Life a Little Upside-down

April 7, 2020 / Gallivantrix / 2 Comments

Hi everyone.

This is half letter, half rant, half diary entry. Yes, that’s 1.5 posts. I know. Don’t worry, it’s not THAT long.

All my posts through February and March were pre-written and scheduled in January. I haven’t written anything new since I found out there was such a thing as Covid-19.

All my great plans to be posting about Ireland and Spain while breezing through my Spring Semester classes that I’d worked SO HARD to prep into good shape last year specifically so they would be a breeze and leave me tons of free time to write and work on my PhD application are…. fucked.

As far as I can tell, everyone in the world is to a greater or lesser degree similarly fucked. I thought for a long time about what I could say here and every time I thought I knew, something changed.

Outside of China, it hit Korea hardest early on. When it started in Daegu I was still in Spain, and I figured I’d deal with it when my holidays were over. Then I got to the airport in Paris to discover that not only had my flight been cancelled but no one bothered to tell me or put me on a different flight. I had a pretty good idea that it was changed because Air France announced the cancelling of all flights through China, but when I checked the flight matrix, it looked like my flight was just changed to a direct flight – Paris to Seoul.

I thought about telling you about the 9 hour airport drama of getting on a new flight, but it seems trivial now that people are delayed days without news, or even completely blocked from returning home.

Then I got here (Korea) and I stayed in my apartment for 14 days. Quarantine wasn’t mandatory yet, but my University asked us not to come to the campus for 14 days, and the weather was bitterly cold, no good for going out, plus all my plans to visit other cities seemed unwise as our case count climbed higher and higher every day. Public schools and universities were all delaying the start of the school year (normally March 1 in Korea).

I read constantly. Trying to understand this new and strange thing. I thought at first it might be like SARS or MERS and I held of on writing anything because I wanted to see what the resolution would be. By the time my 14 days was over, it was painfully obvious the resolution was a long long way off. However, I still couldn’t write here because by then I had permission to return to campus and the school had finally decided on an online class platform.

A week of total insanity where we all tried to figure out what this was, how to use it, being horribly frustrated with everything. The school trying to tell us all “it’s only for 2 weeks” and I kept trying to convince everyone it would be at least the whole spring semester and possibly longer.

I thought about regaling you all with the horrors of teaching with a language barrier in a platform designed for meetings (not training sessions or classrooms) and totally inadequate technology, but by now there are hundreds of such tales from teachers of every level around the world. The Korean public k-12 schools will start their online classes this week and then there will be even more stories out there.

I got sick for about a week. It was only a little sick. I had a horrible non-stop headache and horrible sore throat that I thought were the result of the new online class format. I got a little cough, and a lot of fatigue, and I learned how to teach class from my bed in my pajamas. I don’t have a desk in my apartment. I’m feeling much better now. I don’t think it was Covid, but I didn’t ask to be tested, I just self quarantined until I was symptom free for over 72 hours. I tried to buy a thermometer, but I can’t get one, so I have no idea if I had a fever.

And now I’m allowed back on campus. I have energy again. I am more informed. I feel like an amateur epidemiologist. I’ve done a 4 week intensive online crash course. I thought, “I should write something.”, but I still don’t know what say.

Korea is doing better, but in many ways only because so many Western countries are doing SO MUCH WORSE. I hate the way the President and PM and schools and everyone in charge has been handing out information one/two weeks at a time. The understanding from the WHO and top scientists that this is a long-term project, that a flat curve lasts longer than a tall curve, has been public for what feels like AGES and yet in Korea, they keep acting like it will all be over any minute now. Just another week …. maybe two. Then when the time is up, they say it again.

While everyone in the West is still worried about mass graves seen from space or ice-rink morgues, I’m worried about idiots who can’t go one spring without looking at cherry blossoms ruining all the hard work we did in March and starting a second wave.

Actually, I’m worried about a lot of things. Mostly my family in America where it appears that life is well and truly fucked. My parents, my sister, and her two kids live over there. I’ve heard so many stories from drive up veterinarian offices (they don’t want people to come in, but still want to treat urgent pet health care issues) to race arguments about whether black people can catch it (spoiler, they can, but that’s not stopping people on Twitter spreading lies). It’s a patchwork mess, and everyone I know who is in a different county or city, let alone state, is experiencing something else. Schools are cancelling the remainder of the school year, so many people are out of work that the unemployment graph actually broke. Many of my friends are either part of that spike or stuck in “essential” jobs that put their health at risk every day, and since most of them also have underlying health conditions, I’m basically expecting people I love to die before this ends, and those who survive to be financially crippled for years if not forever.

I am very full of emotions.

I distract myself with school and mindless TV as much as I can because if I think too hard about what is going on in the world, I cry. Like, now.

I’m reassured by a multitude of therapists and psychiatrists that this is normal. That what we are experiencing is so big and so terrible that our poor little brains are just totally unequipped to handle it. The amygdala is in overdrive trying to decide what fear response to use for this unseen threat – fight? flight? freeze? WHAT? cycling us through an endless, relentless roller-coaster of emotions that we may not even recognize as related to the pandemic if we don’t listen carefully to ourselves. Grief is present. Grief for lost opportunities, lost jobs, futures… that’s a real thing. Anticipatory grief is a real thing too. Mostly people go through that when a loved one has a terminal illness. I’m grieving the loss of my life plan and I have some anticipatory grief because I am pretty sure I’ll loose someone I love and almost 100% sure I will lose someone I know. Then there’s depression, anxiety, dissociation, mania. There’s also a collective trauma being built that we will all own the aftereffects of for the rest of our lives. You don’t heal from grief and trauma, you just learn to let it take less space and cause less pain gradually over time, and we are nowhere near the part of this where we can even START to do that.

I’m trying hard to let myself feel my feelings, but also not to let them drown me, and not to forget to be grateful for good things, not forget to enjoy things even while I worry and fear and hurt. It’s hard.

My job is something I can focus on. I work to remake lesson plans into the ill-equipped web format I’ve been ordered to use. I read a lot of advice from other educators online. I spend a lot of time trying to remember my students are so young and so ill-equipped to handle what is happening in their lives right now that I have to be calm, and gracious, and forgiving and encouraging, but I feel like I’m not getting enough of that for myself.

I think my friends/family are trying, but we’re all so scared and unsure that no one can really be “the adult” who listens and supports and comforts. I don’t want a therapist for this (yet), I just want someone to listen to me rant and then tell me comforting things. It’s not easy. No one is unaffected by this. The ring theory does not work when everyone is in the same ring!

I also started an art project before my winter holidays, another paper sea creature. It’s incredibly intricate and I spend at least one day a week happily cutting tiny pieces of paper and checking colors and patterns until I’m happy with one. It’s coming along nicely. Some people paint, draw, or use coloring books. Some people are cooking, or making music, or writing, or making videos, or holding virtual karaoke rooms. Art helps.

Another thing I can focus on is my hobby of travel and photography. I can’t travel right now, but I can dream about it and remember it. I started an Instagram challenge to post a landscape photo every day from a different place in alphabetical order. I call it the #alphabetlandscapechallenge and it’s really excessive, but I needed something complex and detailed to focus on.

I met a lady from Malaysia on Insta the other day and we talked about travel plans for like an hour. At the end she said she felt guilty for dreaming about travel while so many people in the world were worried about COVID, their health and employment.

Someone, somewhere is always suffering in the world. Even before COVID there were people in fear of their health, dying for want of medicine, unable to feed their children, unable to find a job or working for slave wages. I believe it is important never to forget these things, but also to not let them destroy us. I don’t usually go in for quoting religions of any kind, but even Jesus agrees with me on this one, guys.

Now more than ever we need beautiful, creative things. We need dreams of what will come after that are better than what came before. So, maybe that’s what I want to say.

If you take anything away from this rambling letter, then take these 3 things:

Everyone is in this together.
It’s ok to not be ok.
It’s important to keep dreaming.

Now, #staythefuckhome and #flattenthecurve.

9 Days in Taiwan 2/2: City Scenes & Foodie Dreams

February 28, 2020February 3, 2020 / Gallivantrix / Leave a comment

Taiwan part 2: In addition to beautiful natural scenery and a wide variety of temples, I meandered around some of the more famous urban settings such as the “old streets”, night markets, subway stations, urban parks, and street art. Winding through every Taiwanese experience is the food, unique and delicious. I often forget to eat while out doing tourist activities, but here the food IS the tourist activity, so come hungry!

City Scenes

Taipei

Shifen Old Street 十分老街
I went here as part of a day tour which also included the Geo-park, the waterfall, and the other famous old street, Jiufen. Old streets are very heavily curated quaint “old timey” feeling places that are actually tourist traps, but they’re fun tourist traps, with good food and excellent instagram photo-ops, so very worth going to. There’s nothing wrong with enjoying inauthentic-yet-fun attractions.

Shifen is famous for it’s train-tracks and the lanterns. It’s one of the only places you can send off a flying lantern, and probably the only place you can do it while standing on working railroad tracks. It’s a very small place, you won’t spend a day there, but it’s fun to walk around and see the small shops, specialty local foods, and of course, the lanterns.

Jiufen Old Street 九份老街
My views this day were severely inhibited by a very dense fog. This is advertised as the place that inspired the art of Spirited Away, but my guide told me that Miyazaki said he’s never been here. When I followed up later, what I found was this interview he gave (sorry, it is NOT in English) where he says he bases the scenes of his movies on his own surroundings in Japan, not in Taiwan.

Jiufen does bear a striking resemblance to the city scenes in Spirited Away, but it is purely coincidence. I actually find it very sad that the Taiwanese tourism industry is promoting this untruth to attract visitors because Jiufen is amazing in it’s own right both because it is beautiful, and because of all the amazing food. People who go only because of it’s nonexistent connection to the movie come away disappointed instead of just enjoying Jiufen for what it is.

If you’re in Taipei, it’s certainly worth the visit. We took a city bus to the top of the road and walked back down to the tour bus parking lot. It’s about 200 stairs and only one way, so you won’t see different sites walking both up and down. I have a lot more to say about Jiufen in the “Foodie Dreams” section of this post below.

Taichung

Xinshe Castle 新社莊園古堡
This is a fantasy resort designed to look like a European fairy tale. It’s a little piece of Europe for those who can’t visit. When you think about it, it’s not that different from a Western country having an Oriental garden with little Tang Dynasty style buildings and pagoda gazebos. Sometimes you forget that other people are watching us while we’re watching them. I probably wouldn’t have gone on my own, but I was invited along with an ESL teacher who was also on holiday from Korea that I met in my hostel. She used to live in Taiwan and spoke quite highly of the garden and grounds. She was most excited about the swarms of fish in the pond that practically shove one another out of the water to get at the fish pellets tourists drop for them.

Most tourists go there to take pictures. Asian cultures really enjoy posing in photos, so much that there are often lines to stand next to famous landmarks or views. People will respect the line, but if you only want a photo of the view with no people it can be a real challenge. Since it was winter, there weren’t too many people in the park and I got a lot of photos, but I still had to wait strategically to get the best views free from posers.

Houli Forest Park 后里森林園區-天上掉下了一顆種子
After Xinshe we went to a flower garden which was less flowers and more interesting visuals including a really immersive video of pollen and a giant globe light show. I’m still not sure we went to the “right” place, because while everything on the internet says “go to the Houli Flower Farm”, what they actually mean (and show pictures of) is the Zhongshe Flower Market, which is in Houli, and probably very pretty, but reported as very small.

I on the other hand ended up in the Houli Forest Park which doesn’t turn up if you search in English (you can copy paste my Chinese above, or use the link). We had to park a ways out and there were shuttle buses into the park. If you take transit to the Houli Station, it’s less than 1km to walk from the station to the park.

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The Houli Forest Park is gigantic with displays of flowers and garden styles from around the world. It’s got a bit of United Nations through plants thing going on. There weren’t too many flowers because it was winter, but the garden displays were still fun and interesting. After dark, the large sphere puts on a lights and music show that is visually hypnotizing.

Kaohsiung

Dome of Light 光之穹頂 at Formosa Boulevard Station 美麗島站
This is the world’s largest public art installation made from individual pieces of colored glass. It also just happens to be in a subway station in Kaohsiung. There’s no reason not to see this stunning work of art if you are in the city.

Pier2 Art Center 駁二藝術特區
I heard about the amazing street art of Pier2 and set aside a full afternoon to visit. I was pretty disappointed at first because, although I found what was clearly a very artsy area, it was much more artist work space than art on display. I enjoyed everything I saw, but I couldn’t understand where all the photos on Google Image search of Pier2 were hiding.

Only after a bubble tea break did I finally figure it out! All the signs point you to the right (if you’re facing the water). However, if you go left, away from all the “pier 2” signs and across the street and around the corner– there are all the warehouses filled with cute artist shops and restaurants!! Along with more murals, crazy street art, and giant art installations. The local street signs and maps of the area were very confusing, but it was worth it in the end.

Food

Before going to Taiwan, I asked people what they recommended I eat. I scoured the internet for recommendations of “must try” foods, and while I did find things that people ate, there wasn’t any kind of definitive “Taiwanese Food” list. Now that I’ve been, I realize that this is because you can go anywhere and eat anything and it’s going to be awesome. There are just too many wonderful variations and local/seasonal limited editions that it’s impossible to compose a full list, but if you are looking for some definitive items: bubble tea (boba), pineapple cake, beef noodles, pork rice, and dumplings. Here’s what I ate, and I can recommend all of it, but if you can’t find it, don’t worry because you can’t miss out on delicious dishes as long as you eat at any non-franchise place.

Taipei

Theif Chen Tea House 大盜陳茶飲 (the name is only in Chinese on Google Maps)
On the day I got my SIM card, I was just wandering around the neighborhood, and happened to spot a sign in the window for smoked oolong rose milk tea. Milk tea and boba (bubble tea) are absolute must haves in Taiwan, and there are lots of chances. The flavors are the fun part. This was made with smoked oolong and rose syrup and it was entirely dreamy! Smoky and dark, floral and sweet, creamy and cold.

Lin’s Wagashi Confectionery 滋養製菓
Just down the street I spotted a confectionery shop with fresh strawberry red bean rice cake. A traditional mochi style rice cake with sweet red bean paste, a combination I already love, with the added bonus of a fresh ripe strawberry. Heaven!

Food Stalls near Taipei Station: not on a map
There are things like semi-permanent food trucks, but not all the way to “night market” status. Walk up, buy some food, walk away, zero seating. My Google Maps history says I got out at exit M5 and headed toward my hostel (We Come Hostel), so somewhere in that area there are amazing dumplings. I got pork and cabbage, good alone but awesome with the spicy sauce ($1.25), and the winner of savory food that day was the pork bun. I thought it was a little plain at first because my first bite was bun and juices, but the meat filling was amazing, tender, and a little lemongrass flavored (.50¢).

Literally any convenience store:
It’s not only local food stands and tea houses that have food adventures. I got a ginger Twix at the corner store. It’s basically a Twix with a gingersnap core. I do enjoy trying local variants of global brands. If you pop in for a bottle of water, take a look around and see if there’s something unique on the shelves.

Shifen Old Street
While reading about the Shifen Old Street, I discovered a recommended local delicacy of chicken wings stuffed with fried rice. There is one small shop which takes the bones out of chicken wings and stuffs them with fried rice. It’s absurd and delicious. Walk all the way up (it’s not far) and look for this cart.

Jiufen Old Street
This is a foodie bonanza. Other than the night markets, this was the greatest concentration of interesting foods in one place. I didn’t even have time to sample most of it because I couldn’t eat enough! Of what I did get to try, the winners were pineapple cake and peanut ice cream. Pineapple cake is another super famous Taiwan treat. I did not understand what the big deal about the pineapple cake was until I ate some. I had an idea of western style pineapple upside-down cake, which is a bit like a fruitcake and not a thing I’m very into. The Taiwanese pineapple cake is nothing like this. It looks like a very plain beige square, but holds a taste explosion. The middle is a perfect pineapple compote and the outside is a crumbly rich butter cookie.

The peanut ice cream (above) is actually pineapple and taro ice cream with shavings from a huge block of candied peanut wrapped burrito style. It’s a wonderful mix of sweet, salty, fruit, and creamy. I also tried an award winning nougat cookie. The coffee flavor was rich and well balanced with sweet, salty, and bitter. I understand why it won awards. The most interesting was a kind of thin pork jerky (paper thin) spiced with cinnamon and wrapped in seaweed. I would have never thought, but nori and cinnamon go well together. I mostly ate samples because a lot of the goodies were only sold in large gift boxes, but I’m glad I got to try so many things! Taiwan food is epic!

At the Underground Mall at Taipei Station
Somehow I was still hungry after all that food in Jiufen, so I got some beef noodles and onion pancake for dinner when we got back. The beef noodles are another famous item, and you can find them just about anywhere. It’s nothing different from what you’d expect, beef broth, noodles, beef and spices… it’s just… yummy.

Taichung

Yizhong Street Night Market 一中街夜市
I chose a less famous and more local night market at the advice of my hostel, and ate so much food! I had fried squid for dinner and candied fruit for dessert. This type of candied fruit was something I first had in China and love love love. I was only sad they didn’t have the tart haw fruit version, but strawberries are a good substitute. While exploring, I kept seeing signs for black sugar bubble tea, turns out “black sugar” is basically molasses. The tapioca pearls are cooked in the molasses mixture and then mixed into the milk tea. SO GOOD!

Across the street from No. 65, Zhongxing Street, Dongshi District Taichung City
While I was hanging out with another ESL teacher and her local buddy, he drove us to a small hole in the wall restaurant. Google Maps doesn’t have the place I went, but in street view, I can see it’s across from No.65. Look for the teal awning, not the red sign. It’s a Kejia restaurant (Kejia are a local minority people) and I ate so many delicious vegetables.

The Uptowner 雙城美式餐廳
The ESL teacher I met on my trip invited me out to brunch at a local American influenced place. I got these beautiful Florentine Bennys, perfectly poached eggs, and delicious sauces with spinach and tomato added. I know it seems strange to go to Taiwan to eat American, but remember I don’t get this kind of food in Korea.

Miyahara Ice Cream 宮原眼科
While I was looking online for famous food spots in Taichung, the Miyahara Ice Cream factory came up. It’s a top of the line gourmet ice cream and chocolate place that is in the old remains of a Japanese ophthalmologist’s building. Today it has a magical atmosphere that reminds visitors of Hogwarts. The building alone is worth a visit, but since you’re there, be sure to eat the ice cream too. They do sell single cones and cups out front (no seating), but if you come in, you can get one of the amazing 4 scoop sundaes as I decided to do in place of a normal dinner that night.

The 4 flavors I chose were 44% chocolate (light and creamy), 80% chocolate (dark and smokey), black tea and green tea. When they bring your ice cream to the table, they wheel out a toppings cart and you can choose 5. I went for cheesecake, pineapple cake, fruit candy, butterfly and bear cookies. While I was eating, the staff brought by a bonus raspberry flavor fluffy cheesecake dream to taste, so I ended up with 6 toppings. The ice cream was a bit gelato-like, very smooth, and dense, creamy not icy. The flavors were strong but balanced, and there was so much variety in my sundae I never got tired of combining different ice creams and toppings together. Taiwan really is foodie heaven!

Kaohsiung

Liuhe Night Market/Liuhe Tourist Night Market 六合夜市/六合觀光夜市
The night markets are the best place to get dinner if you’re willing to forgo seating (and it’s worth it to eat standing) At this one, I got baked scallop for an appetizer, Aboriginal style wild boar ribs for the main dish, and Chinese style candied sweet potato for dessert (also one of my favorites from China). It was so much fun to see all the foods on offer and to talk with the vendors. There’s less tourism in Kaohsiung, so they were more excited to have a visitor try their food.

Bonnie Sugar 駁二店 (at Pier2)
Another great example of serendipity. I was just feeling a little hungry after hours of walking and taking photos, so I popped into a cafe in the art area. I was rewarded with an amazing fresh fruit tart that the Parisians would be proud of and a carafe of fancy tea with fruit ice cubes. Too posh!

Near the FlyInn Hostel
Kaohsiung is much more industrial than either of the other two cities and there was very little to eat near my hostel, so I ended up with some strange food choices including whatever this chicken thing is and a random place where the old lady called her son out to help me because my dictionary won’t work on the menu. I really don’t know what it was… mystery dinner!

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Just goes to show that no matter where you choose – the 5 star Yelp reviewed restaurant or the soup shop down the alley, you’re going to find Taiwan a gastronomic delight.

If you want to end your view of my Taiwan travel here on a high note, I certainly don’t blame you, but I continue to post stories of my physical/mental/emotional limitations during my travels because I want people with invisible limitations or chronic illnesses to know they aren’t alone and that your limits don’t have to stop you from seeing the world.

Invisible Illness & Love of Travel

In Taipei, a day of temples and a full day tour wiped me out in the warm weather. Far from being “warm winter”, the unusually hot weather and high humidity (25c + 85% humidity is unseasonable) combined with hours of walking and hiking. By the third day I had to cancel additional sightseeing because the body said no.

In Taichung, I met some fun people to spend the day with, another teacher who in lives Korea and her local friend. The local friend had a car and offered to drive us around and we had a lot of fun taking photos and being silly tourists together, but at some point I ran out of spoons and had no idea how to explain or adapt with these friendly strangers.

Trying to explain a few of my limitations and the accommodations I’ve made for myself (not expecting anyone to do for me, just the way I’ve come to manage my issues) I got a lot of push back from the girl who invited me along. Don’t get me wrong, it was 90% a good day but it was so hard to get her to understand why I was in pain and tired at the end and why I wasn’t going to be up for more the following day. She’s 13 years younger than me and basically said everything in the “you don’t look sick” playbook. I love meeting people and making new friends, I know I had more fun and more experiences with them than I would have alone, I just hate that I have to push myself beyond my limits just to be the slowest one in a group.

In Kaohsiung, going to Maolin and Foguang Shan on the same day was a lot. I got on the road at 7am, hiked all over a mountain for several hours, navigated the bus system on my own when Google turned out be a liar, hiked more at a mountain monastery (so. many. stairs.) and navigated back to town without relying on Google which is frankly crap about Taiwan public transit info. It was a 13+ hr day, and about 5-6 hrs spent hiking the hills and stairs.

By the end, I was tired, and my feet hurt like hell, but my legs were fine. It’s not a matter of being weak or out of shape because the parts of my body complaining (feet, ankles, lower back, hands) aren’t the muscles used to climb. I slept hard and long, and while not fully recovered the next day, I mentally/emotionally felt better than I did after the tour group day in Taipei or the day in Taichung with the other teacher and her friend.

It seems I just handle the challenges better when I’m on my own time table rather than trying to keep up with others. Being on my own still isn’t 100% guaranteed to be “at my pace” because sometimes I still have to hurry to catch a bus or something, but it definitely has less negative impact on my well-being. It makes me a little sad to think I’m just going to have to turn down invitations hang out with fellow travelers on the move, I love meeting people, and I get lonely quite often, but knowing I can achieve my travel goals if I’m patient with myself is something that can help me out while I’m on the road.

That was my reflection at the end of the Taiwan trip a year ago. I still think it’s very much true. Even just walking to dinner with friends from the office, I struggle to keep up. In Ireland, I could see that some terrains I pulled ahead and in others my travel companion did. I had one good “hiking” day in Korea last fall, but mostly because we all agreed to go super slow and stop often for photos and the weather was awesome. Here in Spain as I write this I can tell that some days I have more or less brain fog, or that my ankles or knees are more or less able to handle the stairs. It’s not fun, but I can handle my body and brain most of the time, even the bad times. The hardest part is the isolation I feel when I get left behind because other people can’t. I ask if you have a friend or relative who is fine one day, but can’t do anything the next, don’t make a fuss. If they are a little bit slow, just slow down, too, but don’t say anything about it. It means more than you can imagine to be included without being made to feel like a burden.

Finally Writing About Ireland

November 15, 2019February 2, 2020 / Gallivantrix / Leave a comment

I have published something like 6 posts that are distinctly NOT about Ireland since I got back this past summer. Usually that would be because I was hard at work chronicling my adventures and polishing each post into a sparkly gem, but this time… it’s not. This post is going to be the start of the Ireland Chronicles, however, I’m going to take some time at the beginning to talk about a personal issue, so for those who are just here for the tourism, please feel free to skip down to the second segment.

Why Aren’t You Writing About Ireland Yet?

It’s starting to feel like I can’t go traveling with anyone really important to me. I’ve now had two close relationships disintegrate after a trip, while the travels I take with friends who are less close have been great. I don’t define “relationship” as only romantic or sexual, by the way. I happen to think that any degree of association can be a relationship (work relationship, teacher-student relationship, my favorite barista relationship, etc). In this case I am talking about people with whom I felt a long term and deep emotionally intimate connection.

In reality, those close relationships were never actually healthy, and the constant close exposure of travelling together simply put them under a microscope until it was impossible to deny the core problems. As I learn about healthy relationships and boundaries, I find that it’s easy to spot the red flags in a new person, but almost impossible to drag myself out of denial with a person I’m significantly attached to. When you’re so used to something being a certain way, even if that way is awful, it just seems normal, and the abnormal situation of long international trip can cast it into sharp relief.

In this case, I think I was most of the way out of the fog of denial before we actually embarked, but the plans had been made and the money spent, and I genuinely hoped that a nice, low stress holiday would reduce the big problems that I was still blaming on things like job and life stress. The only thing that could have made that more sarcastically apt is if we’d gone to Egypt instead of Ireland and I could really make some d’Nile jokes. I suppose I’ll have to settle for Blarney jokes instead.

I know in my heart of hearts that a single vacation cannot ruin or fix any relationship, it can only blow the truth up to billboard sized letters. However painful the experience was, I’m glad it happened because I think it’s better in the long run to identify unhealthy relationships so that we can either work to make them healthy or if that’s impossible to walk away. However, it makes it hard to write about a holiday when the memories are either good memories tainted by loss or just plain old bad memories. It’s like that movie, Inside Out, when Sadness touches all the memories and they turn blue and sad forever.

When I wrote about the Philippines I did my best to simply leave out any and all references to the person I was with, treating it like a blank space in the narrative and jumping around the timeline to avoid describing the personal details of arguments and emotional clashes. I think it helped, too. The memories of that relationship are still painful, but now I can look at the experiences I had in the Philippines and remember the joy I took from them, happily recommend the island, and even think positively about going again someday.

I’m going to try to take the same approach with Ireland, yet at the same time, I don’t want to paint this in some kind of idyllic holiday life. Those who read this blog often know that I don’t like fake-positive online life, but I struggle to balance my need to be honest about the challenges I face with my desire to share only the best and most delightful experiences. I’ve been putting off writing about Ireland explicitly because I don’t want to think about the hurtful parts, and yet I think it’s vital to my gratitude practice and to my remembering self that I take the time to tease out the good parts and keep them alive.

So here’s the disclaimer: I’m cutting out all the personal negative experiences, I’ll only be including things that could happen to any traveler or group based on regular travel challenges. It could result in a choppy or unbalanced story, but that’s just how it has to be. My life is far from perfect, but I’m trying my best to be better.

Without any further ado… Irish Road Trip

Renting a Car

I enjoy road trips when I’m getting out of a city. I love public transit and happily take buses and trains on most of my excursions, but I had some lovely experiences driving in the US, and later in Germany, France, New Zealand and Sweden. When I choose to get a car it’s because I want more freedom to go to places that are off the beaten track, way outside the city, or just generally hard to get to. Ireland is no exception.

When I was planning my trip, a friend of mine told me that he and his wife had done an Irish road trip about 20 years ago, before there was any kind of highway system at all. Although there is a large intercity highway system today, most of the things we wanted to see in the countryside were still on the old roads (more on that later).

In case you’re curious about renting a car, we used EuropeCar. I looked at a few local rental places, but it seems that there are a fair number of hidden fees with those places that can add up and be frustrating and expensive. By opting for a larger company, we got a real price quote up front and the process of picking up the car was much smoother. I was initially irritated that they were trying to up-sell us the “full coverage” insurance (quite expensive) at the pick up. I was extremely tired from running around Paris all day and a delayed flight into Dublin, so all I wanted was to get to our hotel. When we were standing there it felt like a scam sell, and I was very dubious.

The regular minimum insurance covers any scratches or dings that are less than a 2 Euro coin size (it’s a law) so the car companies can’t charge tourists for tiny chips, dings and scratches that occur in the normal course of driving. It also covers a minimum amount of liability in case you damage someone else’s car or property, or have to go to a hospital. There was a high deductible, but to me, it seemed worth it not to pay a few hundred more in insurance. However, since I wasn’t the one paying, we got the full coverage, and after I saw the driving conditions in the countryside, I was very glad that we did. To sum up, if you want to drive anywhere other than the cities and highways, get the extra insurance. If you want to stay in the cities and highways… ride the bus.

Driving in Ireland

The first thing to mention here is that driving in Ireland is done on the left side of the road, and that the driver’s seat is on the right side of the car… completely backwards from the US where I learned to drive. Lucky me, this wasn’t going to be my first time driving left as I’d had a chance to learn in New Zealand some three years previously. Nonetheless, I still spent a good portion of the first few days just reciting “left side, left side, left side” under my breath the whole time.

You also need to know how to use a roundabout, which is a complex system of yielding and merging that is supposed to be safer and more efficient than traffic lights. Basically, anyone already on the roundabout has right of way over anyone trying to join it. Interestingly, some of the busiest roundabouts at major highway interchanges also included traffic lights because otherwise no one would ever get on.

The road signs are pretty good, written in both English and Irish, and the streets often have painted arrows to help you remember your lane, and also let you know which lane to be in if you want to turn or go straight. There were a few times that the signs an Google Maps did not agree and I got a bit tangled up, but it never took more than a few minutes to sort out. Except Coleraine (pronounced call-rain) in Northern Ireland, which is a hellhole of one way roads and inaccessible streets. My Google travel history looks pretty linear everywhere else, but in Coleraine it looks like a Gordian knot. Don’t get sucked in, drive around.

There’s only one more very important note about driving in Ireland which is that outside the cities and arterial highways, the roads are typically only one car wide, but accommodate two way traffic. Even in the villages with two lane roads, there are so many cars parked along the roadside that traffic is reduced to a single lane’s width. In a lot of places, they are also lined closely with thick hedges, deep ditches, or stone walls meaning you have zero shoulder room. Two way traffic includes other normal sized cars, tour buses, farm equipment, and livestock.

On the one hand, it can be a relief driving these roads because there’s no need to worry about left-side or right side. On the other hand, when you meet oncoming traffic, your knuckles immediately whiten on the steering wheel as you try to figure out how not to have a head on collision.

The good news is that the locals are very used to this. There are a fair number of turn outs on the most narrow roads, and often there is *just* enough room for two cars to pass on the single lane if we’re both willing to rub up against the shrubbery. Once I realized that the vast majority of other drivers were polite, careful, and familiar with the process, I did relax a little bit. As intimidating as these roads can be, it’s worth it to drive them because a lot of little hidden gems can only be accessed this way.

Public Transit in Cities

While we were in Dublin, we were actually able to simply walk everywhere we wanted to go by getting a room next to Trinity College. The main tourist district is quite tightly packed and walk-able, but if you want to go a little further or it’s just too rainy, there’s a great system of buses and trams. However, paying for these modes of transit are unnecessarily complicated. Fares change based on where and when you board and exit, so you can easily end up paying the maximum if you don’t know how to navigate the system.

The easiest way around this is to get a LEAP card. There’s a few ways to do this, but the simplest is to walk into nearly any convenience store and buy one. They cost about 5 Euro and are re-loadable. Fares are automatically calculated if you tap in AND tap out, plus you get a fare discount for using the card instead of cash. I wasn’t able to get the reloading app to work for me, but it’s very easy to reload at any number of grocery shops and convenience stores.

There is a tourist LEAP, but I’d shy away from that one because of the limitations. They are technically unlimited travel, but they only apply to city transit (and a few airport options). Generally, visitors to Ireland want to see the countryside or travel to more than one city, and the LEAP doesn’t cover that. The LEAP is good for most major cities (NOT Derry or Belfast as that is a different country), so I think the top-up card is the way to go.

Please note that the LUAS tram system is a bit unique. There is a post at the tram stop OUTSIDE the tram where you need to tap your LEAP card BOTH before you get on and AFTER you get off. If you don’t tap when you leave, you’ll be charged the maximum fare! I was a bit thrown off by the tapping posts being at the stops rather than inside the tram, but it did make boarding more efficient. I used this in Dublin.

I used buses in Galway. With a bus you need to tell the driver what stop you plan to get off BEFORE you tap your LEAP card. The driver will program your fare and then you can hold your card to the reader. It takes much longer than the tram, but the drivers are generally pretty nice about it. Just make sure you use Google Maps or similar to know the name of your stop before you board. Again, failure to do so means a much larger fee.

Traveling Outside the Cities: Public Bus and Tour Bus

If you do want to travel to another city, there are great and affordable inter-city bus options. I used CityLink. You get a slight discount for booking online. The drivers don’t generally require a printed ticket, so you can book online from your phone or hostel no problem. You can also buy tickets at the bus stations in each city.

Finally, another great way to see Ireland without a car is to join tour buses that leave from the major cities and head out to the countryside. I personally did this twice: once from Dublin to the Wicklow mountains, and once from Galway to Kylemore Abbey.

I shopped around using Viator to compare deals and I found that a LOT of agencies overcharge or misrepresent their tours. Read the details carefully. One of my day trips from Galway was to go out to Inishbofin. I did find a “tour” but it was nothing more than the public bus (CityLink) and the public ferry. They wanted to charge three-four times the cost of those tickets and didn’t even offer a guide to help you find the bus/ferry!

Long story short, if you can use the public transit to get someplace, do it. If there is no public transit, then make sure you pick a reputable tour company with plenty of positive reviews for the tour you are interested in. You can find the links for the tours I went on here: Kylemore Abbey with Galway Tour Company, Wicklow Mountains with Gray Line Dublin.

If you do choose to join one of these tours, please be aware that not all the buses offer all the amenities. WiFi, charging ports and the like are hit or miss, but the seats are comfy and the drivers are very entertaining. I would recommend bringing lots of snacks or even a pack lunch as the timing doesn’t always allow you to eat when you’re hungry or both eat and sight see. They also have deals with some random tiny towns that they stop in for lunch. There’s usually only one place to eat, so it can get crowded or expensive.

Planning the Route

We had decided on a basic road trip itinerary before arriving. I think it’s important on any time sensitive vacation to schedule a certain amount of things. I like to schedule where I’ll sleep, as well as breakfast and dinner (lunch can be on the fly unless there’s a special reason to schedule it). I like to schedule one or two things in a day and also leave myself room to change, rearrange, add or subtract. The schedule for Ireland was unusually tight because my travel companion had a very long bucket list and while I might go back one day, it’s unlikely they will, so I tried hard to accommodate them. Even with a tight schedule, I don’t like to buy tickets in advance unless they’re likely to sell out so that I have the freedom to change things around as needed.

Our schedule was also based on not doing more than about 4 hours of car time a day. It’s a holiday after all, there’s no point in spending all day driving. As a consequence, there were a couple places we visited just because we needed to stop. No regrets, though, even the small out of the way places were awesome. Our final road map looked like this:

Finally, the end of the trip we spent in Dublin, so we returned the car and used the excellent buses or just walked from our very central hostel next to Trinity College.

After 16 crazy busy days, my travel companion returned home, and I had a much more slow paced week spent between Dublin and Galway where I relied on coach bus tours and public transit to enjoy myself.

EXPANDED 3 WEEK ITINERARY

For those who either want a sneak preview or need some ideas to plan your own Irish holiday. You could use this in all or part:
two week drive -day 1-14
one week drive: South = day 2-6+12&13 or North = 11-7 (backwards) + 12&13
one week Dublin/Gallway no-car experience – 12, 13, 15, 16/17 combo, 18, 19, 20/21 combo

Day 1:
arrived very late at Dublin airport, picked up car, stayed in a hotel near the airport

Day 2:
Irish National Stud
Leap Castle (haunted?)
Sol y Sombra Tapas, Killarney

Day 3:
Kerry Ring
(ancient stone forts, sheep, waterfalls, chocolate, and prehistoric fossils)

Day 4:
Fungie the Dingle Dolphin & the cliffs of Star Wars

Day 5:
Inis Oir (of the Aran Islands)
Doolin Cave
Traditional Music House

Day 6:
Lough Key: castle in a lake + treetop walk
Seaweed Baths @ Enniscrone

Day 7:
Belleek Pottery
Derry: Bog Murals, Guild Hall, Peace Bridge
Downhill Demesne

Day 8:
Giant’s Causeway
Carrick-a-Rede Bridge
Dunluce Castle

Day 9:
Bushmills Distillery Tour
The Dark Hedges
Glenarm Gardens
Glenariff Waterfall

Day 10: Game of Thrones Day
Belfast TEC: GoT Exhibit
Castle Ward (aka Winterfell)
Inch Abbey

Day 11:
Newgrange
return car to Dublin Airport
Pub Crawl in Temple Bar
This is the day we were supposed to go to Newgrange, but had a “zero damage” accident with a German family in the parking lot and ended up doing police and insurance reports instead, then had to leave to get the car back to Dublin on time.

Day 12:
Viking Splash Tour
Dublin Walking Tour
The walking tour was cancelled last minute, but we were so tired that neither of us actually minded and we spent the afternoon resting.

Day 13:
Trinity College Library & the Book of Kells
The Museum of Archaeology
The Museum of Natural History, aka “The Dead Zoo”

Day 14:
End of two week version, companion departed from Dublin airport
As the person doing the 3 week version, I took this day to rest and do laundry.

From this point, the schedule is FAR more relaxed… and I really needed it after so much fast paced adventuring. I also did the final week on public transit or tour groups.

Day 15:
Wicklow Mountains and Glendalough (GrayLine)

Day 16:
Bus to Galway
Honestly, you could do more, but I was enjoying the slow pace life.

Day 17:
Downtown Galway + unexpected Pride march

Day 18:
Kylemore Abbey (Galway Tour Group)

Day 19:
Inishbofin Island (public transit)

Day 20:
More downtown Galway… really good Irish food.

Day 21:
Bus back to Dublin airport and fly home.

Expat life: When “Home” Is a Holiday

September 13, 2019September 6, 2019 / 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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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…

I 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.

*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.

Get By With a Little Help From My Friends

June 18, 2019 / Gallivantrix / 1 Comment

I know I publish in a maddeningly irregular schedule. The reality is, this blog is my hobby and not my job, not even a part time one. I actually spend money to run this sucker and I’ve been able to do that for 5 years while never asking for anything from the readers except possibly some likes and subscriptions which are really only for the serotonin boost because I do zero monetizing here.

I have some deeply mixed feelings about the ability and tendency to monetize every possible aspect of our lives, but that’s not what this blog post is about. This is the first time in 5 years I’m going to ask for money, but it’s not for me…

They say that 40% of America is just one missed paycheck from disaster. That rises to 60% for even a small health crisis. I had a medical disaster in 2008 that I’ve alluded to here from time to time, and it made me understand just how quickly a smart, driven, well-educated and experienced person can go from a reasonably good life to being homeless and unemployed. It’s terrifying. One day I’ll actually write that whole story, but I’m still not ready.

The only reason I made it through is because of my family: chosen and bio. People who let me crash, people who let me use their homes to sleep, bathe, cook, and eat in. People who loaned me money or just bought things for me when I needed it: medicine, clothes, food, gas. People who kept helping me for years, even after I got a job and wasn’t in “crisis” mode because they understood that it can take years to fully recover from a fall like that.

One of those people is my chosen-sister, Carla Jones.

We met as teenagers back in Tennessee and when I moved to Seattle, she was only a couple years behind me. She slept on my couch for more than a month when she landed, even though she had a job within a week (a job she still has 14 years later) because she didn’t have enough money to pay first and last month’s rent until she got a couple paychecks under her belt. It was a tight fit. I hadn’t yet broken up with my abusive boyfriend (because I was still in that brain fog of denial and guilt), and the three of us were trying to live in a one bedroom apartment while he was trying to turn me against her to retain his control (which I now know is a common abuser tactic, yay). Seeing the way he treated her was probably the biggest catalyst for me to finally escape.

Several years later, when I was recovering from my health crash I needed to move again. I had been living in the attic of an insanely kind and generous family with a new baby and although I had found a job again, I was still not making enough money to rent my own place. I’d been “paying” about 300$ a month to the household I was living in, but I promise that’s a fraction of what any room in a house in Seattle will actually go for. Really, look it up. There’s people renting a couch in the living room to sleep on for 500-600$. It’s crazy.

They were being incredibly nice about the whole thing, and had not given me any kind of eviction notice, just a request that I move on so they could better use the space for their own family. Reasonable! Meanwhile, Carla’s living situation had become untenable. She was living in a rundown basement apartment with a slumlord of an owner who refused to fix anything including the leaks that were contributing to the masses of mold, and an ex-con, ex-roommate who refused to get their stuff out of the apartment.

We decided to pool our resources and move in together. I didn’t have much in the way of money, I was making thousands less than her, but I did have good credit (thanks dad), and the tenacity to spend 3 months searching every apartment for rent in Seattle to find The One. In the end, I found us a space with 2 bedrooms, 2 bathrooms, a dishwasher, a disposal, a fireplace, and a balcony! For only 950$ a month! My problem? I didn’t HAVE half of rent, plus half of internet, water, garbage, electric, etc… I had taken a shitty phone job expressly because it paid 100% of my health insurance premiums and I was still hella sick.

Despite the fact that Carla also has a chronic illness, she was in a much better position. Her job was unionized, and she couldn’t lose it for being sick. She had a home office, so she could crawl from the bed to the chair on bad-but-not-too-bad days. She had disability insurance that would pay out if she had to miss too much work. She agreed to take the larger bedroom with the en suite bath and to pay the lion’s share of the rent and shared bills.

I honestly have no idea how much money this saved me during the time that we lived together, but I know that I would never have been able to achieve my current dreams without her support. When I left in 2014 to move to Saudi Arabia, she let me pack my things into the front closet, and to leave my furniture, books, tv, art, etc all around the shared space. It saved me the cost of a storage unit at a time when I was sure I’d be returning to Seattle to live again.

On top of the financial help, Carla has been a steadfast emotional support to me since we met. She accepts all my weirdness and all my illness without batting an eye. In many ways, that’s worth even more because there’s no way to measure love.

I could tell you more about Carla’s life, about her childhood poverty, how she lost her mother because of doctors who were too biased against women and poor people to find the cancer until it was too late, about her lifelong battle with extreme migraines and trying to navigate the same biased healthcare system that killed her mother, how she struggles daily to be understood as a person with an invisible illness.

I could tell you how she loves tacos and crazy socks and weird hats and dressing up like a zombie. She is one of the kindest and most generous people you’ll ever meet. She’ll give whatever she has to help others, even when she probably shouldn’t. She’ll feed anyone that comes in the door, and loves to make Christmas stockings full of shiny dollar store junk because everyone should have a full stocking Christmas morning.

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She cooks the most amazing food, and I could tell you about every magical birthday cake she ever baked that made me feel loved and special. How one year, while I was deep in a My Little Pony obsession, she figured out how to make the MMMM cake (Marzipan Mascarpone Meringue Madness) because she saw how happy it made me.

I could tell you about her for thousands of words, and hundreds of pages because she is that much a part of my story. For more than two decades she’s been there for everything, and now she needs more help than I can give.

She’s having another flare up that’s causing her to miss a lot of work. She’s not going to get fired, but she could get evicted because landlords don’t wait for disability insurance to pay out. While she’s sick, she doesn’t get a regular paycheck, and the disability insurance is taking an unusually long time to come through. She’s burned through her savings and although I’ve been able to take some of the pressure off by paying a few other bills, there’s just more than I can do alone, however much I might want to.

Today I’m asking in the true American crowd-fund-your-illness tradition, but not for myself: for Carla. If you like my blog (which is free), think of donating to this fund as a way to say thank you to me by helping someone I love. If you have a friend or relative with a chronic illness, and you know what this is like, spare a couple dollars. Every little bit helps. Click the link or button to open a link to the Just Giving page for Carla:

I hope that you and your loved ones never have to experience these things, but if you do, then I hope there is a world of kind strangers out there willing to lend a hand, too.

Thank you everyone!

Starting a New Year, 2019

March 4, 2019March 4, 2019 / Gallivantrix / Leave a comment

Hello! I have been completely lax on my real time updates since all my EU posts were scheduled in advance giving me a blog break to have my holidays and get back to school without any writing stress. So, here I am, back in Korea. Back in ‘lil ol’ Gyeongju, where the food choices are limited and the air quality is stunningly bad. Can you tell I’m excited?

March is the beginning of my year in Korea. Although the calendar flips January 1st, and the Lunar New Year is often in February, the school year starts on March 1. I started my life in Korea in late February 2016, and inevitably I feel like the first week of the school year is the real Week 1 of my year. So while everyone else does their retrospectives and new year plans in Dec/Jan, for me it’s Feb/Mar. Welcome to Week 1, 2019.

Retrospective:

March 2018: I moved from Busan to Gyeongju, rented an apartment in Korean, and started my shiny new job.

April 2018: Sadly short cherry blossom season followed by a metric ton of other flowers. I got into Macro photography for the first time, and went a little crazy with the flower photos.

May 2018: I went to Japan to visit my friend in Nagoya over the long weekend. I got to visit sacred forests, beautiful gardens, historical sites, plus local shopping and a ton of fun local foods.

June 2018: This was a little slow as the weather was getting hot. I visited a museum here in Gyeongju as well as a couple local archaeological sites, and I cut a couple feet off my hair! Big change.

July-August 2018: the EU summer trip which I cannot possibly link to all of the posts for. France, Belgium, Germany, Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, & Russia!

September 2018: I was pretty glum last fall. The heat of my EU vacation drained me physically, and one of the classes I was teaching that semester drained me emotionally. All my Korea friends that hadn’t left in February, left that summer. I felt alone and stressed out pretty much all the time. Yeah, bummer.

I realize, looking back, that I may have been horribly sad last fall because I didn’t DO anything besides work. I try to track my fun activities through photos and there is actually nothing in the entire month of September and only a handful of smaller activities in October, November and December. Dear future self, don’t do that again!

October 2018: I got into art. I started going to watercolor classes, and made it to a real art store in town to explore more with acrylics and mixed media. I did a bunch of planning for the winter vacation as well.

November 2018: This was a wild trip to the local bird zoo. I didn’t even know such a thing existed, but I went with an out of town guest and had a blast with the birds. I also finished my first major piece of art in like 4+ years, so that felt good.

December 2018: Wrapping up the semester, learning how to file grades in Korean, and generally feeling the wintertime blues. I did make it out to one beautiful light show with friends in Daegu, but sadly caught a terrible cold for my birthday & Christmas.

Jan-Feb 2019: winter vacation! posts will be added as I’m able to get them all written and edited. Taiwan, Jordan, Egypt, & Malaysia!

Going Forward:

The good news is, I feel a lot better coming out of this holiday. The weather was mostly nice where I was, and even though Malaysia was hot af, I wasn’t trying to do a lot outside everyday. Plus, I got to spend 3 weeks with a good friend! The weather in Gyeongju is (so far) much nicer than it was this time last year, and I feel like I know what I’m doing at my job. I know it will still be a challenge to maintain my positivity here (Gyeongju is just too small for me) but at least I’m starting out in a good place.

I will be trying to get to better cherry blossom events than last year, but it is extremely weather dependent. Last year the long cold winter and massive rains gave us a whopping 3 days of beautiful trees. This year the early spring weather is much nicer, so I’m holding out a little hope.

Aside from the local cherry blossom festivals, I’m limiting my Korean outings this spring because I’m finally going to get my mom to do some international travel with me this summer! I need to save up a bit, though, since she’s even less into cheap-and-uncomfortable travel options than I am.

Meanwhile, I’m starting my second year at Korean University Professor life. I get to teach the same classes as this time last year, which is actually quite a treat since I have a lot of material prepared and a strong idea of how to do everything. It takes much less brain space to do, and ultimately should result in a better class experience overall since I can avoid the first-timer mistakes and add in all the things I learned to improve lessons.

This frees up some of my down time to work on my summer plan with my mom, and to finally get into the nuts and bolts of what it takes to do my PhD. Just as with the job hunt for EPIK and the University job, I’m sure I’ll be writing about this PhD process in a hopefully funny and informative stress rant blog.

I am a hopeless academic who would be happy to spend my life in continuous study, but in this case the PhD is not merely for the glorious satisfaction of my own inner Hermione Granger, but a good step in my career. The next tier of high quality and stable university jobs do require this level of education. There’s a lot to love about my current job, but looking forward it would be nice to have a place with English Majors (students who are invested in English instead of merely required to do it) and to know I have some kind of job security past the age of 50 (tenure or something similar). Plus… I’ll be able to refer to myself as “the Doctor” with total accuracy.

Despite the additional project, I am going to try to keep up with the blog because it’s a fun hobby / therapy activity. I’m coming up on 5 years this May, so no reason to stop now!

What you have to look forward to?

In March, April and May, I will be posting more stories from the EU summer trip. Believe it or not, I’m still not done telling all those wonderful adventures.

I will be Instagramming the local spring flowers as often as I can. Those will show up on the ‘gram, and also be mirrored on Facebook and Twitter so you can see them on your favorite platform.

Finally, I will be working to prepare the stories from this winter, which should start to come out some time in May or June.

Thanks for reading along. This blog has shifted and evolved in style and topic over the years as it fits into my life and I grow and change around it. It’s nice to imagine that there are people I have never met who nonetheless feel a connection because of this magical series of tubes we call the internet. ❤

Down Keyboard, Up Brush

November 28, 2018March 4, 2019 / Gallivantrix / 4 Comments

I am not keeping up with the blog recently. Apologies. Realistically, I’ve gone dark for longer before. That whole 5 months I lived in Seattle between Japan and Korea I wrote maybe one post, but I also didn’t have much to write about back then. Now I have 33 drafts sitting waiting for me to work on them, and yet when I open them I just sigh. I did not do a good job taking notes on my summer holidays. I don’t have 4 hours of enforced desk warming at work every day anymore. I have these lovely three day weekends and I can’t bring myself to spend even one of them writing in here. Nanowri-no-mo. The writers block is strong.

I’ve been working on my winter travel plans, which involves reading a lot of other people’s travel blogs. I see a lot of blogs that will do an entire 10-12 day trip in a single post of no more than 2,500 words. It is a great way to summarize a trip and pass on the most vital information to future travelers, so I’m not dissing those folks at all. In many ways I envy them, because my task would no doubt be easier were I to adopt a similar approach. I might even have more fans since “in depth” reading requires an attention span that is not popular in the world of click and scroll. Which, I’m also not dissing. I love scrolling thru my FB feed as much as the next person. However, when it comes to my own content, I want to be able to tell a story. I like telling stories.

It does not help that this semester’s schedule has been a little extra brain taxing, leaving me with less mental spoon-power at the end of each teaching day to sit down and organize a blog post. Three more weeks! I’m staying at this job, don’t worry. I worked way to hard to get it to leave, but I am looking forward to having a chance to get a new schedule for spring semester.

Art History

The good news (for me anyway) is that I haven’t merely crawled into a cave to binge watch Netflix (although I have done some of that as well… like maybe the entire Star Trek catalogue except for Enterprise causethatonesucksfiteme). I have finally reopened my artistic cabinet. Before moving to Saudi Arabia (and thus before starting this blog) I went through a few art binges in my life. In high school and undergrad I was massively prolific. Reams and reams of sketch pads filled, art given as gifts to everyone I knew, and even occasionally sold to strangers for profit!

Then I stopped. For years.

After finishing my MA and getting back from China, I finally picked up the brush again. It helped that I had some peers to do art with. Going over to a friend’s house to paint and drink tea (or wine) is a lot of fun, and it took the pressure off me to PRODUCE. I finished paintings that had been half done for years. I started new ones. I updated older artwork from my high school days to reflect my new style. I was feeling it.

Then I moved, and all the art went into storage. Saudi was… well, you can read the blogs, but I did my last real piece of art there when I made the life size paper Christmas tree to adorn my hotel room. I made every piece of that from paper and foam because Christmas decorations are forbidden in Saudi. That was in 2014. Since then I’ve had art supplies laying around. At least a sketch pad and pencil. People who knew I liked to make art would give me things as gifts and slowly I accrued watercolors, acrylics, brushes and canvas and they just sat on a shelf.

Returning from Europe this August, all my Korea friends were finally gone. Those who didn’t leave in February (the end of the school year) left over the summer. I knew I had to make myself get out and be social in order to avoid the cave-dwelling-Netflix-binge fate. Public “foreigner” events are the best way to go since we all show up expecting to mix and mingle, but I live over an hour away from the two nearest cities with decent expat populations and I knew I needed more than just “socialize” as a motive to travel so far. So I joined some art classes.

Specifically, watercolor. These are much more social than educational, but I did end up learning some new techniques as well as just getting a chance to chat with people. The first one I went to in Busan and everyone pretty much split as soon as it was over. The second one was in Daegu where I ended up spending several hours after the class hanging out and chatting. So far, no lasting friendships have been formed, but I had a good time regardless.

Art Spark

I also triggered my art spark. During the last couple of months I’ve delved much more into making art than into doing photography or writing. As a result, my Instagram and Blog are feeling a little neglected. The first piece I started was a simple mandala pattern on acrylic. I spent about an hour looking at mandalas on Google Image search and then sat down to draw my own. Once the pencil sketch was done, I transferred it over to a canvas by carefully measuring over and over. It’s much easier to make a mandala in a computer where you can just copy and paste for symmetry. I also used a black marker to show the main lines. I basically created an adult coloring book page on a canvas and then started using acrylic paint to “color” it.

I wish I could say I was finished, but it turns out that coloring in acrylic isn’t as fun as coloring with pencils, crayons or markers. I also struggled with color. I repainted part of the outer ring twice, and the middle ring 3 times. I have since taken a digital version into Pixlr and experimented with color schemes for the middle ring. At least now I know what I want to paint there… One day, I might even do it.

One day when I was tired of meticulously painting inside the lines, I decided to pick up the sketch pad again. I liked the idea of the mandala, of the adult coloring book style, and decided to try to make a mandala animal pattern. Back to Google Image search. I scrolled through a few hundred designs before realizing my favorites were the jellyfish. I have no idea why. Not wanting to copy the poor unattributed artist whose work I was seeing plastered all over cheap t-shirts, Etsy pages and Pinterest boards, I decided to make my own!

I stuck the Star Trek on auto-play and went to work on my sketch-pad. A while later I had the finished design. Most people will recognize it’s extreme similarity to the adult coloring book fad. That is totally on purpose. However, when it came time for me to imagine how to colorize my drawing, I didn’t like the idea of repeating my mandala with acrylic paint experience. Visualizing a few mediums while I lay in bed cradling my chronic insomnia, I hit upon the idea of using colored paper to bring my creation to life!

The next day I found a local art store which was overrun with paints and painter supplies as well as the standard Korean “stationary store” supplies like colored pens, and poster board paper. I was never able to find things like wrapping paper, brown paper lunch bags, construction paper, tissue paper or any of the other staple craft supplies I grew up with in America, let alone any of the new craft supplies that my niblings get to play with. Maybe in Seoul there is a shop that has them, but not here. The only patterned and colored paper I could find was for origami. I bought a half a dozen different design packs and a decent sized canvas. There was also no such thing as decoupage glue or mod-podge, so I got plain white glue and made my own by mixing it with water. Old school.

I didn’t want my bright colored jellyfish alone on a white canvas, though. What do do for a background? Paint it blue with acrylics? No… I really wanted a watercolor effect, but I didn’t have confidence in my ability to do it, especially not on a canvas. I decided to make the watercolor on paper and decoupage the background as well as the foreground.

Paper-cut Redux

I cut circles in various sizes, hoping to evoke a “bubble” feeling. I then spent hours (more Trek bingeing) painting them in pale shades of blue and green.

It was worth it. When I finally was ready to create the background, I placed the different sized circles around the canvas. I painted them in layers, mixing a little white paint into my glue/water mix so that the bottom layers would fade a little compared to the top layers and give it some depth. Originally, I thought there would be distinct bubbles against a white background. In the end, the whole canvas was covered and it reminded me of Monet. I tell you, I loved that background so much I almost didn’t want to put anything on it. I will definitely be using that technique again.

For the jelly itself, I started off by cutting the pattern from plain white printer paper (abundant at my office). I used the canvas to make sure the pieces fit and I had to make some changes from the original drawing to accommodate the new size and materials.

When I had the tentacles and body shape done, I used post-it note paper to measure and cut the patterns on the body. It was much better than plain paper because I could make sure they stayed in place while I added other shapes. I had to change the size of the heart shapes because the first attempt was too small. Being able to stick them to the body let me clearly see how the shapes would look glued down.

Finally I was ready to cut the colored origami paper. Sort of. First I had to decide which pieces got which colors and patterns. I had a limited amount, no more than two sheets of each type and remember origami paper isn’t exactly big, so for larger chunks, I had to line up the two sheets along their pattern to make it seem, well, seamless. I also had to balance the colors and shapes in my head.

When I made my final color decisions, the last of the cutting was ahead of me. I had to trace the white paper stencils onto the origami paper and faithfully cut each shape and each layer. The tentacles were actually fairly easy, but the accents on the body were the most challenging. Here again the sticky paper came in handy since I could just stick my stencil to the colored paper rather than try to hold it down. I also enjoyed using the designs on the paper like using the pink circles on dark green to make the circle centers, or using those same patterns on the purple to accent the hearts. Not only cutting the shapes I needed, but cutting them around the patterns.

In the end, the gluing required more patience than I could have imagined! I had to be very gentle with the wet paper. It wasn’t just gluing pieces down, but using the watered down glue like a paper mache. The paper would be wet and tear easily. However, if I didn’t soak the paper evenly, it would pucker and wrinkle badly in response to the areas touched by glue. I added only one or two pieces at a time and had to wait (more Star Trek) for them to dry at least most of the way before applying the next.

Damp pieces were adjustable, but only a little. If I hadn’t planned and checked everything while it was dry, I don’t think I could have assembled it wet. It was a whole new experience. I’ve done paper mache and decoupage but never to create a 2d art of my own design, and on a canvas no less. It took me 3 weeks of working on it in my spare time.

And that’s why I haven’t been writing…

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