers, I’m finally feeling less “tight” and more excited for the future. I hope you can, too.

Aventure en France, me voici!

A Random Day in Dakar

/ Gallivantrix / 4 Comments

I have been in Dakar now for 8 weeks and no two days are the same here. I had some hope that getting an apartment and starting work at the university would create some regularity, but that’s just not how things roll here. I wanted to paint a picture of average daily life, but the truth is every day is different, so I’m just going to pick one at random.

My Fellowship is very much not like a regular job. I have some days at the “host institution” (for me, a veterinary school which has no actual English program or staff), and on other days I’m working on whatever professional development projects or cultural exchange experiences I can find. On the days I’m scheduled to be at my host institution, there are no regular classes. Instead, I’m set up to run an English Clinic as part of the veterinary clinical rotation from 8:30 – 4:15 (-ish) where I’ll see each of the year 3 and 4 students a grand total of one time during the semester. It’s obviously not a “class” in the educational sense; I’ve chosen to think of it as an English Promotional Seminar, which definitely makes me feel like less of a teacher and more of a “cultural exchange experience”, so I guess that’s on mission?

Nothing in West Africa starts on time, but so far, I keep trying. Feel free to place bets on how long that lasts. To get ready for English Clinic, I wake up at 7am, bleary eyed on a Monday and wondering why anyone would choose this. Marcus Aurelius hated mornings too, so I feel validated in my preferences for sleeping late. I start trying to find a car between 7:20-7:30 but there aren’t any. I watch the ride-share apps search and search for drivers to no avail. I go out to the street to scout for taxis, but the black and yellow vehicles which make up 80% of the cars on the road at all other times of day are nowhere to be seen at this dawning hour. When one finally appears and stops for me, he flatly refuses to make the drive south to the university. Though the taxis are thin on the ground, there’s no shortage of talibés (begging children) who have been forced out onto the hot and dusty streets by the so-called “teachers” at the Quranic “schools”. I retreat from the human rights violations that make me confront the horrors of humanity far too early in the day, and return to my apartment to continue trying the apps.

When a driver finally accepts my request around 8am, I know I have to face the inevitable phone call. There are no addresses in Dakar, so you give directions for everything. The apps have GPS maps, but most drivers don’t know how to use them well. Heetch, a French company in neon pink, has an option to share location and an in app messenger, but the drivers call anyway. Yango, red for Russia, even includes a “do not call unless it’s an emergency” option, which the drivers ignore completely. The drivers speak in rapid French accented with Wolof or another African dialect. When I first arrived, these calls were panic inducing, but I’m finally getting used to it. They’re probably going to ask where I am, they might ask where I’m going, or they could tell me they are stuck in traffic. This one is all three. I agree the traffic is terrible, and I know I have to wait. Two minutes later, he calls back asking me to cancel.

I keep trying. All drivers busy. No drivers available. Eventually another driver accepts and calls. They ask where I am, even though it showed the location on the app before they accepted the job, and they ask where I’m going. They tell me how long they think it will take for them to reach me, even though the app tracks them by GPS and shows me when they are near. It’s everything I hate about talking to strangers on the phone plus language barrier – every time. The driver arrives around 8:30 and we set off. He doesn’t want to take the Corniche, even though it is the most direct route it will be a traffic jam at this hour, so instead he weaves through side and back streets. He cuts back and forth between the seaside road and the interior road. Both are choked with cars. I watch the traffic which seems to be an ongoing negotiation, drivers signaling by any means except the turn signal – leaning out of windows to chat or yell, and occasional passing pedestrians helping to direct cars when things get truly jammed up. In the early morning rush hour, most major intersections and roundabouts have an officer directing traffic. There are no traffic lights anywhere.

Most drivers know where the campus is generally, but not the veterinary school. This driver is flying blind, no GPS in sight, so when we near the campus, he asks me for directions. It happens probably slightly less than half the time that the driver can’t or won’t use GPS (phone data costs money after all), it’s not the norm but still very common. This was another source of panic in the beginning, since when I was newly arrived I had no idea where anything was nor the best way to get a place. Now, I at least know the roads I travel regularly and I have enough working knowledge of the city’s geography to use Google Maps without getting lost. I am able to direct him to the school and we arrive a little less than an hour after leaving my apartment.

I walk onto the campus greeting staff, students and faculty in a mix of French, Wolof, and English, deposit my bag into my office and head to the security guard who has the key to the conference room that has been issued for my use. Today, the room is in use by another group, but no one thought to tell me about it until I was trying to get in and set up my clinic. It’s a wild departure from both Western culture (where I grew up) and East Asian cultures (where I’ve worked the last 6.5 years), but then again, so is showing up 60 minutes late and not getting reamed, so … when in Dakar, I guess. A few other faculty members who were wandering the halls popped over to help, and soon I was placed into a new conference room, a special room usually reserved, I’m told, for the director general. The complex process of making sure that my computer can be hooked up and both audio and video can be delivered to the students starts all over again. A third faculty who is more tech savvy must be called in for this. As we begin to get the TV and speakers online, I realize that the students have no idea where to come due to the unannounced room change, so a fourth faculty must be contacted to issue a broad text message to the students.

After some trial and error, we get the computer, tv, and speakers all talking to one another and I’m able to begin class around 10am. Just 90 minutes later than scheduled. Of the 14 students expected to show up, 10 are seated around the conference table. I breeze through the introductions and ice breaking games with the students, all but one of whom are uncharacteristically shy. I myself am particularly low energy having spent my weekend on an exhausting but interesting road trip. Perhaps were I less tired, or the students were less shy, we could buoy each other up, but instead, I declare a break after our second game.

Returning from the break, we charge through the listening comprehension activities and then break again, this time for lunch. I feel like I’m missing a part of the picture of how things work here and that I’m scheduling the sections and breaks badly. The students never act like I’m doing things the normal way. When I ask the one member of the faculty that speaks English well, he assures me that they are just being students trying to get out of work, but also points out that sometimes the teachers offer to skip breaks/lunch in order to finish early. That sounds exhausting, and I’m hungry. I need breaks too!

I walk out the back gate, passing the cows that no longer startle me so much, watching the pied crows drift lazily between the fences and the trees and listening to the calls of raptors riding the thermals above. The sun is oppressive. Despite the fact that it’s early December, and the temperature in the shade with a breeze might even be considered pleasant, the sun feels like it’s trying to eat my skin. It feels like reaching into the oven when the heating element is on, but everywhere. The faculty restaurant is nestled in a lush garden and in perpetual shade. During October’s heat wave the shade was not enough to make the outdoor dining bearable (and there is no indoor option), but today it’s fair enough without the hungry sun.

I like the faculty restaurant because it’s close, cheap, and fast. Most restaurants bring food out with the same attention to time as everything else here. If you were hungry when you sat down, you’re hangry by the time the food arrives. I wouldn’t dream of trying to eat at a regular Senegalese restaurant in less than 2 hours, but the faculty restaurant is half cafeteria. The dishes are cooked in advance and are waiting for the teachers to come in and order. Today I choose Thiebou Yapp, a traditional beef and rice dish served with a kind of onion chutney sauce that is a little piquant and only slightly spicy. Some days I might finish up with some attaya, a very sweet strong tea served in tiny cups, but I can see I need to leave to get back to the class on time, and I still have this lingering attachment to being on time. An attachment the students do not share.

I get back to the conference room/classroom just in time, but no one else is there. I wait and wait, and after about 30 minutes I decide to go ahead with the 5 students who have shown up. Over then next 30 minutes, 3 more students trickle in one at a time, the last returning over an hour after I asked them to. I don’t keep attendance or give grades. I will not see any of these students again inside a classroom until next spring. I understand why they might feel like it’s a waste of their time, and I can’t be upset at them for not wanting to do this ill-conceived program. I feel a lot like the school just wants to be able to say “English happened”, which was one of the biggest things I disliked at my last school. If my job is to teach, then I want to teach, not talk to myself in a room of 5 people who are falling asleep, reading their phones, or just zoning out because they can’t understand me, none of whom I will see in a classroom again for 3-4 months after our one day together.

The after lunch section is my least favorite part of the single day “curriculum”. The school asked specifically for clinical roleplay, but I’ve discovered two main problems with this. One – I’m not a veterinarian, so I don’t know what goes on in a veterinary clinic. And two – 90% of the students do not have the English ability to have a basic vet-client conversation even with a helpful worksheet. I can deal with the first part a little by researching, but nothing I do will make it possible for the students to gain conversation skills in a few hours. I desperately want to cut this section, and I am mentally preparing for how to do that, but I feel backed into a corner with it now because I need to be able to say that I tried it their way before I junk it, plus I’ll need time, energy and brain space to invent something to take it’s place (none of which I have on this day). It’s a struggle every time, and with this extra shy, extra small group of students it’s even harder because they are so reluctant to speak, but we survive. I praise them and smile and applaud and they decide to forgo the last break in favor of leaving early.

I don’t mind the idea of leaving early myself, so I walk everyone through the last section, a self-study guide with a list of free resources, and introduce the final game of the day. I love this game because everyone universally gets into it. I read somewhere that first and last experiences shape the emotional memory, so I want the students to have fun at the beginning and the end of my clinic day. AGO is a Japanese card game based on UNO but designed for learning English. It never fails to arouse competitive feelings and get lots of people smiling and laughing. In this case, the students who were so eager to leave early they wanted to skip the break end up staying late to finish their games. It’s a tonic to me too, when after a long day of pulling short quiet sentences from shy and reluctant students I can see them having fun again. It rescues me from the pits of despair that this otherwise futile educational effort brings on.

When it’s finally time to leave, I have to search for another car. There are no taxis along the small internal campus road, so my options are to use the apps or walk to the main road. I sit in a small courtyard waiting for a driver to accept my request. When one finally turns up, it’s an actual taxi, … part of the reason we agree to pay more for the app cars is that they are better cars, usually with AC, while the beat up little bumble bee taxis are frequently falling apart and have no AC, fine for short trips but rather miserable to be stuck in traffic in. But what are you going to do? I sit in the back and try to pretend that the wind through the window is enough for the nearly hour of traffic back to my apartment.

While I’m sitting there, feeling tempted to complain and feel sorry for myself, I slowly realize that the ever present butterflies of Dakar have become a flurry. There are always what I as a city girl think of as “a lot” of butterflies, but today the small white wings fill the air by the thousands. It’s impossible to film or photograph because they are so tiny and move so fast, yet as I stare out the window in the heat of stalled traffic, I am transported by the pure magic of witnessing this Senegalese snow. I had never thought of butterflies as a weather condition before, and yet even the largest of butterfly greenhouses I’ve visited have nothing on the migration I am witnessing from the back of the beat up taxi. The way they drift through the air looks like cherry blossoms or snowflakes caught in a breeze, though both are sights I associate with much cooler weather. I think about how un-Christmas-like I have been feeling as December continues on, and marvel at this little whirl of white. How can I be upset at traffic or late students when this beauty exists?

At home I go straight to the shower to rinse off the sweat and dust of the day and the traffic. I prepare drinkable water by moving the boiled water to the bottle in the fridge and boiling a new kettle to cool overnight. I watch tv, eat dinner, and log into another zoom call to manage the bureaucracy. The next day, I’ll decontaminate my produce delivery to make the fresh fruit and veggies safe for my delicate western constitution, and I’ll figure out what the next step in the next project that needs my attention is. Life here is more different from any place I’ve lived in a long time, there’s no routine in my job because everything is always changing, and no routine in my life because it’s always breaking down, getting replaced or being updated. I am still not sure how I feel about this lack of stability and constant uncertainty, but I do know that without it, there wouldn’t be unexpected moments of beauty and joy, so for now, I’ll take the trade.

Life in Dakar: Week 3 Part 1 – Maslow Was on to Something

/ Gallivantrix / Leave a comment

Since arriving in Senegal on October 17th I “lived” in 4 different places in just three weeks. I have struggled to reach the most basic level of the famous hierarchy of needs which includes food/water/sleep and have been very touch and go with tier 2: shelter and safety. I have to say it is absolutely wild how much your mental focus shrinks to encompass only these things when they are at risk. Today, I’m writing about how my world got sucked down to the tunnel view of food-water-sleep because I think its important to reflect on the ways that insecurity over food/water/shelter can grind a life or even a whole population to a halt.

The original draft of this week was far too long for a single blog post. Anywhere you see an asterisk* that means there’s some extra details in the part 2 post of side adventures and footnotes.

Some Words About Maslow: the hierarchy is old, and the details are outdated. I don’t personally think “reproduction” or “sex” belongs on tier 1 because we aren’t going to die as individuals without it the same way we will die of starvation, dehydration, asphyxiation, or exposure without food, water, air, and climate control (shelter, clothing, fire, a/c, etc). I would put it in tier 3: love and belonging. The debate rages on in the dark corners of incel internet -just, not in my blog. So when I talk about the tier 1 physiological needs I mean the things we die without: food, water, breathable air, and enough control over the climate/our own body temperature so that we neither freeze nor overheat. Tier 2 is “safety” which includes things like having a reliable long term source of income, having decent health, having stable housing, and of course not being in danger.

Some Words About Comparative Suffering aka “It Could Be Worse”, aka “The Pain Olympics”: Nope. Individual reactions to different levels of stress and trauma are, you guessed it, individual. One person may respond to the same trauma or challenge different ways at different times in their lives. Two people may experience the same exact traumatic event and react totally differently based on their own past experiences and states-of-being at the time it happened. I have comparatively more resilience for dealing with culture shock and unexpected international adventure related obstacles than a person who hasn’t got my experience. I have comparatively less resilience in dealing with Dakar, Senegal than locals or expats who have lived here for years. All of our experiences relating to the challenges of living here are valid. So I don’t ascribe to “you think this is hard for you? the locals deal with worse conditions every day of their lives, so you can suck it up for 10 months”. I follow a “This is hard for me and wow, the locals deal with worse conditions every day of their lives, that is also terrible, no one should have to in these conditions” kind of mentality. No Pain Olympics here.

The Last Disclaimer: I am relatively safe and healthy here. I have not been without food, water, or shelter in the time since I arrived. I have simply had to focus far more of my mind, time, and energy on them than at almost any other point in my life. I still have an enormous privilege as an educated, white, American that I can afford to just book myself a hotel room and pay for the taxi to move my belongings. I can order delivery food or take a taxi to the grocery store. I do not have to walk around after dark in unsafe neighborhoods when the car breaks down. This hasn’t been about my needs not getting met at all, it’s about the fact that as said privileged, educated, white American I spend 95%+ percent of my life never even having to give more than a passing thought to how to get those needs met and for the last three weeks, it’s almost all I’ve thought about. I acknowledge that it is echoes of “poor little rich girl” (though I’m actually poor by US economic standards, I am definitely seen as wealthy out here in Senegal). It’s more than a little cringe in that respect, but don’t look away. This is how we learn and grow.

When Last We Saw Our Intrepid Writer

At the time of my last post (Monday, October 31), I was in hotel #2: a complex of furnished apartments that billed itself as a hotel. I was supposed to move from the unit I was in with the broken shower to another unit when it was emptied out on November 5, but shenanigans. I told you in my last post that the shower was fixed, I was incorrect. The building manager took the shower head away and cleaned it and put it back and showed me that water was coming out of it and then left. When I was just taking quick rinses to get the sweat and dust off me, I didn’t notice, but the next time I went to shampoo my hair, two problems arose almost immediately. One was the lack of hot water. (I’m starting to learn that hot water is actually a rare thing here, and mostly probably not a big deal because it’s hot all the time. I just really like hot showers.) But worse, the newly cleaned shower head projected water all over the bathroom. Enclosed showers are not actually common in many parts of the world. I haven’t had one in ages. Not even a curtain. The shower is just in the bathroom, there’s a drain in the floor. Some set ups are better for keeping your toilet paper dry than others. This one was sending so much water to the far end of the room that there were puddles on the counter between the sink and the wall. Nothing was staying dry.

I don’t know if the shower alone would have been enough to send me packing, probably not TBH, I could have worked around it. There’s more. The weekend 1-5am disco/nightclub that I mentioned in my last post continued on past the weekend and crept up its start time earlier and earlier until it was going from 8pm. The volume wasn’t just heard, it was felt. I was waking up so many times a night there’s no way I was getting a full REM cycle. I’m dealing with dust, and bugs, and cheap flimsy breaking stuff, but I gotta be able to sleep (tier1!)*.

At the point I realized that I was not going to be able to stay in that building, I was able to get in contact with a local realtor through the Fulbright ETAs (English Teaching Assistants). One of them had stayed in Dakar earlier in the year and her host mom was also a realtor. In many parts of the world, realtors are needed for rental agreements as well as property purchases. It was the same in Korea. Anyway, she had contacted me over the weekend to say there was a potential place that seemed perfect for my needs and budget in the same building where her parents lived (reassuring). At the time, I thought I’d get to see it on Monday or Tuesday. This was not to be.

Tuesday: When I Realized Things Had to Change

I was going not-so-quietly insane from sleep dep by the time Tuesday, November 1st rolled around. There was a program wide zoom meeting* with any Fellows who could attend and a few program coordinators in DC. They asked us how things were going, and I replied that there were some struggles for me. When they asked me to elaborate, I tried my best to be “oh haha, isn’t it funny, culture shock and new experiences” about it, but around the point where they realized I wasn’t getting sleep, they had a kind but firm “not ok” response. This alone was a bit shocking as my complaints about not being able to sleep in the room due to power outages the week before had been greeted with crickets by both my contact at the university and the Senegalese deputy RELO at the Embassy. It was a solid relief to have someone validate me about the housing problems for the first time since I arrived. They encouraged me to move as soon as I could, to contact the Embassy again, and said that they would also send a message about it.

By Tuesday afternoon, I got news that the realtor was at the hospital visiting family, but had no timeline on when she would be available or whether the apartment she proposed was still on offer. I went home from my meeting and started the search to move. I was only looking for something short-term, thinking once more (possibly with foolish optimism) that I was days away from a real apartment. My social sponsor (aka university contact) wrote me from South Africa to say that I could either move to a floor above the nightclub (he knows I can’t do that because of the stairs) or take the unfurnished apartment, and I again reminded him why that wasn’t possible (see previous post for details) and asked him to plan to help me start looking again when he got back to Senegal.

Wednesday: The Longest Day

Wednesday morning I awoke to find a response from the deputy RELO at the Embassy giving me approval to move to a new place and with some actual suggestions for how I might take the long-term housing into my own hands. Unfortunately one of the suggestions was the realtor I was impatiently waiting to hear back from already, and the other was a place that would not be available until January. I quickly logged back into Booking and Airbnb to search for a new place. I resolved to find a location where I could be safe and comfortable for a week while we kept on home-hunting. It’s increasingly difficult to find reliably good places online. Shocked Pikachu Face: people lie. People especially lie when money is involved. Desperate people really really lie when money is involved. So, Booking and Airbnb are full of places with fake photos and reviews by their own friends. You have to actually read what’s written to make sure it’s authentic and not a bot or a buddy. I’ve gotten good at this over the years, I’ve learned how to pick out places that will be ok for me and avoid the places that are likely to have problems. Years of detailed international vacation planning on a budget has prepared me for this very moment. I found a good looking place with an 8.9 rating on booking, a plethora of good authentic reviews, and confirmation of a functional elevator, but it was only available for 4 days. I needed to go, though, so I booked it starting that very day, hoping that an extension or a move to a nearby room might be possible after I arrived.

The complicated thing about moving in Dakar is that there are no addresses. When I arrived at the airport, the hotel sent a driver for me who knew where that hotel was. When I moved from hotel #1 to hotel #2, my social sponsor got a friend and a truck and drove me there. Now, I had move to hotel #3 all on my own. To make matters more fun, it was not a named hotel. It was a furnished apartment in a building on a main road, but didn’t list the name of the building on the booking site. There was no way for me to know which building, or what floor, or any specific information on where to go by website alone. I messaged the manager who gave me some cursory directions, said to have the taxi driver call him for more detail, and agreed to have someone meet me to help with my luggage.

Next, I went to check out of hotel #2*, and the lady at the front desk was rather sad about it. I think they liked having me because I didn’t make a mess or noise, and also didn’t need the cleaners in every single day. I told her about the nightclub music, because that was really the deal breaker, and the offer was once again … more stairs. I used my translating app to let her know that I had a health issue that made stairs difficult for me, and to her credit, she was amazingly sweet about it. She worked to minimize my time on the stairs when she was helping me with my bags, which shows that there is at least some cultural awareness of invisible mobility/disability issues.

She also helped me negotiate with a taxi to get all my bags to the new place. I have been largely avoiding taxis, because the expat ladies of Senegal tell me that their taxi experiences here are not unlike the ones I had in Saudi (for those new, or who don’t recall, there was some very gross and skeezy stuff). I have installed and used a car share app called Heetch (similar to Lyft or Uber) because there’s no haggling over price, you can put your pick up and drop off locations in the GPS, and there’s an added layer of security because they are registered with the company so if they sexually harass me, I can report them more easily.

This taxi driver was not bad. He wanted to chat in French, but he used simple language and spoke slowly with me. He did ask if I was married, but when I said I was (yes, I lie for safety and comfort) he didn’t try to get me to cheat on my “husband” (yes, that happens more often than you think). He helped me get my bags from hotel #2 and when we got to hotel #3, he didn’t just drop me and my luggage on the sidewalk, he waited with me while I got the hotel to send the promised luggage assistance to us. That was a harrowing few minutes because I have more luggage than one person can move at this point (it has expanded since I got off the plane) and I was trying to keep an eye on the taxi, the porter, and all my bags in two locations on a very busy sidewalk. Thankfully, I and all my bags made it inside in one piece.

The apartment was beautiful, but the power was out. Not in the building, electricity is unit by unit, so the elevator worked and we got the bags up ok. After some awkward internet translations, the guy told me he was going to get the power back on, and it should just be 5 minutes (in reality over an hour)*. When the power was up and running I couldn’t find the remote to the A/C in my room. I sent another message to the management about it and the general helper guy (porter, cleaner, electrician, but NOT the owner) came back over. He found a remote for me, but then something very strange happened. He was messing with the breaker box and the power for the place went out again. He spent the next 15-20 minutes flipping switches and turning the power on and off. There was a French speaking foreign woman with him who seemed pretty upset, but I couldn’t understand enough of the conversation to say why. I was too hot and tired to try, so I just lay on the bed thinking cool thoughts until it was fixed. It worked immaculately the rest of my stay.

I honestly think it was the best place I stayed. The building had an elevator, the apartment was spacious with a shared kitchen, living room, and balcony (great view over the city), the bedroom had it’s own key and a private bathroom, some amount of hot water and reasonable water pressure, good wifi. The owner even came to check in on me personally that evening. It will be hard to live up to.

I tried to order delivery again, but after 30 minutes of not having my order confirmed, I decided to walk up to the local shopping center before it got dark. There was a really nice grocery store and a mini mall. I got some staple groceries and it turned out the place I placed my delivery order from was in the mall food court. They called me while I was there, so I just went over and talked to them. They actually hadn’t meant to be on the app because they weren’t fully up and running, but offered to cook me the food anyway since I was there and gave me a complimentary peach iced tea while I waited.

I slept so well.

Thursday: Adventures in ATM

The day I checked in, the guy who was dealing with luggage and electricity also brought me my bill. I wasn’t really prepared to pay at check in, so I asked if I could pay the next day after I had a chance to find a bank. There were three banks under hotel #3 building so I thought that would be easy. But no. There are no ATMs in those banks. Culture shock is not knowing banks can exist without having ATMs inside. I asked the security guard at my building where I could find one, and somehow ended up being directed across town, like all the way across 30 minute taxi ride, and I was so flustered and confused that I just came back into the room to have a cry because culture shock is also having wild emotional swings! After I cooled off and washed my face, I started Googling a solution to my problem. I eventually figured out that ATM is the name of a home goods store here, so when the helpful humans were trying to show me where to go on the map, they were showing me a shop, not an automatic teller machine*.

After using Google Maps (yes, I know it’s an addiction, they should pay me a sponsor fee) to locate ATMs in the area, I went back to the mall to find one. The security guard there pointed me to a bank across the parking lot. The ATM inside didn’t work, but the bank security guard stood respectfully by while I used the one outside. There are security guards everywhere. Saftey tip: say hello to all of them every time you pass. Cash safely tucked in my bra (yes, ew, but I’m not risking hundreds of dollars in my bag which might get snatched off me by a motorcycle thief) I went back into the mall for ice cream. On my way out, I saw an ATM inside the mall right next to the grocery store entrance. *Sigh.

The realtor wanted to meet me after she finished work to go and look at an apartment I was pretty sure I didn’t want and couldn’t afford but I needed to show willing. I took a Heetch car over to her office and waited awkwardly on the street outside for her. I’m slowly getting more comfortable walking around on my own, but lone woman standing on the street is not ideal in pretty much any urban setting. Eventually she came out drove me over to pick up the landlord and then we looked at the place. I say that sentence like it wasn’t 30 minutes of traffic and phone calls trying to find the landlord, then trying to find the person who had the key, then getting the key, then getting to the place. Nothing is fast or simple here.

The apartment they wanted to show me was very far from the school. Not walkable at all. This isn’t a deal breaker, but it is a factor. It was on the ground floor (no stairs, yay) with good security doors/walls/bars, but because of that very little light. There was no A/C in the living room which is fairly standard, but less than ideal because as I had already found out it means I won’t use the living room when the weather is hot, and although they tell me it cools down in December/January That’s still me not being able to use the living room more than half the time I’m here. Again, not a deal breaker, but a factor. Here’s the deal breaker: you had to walk outside across a mini courtyard to get to the kitchen. Outside. To get to the fridge. They wanted 700,000 CFA for this. That is $1,067 USD. I once lived in a studio where the shower was in the kitchen and the bathroom was down the hall (that’s the building hall, studios don’t have halls inside them). That was only 425$ a month, and I was a broke-a$$ college student*.

I politely declined.

When I got back to hotel #3 for the evening, I went to see another apartment in the same building up on the 10th floor. I had gotten the go ahead to find a long term Airbnb stay because the week by week hotel hopping was too much. It was listed on Airbnb but had no rating or reviews. I was unwilling to book anything sight unseen after all the experiences I had so far, but I figured it was in the same building as my very nice room, so if it was a little less nice than the one I’m in now that would still be ok. Nope. The pictures on the website were some other place. Most of the amenities listed were not present, and the “furnished” room had no bed. I don’t wanna be the picky privileged white girl, but I feel like “bed” is definitely a key component of “furnished”. I went to sleep feeling even more hopeless than before because I was in a good space but knew I’d have only 2 days left to enjoy it before I had to launch into an as yet unknown #4. I still slept better than any night in #2.

Friday: Stopgap Solutions, Meet the RELO, and a Broken Down Taxi

Friday morning I arranged with the younger teachers here to stay in their spare room for a couple weeks while the quest continued. I messaged more places on Airbnb and scheduled a viewing for later in the day. I wrote another email about my progress (or lack thereof) to the people “in charge”, and my American RELO* asked me to call her.

Despite her own circumstances*, she said she understood my needs (a/c and minimal stairs) especially since she herself works all day in the nice, air-conditioned, clean and beautiful embassy. I’m still a bit worried for her, because I feel like she should also have at least A/C to sleep with in this weather but she said it’s ok for her. She doesn’t expect me to do the same just because she is, since our needs and daily circumstances are different, which is nice. She also said that if I got stable housing by December that would be a win. So. Ugh. At least no one is pushing me to work full time (or you know at all) while this is going on*.

In the evening, I went to view another Airbnb. It’s a beautiful house occupied by a Spanish expat with excellent English skills. She’s in her 60s and renting out her daughter’s room who’s gone off to study. The house is huge with a garden courtyard, and it’s walkable to the school and shops. The bedroom is up a flight of stairs and the bathroom up there is shared with one other girl, which is less than ideal but should be ok for a month or so. The real sticking point was that the empty room doesn’t have A/C. I explained why it was important to me, and I offered to pay the offset for the electric bill while I was there, so she said she would look into what it would take to have A/C available to me*.

Saturday – Now: Breathing Room

Over the weekend I moved in with the Fulbright ETAs spare bedroom where I’ll be staying for the next 2 weeks*. There was a whirlwind of stressful emails and text messages that I don’t have the strength to recount blow by blow, but the upshot of all of it was that I got some breathing room. I received word from the Spanish Airbnb hostess that A/C would be possible and I got the required approval to book that room for a full month (through Dec 21). I got in touch with another ETA who is leaving in December and I have made arrangements to go and see her apartment on Thursday of this week. Hopefully it’s going to work. She says it’s 1.5 flights of stairs and has A/C in the bedrooms and living room, but there are some “things” about it she wants me to know before I live there. It’s vaguely ominous, but I guess I’ll find out soon enough. If that place works, the Airbnb hostess says I can extend until Jan 1 when that apartment becomes available, meaning I’ll get my housing a mere 2.5 months after my arrival.

Despite the fact that it still isn’t fully resolved, I feel a sense of relief to see a light at the end of the tunnel even if that light is 6 weeks away. I feel like the giant knot in the bottom of my stomach and top of my spine have unwound ever so slightly, enough to be able to look up for the first time possibly since I arrived here. There’s this phenomenon that happens when things slowly get worse/harder/more painful that we know it’s not good, but we don’t really know how BAD it is until it stops. That happened to me with my sleep and the night club noise, and it happened with my whole cognitive self and the bottom tiers of Maslow’s Pyramid.

I am so profoundly excited for the opportunity to live and work here in Senegal, but I was 100% not able to engage with that excitement or adventure for more than a few seconds at a time while my brain was consumed with thoughts of being able to get food and water that wouldn’t make me sick and a place where I could sleep and feel safe for more than a couple days at a time. There’s a lot to unpack in the space between an intellectual and visceral understanding of how that hierarchy of needs works, but I think it’s safe to say that it’s important to remember to be gentle with yourself and others whenever those bottom two tiers are in a state of flux or uncertainty because even the most capable and resilient among us can sucked under when circumstances change.


Life in Dakar: Week 3 Part 2 – Side Adventures & Footnotes

/ Gallivantrix / Leave a comment

The blog was too long when I tried to put everything that happened to me that week together, so here’s the stuff I cut out of the first post that wasn’t directly related to Maslow, but might still be interesting.

When Last We Saw: More Tier 1 Struggles

The first post about week 3 is almost entirely about housing. The other tier 1 concerns of food/water/climate were a ‘manageable struggle’. I had not yet figured out water delivery and was thinking to put it off until after I got my “permanent” home, but I was able to boil water on the stove in a saucepan and create a reserve of clean, safe water that way. I had only a small saucepan which took a long time to heat up and had to be watched and checked on so it didn’t boil dry either. Then had to be covered while it cooled down and transferred to another container once it was cool enough. This had to be done multiple times a day. I have now purchased an electric kettle which boils 1.7L in a couple of minutes and turns itself off. I set up a cycle where I fill my water bottle from the bottle in the fridge, refill the fridge bottle from the water in the kettle, and boil a fresh pot that will have time to cool off before the next cycle. Also, the cord on the kettle is so short that I can’t plug it in anywhere in the kitchen, so it’s in my bedroom. Because I go through 3L or more a day here, this method still requires far more thought, time, and energy than “tap to glass”, but it’s a huge upgrade.

Food had to be ordered or I had to go out to purchase it at least every other day. I didn’t have the resources to clean produce safely in the room, nor to store and cook things like fresh meat. I had bread, peanut butter, oatmeal, rice and yogurt (yay traveler’s tummy troubles), but I had to negotiate with a delivery driver to get food most days (remember, no addresses). I know, it sounds like a privilege problem, but I didn’t HAVE the ability to prepare much for myself, so delivery was how I got food. In habitation #4, I have access to a better kitchen and slightly less concern about having to move anything I don’t eat in a few days, but we still don’t have produce sanitizing set up here (the ETAs have only been in this apartment about a week longer than I have) and I’m not settling in to buy staples like cooking oil. They are mostly living on pasta, and while I’m more comfortable eating cheese or peanut butter sandwiches here than other places, that’s about the extent of my food prep, so I’m still heavily reliant on delivery. The main difference is that one of the ETAs speaks both French and the local dialect Wolof and can direct the drivers much better than I can.

The A/C has worked pretty well everywhere I’ve been so far. In hot enough weather, A/C isn’t a luxury for anyone and I’m one of the unlucky people with a condition known as “heat intolerance” which is just doctor for “you get sick from being hot faster than baseline”. Everyone gets sick from being too hot. It’s called heat exhaustion and heat stroke. I just get sick faster than most. My core temp rises above 100F/37.7C quite fast in hot weather, so I need better access to climate control aids. Habitation #4 is the first place I’ve been with A/C in the living room, which has meant I can venture out of my bed and do some work at the table or sitting on the sofa which may seem minor, but there are big mental health bonuses to separating your sleep and work spaces. When I was teaching online classes from my bed in Korea at the beginning of the pandemic, it fueled my depression hardcore and made getting a desk/workspace a top priority for that move in 2021.

Tuesday Nov 1: Unexpected Holiday

That day, I got myself together and dressed and headed over to the university to show my face because that’s what I was asked to do while I don’t have any other duties, classes, or even enough data to start building towards those things. (I wanna be working, I really do, but every time I ask I get told “later”.) Anyway, I got to the university and it was a ghost town. My contact was in South Africa for a conference, and I sent a message to the person who had my office key to find out what was going on. There’s some kind of “one key” policy here so the cleaners can’t get into my office if I have a key? But I can’t get into my office if I leave it for the cleaners? I still don’t know how this is actually going to work long term. In the mean time, I took photos of the animals laying around and got totally startled by the existence of random cows. I had to hop on my zoom meeting from my phone standing outside my office so I could use the Wi-Fi. At least the hallways have good ventilation even though there’s no A/C. It turns out that All Saint’s Day is a non-working holiday in this Muslim majority country.

Wednesday Nov 2: Still the Longest Day

Hotel #2 check out – What’s up with expense reports anyway?
I have to get pre-approval and receipts to claim my “settling in” expenses, which cool, but I didn’t book hotel #2. I didn’t sign any agreements or log in as a guest. I think maybe they made a copy of my passport when I got there? But also maybe just looked at it because I don’t think they had a copy machine. I also had to pay for that room in cash. The bigger hotels and shops here do take Visa/Mastercard but it’s not very common. The lady helping me to check out said that the manager would bring me a printed receipt to the school the next day, and while I don’t under any imaginary circumstances think that she was being deceitful, I just had no faith in the reality of that manifesting due to cultural experiences I’ve had in the past. It’s not a scam or anything, I paid the agreed price. I just wouldn’t be able to claim my reimbursement without a receipt. I managed to talk her into giving me a handwritten one that day. I still haven’t seen the “official” receipt, btw, and ended up submitting my expense report with the handwritten one.

Hotel #3 check in – The Case of the Forgotten Medicine:
The power was out when I arrived at hotel #3, but there was a good breeze in the living room, so I settled in to wait. Just then it hit me: I had left my medicine at the other apartment/hotel! Due to the heat, I’d been keeping it in the fridge and I had a crystalline memory of taking it out of the fridge and not putting it in the bag with the groceries because I wanted to put it in my backpack (less possibility of it falling out in transit, the irony).

The good news was that the two hotels were actually just over 1km apart. I only needed the taxi to deal with the bags. I took off down the main street and frantically tried to figure out how to send a message to hotel #2 to let them know I was on my way. I didn’t book that place. I didn’t have any contact info for them. They weren’t in Google. I got my social sponsor to send me the phone number and sent a text message in French but got no reply. I was left to hope that the cleaners hadn’t just thrown it away before I could get back. As I came in the bottom entry, I ran into the helpful and kind lady who had managed my departure and, in very broken French, tried to convey that I’d left medicine behind. She knew exactly what I was talking about and bid me to wait (she remembered about the stairs <3) while she went to get it. So grateful!

Medicine in hand, it occurred to me that without the added adrenaline, I was too hot and tired to make the walk back just then, so I got out my ride share app and summoned a car. It took about 20 minutes to arrive, but he did call and warn me about the wait, and I was sitting on the stairs in the shade with a decent breeze, so I was ok. Better than walking in the blazing sun. The car, when it turned up, was newer than most taxis and had actual running A/C. The driver didn’t have the appropriate change, so I ended up paying 500cfa extra, but later I discovered that I could claim that on the app as a credit, so I’m giving that a shot to see if it works.

Thursday November 3: ATMs & Budgets

ATM in French:
No, I don’t assume everyone uses English all the time, but ATM is a very common loan word in many other countries and even where it isn’t a lot of people know what it is because they want the tourists to get access to more spending cash. It should not have surprised me that French was having nothing to do with our tawdry English acronym. Google Translate gives the translation of ATM as AU M.

Google Search turned up the expression “distributeur automatique de billets” and further Googling showed that maybe some people use DAB as an acronym but it wasn’t common. The linguist in me was skeptical about this answer because humans don’t like to use long words or expressions when short ones will do. We like to abbreviate. There had to be a short form equivalent of ATM, but no amount of searching on my part was yielding results that day, so I went back out into the world armed with “distributeur automatique de billets”. People looked at me funny, but at least it worked.

I have since learned this is, as I suspected, wrong. The machines are properly called “guichet automatique bancaire” (sometimes guichet automatique de banque and guichet automaique de billet) and abbreviated as GAB (pronounced “gab” not gee-ay-bee). Google Translate knows full well how to translate these terms from French into English, by the way. Just goes to show we can’t rely on the Oracle for everything.

Apartment Hunting & Budget Allowance:
After the repeated failed apartment viewings, much conversation has ensued between myself and both my social sponsor and realtor about the problem of my budget, which I have no control over. The US Government promised in my contract that I would have a furnished room with private bathroom/bedroom + kitchen access and good security, although they themselves do not provide the housing, they will intervene to make sure the minimum standards are met. They also decided that it should cost no more than 700$ US a month to rent this dream. I’m willing to pay a little over budget out of my own pocket for a good place, especially because of the issue with stairs and a/c, and I’m not attached to being walking distance from the school, no matter how bad my social sponsor makes it sound. The ETAs and the RELO don’t walk to work and they are fine. But it’s increasingly obvious that 700$ US a month is not actually enough even to meet the minimum standards laid out in my contract. What to do?

Friday November 4: Bureaucracy

My American RELO:
Normally, these projects are overseen by a Regional English Language Officer, or RELO for short. Unlike the project managers in Washington DC, the RELO is in the physical location of the project and therefore able to oversee arrangements, claims and conditions before the Fellow (that’s me) arrives. The one and only Fellow in Dakar before me came in late 2019 and left early because of COVID. They never really had a chance to settle in and besides, a lot changed during the pandemic. The former RELO in Dakar left earlier this year, back in the spring sometime, basically right after doing my interview. The new RELO just arrived in town a week or so after me. Things did not get done in an ideal manner during the intervening months. The deputy RELO (a local Senegalese woman) was, I’m sure, doing her best, but it’s a LOT for one person, especially one person whose job it actually isn’t, so no blame attaches. This is not a blame or fault sort of situation, it’s more of a Lemony Snickett situation.

Our conversation that morning was very surreal because it turned out her housing situation is actually worse than mine. The place she’s supposed to live is still being built and the place the embassy stuffed her is apparently a concrete box with no a/c where her husband is doing laundry in a bucket, so… I had to rather awkwardly inform her that air-conditioning is not that rare here (not ubiquitous like Korea but it’s at least been in the bedrooms of almost every place I’ve looked at) and that washing machines do exist. She actually asked if they had washing machines here and I still don’t know if she was being ‘Merican or sarcastic…

The Reports Never End: Working for Uncle Sam
I filed another round of expense reports that day as well for the last 2 hotels and a qwerty keyboard for the office at the school (the one my contact at the university said would take 3-5 weeks to get and I got in 2 days). Expense reports involve an excel spreadsheet with the items, descriptions, local and US costs; copies of the pre-purchase approval, copies of the receipts, and a screenshot of the daily exchange rate using Oanda all bundled up in a single pdf file. It isn’t hard work, but it is tedious and time consuming. I also wrote my post-arrival report which I had been putting off in the vain hopes that I’d have more solutions to report than problems, but since the report is due mid November and no one expects anything to change before then, I figured I might as well. It could be argued that things have changed because I have better options, but the questions they were asking were about my permanent housing and about my primary project at the host university, neither of which I expect to have up and going before Christmas.

Broken Down After Dark:
By the time I finished chatting with the hostess of the Airbnb, it was getting late so I went into a nearby restaurant to order take out with plans to use the ride app to get back to my room because dark was descending and I’m not supposed to walk alone after dark. Much like the first time I used the app, the driver messaged me to say it was going to take a while because traffic, but I was ok to wait inside the restaurant until he got there. I suppose that’s going to be the trade off for taxi vs ride share: waiting without haggling or haggling but less waiting.

The car seemed nice, and we drove most of the way with no problem other than traffic. Then just as we get to the busiest roundabout the car died. Dead. No amount of prayer was getting the engine going again. Cars were going around us three deep with motorcycles and pedestrians weaving in between. The open air market and the bus stop are right there. If it was daylight, I’d have walked the short distance back to the room, but it was full dark and we were in the busiest and most crowded spot.

The driver was obviously embarrassed but very polite and professional. He arranged a taxi for me, haggled for the price, didn’t take any money from me for the part of the ride I did with him, and escorted me through the traffic and crowds into the taxi safely. Of course I left him a good review.

The Weekend: Resting Day & Moving Day

I did as little as possible Saturday. It was glorious. I lazed about in the air-conditioning eating leftover takeout food and drinking the last of my bottled water because I didn’t want to carry it on moving day. I didn’t even post on Facebook.

Sunday, the Fulbright ETAs came over and very efficiently helped me get all my bags down the elevator and into a taxi, then with similar efficiency back up two flights of stairs to their own apartment where I will live for the next two weeks. I feel like the most backward adult, having to ask two ladies in their early 20s if I can crash with them because I have no place to live. I suppose I could have found another hotel, but the problem of the “moving in” budget which I described in arrival post still loomed large. I felt like it was a horrible waste of money to keep living in hotels. Plus, kitchen! The ETAs have a nice 3 bedroom apartment with a/c in every bedroom and the living room. Aside from the fact that I feel silly living with people young enough to be my children (if I had children), they are hosting out of town folks for Thanksgiving and getting a third roommate in Dec/Jan, so it has to be temporary. Nonetheless, I overflow with gratitude at being able to know where I would lay my head for 2 weeks in a row and for being able to finally have the time/space/energy to go through my luggage and rearrange the suitcases so I could stop wearing the same 3 outfits. I’m still mainly living out of the “carry on” size one, but at least now the 3 bags are more suitably arranged for daily access, occasional access and storage.

I offered to pay rent and utilities of course, but then found out later that it might have been disallowed because of conflicting expense reports. Between you and me, I would have paid them out of my own pocket if the expense had been disallowed because I’m the frickin’ adult here, not a freeloading broke-a$$ college student (no matter how much I still feel like one sometimes). Adults pay for things when they are with the youngers. That’s the social contract. I also bought them Indian food for dinner as a thank you for not just letting me stay, but helping with the move. It’s a slight step up from pizza and beer that accompanies most broke-a$$ college student moving days.

Monday: Mo Money Mo Problems?

I received word that the budget for my housing has been increased! Apparently between my searches and the deputy RELO’s searches, the RELO had enough data to make a case for an increased budget. I’ve told both my social sponsor (who is supposed to be the person helping me secure housing) and the realtor I contacted through the ETAs about the increase to help in the search, but so far the social sponsor gave me a single thumbs up emoji, and the realtor tried to show me a place that was even more expensive than the last one (and still way outside even the increased budget allowance).

For one horrible moment, it looked like the RELO wanted me to do a shorter stay at the Airbnb because she thought we could find real housing faster with the increase, but I pointed out that after living at 4 places in 3 weeks with that hope, I really needed some stability and she agreed.

Looking Forward

It’s relevant to note that no matter how much I’m complaining, all my solutions are “stay here and make it work” oriented. I’m not interested in giving up. I’m also not exclusively having bad experiences. It’s harder for me to write about the good ones because they are small and wedged in between the difficult ones.

Now that I’m not spending every waking moment on food/water/sleep needs, I can hopefully start to focus on other things. I still have a long way to go to get the project at my host university going, and I am hoping to make some progress on my secondary project as well in November. In addition, I’ve received an invitation to submit for a presentation at a conference in December, so I now have the bandwidth to work on that as well.

I have to acknowledge the lack of photos, too. It’s very difficult to remember to get out my phone to snap a pic in many of these situations. I want to take more photos because I like having those memories to look back on, but it turns out you have to feel secure and well rested before photography makes it into the picture, so to speak. Once I’ve been in a neighborhood long enough to know what feels safe and what feels sketchy, I’ll be more confident in holding my phone in my hand to take those pictures, but a very real concern of having my phone snatched or of taking a photo of the wrong person and causing a problem has kept me from doing so even when the thought has managed to pierce the veil of stress.

Finally, I’m still glad to be on this crazy adventure. I’m enjoying seeing the different parts of the city. I’m plotting places I want to explore more when I have my basic needs met and the weather cools off. I’m seeing beautiful clothes, and interesting street food, and random butterflies and flowers and trees that make me smile.

I’m holding on to the fact that my future self will treasure the positive parts of this journey while downplaying the crying because that’s what’s happened to me literally every other time.

As always, thanks for reading along with my crazy adventures even, and possibly especially, when they get difficult.

Who can even, right now?

/ Gallivantrix / 1 Comment

I am finally free of the oppressive summer humidity that is South Korea as the cooler (and shorter) fall days are sweeping in. It’s definitely having an impact on my mood and body, but is it enough to counteract the pandemic-dystopia blues…. meh… probably not.

2020, eh? What a wild ride. No matter what corner of the earth you are in, you have not escaped, and in many ways, Americans in particular are experiencing a heretofore unknown to us level of total failure at all things. I will not barrage you with tales of woe from what once was the bright shining beacon of freedom, hope, democracy, and economic prosperity (you can read the news if you don’t know but want to), suffice it to say that most of us who have the dubious honor of bearing citizenship of that country are going totally bonkers in a way that previously was only known outside it’s borders and it’s civics textbooks.

As an American living and working abroad, I’m in an even weirder position, since 90% of the people I love most in the world are stuck in the nightmare of soaring Covid infection, crumbling democracy, rampant police brutality, massive climate damage, spiking unemployment, and some of the most bizarre conspiracy theories* of the last 1000 years. While I have the pleasure of living and working in South Korea which is handling the pandemic very well, balancing our freedoms with our safety, while keeping the economy from collapsing into a black hole. I even get to work from home. Sure, I hate online teaching with the fire of a thousand suns, but I’m safe from germ-infested students.

*note: those links are just top google search results to make it easy on you, but feel free to search for more if you are somehow oblivious to the horrorshow that is this American life in 2020.

I am personally safe, healthy, and financially stable while all those I love stuck stateside are in freefall. I have lost one friend (yeah, metaphor for he died, not that we parted ways) this year, and another is struggling with what may be permanent disability due to a Covid infection in the spring. Friends are loosing jobs, healthcare, homes, and those who are stable are terrified it will all go away if they do get sick, but they can’t avoid crowds and maskless idiots all the time.

What have I been doing?

Since I last wrote about my pandemic teacher life in Korea, I am still doing intermittent fasting (it sucks less, but I’ve only lost like 3 kilos), all my plants died, my D&D game is still going, but my players jumped into the Abyss for no reason, I managed only one single outing during the hot weather (it was NOT a fancy hotel, but it did result in adorable birbs), and I managed a few Ireland posts before all my steam diffused into the broader steamy air of the oppressively hot Korean summer and my world shrank to one highly airconditioned bed and a Netflix hookup.

I’ve also been reading books about trauma recovery and Vladimir Putin, which may seem like an odd combination until you look at the politics of it all. I thought really strongly about doing a book review of any one of the books by Massha Gessen that I’ve read, but I just don’t know if I have the soul within me to recap her already devastating recounting of the transition of Russia from USSR to almost democracy to Putin autocracy. Read them, though, or do the audiobook thing.

And if you’re interested in the work I’ve been doing on trauma, you can check out these books:

I’ve had no good days. There have been ok days, bad days, and HORRIBLE days. Horrible days involve involuntary non-stop crying, panic/anxiety attacks, suicidal ideation, and total isolation. Bad days, I can get through the bare minimum of “eat/hydrate/teach” and then have to sink into dissociative distractions like video games, binge watching Netflix, or reading pop-YA fiction to keep it from becoming a horrible day. Ok days I might actually experience fleeting moments of “that’s nice” before the ennui sets back in. And from what I understand, this is pretty much the new normal for almost everybody I know.

I’ve been writing long Facebook treatises on loneliness, social isolation, the dangers of unverified memes and bandwagon political movements. They go into the void and are never heard from again. There is only a wall of depression, fear, fatigue and “other responsibilities” separating us all from our loved ones near and far. I have never felt so alone in the 6+ years I’ve lived abroad as I do this year, and everyone else posting into the void says they feel lonelier than ever, too, trapped behind social distancing and quarantine measures.

Are you there, Internet? It’s me, Kaine.

The point I’m making here (badly) is that I logged into my own website for the first time in almost two months today and realized that I felt like a complete SLUG for not having written more during this unprecedented period of free time. After all, I can’t GO anywhere or DO anything. I’m basically primed to be my artistic best, right?

Wrong.

I hope by now this is not the first article you have read about why we can’t (and shouldn’t) be holding ourselves to the same standards of productivity we do when we are stable and healthy, but we can’t. I bought a huge box of art and craft supplies over the summer and it’s still sitting there, only having been opened long enough to check the contents matched the order. I DID get my e-reader after several months of trying (why Korea, why) and I have been reading a LOT, not only the above books, but a tidal wave of bubble gum fantasy and sci-fi to aid in my voracious search for dissociation aids. After all, if I don’t have to think about the terrible things, they can’t hurt me, right? right??? (again, no). I have written exactly nothing, created … well, does designing my Animal Crossing island count as an artistic endeavor? And now I found myself with a little extra time after doing my teacher job, and not feeling totally exhausted/overwhelmed, and open my blog to realize the gaping hole in my narrative ability.

Will I write more? Eventually, yes. I am writing today, though not a story of globe trotting. The writing may change to reflect the world I’m living in now, because it’s hard to get excited about travel when it feels like my favorite most wonderful toy that just got yanked away by some mustache twirling cartoon villain. Perhaps avoiding thinking of my past adventures keeps me from being sad about my current and future adventures that have been cancelled. Perhaps another day, thinking about my past adventures will be a happy memory again. I expect it will go back and forth a few dozen times before the pandemic is under control enough for my hobby to resume.

Maybe the next time I log in, I’ll be willing to write another post about Ireland or Spain. Who knows. Until then, thank you everyone! Remember to wear your mask, wash your hands, smash the patriarchy, and support Black Lives Matter!

It’s ok to not be ok.

The World is Temporarily Closed

/ Gallivantrix / 2 Comments

Hi!

Welcome to July. We’re officially halfway through 2020 and wow it has been a trip! Like, the kind where your shoe gets stuck in a crack in the pavement and you end up taking a face-plant on the sidewalk… into a pile of dog poo.

wtf

I know that I have readers from every corner of the planet and it never ceases to amaze me. I don’t think there are too many corners of the planet who are feeling unaffected by Covid-19. The last time I wrote, I was still trying to wrap my head around the crazy new world and the terrible drama of online classes. Most people still thought it would “be over soon” and “go back to normal” and I have to say I got a lot of stink-eye for saying it might last up to 2 years.

Now, every country that isn’t America has pretty much buckled in for the long haul. We’ve done a pretty good job of getting it under control, but we all know that any return to “normal” (defined here as pre-covid life) will see an instant uptick in cases. We know masks are required and we have fashionable ones. We know that bars and nightclubs are hotbeds of infection and we either close them, limit them, track everyone who goes or all three. Everyone (again, except the US) is talking about how to live life amid the restrictions of social distancing, and while it won’t be easy, it’s doable.

If you are not in America you are very lucky, but may also be unaware of just how insane it is there. The growing case numbers, the filling ICUs, the absurd hospital bills, the stunning array of symptoms and worst of all – the huge number of inconsiderate idiots who still think it’s a) just like the flu, b) a hoax, c) only going to kill people they don’t like, so that’s ok.

ES9GT5hU8AAI6bd

On top of the horrific handling of Covid19, there’s also still an unacceptable level of state sponsored violence. As an American expat, I’m in the unenviable position of being personally safe (thank you South Korea) while worrying about almost every person that I love and watching my entire country change into a tire fire like that moment in an optical illusion when it changes from a duck to a horse, but instead it’s changing from a first world democracy into a failed totalitarian state. It’s stressful.

I have had a LOT of emotions this year so far. On a personal level, I decided to start my reading list for dealing with trauma (PTSD/CPTSD) which is a necessary step in my healing process, but it is painful af. My future went from having a reasonable plan for my financial stability and mental well-being to being … ok, I have to admit, I’m still financially stable as long as this University keeps us foreign teachers, but there’s a pile of stuff that makes long term teaching options almost impossible without being able to pursue my PhD or, you know, move countries. I am still worried that I may end up back in a country where healthcare = bankruptcy without any real retirement plan but that’s like 20 years in the future and who knows what the world will look like then, really?

Eventually, I figured out how to cobble together lesson plans that would work in my university’s limited online platform and cried to myself every time I read an article about innovative online teaching from universities that gave the professors more freedom in how to operate. I do actually understand why the Korean universities are being restrictive. There’s some politics and some history of corruption and no one wants Covid-19 to turn into the moment universities return to that corruption, so we all have to dot our i’s and cross our t’s or… however that works in Hangul (우리의 점을 찍고 우리의 점을 넘어?)

The spring was fraught with pits of despair and peaks of anxiety. I wanted to photograph beautiful spring flowers and maybe go to the beach or write in this blog, but no. My brain was on fire and all my executive function was absorbed in the herculean tasks of teaching my classes, brushing my teeth, washing my hair, doing laundry, and feeding myself something other than ice cream and red bean buns. Thankfully, Animal Crossing doesn’t require any executive brain functionality.

FB_IMG_1591001356083

What Did I Actually Do?

Once I got a grip on the online class format, and the basics of catching critters for Blathers, I did experience some restlessness. Lucky for me, Korea calmed way down by April and it was basically safe to go out (as long as you wear a mask, wash your hands a lot, and avoid crowds).

I went to a dog cafe in Busan, hoping that some fluffy puppers would cheer me up, but the ajuma “running” the dog room wouldn’t leave anyone alone and kept winding the dogs up to bark and do tricks and pose for photos. The doggos were pretty, but the acoustics were not good for borking and we had to leave well before our time was up.

20200502_185909

I also made it out to the Belated Buddha’s Birthday lantern festival at Samgwangsa, which I do enjoy. It was definitely the least crowded I’ve ever seen it, even though we were there on a Saturday night. Everyone was masked and trying to stay distant. In addition, it seemed the lanterns had been raised up quite a bit to be well out of reach and provide more air circulation in the covered areas.

download

My uni also decorated for the holiday even though we couldn’t have any festivals. Westerners who were sad about Easter being “cancelled” because of Covid have a slight idea what Asia felt like loosing both the Lunar New Year celebrations and Buddha’s Birthday to it.

20200414_121331

In the absence of the ubiquitous spring festivals celebrating cherry blossoms, lanterns, and the general end of cold weather, I was able to participate in a couple virtual movements.K-pop fans brought a lot of attention to the BLM movement and Koreans got curious. There was a small but vibrant movement to join in the global protests and I was able to give my students some Korean language info as well as participate in the Instagram rally.

IMG_20200609_184124_932

For the first time ever, Seoul Pride was cancelled not because of angry, violent churchy types but because all large public gatherings were called off. There was a big scare surrounding Covid19 spreading in Seoul in particular at some gay clubs. There are no anti-discrimination laws here (yet) so contact tracing Covid19 leading to public outing (loss of family and job probably forever) was a huge issue. Although the government is looking at anti-discrimination legislation for the first time in 14 years now, they are still terrified of the loud minority of hate-mongers who are just convinced ANY laws against ANY kind of discrimination will lead to Korea turning 100% gay. The “good” news is that at least they made very solid efforts to protect people from being outed when coming in for Covid testing and provided a Bush-era AIDS testing policy of not asking where they thought they might be exposed. Anyway, the LGBTQIA organizers made a virtual Pride parade where everyone could create an avatar and “march” online. Cute.

Screenshot_20200624-121939_Facebook

I shared my partial art project in my last check in, and sometime this spring I finished it. I’m very pleased with how that came out. It is made entirely of paper and glue. Tiny, tiny bits of paper glued in layers to create “scales” and patterns. There’s not a lot of wrapping paper here, which is what I’d really like to use for this style, so I use origami paper instead which severely limits the size, color, and pattern available. I would love to start a third piece in this style, but I’m having some creators block. Suggestions welcome.

20200427_122500

I also got the chance to make a cheap DIY pinhole viewer for the solar eclipse. Lucky for me, the afternoon sun comes right into my window so I didn’t even have to go outside for that one. Yes, I just poked pinholes in a sheet of paper in the shape of a heart.

What About The Summer?

For a while, I held out some false hope that I might be able to do some travel this summer, maybe go to Alaska (it’s America, they can’t actually ban me) to see some glaciers and forests. Maybe get my sister to bring the kids up (family reunion!). It seemed like it might just be doable. In May, people were sort of kind of like, let’s try to be sane. But that pipe dream fell apart as we realized that Alaska was requiring 2 week quarantines even for visitors from other states.

I still tried to tell myself it might be worth it to go there or someplace like New Zealand even if I had to stay in my hotel for the first two weeks because at least I’d get to do something and not be trapped in the sweltering humid heat of Korean summer, but alas. First my uni sent out letters advising faculty not to leave Korea except for emergency reasons. Then, the Immigration office sent out letters saying that multiple re-entry was cancelled, and anyone wanting to leave and re-enter Korea would have to apply for special permission AND get a health check from a designated health center within 48 hours of returning, and if it wasn’t good enough, might be denied re-entry upon arrival.

So, here I am. I’ll be spending my summer in Korea. All of it. No travel for the traveler.

1_GZH-v41sFKALHXVigUs3yA

I’m still weaving in and out of a sort of ennui based depression, but it is much better than it was in March/April/May which was punctuated by random bouts of uncontrollable sobbing, catastrophizing anxiety, and ice cream for dinner.

I’ve started an intermittent fasting plan (16:8) in an attempt to NOT stress eat anymore. I think everyone practicing social distancing is struggling with diet and exercise in conjunction with a huge lifestyle change (not going out) and a huge dose of STRESS HORMONES. I myself gained about 4 kilos since my check up last December and would like to get rid of that before it gets any worse.

I am trying to grow plants, which I never do because I often leave my apartment for weeks at a time. I named the first two plants too soon. My mint plant had a near death experience after coming home with me, but pulled through and was rugged but making it. My balsam plant was grown from seed and was being a primadonna about sun/heat/water ratios for a while. I named them Brutus and Pixie: the rugged war scarred elder and the young naive cutie pie. It seemed right at the time. I think I may have killed Brutus for good. He caught something that turned all his leaves black. I washed and treated the roots, disinfected the pot and replanted with new dirt, but it’s not looking good. Pixie is flourishing and the little pink cup sprouted a single tiny lavender seed which is giving a very commendable if miniature effort.

I’m running a D&D campaign, which is astonishing. I was an avid gamer (tabletop and LARP, not console/PC) for 20-25 years of my life, but I haven’t played anything since 2014, and I haven’t played D&D since maybe high school and I have NEVER played with the new 5e rules so I’m really hoping I don’t accidentally kill the whole party with the first boss fight. It is good to have some real human socialization, though. Since our little town is pretty much Covid-free, we are meeting in person to have game sessions. Wild.

I might check myself into a fancy hotel on the beach for a couple days, just to feel like I’m on vacation. I hear the water parks are almost empty, too. I can’t do much in Korea due to the unbelievable heat which tries to melt my skin, cook my brain, and turn my joints into overfull sausages all at once. The beaches here are usually packed solid every summer (I have never even wanted to go) and now require reservations to enter the beach (no one is really sure how that’s going to go since there aren’t fences or gates…) in an attempt to keep the social distancing alive. I still don’t want to sit on the beach, but I think I could get behind a rooftop pool with an ocean view.

I’m going to attempt to resume writing. I still have a LOT of material from my travels in 2019 since I’ve done literally nothing with my Jordan/Egypt trips, or my Spain trip, and am less than halfway through the Ireland trip stories. Plus, I still have like 2 volumes of Chinese Fairy Tales that got dropped when my life turned upside-down.

I can’t guarantee a schedule or that I won’t sometimes interject with more of my own personal 2020 life struggles, but I’m hoping that maybe some new travel stories will help me to remember there are still great things out there and help you feel a little less cabin fever while you work on that self-isolation and social distancing.

Thank you everyone! Remember to wear your mask, wash your hands, smash the patriarchy, and support Black Lives Matter!

IMG_20200606_134409_163

Expat life: When “Home” Is a Holiday

/ Gallivantrix / Leave a comment

Settling into school life and hoping for the summer to end as quickly as possible. I’m enjoying the new group of students and happy to see some of my best kids from the spring back in my class for part 2. I’m also working up the steam to start my next major research project which will hopefully be the key to the next big chapter of my story. Until then, I’ll continue on with the story of my July in America. As promised, this one’s all marshmallow.

Originally I was going to try and squeeze all my US stories into a single post, but I thought people might get “wall of text” fatigue. It’s true that the “worst things” post was a bit longer, but this one has better pictures ;P

The Best

Despite the months of stressful bureaucracy and anxiety inducing news stories, once I actually arrived in Seattle I had a pleasantly surprisingly nice time. I managed to avoid all the Nazi rallies, mass shootings, bad weather, or other catastrophes. I stayed with my friends who I traveled in Europe with last summer, and who were kind enough to also lend me a spare car. In an all too brief 16 days, I was able to reconnect with some of the best people in my life. Words cannot express how grateful I am.

In regards to headline news problems, I think in large part, I was just lucky (with a small dose of white privilege). It turns out that I just happened to miss the Nazi rallies and mass shootings which happened either right before I arrived or right after I left… it’s like having good weather or something, which I also had because thankfully the west coast was not on fire this year… tho it appears the southern hemisphere is instead?

My last visit to Seattle was only 9 days. I was sick from root canal and kikuchi, and working on emptying my storage unit in a way that would make Marie Kondo proud. I was not in a good space physically or mentally. Despite these hurdles, 2017 helped me to realize I didn’t need to be afraid of returning to Seattle, that the people who hurt me there couldn’t reach me anymore.

This trip (2019), I only had two real “errands” and so was able to take more time to really devote to spending with friends. Sometimes I forget just how important that really is. I live my life at the end of a very long line that ties me to Seattle and gives me stability. I was starting to feel my anchor line fray and now it’s repaired with all the love. I wasn’t lost or breaking, but perhaps dragging a bit. Now I feel stronger and more buoyant, ready to face another year or two of expat challenges out here at the end of my kite string.

Moments and Memories

I got to be in the US for July 4th for the first time in 5 years. I had a beautiful brunch cooked by friends, visited a local backyard party in the afternoon, got to see some friends. The fireworks show I went to was put on by some friends way up in the Snoqualmie mountains and was highly enjoyable. Plus, I got to geek out with people about my ideas and research in a new and exciting way. 

20190704_220929_000-ANIMATION

I got a lovely camping trip near Mt. Baker with some gourmet s’mores and just enough rain to remind me where I was but not enough to ruin the night. My friend brought her boys along and they spent the evening picking huckleberries and later we taught them how to be “dragons” using their breath to keep the fire going strong. ❤ PNW 

I got to visit my friend’s new farm, see all her beautiful and delicious plants, snuggle with the baby bunnies and chase the baby chickens around with a camera. It never occurred to me to use peacocks as guard animals, but it turns out they’re way better than dogs at watching the skies for raptors like eagles or hawks, which in the PNW are a bigger threat than coyotes or wolves.20190708_175710

I got to sit in a living room in my PJs and trade silly YouTube videos and teaching anecdotes. That may sound mundane but when you’ve spent several years socializing exclusively in bars and cafes it’s a huge relief to just chill with ppl with whom you have mutual caring.

I got to eat all the foods I miss: Mexican, Ethiopian, Seattle-style Pho, large American style chunks of beef. At the mexican restaurant we told the waiter I hadn’t had any good mexican food for years because there were NO MEXICANS where I lived… he was so deeply perplexed, unable to imagine a place Mexicans had not yet migrated to until I explained it was Korea. I also got homemade goodies.20190703_094405.jpg

I got to have a whole weekend of the best sunny sailing days and bbq nights in my memory. A couple years back, some very good friends of mine (really amazing people, too) finally fulfilled their dream of selling their house and moving on to a boat. I didn’t realize it, but apparently it had been over a year since they took their home out for a sail before my visit, and as he says it, unless  you go sailing, it’s really just a very small and inconvenient house.

The weather was amazing, calm and sunny (ok, maybe not as windy as we’d like for a sail, but excellent for relaxing). We puttered around the Puget Sound and watched the other boats and abundant wildlife like harbor seals, porpoises and even a couple humpback whales. In the evening back at the dock, we grilled up steaks and burgers with fresh summer corn and talked and laughed well into the darkening hours. I had two days with two different groups because so many people wanted to come along we couldn’t fit them all one one sail. I got to meet some kids, and I got to introduce some of my favorite ppl to each other for the first time. The whole weekend felt like one amazing gift.20190713_143906.jpg

Finally, I got to karaoke it up with my fav singers and watch friends on the outs make up. Way long ago, we had a standing Tuesday night Karaoke event which has since fallen by the wayside except when I come to town. My flight left Seattle on Wednesday afternoon, so that last Tuesday I was in town, we brought back the tradition. Not everyone could come, so we had an earlier event the week before which was much smaller, but allowed 2 ppl I love to talk for the first time since a messy online fight and to make up!66668387_10219151571557527_1426599298904096768_n (1)

At a karaoke night we sing our fav songs from back in the day, and do silly duets, and generally have a great time. Even when it’s not as dramatic as a friendship restored, I love watching ppl who haven’t seen each other in months or years come together again and catch up because they’re both coming to see me. Most of all, I love that our last song is a group sing of Bohemian Rhapsody. It was the “choir” song in general, but some time in the last 5 years it has become the “farewell Kaine song” and it feels like nothing so much as an arcane Bacchanalian ritual as ALL my friends in the bar get up on a tiny stage and circle around me to sing this 6 minute absurdist mini-operatic aria to/with me. It’s actually a palpable feeling of love and support I find stunning. 

I know that none of the people I visited with live that way all the time any more than I do. I felt a little like the Doctor whirling into town for a wild adventure, and at the same time I felt like I was living in one of those quintessential “last summer before everyone goes to college” Hollywood movies where the days are an endless succession of ever more wonderful and heartwarming experiences. We’ve all returned to our daily grind lives, but for two beautiful weeks it was really a golden summer.20190714_203512_2

In Dixie Land

From Seattle, I went on to Memphis to visit with family. To be honest that was much less a “one last summer” movie and much more a “home for the holidays” movie but in July instead of December. That might sound cute, but take a minute to actually think about those movies… Ironically, I had actually suggested we do a Christmas in July event because I miss the heck out of my traditional American holiday foods, but in the truest spirit of “home for the holiday” movie tropes, it was planned for and never executed.

Comedic family drama aside, I did have plenty of good experiences:

My sister and I FINALLY got the tattoo I designed for us when her daughter was born (in 2011). We wanted to get it at the same time rather than doing it in separate cities, and it’s taken all this time for us to be in the same place with the time, the money, and the health (apparently you can’t get a tattoo while nursing) to finally get it done! And with all that, her tattoo artist is also her daughter’s uncle (there’s some by-marriage of her father’s sibling in there somewhere, I’m honestly not quite sure how he’s her uncle and I’m her aunt, but we are not related at all).

I gave the niblings all their accumulated gifts and my niece was very gracious about all of them, but my nephew who is a bit younger and still lacking in social graces was unimpressed by all but the car shaped pencil case. I mean, he always said thank you, but there was a clear difference in his level of enthusiasm once we got to the car shaped gift.

I got to dye my niece’s hair! Super exciting bonding experience there, as you know I love the crazy color in my hair. She wanted purple, and because she’s still a bit young, her mom and I decided on an ombre so that we wouldn’t be putting any of the chemicals near her face. She was a real trouper about sitting still (although playing the new She-Ra on my tablet probably helped), and all the showers she had to have, but in the end she was very happy with it. I later heard her teaching her brother how to be Bo to her She-Ra… wait till they find out who She-Ra’s real brother is…

20190721_145646.jpgI also had a chance to catch up with the girl that saved me from my own misguided desire to be “preppy” in high-school. She could not have been more grunge/alternative if she’d walked out of a Nirvana album. We were thrust together as locker partners by happenstance and eventually I got some JNKOs and flannel and we became great friends. We lost touch after the birth of her first kid, but found each other on Facebook last year and she took the opportunity to drive me all over backwoods Mississippi where I got to enjoy the woods, wash up in a ground pump (icy cold fresh water!), eat at a diner that was stuck in 1956 (prices too, I think) and learn all about what she’s been up to in the decades we were out of touch.

58444027_2288975364456513_4244888406825369600_n

*Internet life disclaimer: yeah, this post is dedicated to all the nice and good experiences, but that doesn’t mean it’s always sunshine and roses. Never compare your real life to someone’s online life… even your own.

Over the next few months I am going to be working on posting all about my trip to both Irelands. Given that I’m going to also be working on teaching and researching, I’m not sure how much time I’ll really have for writing. To keep you entertained, however, I plan to be releasing a series of Chinese folk tales I translated several years ago. I once intended to make them into bilingual children’s book with short language lessons, but it’s been close to a decade and I don’t think it’s happening, so you might as well enjoy the fruit of my efforts in the form of traditional Chinese stories in easy to read English.