Brilliant Quotes of the Noughties [2000-2009].

Sometimes friends bantering can quickly spiral into pure genius. Here are just a few quotes I remembered recently, which may or may not be funny to anyone else:

“But our dwarves have magical powers.”
- Nunoo, on the difference between ‘real dwarves’ in Ghana, and the ‘mythical dwarves’ found in folkloric tales such as The Lord of the Rings. Ghana, 2006.

“Unless that hamburger has alpaca or guinea pig in it, I’m not interested!”
Sarah, responding to the waiter’s dinner suggestion after delaying her much anticipating first Incan meal of either alpaca or guinea pig by 3 days due to altitude sickness. Peru, 2006.

“It’s all in your outlook: sure you’re being cheated, but you’re being cheated in the sun!”
- [Translation] Hostel bartender, on why I should go to Morocco, and to this day the best travel advice I have ever received. France, 2002.

“It gets rid of the goatiness”
- Maura, on using lemon rind to mask the ‘goatie’ flavour of goat’s cheese, coining the term ‘goatiness’ forever. Canada, 2001.

“I was seriously disappointed by the lack of llamas”
Sarah, on her first impressions of Machu Picchu. Peru, 2006.

“And that’s a historical fact.”
- Consultant_Tim, on all of the historical ‘facts’ we fabricated during our car ride across Jordan, collectively falsifying all of Jordanian [and Western Civilisation’s] history. Jordan, 2009.

“Is that funny, or am I just drunk?”
“I don’t know, I’m drunk.”
- Mikey and Me, on a particularly creative Abu Dhabi park job. UAE, 2009.

“I know – let’s make a Junction Triangle interpretive dance!”
- Dougie, on how to effectively present our revitalization plan for Toronto’s Junction Triangle. Canada, 2005.

“It’s irresponsible of you to have a heating bill of less than $600.”
- Toronto Landlord, on why he shouldn’t have to pay to insulate our house in order to reduce energy consumption and our heating bill costs. Canada, 2004.

“Alpacas have cuter faces.”
- Sarah, on her highly scientific method for distinguishing alpacas from llamas. Peru, 2006.

“You promised me Madeleine Albright, elephants, and Livingstone. I’m leaving!”
- Mikey, on his invented expectations of Ethiopia. Ethiopia, 2008.

“It’s f-ing brilliant. Just add water, instant community.”
- Me, on my first week of graduate school. Canada, 2004.

[Not] Spoiled.

We had a busy summer of exciting travels.

July was spent in Canada, with trips to enjoy friends and family in Calgary, Vancouver, and Portland, a drive along the stunning Oregon Coast to the Olympic Penninsula in Washington State, and a stay at a former Burlesque house in the 19th-Century-preserved-wild-west town of Port Townsend.

August began with a long weekend of good food and great music in Amsterdam. Just a few weeks later we were back in the Netherlands for some birthday fun -- indoor skydiving, more fantastic food, and a weekend stay at Engelenburg Castle, including a six course meal with six paired wines.

September began in the Netherlands at the castle, five days later we were in Beirut for my birthday weekend of surprises. My first surprise was a trip to Byblos, the famous Phoenician port town founded in 5000 BC, for walks around the old town and the best squid I've ever had in my life. The next surprise was a tour of Chateau Musar Winery, and a visit to the absolutely stagerring Jeita Grotto. Between surprises, we spent our time walking the neighbourhoods of Beirut, soaking in its raw beauty and animation.

Another four day work week in the UAE, and it was Eid holidays in Jordan for a wide range of historical, relaxation, spiritual, and adventure travel experiences. The well-preserved Roman city of Jerash rivalled Ephesus, floating in the Dead Sea was surprisingly entertaining, and there was lots of good food to be had. Seven hours walking around Petra was not enough to absorb the vastness and intricacies of the 5.5 km long ancient capital of the Nabataeens, a truly ethereal place of natural beauty, dramatic landscapes, and monumental yet elegant architecture, that requires a high degree of fitness! Our trip wrapped up with an adventurous climb up the gorge-ous (pun pun) Wadi Mujib where I was twice rescued by Reinier from the rapids, and finally a walk through Amman's Byzantine ruins.

While enjoying another delicious three hour meal in Amman, Reinier looked at me holding a glass of Jordanian red wine and asked: "Are we spoiled?"

"Well, that depends on how you measure it. I live on the other side of the world from all of my family, and I live three timezones from my partner. I live in a city I don't feel connected to, where I cannot do many of the activities I most enjoy. I see injustice every day, and I don't have the luxury of knowing that there is a social safety net that is taking care of the under-priviledged, which I am not only helping to pay for via taxes, but I am also able to influence via a democratic system. My job is very challenging but exhausting, and getting anything done in the UAE is full of obstacles and frustration. We pay for this -- we can afford all of these trips financially, because we pay for it with lifestyle, distance, and stress."

Spoiled is relative. Anyone who enjoys security in food, shelter, and personal safety is spoiled. Within my current context of living in the UAE, spoiled to me is living in the same city as your partner, paying taxes towards the wellbeing of others, understanding your rights, living within a few hours of your family, and enjoying an active and engaging lifestyle with your urban and natural environment.

However, within my next context of being poor but happy living in Europe, we shall see how quickly I miss the luxuries I do have here: lots of vacation time, sufficient finances to spend on all the travels I want, daily swims in my pool, an exciting job, and having a tight social international community I can always count on. We shall see how long it will take me to realise that I am [not] spoiled here.

Prairie Skies.

I have often said that Dave and I became close friends over a pint of beer, and Nancy and I became close friends over a bottle of rum.

A week or two after I moved to Matsuyama, Ehime on Japan’s Shikoku Island, a strong off-shore earthquake hit halfway between Matsuyama and Hiroshima. After I restored our dishes to their original shelf locations from the floor of our apartment, I went to the liquor store where they were having a sale on all the liquor bottles that were soaked in liquor from neighbouring bottles that had broke during the earthquake. Having not yet acquired a taste for non-girlie drinks yet [I didn’t start drinking beer until I was 23], and not recognising the kanji for vodka, wine coolers, or fruit liqueurs, I picked up a huge bottle Meyers’ Extra Dark Rum, remembering that I had loved the rum balls my sister had made for me the month before when I was in Montreal.

In our building lived the four Canadian English teachers who worked at Aiko Kindergarten: from the mountainous coastal city of Vancouver were me, my brother, and Ando; and from the Prairies in Medicine, Alberta, was Nancy. I was already good friends with Ando and my brother, but hadn’t really had the chance to get to know Nancy yet.

- I have a huge bottle of Meyer’s Dark Rum that I don’t exactly know what to do with.
- I love rum. I spent several years with a Chilean man, and we went to Cuba together one year and spent the whole visit drinking Cuban rum.
- I’ve always wanted to go to Cuba, Morocco, and India. Why don’t you swing by the apartment sometime this weekend while everyone’s in Kyoto and we’ll drink rum and you can tell me about Cuba.

By the end of the weekend, my imagination was filled with thoughts of Cuba, stories of growing up in a small town outside of Medicine Hat under the prairie skies, and a headache from all the rum.

Nancy is probably my most free-spirited of free-spirited friends, having her own unique definition of success for herself, who is care-free to societal life checklists. I met Nancy when I had first begun my [apparently ceaseless] world travelling, when I was a soul-searching 21 year-old exploring the world in an effort to understand my most useful role in it. Later on in these formative years, I learned to size people up very quickly, judging whether or not we would have anything in common, and pursuing friendships according to my initial impressions. When you live as a nomad, you have to make meaningful friendships very quickly and not waste too much time with people who you think you won’t have anything in common with, because you are often put into situations where you are forced to be friends with people you wouldn’t normally befriend because of geographical circumstances.

In many ways, Nancy and I have very opposite personalities, and I may have judged our potential to have a friendship differently if I had met her now. Nancy approaches the world as a prairie sky -- a blank canvas where she can trust that everything always works out in the end, and not needing to force time commitments on incremental stages of career-relationship-home ownership-retirement in some overall life plan of 25-30-65 years old. I am much more goal-oriented, climbing peaks to get the best view, organising my time around known boundaries, dividing time into manageable stages towards some imagined goal, only filling the spaces between these planned edges with spontaneity and impulse.

An illustration of Nancy and my calculated boundaries vs. prairie sky approaches:
- I have far too many interests, always wanting to explore every crevasse, every peak. Constantly un-satiated by what I can see, wondering what’s beyond the next corner, around the next mountain, across the sea. I’d hate to put my children through this some day, so I should marry someone who knows exactly what they want all the time, always satisfied that they can already see everything they need to, so that our children end up as normal people.
- I always figured your genes know: if you have good chemistry with someone, you’ll probably produce good babies.

I caught a lift from Vancouver to Calgary last week to catch up with Nancy and her little Zachary en route back home from the Canmore Folk Festival, but we missed each other in Calgary and so I rented a car and drove across the prairies to Medicine Hat instead. On my three hour drive to Medicine Hat, I was annoyed by how boring the road was, by the country music playing on the radio, by the ineptitude of the Canadian Tire staff not being able to find me an iPod converter so that I didn’t have to listen to the country music playing on the radio, and by the fact that Nancy and I hadn't met up in Calgary as planned. I love scenic drives and had just spent 10 hours in the car on the Coquihalla, one of the most beautiful highways in the world that dangerously stretches from BC’s coastal mountains to the Rockies, ooo-ing and awww-ing the whole way at one of nature’s most obvious efforts at sensational beauty. The three hour drive across the prairies was feeling much longer than the ten hour drive through the mountains, mostly because of my perceived monotony of the landscape.

One laugh from my little Zach, and one hug from Nancy, and my annoyance had melted away. I spent the next few days in Medicine Hat with the two of them, peeling off layers of anxiety and stress from my schedule of being in so many cities for the last three months. I was enjoying every minute of my conversion to the prairie lifestyle, however short it was. We accomplished nothing, we never looked at a clock, never had to be anywhere at any time, our day revealing itself as we went along.

Contrary to my journey to Medicine Hat, on the return journey to Calgary I was almost overwhelmed by how beautiful the prairies were. Maybe not beautiful in an exciting and glamorous way, like the Rockies or the Coastal Mountains, but in a more under-stated, subtle but profound way. You could almost see the curve of the globe, the land and sky were so vast, un-interrupted.

Nancy's open-skies attitude and influence have once again defeated my judgmentalism and taught me something about expectations. I rely heavily on my judgments, but sometimes too heavily, and it's always refreshing to be proven wrong and learn something in the process. Thank you Nancy -- you've taught me even more than just an appreciation for rum.

How to keep one’s self entertained while unemployed.

Mastering the art of enjoying being un-employed is an important lesson in life. The most difficult thing I’ve ever had to do in life is figure out what to do with my life. We distract ourselves from this Herculean feat by constructing life plans such as university-marriage-work-kids-retirement. We work for retirement, filling our lives with distractions and then reach retirement only to realise we’re running out of time. In fact, many people die within a year of retirement because they’ve lost purpose, forgetting the original point of working in the first place. Retirement is when we can’t avoid it any longer, we’re finally staring in the face of the original question we were trying to avoid in the first place when we first graduated: what do I really want to do with my life?

When you’re unemployed, you’re facing this same dilemma on a basic, daily, unavoidable level: what do I really want to do with my life – TODAY?

-It’s so great to have you in town to go on bike rides with. I can’t remember the last time I had the time to do something like this.
-Well, I have all the time in the world.
-If I had all the time in the world, there are so many things I’d like to work on for my portfolio. So many creative projects I wish I had the time to flesh out.
-I know. I have so much material to write about – like when that Spanish boy climbed into bed with Taser while we were asleep in Latvia. But I feel like I’ve been too busy to write. But really, what the hell do I do with my time?
-When we have the time, we don’t know what to do with it.
-And when we don't have the time, we're inspired to dream of what we'd do with it. I think I’d rather have the inspiration, and feel I don’t have time to fully realise my creativity than lose my inspiration. I’d rather be inspired than have a lot of time.

I’m used to being very very busy, and get annoyed when people claim they don’t know what to do with their free time. If I had free time I’d: learn Spanish; cook more; take an art class, probably pottery or glass blowing; sign up for a dance class; practice more piano; garden; cycle downtown every day, organise all my old photos; do my taxes; the list goes on…

Lists are good. They help us break up our days into manageable pieces. Just before I graduated from my first degree when I was 2o years old, I had such a heavy course load yet I could barely force myself to concentrate on my studies because I was too busy planning what I wanted to do with my life once I was "free". I made a list of things I wanted to do in my lifetime -- a list of over 8o adventures -- and I still have the list, somewhere. Maybe that's one to add to my list: amalgamate all my existing lists.

Fast forward a few months and I was facing graduation. I’ve often said that the most paralysed I’ve ever felt in my life was when I graduated from SFU in December 2ooo. I had a degree, I sold all my possessions so I had money, and I had the whole world available to me to start my adventures. Yet I was paralysed as to where I should start. I knew how to push boundaries, but without any boundaries to push, I was lost. I felt the same about being creative – in high school when we had creative writing classes, sometime Ms. Morgan would put a blank sheet in front of us, give us a pencil, and say: “write!” I never knew where to start. Other times she would say “write about this ball of paper, in the style of James Joyce”, and I could be the most creative person ever.

As with anything in life, it’s all about perspective, and having a tentative plan to move to the United Arab Emirates has certainly helped me keep a healthy perspective on my employment situation. Travelling around the world also helps.

I’ve been very quiet and mysterious since I got back to Canada, not purposefully, but mostly because I am just as in the dark about my immediate future as everyone else is.

I’m someone who likes to think I’m very consistent with what I say I’m going to do. For the last two months, I’ve had vague plans to accept a job in the United Arab Emirates, but until I have a plane ticket in my hand, I’ve been reluctant to make some bold announcement detailing my imminent move.

Where will you live?
For how long will you be in the UAE?
When do you leave?
What will you be doing?

All I know is that I have been offered the position of “Planning Analyst” with the Planning Department of the government of Abu Dhabi, that I’ve accepted my terms of employment for an initial contract of 3 months, and that I’ve requested to leave on 17 August 2007. I hope to stay at least 9 months to 1 year, but we’ll see how/if it goes. I promise – that’s all I know.

-You’re moving to the UAE? That’s so exciting.
-Honestly, I have the most boring life ever.
-Don’t you dare say that. We all live vicariously through you.
-No, I’m the one who literally lives through you. What have I been doing the last 4 months? Basically, I don’t have a life of my own, and so I fly to other parts of the world and live the lives of my friends for a week at a time. I need to get my own bloody life.
-But your life’s so interesting.
-Really. Honestly. It’s so boring. You have a life, and in your life you look forward to things like travel. So travel for you is exciting. It’s you at your best, and it’s something you can always look forward to, something to aspire to. I travel all the time, everyday I’m doing what most people aspire to do. And it becomes a chore. So everyday I’m faced with the philosophical dilemma of having to re-establish what inspires me, what I look forward to. Because I don’t have a trip on the horizon, my life is a trip. While everyone has this easy answer of what they would do with their vacation time, I’m actually having to live that day, every day, and try to find new ways of making it fresh.
-But that’s so depressing.
-Exactly. It’s much easier to be distracted from thinking about your own purposelessness when you have a trip to look forward to. Or maybe granite counter tops, or renovations on your house. Those activities which deviate from the norm of what we do. So I have to listen to everyone tell me how exciting my life is when really I just wish I had granite counter tops to distract myself from thinking about life. I really can’t complain – I have a super awesome life, with super awesome people in it, and I wouldn’t change it for a second – but it’s not as easy as everyone thinks.

The hardest thing in my life is saying goodbye to a community of friends. The second hardest thing in my life is grappling with constant philosophical dilemmas around meaning, purpose, inspiration, and life in general. I once got in an argument with a friend of mine in Africa about it:

-You white people have everything, and yet you’re always complaining.
-No, you people in Africa always have purpose, and yet you’re always complaining about not having enough stuff! Japanese people have one of the highest standards of living in the world, and they live longer than people in any other country. Yet they have the highest suicide rate in the world. Africans aren’t killing themselves!

So I continue to do exactly as I please, everyday waking up, choosing to just go with the flow, or attempting to tackle one of my lists: my list of things to do; my list of activities I love doing; my list of foods I want to learn to cook; my list of microbrewed beers I want to taste; my list of places I can cycle to from my house; my playlists of songs I like to rollerblade to; songs I want to download; things I want to write; great literature I want to read; films I want to see; friends I want to visit; organisations I want to research; etc. As with life in general, once time starts to become scarce, I’ll realise I don’t have enough of it to accomplish all that I need to do before my departure [or in my immediate case, my departure for the UAE]. This exercise of the last few months of being un-employed and relatively un-distracted may prove to be a prism through which to examine the larger task of constructing one’s life. If I can master this on a daily level now, maybe I’ll avoid a mid-life crisis in the future?

Am I actually complaining about this?
If this is my biggest worry, than my life must be pretty good...

"Landed"

I was in the car with Stefan on the way to London Heathrow. I hate London Heathrow. This must have been the 5th or 6th time I was in the car with Stefan on my way to or from a London airport. Thank GOD for Stefy!

The "June 2nd" date that had been scheduled since last July as my return to Vancouver had finally arrived. I had had that date imprinted in my brain for nearly a year. When I booked my plane ticket last summer, the travel agent needed to know two things: when did I need to arrive? And when did I need to return? Clueless as to what my needs would be an entire year away, I calculated my answers based on what I knew:

I finish work in Ghana at the end of February.
I don't want to go all the way to Africa without seeing some of the continent, but judgeing from my experience in Turkey, I'll probably be really ready to leave after 6 months.
Ando's in Morocco, but it's probably cheaper for me to fly there from London than from Accra.
Leanne may be in South Africa, but she's about as easy to keep track of as I am.
My mum wants to go to Italy.
Mary and Adam are getting married in Ireland at the end of May.
Paul's at Cambridge, Sandy's in Wales, Stefan and Amy are in Watford.
Anastasia's going to be in Sweden March-June.
It might be easier for me to find summer work in the UK than in Canada.

With all of this, I took my first step back into the unknown and booked a return from Heathrow to Vancouver for 2 June 2007, completely unsure as to how my year would transpire, not knowing where I'd actually be, who I'd be with, or even if I could afford any of this.

Plans started revealing themselves easily, and with little effort on my behalf, I accidently stumbled upon the best way ever to travel: all the comforts and stability of having the familiarity of close friends and family, with all the excitement of having new experiences and seeing new places.

In Ghana, I was constantly surrounded by the love and affection of my Ghanaian friends. Over the three months of travel since I left, I think I was away from old friends and family for only maybe 2 weeks in total, and even then, I usually met fantastic people along the way to enjoy some laughs [and beer!] with. I cannot imagine a better way to see the world -- innaugurating friends' guest bedrooms from South Africa to Morocco to Barcelona to London, with more friends and family flying across the world to join in the adventure.

But this wasn't just any plane today -- this was the plane. The plane that was going to take me "home". The plane that I didn't have another plane to connect with afterwards. The plane that would put all my suitcases and most of my possessions into one common city -- except a few items I have scattered around Toronto.

London Heathrow is a huge airport, and Terminal 4, where all the cross-Atlantic flights depart from and arrive to, is very far from all the other terminals. As we approached T4, Stefan saw a sign on the highway reading "As of June 1st, 2007, all British Airways Flights to Vancouver Leave from Terminal 1". What were the chances? There are two daily flights to Vancouver on British Airways. If they really wanted to make a dent in air traffic at Terminal 4, why not re-route all flights to...say...New York? Or Chicago? Why go to all this effort to re-route 2 bleeding flights per day???

But there it was, the writing was on the wall:
"Flights to Vancouver"
And it finally started to sink in: I'm going "home"!

What I completely forgot to factor in though, is that without a clear idea of exactly what I'm doing in Vancouver, not having any imminent employment opportunities there, plus a pending trip I'm making back east to de-brief with my boss and visit my TO and MTL crews, there will definitely be more flights and more packing. Etching return dates into my brain, breaking up my life into beginning-of-the-trip, and end-of-the-trip travel dates, is all just a game I'm playing with my head.

THERE WILL ALWAYS BE MORE FLIGHTS AND MORE PACKING.