Kevin Mitchell on Making Sense of the Gulf.

"When confronted with such rapid transformation, it is difficult to make sense of what is happening in the Gulf and constant change precludes broad generalizations. One tends to either run in fear while ranting about the excesses made possible by the most extreme manifestations of neoliberalism or to stand frozen while expressing a perverse fascination with what is deemed to be inevitable."
- Kevin Mitchell on the Gulf countries in "Constructing Fact, Fantasy, and Fiction", Al Manakh 2006

2008 in Review: another point form summary of travels with promises of more thoughtful reflections to come.

My New year's resolution is to drink more water and by year's end to have books, films, music, recipes, and intriguing articles, websites or other tidbits to recommend in my 2009 review. For 2008, I have failed entirely at a balanced life and have mostly concentrated all my energy (and money!) on travel, travel, and escapism via travel.

I have been very fortunate to be able to travel so much this year, and with such good company -- I intend to do some justice to the people and places I have met along the way by dedicating more time to writing about them soon. Here is a brief summary of some of the highlights (in no particular order):



Lebanon - electric street life and urban renaissance in Beirut, and my first Muslim- and Lebanese- wedding in Tyre.



Oman - legitimate natural and cultural oasis, with authentic historical culture and remarkable old, decaying towns to set up camp in.



Yemen - one of the most extraordinary places I've been, with gingerbread-house-looking historical skyscrapers, beautiful landscapes, and a lot of able-bodied people chewing qat on the side of the road all day long.



Nepal - pagodas and dim sum, hinduism and curry, experiencing extremes of funky ex-pat communities in Kathmandu, and a weekend local-style in the village of my tea boy with his family.



India - an emerging economy with all the comforts associated with having a middle class. The legacy of thousands of years of progressive civilisation, and an overwhelming excitment for the future. I only scratched the surface of Delhi, Agra (the Taj Mahal), and Mumbai.



Sri Lanka - military offensives kept all the other tourists out, but there is just so much Sri Lanka has to offer. Preserved (and unexpectedly impressive) archaeological cities, stunning beauty, good food and crafts, and sacred buddhist sites.



Ethiopia - where to begin? Ethiopia has been secretly succeeding as a great empire out of reach at 2000 metres for thousands of years. It's the cradle of humanity, with many of the world's earliest hominids surfacing in the Great Rift Valley, it has been a 'civilised' Christian empire with a developed writing system hundreds of years before Christianity ever reached Europe, 11th Century churches carved out of bedrock (picture above), natural beauty, excellent food, the headquarters of the African Union, the only sub-Saharan African country to have never been colonised by imperial forces. The list continues.



Scotland - extended business trip to re-visit my first ex-pat home (Edinburgh) and finally give Glasgow the attention it deserves!



Belgium - cycling along canals to abbeys all over central Belgium, sampling the fruits of the monks' centuries of labour: Belgian Abbey Beers!



Germany - Christmas with my mother in Cologne, Bonn, the 'romantic Rhine', and Trier, just the two of us (literally -- all the shops were closed and the streets empty). Trier was a surprising highlight of our lovely, however frozen, German experience.



Paris - a romantic New Year in the most notoriously romantic city in the world.



The Netherlands - lots of laughs, meals, walks and wine, and a nine-hour long Christmas dinner in Dutch. I will have a lot more to say about NL in 2009.

Thankfully there's lots of water in Holland, which should help scratch off my first New Year's resolution!

Bikes, Beer, and Belgium: A BlackBerry Holiday

Namur, Belgium, taken with my BlackBerry and emailed in almost real time to friends abroad.

Lonely Planet is the bible of choice for backpackers all over the world. My LPs have gotten me around all sorts of places where I didn't speak the local language, didn't have time to wait to ask the locals how often the boat leaves for ___, and have given me the needed direction when faced with thousands of decisions ranging from how do I eat, to what is the best itinerary for 5 days in ___ country.

However, I was finding myself living vicariously through my LP, afraid to venture off its suggested paths, into the unknown world of self-reliant exploration. As a stepping stone away from the Lonely Planet Holiday towards Independant Travel, I have discovered the WikiTravel Holiday, the Google Holiday, and on a trip to Belgium and Holland in June 2008, the BlackBerry Holiday.

Holland's cities are living laboratories of Urban Planning...I had friends to visit in Amsterdam...my brother is a student of homebrew...Belgian beers are our family favourite...a trip to Holland and to Belgium as a 'research' trip...but if we are drinking, we should cycle instead of drive...I'm too busy for Wikitravel and Google research before we get on the plane! And so was born the theme of our trip: Bikes, Beer, and Belgium - on a BlackBerry.

Virtually all of our research including accomodation, cycling distances (but not elevations!!!), people to meet up with, brew pub opening hours, bicycle rentals, and restaurants came from various applications on my blackberry. At historical locations, I could simply wiki the name of the place, and we had an instant self-guided tour full of interesting little tidbits of information to help explain what we were seeing. On the train into a new city, we would search for accomodation, plug the address into google maps, route the path from the train station to the hotel including exact route distance, and organise our hotel choices with all of this in mind. Quite a departure from the usual walking-aimlessly-carrying-6-months-of-gear-on-your-back-looking-for-accommodation ritual that backpackers in Europe can empathise with.

What's dangerous about the convenience of travel is that we have gotten lazy. I rarely prepare anything before a trip these days, I know much less about the place I'm going before I depart, and this has very negative impacts on my depth of experience of new places. I used to have rules: always know how to say 'Please', 'Thank you', 'Excuse me', and 'Hello' in the local language before setting foot in a new country; have some knowledge of the political and social history of a place; it's staple cuisine and traditional dishes; etc. In fact, I have been so laissez-faire with travel in recent years that I have caught myself looking up the significance of places and sites after I've gotten back from a trip, when I finally have time to enquire. I am often so busy before a trip that I don't even have time to print the Wikitravel notes I copied and pasted way back when I had first bought the ticket!

I had an excellent trip to Beirut this summer -- I went with a friend who was from Beirut and with an urban planner colleague of mine in Abu Dhabi. Before I left, I was determined to finish the Heart of Beirut book I had bought the year before -- a book which explores the urban history of a famous square in Beirut through the eyes of the people who had occupied it, and how people and politics have transformed the urban form of Beirut. But in the days before my departure for Beirut, I was still in the book's prologue!

Luckily for me, my roommate's an urban planner...from Beirut...whose last job was working for the urban planning authority in Beirut responsible for the masterplanning and reconstruction of the city's historical downtown. In 1 hour, using the excellent diagrams and maps from my book, she walked me through the layers of the city, the story of what I was about to go see. And my trip to Beirut was one of the richest trips I have had in years. I don't expect the luxury of having a local urban planning expert who speaks perfect English guide me through every travel experience of my future, but it did remind me how important stories are to a landscape, and how they can mould your experience of one.

Will my BlackBerry only make me lazier? Or will it add layers of conventional information, alternative stories, historical reference, and sub-cultures to my experience? Why spend so much money and time traveling when you can't invest those few hours before you leave to learn things that will make your experience exponentially richer? If I depend on GPS all the time, will I entirely lose my good sense of direction? I take pictures with my BlackBerry and immediately in near real-time send them to friends abroad, yet I never get around to putting words to the picture by bringing any depth to the stories of my travels on my blog anymore? Is access to third party (English) information conveniently enabling me to avoid engaging with people right in front of me?

I think I know the easiest solution: a Lonely Planet Application for BlackBerrys.

The scale of authenticity.

Abu Dhabi's an excellent place to have young children, but for an imaginative 20-something, there's little to do except work. And I've been working 10-12 hour days for almost 2 months straight now. Though I really enjoy work right now.

A typical email from me these days reads "No, you have not been removed from 'the list' -- I've been working too much to write lengthy email updates these days." I think the reason my blog was so active while I was in Africa was because I had little else to do at work! But also, I had far more material to work with in Africa than I have here.

Abu Dhabi is a peaceful, island city where activities and places are controlled in order to maintain the peaceful status quo. There are no real spontaneous, organic, cool places to discover, no quirky cafes opening, or room for interpreting public space.

I went to Nepal for an extended long weekend in March, and we spent most of our time hanging out with the owners from our hotel -- an ultra-cool couple from Seattle -- and their ultra-cool friends. The couple met in Seattle and returned to the husband's homeland a few years ago to re-build his childhood home into a guesthouse, and they enjoy hosting their guests as if they are old friends at home, and they have all sorts of funky ex-pat friends who own restaurants and bars around Kathmandu. One evening, we were sitting around a fire at an open roof Korean resto-bar, having drinks with the American Embassy crew, talking about how much we appreciated having all these stylish and interesting places to go to in Kathmandu:

- Yah, but this is not the Kathmandu experience.
- I disagree. This is a Kathmandu experience, and something I have no guilt enjoying, because it's still something I cannot get in Abu Dhabi.
- Yah, but this is not the real Kathmandu.     Look around you -- we're all ex-pats.
- I totally get what you're saying, and if I hadn't just spent half the weekend staying with the family of our tea boy in his village, then I would probably walk away from this long weekend feeling rather empty about my experience in Nepal. But, on the scale of authenticity, sitting on this rooftop in Kathmandu, drinking Black Russians with a bunch of Americans, Koreans, and one Napalese person still ranks many notches higher than anything I've managed to find in inauthentic Abu Dhabi.

I think I spend very little time really "in" Abu Dhabi. It's not a bad place here, in fact, I think it would be heaven to raise small children here. And I hate it when people complain that there's nothing to do, because we have everything we need here, and people leave you in peace on the streets, and we're given space. But the truth is that Abu Dhabi is just too chill, with a focus on families. And 5 months of the year it's too hot to go outside.

Largely because of this simple climatic fact, much of life in Abu Dhabi feels very manufactured. Most urban activities were designed to avoid the reality of the outside world -- air conditioning runs all year round, and they even tore down the old central souk in order to build a 'modern' indoor one (ah, when you build a souk indoors, it's called a 'mall', and there are already plenty in Abu Dhabi!)

Mostly I lead a very domestic life. Topics of conversation revolve around work (almost my entire social circle are people I work with), buying furniture (I'm in the midst of my second move already, and there are always new people coming who inevitably talk about furniture), and cars (I just bought a pimped SUV – the most fuel-efficient SUV available in UAE, by the way). I lead more of a Burnaby life now than I ever lead in Burnaby!

The real world only bullies its way into one's life here when something goes wrong -- such as finding accomodation. My move has been filled with drama -- I was kicked out of my flat by building management because they want new tenants so that they can ask for more bribe money, then the roommate turned on me and displayed her un-humanly selfish and victimized attitude in its full glory, it took 2 months to find a new place to live (which we're paying $50,000 per year in rent for by the way -- Abu Dhabi is ridiculous for housing!!!), and now I'm homeless until the new pad is ready for moving in.

Even in family-oriented Abu Dhabi I seem to find some authentic drama to keep me entertained.

Since when is Jo'burg 6500 km from Cape Town?

Forget half the length of Africa, the final tally of our spontaneous road trip from Johannesburg to Cape Town ended up at 6500 km -- that's about 80% the length of Africa.

Until I have the chance to sit down and properly reflect on the trip, here's the experience in visual form http://www.photobox.co.uk/album/7357675, and here's the experience in point form...

Highlights:
-Victoria Falls -- an absolutely mind-blowing site, impressing me the likes of Machu Picchu
-Fish River Canyon, Namibia -- despite the un-imposing name, it's a stunning canyon, apparently second only to the Grand Canyon in stature
-Highway wildlife in Botswana -- we saw more wildlife along the highway than we did in the National Parks, and it was so refreshing to know that elephants, giraffs, zebras, and lions exist not only in National Parks, but still roam Africa's vast landscapes
-Cape Town -- along with the entire Western Cape, will never fail to inspire me
-People of Zimbabwe -- the glimpses of Zimbabwe we saw through our trip and conversations with emigrants in Botswana have stirred in me an absolute fascination in the country and its people
-Quirky accommodation across the region -- we stayed at everything across the board, and half the fun is chatting with the characters who run the B&B's, camp grounds, backpackers, huts, resorts, and even a camp for orphans!
-Namib dunes -- of course...
-Widely varying landscapes and people -- we had such a variation of landscapes to cross, and colourful personalities from across the region's social spectrum
-Leanne & Guillaume's wedding -- at Kirstenbosch botanical gardens, an event that brought people together from literally every corner of the world
-Reuniting with old friends as if no time has passed...

Lowlights:
-Forgetting my phone at the hotel just 15 km away -- but still in another country!
-Witnessing the circle of life -- such as a rotting elephant on the side of the highway and dozens of vultures capitalising on donkeys' roadside misfortunes
-Driving 6100 km of a 6500 km roadtrip -- though teaching Sara how to drive standard on the left side of the road and the right side of the car was quite a highlight -- go girl!
-Botswana's landscape is really quite boring to drive across, but the coolness of the people makes up for it

We made some amendments to our list of acquired skills along the journey:
-Charming border guards out of paying heavy registration fees to enter their country
-Disinfecting our car and ourselves at dozens of Foot and Mouth disease checkpoints across Botswana
-Avoiding men in military gear carrying riffles, mysteriously exiting and entering the un-fenced National Parks in Zimbabwe
-Off-roading our little VW Polo like a Land Cruiser, and still being the only car in Namibia that didn't get a flat
-Recovering bank cards eaten up by ATMs across Botswana
-Exporting South Africa's extremely polite highway driving to Botswana
-Name that road kill -- we have identified an elephant, donkeys (although it was difficult to identify underneath a dozen vultures), eagles, something that looked like a baby gorilla, and then the usual dogs and cats
-Dodging livestock -and- elephants -- we also shared the road with a giraffe, zebras, dozens of baboons, and other exotic mammals
-BYO-Hotel -- sleeping in the car when we can't find reasonably priced accommodation, and drying our clothes in the car while on the road
-Capitalising on any opportunity for make-shift workouts
-Decorating Marco's windshield (our car) with colourful insects
-Having lively filling station conversations -- our most interesting conversations have mostly been with gas station attendees and chats with various Zimbabwean hawkers at filling stations
-Eating everything but Batswana food in Botswana, including Portugese, Chinese, South African, Lebanese...
-Entertaining eachother -- I think we must have covered every topic of conversation known to man before we reach Cape Town!

2300km down, 2300 km to go!

My first trip to Southern Africa, I spent a month living here. I had my hair cut, I bought underwear, I ate whole foods, went shopping, and lead a pretty domestic, sedentary life with our South African friends.

This trip is virtually the opposite -- we are combing across the surface of four countries, a road trip the distance of about half the length of Africa.

Driving is not the only skill we have mastered along the way though. We are also learning how to:
-Charm border guards out of paying heavy registration fees to enter their country
-Name that road kill -- we have identified an elephant, donkeys (although it was difficult to identify underneath a dozen vultures), eagles, something that looked like a baby gorilla, and then the usual dogs and cats.
-Dodge livestock -and- elephants -- we have also shared the road with a giraffe, dozens of baboons, and other exotic mammals.
-BYO-Hotel -- sleeping in the car when we can't find reasonably priced accomodation.
-Have lively filling station conversations -- our most interesting conversations have mostly been with gas station attendees and chats with various Zimbabwean hawkers at filling stations.
-Distinguish between reality and our dreams -- as usual, our anti-malarials are giving us unimaginably vivid dreams to enjoy.
-Entertain eachother -- I think we will have covered every topic of conversation known to man before we reach Cape Town!

Tomorrow we say farewell to Botswana after a week of traversing this vast, barely populated country of really chill people, and a short trip to Zimbabwe to see the absolutely monumental, majestic, and massive Victoria Falls. Tomorrow we head to Windhoek in Namibia, where we will begin our descent through the Namib dunes to the Western Cape of South Africa, exhausting our one CD of Batswana music along the way.

Re-thinking xmas.

Normally this time of year, I send a mass email of alternative holiday gift ideas, but nowadays so many other people do a better job.

There are 59 alternative gift ideas here >>
More resources here >>
And plenty of goats here >>

Car-Culture Shock.

I have been busy moving into my new apartment, traveling virtually every weekend, and working much harder than I'm legally allowed to during the holy month of Ramadan. As such, I haven't had much time to write. So I thought, in the mean time, I'd at least share some of my email responses to questions people have been posing me...

How is it going over there? You arrived in Abu Dhabi the same time as Christopher arrived from Sierre Leone to Toronto, so I'm going to time your culture shock together! Has it began yet?
I think our experiences of culture shock may vary slightly...I work and socialise almost exclusively with Montrealers and Vancouverites. Even my two non-Canadian friends both lived in Canada for awhile. Plus the fact that I've been on the road for so long, I'm kind of instantly adaptable these days. The biggest cultural difference is that I'm adjusting to car culture.

What's it like?
Well, I've had it really easy here. I got hooked up with an apartment with a really cool Aussie girl my workmate met on the street, in the building 3 of my work colleagues live in. So I have a fab place, fully stocked with furniture and dishes and the like, and my workmates seem happy enough to drive me everywhere. I basically haven't lifted a finger. I'm so stocked up that when it was time to have a potluck amongst the crew, I hosted it because I have the most dinning space and dishes. I even have a guest room with a double bed all set-up.

Abu Dhabi is a place that's very difficult to characterise, and my experience here revolves around my job, my weekend travels, and my workmates who live in my building. I feel like I could make more definitive statements about Oman than I could about Abu Dhabi, because I don't feel like I've remotely scratched the surface of AD yet. I feel like I'm combing the surface with a car, but I'm not even the one behind the wheel.

What's work like?
Work has been fine, but new staff is always arriving, and change is the only constant, so things might not always be as good as they've been for me at work. I anticipate that any cool projects I've been given to manage will be re-allocated to new staff members just when they start to get cool.
How do you get exercise with the not going outside part? Are you swimming there?
We have a pool and a gym on the roof of our building, so I go to the gym about twice a week and I swim a couple times a week too. But not so much as exercise -- it's still too hot in the pool and outside to swim for exercise. One night I went swimming in the Persian Gulf at 4am, and even then the water was still a couple degrees hotter than the air -- maybe 35 degrees at 4am.

But this week it has finally cooled down, and being outdoors is actually beginning to be enjoyable. As autumn ensues, I'll be able to comfortably explore my environment from outside of the car and actually penetrate my environment enough to have some actual culture shock.

Thank God It’s – Thursday?

Some Q&A about my first week in the United Arab Emirates.

TGIF has a whole new meaning in the UAE – people are literally thanking God on Fridays as they go to the mosque for mid-day prayer after a long Sunday to Thursday workweek. Though I doubt the TGI Friday restaurant chain had that much forethought when they opened up shop in Dubai.

Isn’t Abu Dhabi where Garfield would send Nermal?
Yes, Abu Dhabi is where Garfield would send Nermal – and sometimes Odie – by airmail. It is also the capital of the United Arab Emirates, a country composed of 7 Emirates including Abu Dhabi’s famous cousin, Dubai. His Highness Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan is President of the UAE and Ruler of Abu Dhabi, and Abu Dhabi is governed by His Highness Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi.

Where is the UAE?
The UAE is located on the northeast corner of the Arabian Peninsula and is bordered by Saudi Arabia, Oman, and the Persian Gulf. Other neighbouring countries on the Arabian Peninsula include Yemen, along the Persian Gulf are Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait, and Iraq, and just across the Gulf is Iran.

How far is Dubai?
I went to Dubai this weekend, and it took about an hour to drive there. Though the UAE is one country, each Emirate enjoys a great deal of autonomy. While Dubai has invested heavily in tourism and has deregulated real estate such that foreigners can own property in the Emirate, Abu Dhabi is more government and industry focused, where only Emiratis can own land. Dubai is a collision of new meets old, east meets west, where the “locals” are filthy rich and are the last people you find on the streets. Scattered “downtowns” of new developments compete along the highway with few pedestrian and road connections between them where social life is concentrated in the towers, while the fantastic older city is centred along the creek, with a great number of ferry and pedestrian connections between the various souks and other centres of migrant worker street-life. We arrived at mid-day on a Friday – prime prayer time – and it was thrilling to see the streets of Dubai at their most social hour.

Do you have to wear a headscarf?
The UAE is a very liberal country, and I have felt even less threatened here than I did in Turkey and Morocco – also very liberal Islamic countries. The UAE is composed of 80% foreign nationals, and women’s style of dress reflects this – women dress in anything from a head-to-toe black Burqa, to very tight clothing with a headscarf, to knee-length skirts and a tank top, and Indian women where saris. Emirati men all seem to wear their traditional white Arabian draped clothing with a white head piece.

Where do you live?
I’m staying at a hotel until I sufficiently furnish and move in to an apartment that I’ll be sharing with an American woman in a downtown district. The other three planners all live in the same building about 20 minutes away from my future home. The hood I’m moving into is very Pakistani, and everyone is super friendly. As Aaron says, in the absence of a communal language, the currency here is sweetness.

What’s work like?
The working week is Sunday through Thursday, with Friday and Saturday being our weekends. Our office is a new branch of the government that is still being defined, named, and housed. There are three bosses in our office [two Emirati, and one Australian], four planners [2 Canadians, an American, and an Aussie], and about a dozen managerial, administrative and support staff members, including local, Lebanese, and Bangladeshi nationals, with about as many women as men. We also have a team of consultants from Boston working in our office for the next year, three of whom are permanently based in our office in AD and are staying at the same hotel is me. Lunch is the major meal of the day in the UAE, and we eat lunch communally in the afternoons together, usually Lebanese food. If my name wasn’t difficult enough, I share an office with an Australian planner of Greek origin.

What’s daily life like for you?
Everything feels familiar and normal for me here, but in reality, it’s far too soon for me to accurately describe daily life here. I have described the city as a paved Morocco, while others have described it as Texas meets Tehran. There is no alcohol in the UAE, except at hotels [that said, we still managed to find a 2-for-1 margarita happy hour this weekend at a Tex Mex restaurant on the ground floor of a hotel in Dubai]. It’s very very hot, generally 40-50 degrees Celsius with 40-80% humidity. Before our epic walking tour around Dubai yesterday, I hadn’t spent more than 15 minutes outside in the heat at a time, and my colleagues with whom I was travelling with seemed to concur. I estimate that yesterday was the most consecutive hours I’d ever spent in sweltering heat in my lifetime – in Japan, I’d duck into a convenience store for 10 minutes just before reaching the threshold of being desperately overheated. Yesterday, I surpassed that threshold pretty quickly, and spent most of the day almost numb, wondering how there could be any more liquids inside me left to sweat. But it was absolutely worth it – a Friday to thank God for.

Been there, but have I really "done" that?

-You saw Hadrian’s Arch in Rome?
-Umm…yes. That’s the arch next to the Colloseum right? There are so many…
-Wow – what an incredible experience. I mean, I’ve never been there, but I took a course in Roman History, and wrote a paper about Hadrian. Did you know he built that arch after [blah blah blah]? But, what do I know. I’ve never been there.
-Well I’d “been” to Rome 4 times before this particular trip. I did a degree in Archaeology and didn’t want to go to Rome before I had the chance to really research the place and dedicate a lot of time and effort to do the experience justice. But eventually, I realised I’m never going to have the time to do the experience justice, so on the fifth trip, I finally dove in and saw Rome. But really, there are a lot of places I’ve been where I honestly believe someone who has read a book about the place has “been” there more than I have.

My last trip to Italy was a two-week holiday with my mother as her retirement wish. When she met me in London to depart for Italy, I was in a sorry mental and physical shape – I was recovering from living in Ghana where I was constantly sick, a month in South Africa where I was in chronic pain from some of my medications, and was experiencing quite a bit of culture shock from re-entering the Western World. Despite all of this, our trip was one of the most enriching trips I’d ever had in Italy. Not so much because of places, but more because of the Italian lifestyle, and getting to share the experience with my excellent, and ever-deserving mother.

When travelling, many of our experiences are defined by how hungry/thirsty we are, by the company of people we find ourselves in, by our mental state, and by how friendly people were our first hour in a country. Perspective is important when trying to mitigate these internal and external effects on our travelling experiences, but really, what is travel if not being internally and externally affected by environmental circumstances?

I’ve written before about how travel and living abroad can be vastly different experiences, largely depending on depth of experience [see “Aspiring to be a piece of meat”]. The more places you tackle in a shorter time, the shallower the layers of the experience can be. In one’s lifetime, they can see a thin version of the entire world, a deeper experience of some few key places, or a profound experience of one place. All these experiences are worth having, as long as we keep the objective of our discoveries in mind: vacation, holidays, travels, or cultural immersion?

All inclusive packages. North Americans work very hard, and when we go on vacation, we want a vacation. Travelling means constant decision-making, and it can be far more relaxing to have someone [presumably] in-the-know make all those decisions for you. Plus it’s often cheaper to get the package than the plane tickets alone. While for me a vacation means going “home”, I can entirely appreciate why some people would want to go to Cuba to have the experience of being in a hot Canada, rather than the experience of Cuba. Mingling with locals, gauging expectations, and being a model citizen while travelling is exhausting work, and often requires a recovery period afterwards – a real vacation. Sit, relax, drink daiquiris from filtered water ice cubes, and be served. Just make sure you say “thank you”, try to patronise more sustainable resorts with proper environmental and labour policies, and remember that you are on vacation – you are not travelling Cuba.

Backpacking. Above anything, backpackers are about hanging out with other backpackers, and can be a hugely entertaining way to see the world. Within minutes of meeting these people from all over the world, you will find you have days worth of things to talk about because, regardless of your geographic origins, you all studied social sciences and come from middle-class families in former British or Spanish colonies. You can spot the rookies by conversations about accents or different words we use in Canada vs. the US vs. Australia vs. England. The Aussies will poke fun at the English, the Kiwis at the Aussies, and the Canadians will swear we don’t sound anything like Americans and promise we can tell the difference.

Some of the best laughs I’ve had in my life was with a group of 6 backpackers – 2 from England, 3 from Australia, and me – whom I had the pleasure of spending 24 hours in relentless company with in Lithuania. I had been to Lithuania 3 times before, but as a Lithuanian where my family picked me up from the airport, toured me around, and dropped me off at the airport. I had never experienced Lithuania as a tourist, and wanted to see how my homeland compared with other European cities I had travelled to.

With these backpackers in Vilnius, we cooked a communal feast together for dinner, toured the city together, everyone offering fun anecdotes about how this place reminded them of ____ in ____, and where to go in ____. We drank beer on a creek side terrasse, got shushed by the locals during a Lithuanian poetry reading that none of us could understand, and we will all remember what a good time we had in Lithuania.

This experience can be repeated all over the world, and if stuck to exclusively can become very tiresome. I swore I’d never backpack again after I saw Indian Dreamcatchers being sold in Thailand, China, Vancouver, Venice, and Paris -- all within a 3-month period. But in smaller doses, backpacking is yet another excellent way to enjoy the world.

Travelling alone. The loneliest birthday of my life was spent in the French Alps in 2002. I was an archaeologist in central France, but took the afternoon off of work to spend the weekend in Annecy – a picturesque ski village about 45 minutes south of Geneva, complete with medieval canals and stone buildings. When I arrived, it was already dark, the hostel staff wasn’t answering their phone, and I didn’t have the address of the hostel. I hitch hiked into town and found a cheap hotel room in an empty building in an empty neighbourhood, and didn’t see another soul for the rest of the evening. Sometimes you just need bodies around you, even if they’re unfamiliar.

The next day, the hostel staff managed to answer their phone, and after a long day of walking around town, I spent the afternoon chatting with the hostel bartender. He and some of the hostel staff were going out that night to celebrate a friend’s birthday that lived on the other side of Lac Annecy, and there was an extra seat in the car. This ended up being one of my most enjoyable evenings while travelling, and would have never been possible if I weren’t travelling alone. I have similar stories about walking from Greece to Macedonia alone, travelling to the Sahara desert alone, and a fun coach to Istanbul alone.

Travelling with friends. I have lot of friends who I don’t think would be very fun to travel with, but I have also had company who have made the best of some pretty dodgy situations. Despite constant obstacles and sickness in Peru, I most remember all the clever banter with Sarah. In Latvia, poor hostel organisation and roommates with grossly different personal boundaries turned out to be a platform for Anastasia’s excellently delivered comedic reactions, even after having to share a bed with a drunk Spanish boy who climbed in with her for 3 hours.

Friends who you meet while travelling alone are great because you instantly have something in common, but equally important are friends with whom you have history. While I have bonded with all sorts of people all over the world, often very quickly because of obvious common interests and personality traits, but there is no substitution time-tested friendships, regardless of how irrelevant you are to each other in contemporary contexts. Human relations are about filling roles, and when we travel we meet people who mutually need someone to fill those familiar roles for the duration of that particular, however temporary, context. Having a lot in common with someone is also really important in friendships and has an important role in terms of familiarity and feeling understood, but old friends have the familiarity of resilience and the comfort of knowing that they can overcome obstacles.

Travelling as a couple. It can be exhausting trying to maintain emotional health by keeping in touch with familiar people back home while building new communities of people along the way. Bringing a partner with you really helps with emotional issues, allows you to share something profound with your partner, and, as a woman, travelling with a man can really help with some of the daily discomforts of being approached by opportunistic men. It’s like you can have your life and travel too. However, travelling with your partner can easily limit how deep your experience is locally, because you don’t need to seek comfort from your environment, and so it’s easier to turn to each other instead. Plus, the only people who want to talk to you are other travelling couples.

Particular knowledge. I live around the world and have friends who live around the world, and visiting them is my favourite introduction to a new place. They understand local customs and some language, can hold your hand through the initial discomforts, tell you the good places to go, and are often excited to use you as a partner in adventure for things they can’t do with their local friends. The benefit of growing up in Canada is that many of my friends are first-generation and have family to visit in other parts of the world. I also enjoy theme travelling -- microbrewery road trips around Cascadia, wine tasting in South Africa, archaeology in the former Roman empire, wildlife viewing – these are activities enriched by developing a particular expertise about one common layer. Or by travelling with someone who holds that particular knowledge.

Expats. There are technical differences between expats and sojourners, but I will combine the two here. Expats are like backpackers who graduated to the next level. Expats vary greatly – in most ex-pat communities, people are some combination of: (1) the expats who only hang out with other expats, whose definition of a good place is based on having cool expats there, who transport their world to different geographical locations around the world; (2) the expats who will have nothing to do with other expats. They do not greet the only other white person in town, they can’t remember the last time they spoke English, they write in their day planners in the local language and only eat non-Western foods; and (3) the expats who have local and expat friends, but whose expat friends are actually enriching their local experience rather than solely being a source of escaping it [also necessary at times].

When I lived in Ghana, there were only really 2 white people who lived in town: Kathryn and me. Kathryn and I didn’t meet until she had been there 4 months, and I had been there 2 months. Kathryn lived with a family, had to learn Twi to get by, worked in a small office where no one drank alcohol, and was living on a much tighter budget than me and therefore ate a lot of street food. I lived with a young Ghanaian woman, my friends were constantly speaking in really fast Twi, I worked in a huge office with all sorts of politicians, private consultants, technocrats, bureaucrats, Community-NGOs, and general members of the public, where the big men would scoff at the idea of street food, but I could cook vegetables at home. I learned more Twi from Kathryn than from any of my Ghanaian friends, learned about taboo subjects like family life and the treatment of children, and ate street food all over Ghana because of her. Kathryn learned about young Ghanaian social life, how Ghanaians drink, how Ghanaians settle a bill, the politics of Ghanaian marriages, and how to tell stories in colourful English to a Ghanaian audience. Our friendship was a necessary escape, but also an enrichment of the Ghanaian experience.

Nomads. I’ve written about nomads a lot. Nomads are everywhere, and yet nowhere, can feel at home anywhere, yet nowhere. Nomads don’t compare how many countries they’ve been to or how long they’ve been on the road. They do normal things in extraordinary settings, have a wide range of insatiable interests, and have gotten really good at letting themselves be in the hands of others. They like to have guest rooms whenever they are temporarily settled, and they know another nomad when they see them.

There are limitless ways of experiencing the world, and while some classify them as being a greyscale of shallow to deep, I think of them more as different axes across a landscape. Depending on an individual’s interests and objectives, they are all experiences worth having, none being necessarily more important than another. While my journey seems to be profoundly geographic, others chose to understand a variety of contexts in one place, or concentrate on their relationships with their partners, or study something like meditation, or yoga. If I didn’t travel so much, I think I’d be a much deeper person.

Revisiting Ghana...via YouTube.

As I prepare to depart for the Persian Gulf, my thoughts are of...Africa? Visiting colleagues from Ghana in Canada, retrieving my Ghanaian music collection, and watching 'Blood Diamonds' has set a tone, I think. Blood Diamonds had some insightful one-liners and introduced the audience to a lot of issues about white people in Africa. But it is still a film intended for a Hollywood audience, and many sacrifices had to me made to cater to the objective of making the film accessible.

My experience in Ghana was nothing like the film's depiction of Sierre Leone -- even when under military dictatorship, Ghana was quite peaceful, and Ghana has been a model democracy for the last 8 years. Though tribalism occurs in Ghana just like everywhere else in Africa, the dominance of the Ashanti, the limited role of colonialism in Ghana at playing tribes against each other [that statement is very debateable], and the cultural priority of having a good time first [though this seems to be a pan-West African cultural trait], seems to have kept Ghanaians loving each other over the last 50 years of independence, unlike most of their neighbours.

Some clips I found on YouTube that help illustrate some of my experiences in Ghana...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=st13lz8EmAUhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mi_sxqlwRNY
Kumasi's Kejetia station/market. Kumasi's the capital of the Ashanti Kingdom, and Ghana's second largest city, but much older than Accra and therefore actual feels like a city rather than an extended village.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0FZj2hoI1f4
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OyRumEg2_og
These clips belong in my "Cultural Lesson: Taking public transit" post. The first is a shot of being on a tro-tro stuck in traffic, I'm assuming as a result of a car accident. Hawkers quickly fill every crevasse with goods to be sold -- their entrepreneurial spirit never fails to amaze me. Very similar to the experience of waiting for the tro-tro to fill, or of any tro-tro station in Ghana for that matter.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0bCeBCy0Bm4
A typical Sunday at church. Sometimes these events would go until 4am -- piercing voices over amplifiers and speakers set 5 notches louder than they [or my ears] could stand. Outfits 5 notches too bright for my eyes, and food 5 times too spicy to be enjoyable. But GOD DO I MISS IT!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s07oBh007Jw
Very typical of streets in Accra. The kiosks on the side of the road selling phone units, the concrete 'drinking spots', the drains/open sewers lining the roads, about one third of the buildings being under construction [it seems to take at least 10 years to finish a building] and dust, dust, dust. Though there's a serious lack of laughing in this video -- a key feature of Ghanaian life.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JBgQO5-VN6Q
Aaah, Accra's busy Kaneshie Market, right next to Accra's largest tro-tro station, Circle. This place was Cheryl [a fellow CIDA intern in Accra]'s idea of hell. Very lively, very claustrophobic.
http://www.ghana50.gov.gh/
The official website of Ghana@50 - the first sub-Saharan African country to gain independence. Includes a video of Kwame Nkrumah's famous speech "The battle has ended. And Ghana, your beloved country is free forever". Still looking for the Ghana@50 theme song though...

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...

Reflections of a Nomad.

This is my third trip to Toronto where I have attempted to move out of my beautiful home on Brunswick and College. Once in May 2006, once in September 2006, and now in July 2007. Each time I take out another load of my stuff, either shipping it to my parents’ house in Vancouver, or spreading the burden to new households across Toronto.

I've been travelling around the world visiting old friends for over four months now. It certainly takes the bite out of being unemployed [and plants it squarely on the wallet].

Constantly visiting dear friends has finally gotten me used to answering questions about myself. Going to my High School reunion, a mini-elementary school reunion, and having a facebook reunion with people I grew up with in summer swimming has given me a lot of practice. It's been lovely seeing everyone -- everyone looks the exact same and it all feels very ordinary and familiar to me. Yet everyone I've reunited with -- especially at my High School reunion -- has been struck by how surreal it is to see each other, and how different everyone looks.

-So, do you still live in Burnaby?
-Um. I don’t really live anywhere.
-What do you mean?
-Well, I just came back from living in Africa and am probably moving to the Middle East.
-How long are you in town then?
-I don’t really know.
-What do you do?
-I’m an urban planner.
-Where do you work?
-Um, well I do contracts, so I'm sort of a freelancer.
-Ok, so your last contract was as an urban planner, working for whom?
-My last job was in international development, and my job before that was as a researcher.
-But before that you were an urban planner?
-No.

My facebook reunion asked the question more simply: what are you all doing now? I replied as such:

Story #1 - I'm unemployed, unmarried, and stay at my parents' house in Burnaby.
Story #2 - I'm an international woman of mystery who, since ending her swim coaching career in 2000, works half the year abroad as an archaeologist/teacher/waitress/urban planner, and spends the other half jet-setting around the globe.
Story #3 - I secretly married a spy back in 1997 in Scotland.

The life of a nomad can be a balancing act sometimes. Having pockets of possessions dotted around the world can leave one feeling stretched out and un-gathered. But removing all your stuff from a place makes one feel like there’s nothing left there to go back to – the final slamming of the door behind you. The symbolic gesture of having wine glasses, chopsticks, a duvet, and a carpet leave the door open slightly ajar for a possible return.

Stuff.
Place.
Self.
Friends.
Heart.
Head.

They’re rarely all in the same space. The luxury/burden of being spread out across the world. Always everywhere, yet never anywhere.

Whenever I leave a place, I can safely say that I’ll probably see that community of friends again. After living in Japan in 2001, I went back to enjoy my Japanese community in 2003 and 2004. I have had several reunions – in Toronto, Vancouver, and Cape Town – with my Istanbul community. I revisited my Austrian community of France in 2002 when I went to Sicily in 2003. And the list continues. It’s a comforting thing to know that leaving a place is more of an “Aurevoir” than a “Goodbye”.

I have become a bit of a chameleon – immediately adjusting to whatever environment I find myself in, and effortlessly revisiting the facets of myself that surface from familiar friends, no matter how much time has passed since I last saw them. “Every time I see you, it’s as if no time has passed!” It’s like I live neither geographically nor chronologically, actually forgetting all the various time-space experiences that have passed since I last said “aurevoir” to any given community.

If that wasn't confusing enough, I also have a whole community of people whom I only see abroad. We meet under very temporal and contextual circumstances, yet we seem to be one of the few consistent things in each other’s lives. The few people we can really count on seeing are each other, because we literally could be anywhere [and therefore everywhere]. Experiences which seem surreal to others are common for us, and what’s common for others is surreal for us.

Sometimes it can be difficult to explain to people exactly what I do, and it can be a lot easier to be mysterious than to give direct answers. Direct answers always result in the same direct question: how do you afford to do what you do?

I hate to burst everyone’s bubbles, but I am none of the following: an heiress; the beneficiary of a rich Japanese business man; secretly on a CSIS salary; multilingual; have unknowing husbands all over the world writing cheques for me; nor do I take some sort of miracle pill that enables me to do what I do.

I wouldn’t change my life for a minute, but I do what I do because I made sacrifices [and because I have very understanding friends and family who are fabulous and share their lives and stuff with me so I don’t have to transport my own of everything, everywhere I go].

We are constantly making priorities in our life, adjusting and re-prioritising elements of our lives in the face of changes to our own definitions of self-success. No one has all of everything. It’s like you have a pool with all sorts of toys you can fit inside, but the size of everyone’s pools are pretty much the same. I’ve filled mine with traveling and learning, and made sacrifices in the home-ownership and marriage departments. Most people do a better job at balancing which departments they fill their lives with. Whenever people are like “you have the coolest life” I say “but I don’t have anything except pictures and memories. I don’t even actually own my suitcases – I borrowed them from my mother.”

Just when we nomads think we’ve got it all under control, floating around the globe with only our blogs knowing exactly where to find us, it’s when we are packing that it all catches up with us [or when we’re trying to find someone to insure us!]. It can be deeply scary packing everything into a suitcase or two, putting it in a corner by the door. Like THERE IT IS. All you have to show for your life fits into a small corner. But it also fits onto your back, so you can take it anywhere!

I pack the wine glasses and decanter Paul gave me for my birthday when I first moved to Toronto. I’ll donate them to Danielle and Andrea. My duvet that was my grandmas and I brought out east my first winter in Montreal six years ago is at Chrisa’s. My sushi dishes from Japan in 2001, my chopsticks my brother gave me in 1999. They really are nice wine glasses. The kind I would love to have in my own place someday.

The only thing I can’t seem to find are my speakers. How much joy did those speakers bring to my life! I don’t have my phone numbers with me, so I can’t call my Brunswick roommates to ask where I left them. What a convenient lack of organisation on my part -- I guess the door is still open for a return some day. I flick the glass of wine and listen to the long ring that persists, pour some wine in it, and toast to myself a final glass before I give the set to Danielle. I smile and realise I'm not going to find my speakers -- despite three moves, I'm still managing to leave some trace of myself at my beautiful Brunswick and College home after all.

"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.

Needing a vacation from being on holidays.

I've been in Morocco, Spain, England, and Latvia in the last week, and am off to Lithuania tomorrow.

Caught some Italian opera...in Latvia...where I've met up with a friend whom I met in France 6 years ago...who's from Oregon...while trying to coordinate my next means of employment with people in Canada and the Middle East...while I'm in Africa and Europe.

It was so difficult trying to explain to the expats in Morocco that tourism was #4 on my list of things to do in Morocco. #1 - look for gainful employment; #2 - re-connect with my friends and family in preparation for landing; #3 - relax and enjoy some sort of lifestyle while my bags were firmly in one place; and #4 - see some of Morocco.

Unfortunately, Morocco is a tourist's heaven with its rich culture, starkly varying landscapes, history, and cuisine. But I just wanted a vacation from being a tourist. I wanted to sit at a desk, do mundane tasks, not go outside and enjoy the sun, and not see anything new and exciting.

Luckily here in Latvia, Anastasia and I seem to be on the same page and have spent most of our time here passively soaking in Latvian culture via meals, drinks, strolls through medieval city centres, and bathing on beautiful Baltic beaches.

And while I feel like I could stay in the Baltics forever, I'm also looking forward to an extended vacation from being on holidays when I land back in Canada in a few weeks. Excitement is always what deviates from the norm of one's usual existence.