The last two weeks were just super busy and I am so glad
they are over. It’s now June, which is kind of unbelievable.
I guess I have about 10 more months in Guangzhou,
and then home leave and then training in D.C., followed by an arrival in Istanbul about this time
next year.
Between now and the time I leave here, I calculated I have
about 12 more holidays, two of them multi-day ones. I tried to lay out some
potential travel or stuff to do on those days. In September, I’m taking off a
week to travel through China,
and I’m debating taking off a week in November to go to New Zealand.
The next one, the one I’m taking off a spare day for, is in
June and I finally got an alternate for Katmandu:
I’m going to go to Busan, Korea. It’s on the southeast tip
and is on a beach, plus there are mountains. The ticket was about the same as Katmandu, so that worked
out fine. I don’t have a place to stay yet but am not worried about it. A guy
at work is married to a woman from there so I am going to pick his brain on
suggestions. It’ll be low-key, though.
It’d be nice if before I leave here, the Disneyland in Shanghai would open, but
I don’t think that’s going to happen. It was due to open this summer, fall and
then winter but it’s now been postponed until spring. Tokyo Disney is still an
option, though.
I still want to go to Katmandu,
and Brunei
is also on the list. Those are really only the two new countries I can probably
visit (at least unless I take off more time on any given day) but I am
considering Krabi, Thailand;
and Singapore
again. I’ve been to Singapore
for a daylong visa run and to Bangkok
and Chiang Mai, but there’d be something new to see.
Who knows, though. Hong Kong
is still the go-to place. It’s expensive, but cheap to get to and that counts
for something. Plus, it’s also only two hours away and requires little
planning. That counts for a lot.
A group went this weekend but I stayed home and opted to do
not a whole lot. It’s just so amazingly hot. The other day it was 93 with a
“feels like” of 110. My two-block walk to work is enough to sweat through
clothes. Yesterday, it also monsooned like nobody’s business. We’ve got it all
here, folks.
I woke up with a sore throat yesterday (it’s escaladed
today) and decided to just do some cooking. I’m going to make a dessert for a
going-away party next week and I needed to test-run a new recipe. After packing
out some colleagues, I got some cacao powder and found a cookie recipe. It
sounded a little sketchy – cookies with two kinds of pepper – so I wanted to
give it a shot. They’re pretty good. They definitely bit you back.
The cacao powder – yes, not cocoa – came from the apartment
of a colleague who had to leave quickly. This week was the packout. I am so
glad it’s over. I still have a couple of steps late, but they pale in
comparison to arranging someone’s house, then overseeing people come in and
pack everything, then load it and take it away.
It took all day Wednesday and then Thursday morning. They
had 86 boxes and 3300 pounds of stuff. By comparison, I had about 750 pounds,
and probably 250 of that was toiletries and other consumables.
Today is one more small inventory and after that, I hope
it’s done. Of course, I still have five bottles of wine to try to get to them.
Maybe it’s never done.
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