You can go home again

Breathing a big sigh of relief right now. The federal government has shut down but I’m one of the people still cleared to work, however, I got an email telling me to “remain in TDY status,” which I interpreted as “stay where you are until the whole thing blows over.” Fortunately, I learned that’s not the case. What the person meant was “continue as planned and go home as scheduled.” That is a huge relief because I’m due to return to Baghdad at the end of the year and am there long enough to, hopefully, do some paperwork and some laundry and then repack and head off to my three-week vacation. Erbil is nice in its own way, but there’s no place like home.

Beyond school, I’ve never taken three weeks off at once, and it’s a lot of planning. My hope was to get stuff paid for in advance so that I will have empty credit cards once I land. As a result, the thought of having to postpone or cancel the trip was freaking me out. I think in one day last week, I charged four side trips that averaged $200 each, and that’s only a portion of what I’ve pre-paid. With few exceptions, lodging and transport (trains and planes) have all been charged and paid in advance. This is going to be a trip like Alaska was for me: really big and so expensive I really don’t want to know what the total cost winds up being.

It’ll probably be my only grand scale trip, though. I’ll get four long vacations in the year and a half I’m here but the next one is to America and the last one will be my first cruise, so it’ll be paid off before I depart. The remaining one is up in the air but I’m not in any rush to plan it and package tour sounds good to me.

Erbil is still good, too, although I am really chilly right now. Our housing units are on par with Morocco’s but most of the rooms have individual wall AC/heat units. To go from my room to the kitchen, I have to leave a warm fuzzy room with a nice rug and walk over cold tile through a room with cold, concrete walls before I get to the kitchen. There’s a heating unit in there, but since the door to the wide-open hallway is always open, it’s usually not worth it to turn it on.

I spent quite a bit of time in there over the weekend because we had a Christmas potluck dinner and I offered to bring mashed potatoes. Since I was the only one bringing them and you have to have mashed potatoes for Christmas, I bought a huge amount of potatoes. Scrubbing and chopping them kept me warm, and then I went to boil them. There were two giant pots in the cabinet and it took both of them. Although the potatoes would almost all fit into the bigger pot, water did not. I wound up spending about an hour boiling them so I could then mash them. It was warm.

And thank God, there was a potato masher. When I volunteered to bring mashed potatoes, it didn’t occur to me that a kitchen could not have a potato masher. I mean, I own two. But I hadn’t checked before I bought the taters, so I was really relieved when I found them in the third drawer I ransacked.

Fortunately, there was a cutting board. I hadn’t known this until my second morning. I make hash browns and eggs and couldn’t initially find the cutting board but on the second morning, I found it hiding behind the clean dish rack.

 

One of my roommates, the one from Albany, has been here for months and didn’t know about the cutting board. I timed my potatoes so she could have time, room and pots to make enough deviled eggs to feed a refugee camp. As a result, I’d abandoned the kitchen for warmer pastures and didn’t notice she was slicing eggs and chopping scallions on a plate. When I circled back later, she lamented about the lack of a cutting board, I showed her where it lived. She had no idea, poor thing. It was a lot of eggs and scallions.

In other news, I still haven’t seen “The Mule,” but hope to on my vacation. No clue if it’s playing in Oz, but we’ll see. Anyway, in doing a slightly stalker-ish Internet search for a different reason, I discovered that Toby Keith sings a song for the movie and there’s a video with clips from the movie.

I found Karen! She is behind Dianne Wiest, wearing the ivory dress and sitting with her movie husband. I can’t wait to see the movie. Clint Eastwood rocks.

There once was a woman who lived in a CHU. Thankfully, it wasn’t me.

We had container housing units at Hope Village. You might not have seen these, but you can picture them: A tractor-trailer, minus the tractor, divided into a couple of rooms. That’s a container housing unit, or CHU. Hope Village’s didn’t have any sort of plumbing because we had a separate trailer for it, but the ones here in Erbil are “wet,” meaning they have a tiny bathroom in them. But no kitchen or washer and dryer, two things that I really appreciate for a three-week TDY.

Fortunately, I am not living in a CHU. Instead, I’m in a giant house that’s designated for female TDYers here. Right now, there are three of us. The other two are in two of the three upstairs bedrooms, which is also where the washers and a bathroom are. I’m currently the lone occupant of the downstairs, which consists of 2-3 bedrooms (really it’s three, but one is half the size of the others and only contains an iron), a giant kitchen, a bath and a half, an oversized hallway that’s both longer and wider than some bedrooms I’ve had, and 2-3 oddly configured sitting room/living room/formal dining rooms. I think these used to be two separate rooms, because there are two doors within a two feet of each other that lead to the oversized hallway.

They’re nice digs for a couple of weeks and I’ve really enjoyed cooking. Since the temporary employees meander in and out, it’s kind of hostel-like (though absolutely not hostile). There’s a lot of random leftover ingredients laying around, like pasta, spinach and garlic.

Since basically our compound here is literally a couple of city blocks, there are little grocery stores (smaller than 7/11s) that sell the basics, which is perfect for me since I’m a basic kind of person. I got rice, macaroni (I didn’t know about the cache at first), milk and eggs and then loaded up with carrots, onions and potatoes when the veggie guy came.

And I got outside! The coordinator sent out an email for a supply run (my employer would capitalize the “s” and “r” but I refuse to). I didn’t even know where it was but I signed up. I just wanted to go “outside.”

Oh what fun! The outside world! Iraq! Lovely Erbil, Iraq. Which, since most cities look very similar, a lot like anyplace in Turkey, Morocco and Jordan, but who cares, right? I was outside!

Only a few people can go, and since we don’t drive, we all went together in a motorpool ride. Everything’s coordinated and such, so we only had an hour, but that was plenty time to hit the grocery store, what since I didn’t need groceries and all. I did manage to buy these cookies I discovered in Istanbul that are basically Twix bars, brownie mix (we’re doing a Christmas potluck), a couple Snickers bars, milk and juice. Oh, and, quite randomly, a nail file. I’d tried to buy one from both Target and Walmart, but neither would allow the $1 metal item to be shipped to me. And then I found one in Erbil, go figure. Also about $1, but most everything else seemed cheaper. I got a heavy bag of groceries, handed over a $20, and got enough change to go to the coffee shop next door and have Iraqi tea, which, let’s get real, is the same thing as Turkish tea. Not a bad thing, of course.

The downside of the whole “outside” trip was me managing to pull my back getting out of the car, which, since we’re American, was a giant Suburban or something similar. By bad luck of the draw, I was in the back seat and, getting out, managed to step out in massive pain. If I had been anywhere else but on my one shot at being “outside,” I would have gone back to bed. I hurt so bad and basically eased myself through the whole shopping trip. At one point, I went for a bag of rice on the bottom shelf and instantly regretted it.

What it is with backs that makes them somehow susceptible to the silliest movements? I remember two other times when I hurt myself. One was playing softball, when I reached down to get a ball at the backstop and couldn’t get up. The other was when I went to play with Kocur, who was more than delighted that I brought myself down to her level and then couldn’t get back up. So much more convenient to play with her, right?

Yesterday after the “supply run,” I pretty much loafed around in pain. I’d gotten up early and ran, so I didn’t feel bad about that, but I did eat a Snickers, a small bag of malted milk balls (alas, not Whoppers, but he best I could do) and a Twix-ish cookie, but that was over the course of a long day, not in a sitting.

With a little of the scrounging thing, I also tracked down some chicken that clearly had been in the freezer for longer than my two roommates had been here, so they were fair game. I had baked chicken and rice plus spinach.

And Star Wars. For some reason, two of the channels here are playing Star Wars, like all of the way through. They’re different channels, probably run by the same media conglomerate, but very definitely, Star Wars was on one channel and The Empire Strikes back on another, so go figure. For whatever odd reason, they skipped The Force Awakens (though they did Rogue One) and went directly from Return of the Jedi to The Last Jedi. Han Solo, I guess, isn’t out on TV yet so it wasn’t in the mix. But was nice having the Force with me as I spent the day in pain.

One thing leads to another

I’m finally in the part of my job where I am busy, and I am so thankful about that. I’m going from assignment to assignment, which will lead to my first vacation, which we call R&R.

People live for R&Rs here and, since we basically have to take three three-week ones, plan big trips. I talked to people who returned last week from Italy/Spain and Australia New Zealand.

You ask some about their recent or upcoming R&Rs and their eyes glaze over and their voices fill with wistfulness. People seem to live for them.

Not me, of course. I’m weird. I love it here. Not ready to go on R&R, but I am ready for my next assignment, which is at our consulate in Erbil.

For those who don’t know (and it’s OK; I didn’t, either), Erbil is in northern Iraq, and it’s where a lot (but by no means all) of the Kurds in Iraq live. To the degree that some refer to the area as Kurdistan, a T-shirt I am hoping to acquire in the upcoming weeks.

Staffers speak of Erbil as some kind of la la land. Well, la la land before La La Land became a thing. I tell people I’m headed up there, their eyes mist over as well. “You can go outside, you know.”

I didn’t know, and I’m fearful of believing such Utopian propaganda lest I set my heart on wandering outside of the Hundred Acre Sandbox and into … well, Iraq. Real Iraq. The thought of their being a real world outside our T-walls is downright delightful. I would totally love to wander into some kind of sore and buy some Iraqi delicacy, whether it be tasty, crafty or whatever else might lie in store.

There’s rumor of a mall that has a Carrefour in it. For those who’ve been around for a long time, that’s the Walmarty store from Jakarta. We also had one in Morocco (though not my town) and Istanbul.  I want for nothing but the idea of being able to purchase some little trinket, or maybe those knockoff WintOgreen LifeSavers called Polo is the kind of unexpected Christmas gift I’d welcome.

The bag I’m taking up, though, won’t have room for much. I’m allegedly heading up there for three weeks. It’s for work, so I have to do work clothes, after work clothes and workout clothes. Somehow, I feel like the R&R packing will be less, although I will have to also bring swim stuff since I plan on snorkeling.

Oh yeah, did I mention that the R&R is to Australia? I’m going to piecemeal my way through the country. I did Melbourne to Sydney the first time, Perth the second and now I’m planning Cairns to Sydney although I have one flight in there, from Brisbane to Sydney. I ran out of time. Three weeks doesn’t seem like much when you’re trying to bask on the beach and play in the water.

The No. 1 goal on that is to dive and/or snorkel the Great Barrier Reef, and I’m taking the train from Cairns to Brisbane, with three stops in there. I think it’s three, anyway. I made my last reservation right before I started the last three-week assignment and anything that happened before that is kind of a mushy blur now.

When I get back, I’m headed immediately to another assignment. This is what I signed on this tour, to wander from one department to another. There’s just the one department in Erbil, but there are three or four I could possibly work in this tour. I’ve done two of the three big ones already.

I feel a little like a tumbleweed in this assignment, because I bounce around from one place to another. You finish one and head to another. The good thing about it is that when I fly out of here for R&R, I am between assignments. I don’t come back to an overloaded inbox with projects coming due; it’s a clean slate in a new gig.

Latchkey life

Everyone in my little Hundred Acre-Sandbox lives a latchkey life. It is sort of like a prison, but a nice prison. One with two nice gyms and a place where you can meet to knit or smoke cigars, not that I do either of those things at this time.

It’s like a little city. Since we can’t leave, everything’s here, down to the hair salon and barbershop to the water processing plant and firehouse. They’re staffed with fellow residents of the One Hundred-Acre Sandbox, and we come from all over. It’s not just my department colleagues who staff the place; we have other federal employees and contractors plus a lot of third-party contractors as well.

It might be a prison, but I have the most amazing prison cell ever.  Although there are several other housing complexes in the sandbox, the people with DoS have nice little one-bedroom apartments with a little sitting area (mine has a kitchen table full of crap), a pretty big bedroom – big enough for a comfy chair – and a decent-sized living room. The living room is exactly the size of the bedroom; at one point there were enough people here to necessitate roommates, but fortunately I missed that. Oh, and the bathtub is pretty deep. I’m so glad I don’t have to share that with anyone. There’s even a great storage closet that houses all the toiletries I brought for two years (it looks like miniature Target). Really, it’s an incredible prison cell.

Like a prison, the whole sandbox is secure. I’ll never leave the compound, although I did get lucky the other weekend and was allowed to step outside the door to meet someone coming in. That’s probably as much of Baghdad as I’ll see, and the only thing I noted was that people drive really fast on the road out front. I also noticed, looking at an outdate map, that where I live is somewhere near Saddam Hussein’s old house. I’m a terrible map-reader, though, and I could be off on that.

Part of the security is the fact that we have to wear our badges every time we leave our little prison cells. As a result, everyone has an ID badge hanging around their necks. It’s kind of fun to see everyone’s lanyards. Certain themes recur: former posts, the generic Baghdad one, sports teams. It’s amazing how many people see my Florida State one and approach me to sympathize about football season.

Badge holders are another big thing here. At previous posts, I’ve had two card things I need to carry around but here it’s four. I have two for the office, my ID and the most important one: my food card.  I need that when I eat, so I carry it around all the time. So, like a lot of people here, I bought a little badge holder that holds three cards. It also has what was marketed as a change purse, but in reality it’s a zipper that leads to a narrow sleeve that I might could force a single sheet of paper into. Ah well; I don’t really need money day-to-day here. I mean, it’s not like I’m using cigarettes for currency instead or anything like that, but there’s just nothing to buy.

When we get our prison cells, we’re given this gas station bathroom-sized keychain with three, I think it was, keys on it. I lugged the thing with me the first couple of days and I finally realized no one was juggling the bulky things. It took awhile to catch on, but I figured out everyone had taken the one key they needed off the gas station keychain (seriously, here now for two months and I am not entirely sure what the other keys go to) and fastened it to their lanyards. Some people wear theirs in front, and when you see many people walk by, you’ll see their housekey dangling from the back of their lanyards.

We don’t wander around without our badges and keys. After locking myself out one time (in my first week, no less), I fashioned a hook right under my peephole so there’s no way I miss it when I leave.

It’s very much a latchkey life.

My vote counted and other things to be thankful for

It looks like the Florida elections – at least the results – are settled, and I’m glad my vote counted. It almost didn’t. My absentee ballot came in last month, I swear several weeks ago. I took it home, researched the amendments and then stuck it in the mail the same day.

But we don’t have daily mail service. It comes and goes in batches, and sometimes gets held up at the airport. How it works is my mailing address is sort of like a PO Box at an airport somewhere. The first-class stamp (I don’t even know how much they are these days, thank God for Forever stamps) gets it there, then your tax dollar gets it on the plane to me, wherever I am.

However, it seemed like there were 3-4 weeks in between and I really didn’t get my vote a second thought. I stuck my “I voted by mail” sticker on my computer at work and forgot about it until some Peace Corps volunteers from China were mentioning that they ballots had no been received. I asked how they knew – it’s not like absentee votes get confirmations – and they said they called the supervisor of elections. Off that, I called on Tuesday after Veterans’ Day and my vote had not come. I was kind of panicked, because, well, what do you do? She asked if I’d FedExed it, and that’s just not an option. They nicely took my name and said if it came before Nov. 15, it would count. This, of course, was during Florida’s recounts. Basically I’d have been screwed if it didn’t come in, but fortunately, it made it that day. So I am happy my vote counted!

The mail seems to be running again, which is good. I’ve gotten one of my replacement credit cards and the debit card. I still don’t have the American Express, but I was able to go online and get a couple of things done, bought and stuck in the mail. With one exception, I think I’m almost done with Christmas shopping.

With the release of the incoming mail, the two outstanding packages I had out also arrived: a gift box from a friend that included a lot of candy corn and my boat shoes from LL Bean, which fit perfectly.

I’ll be wearing those to work today, where I am finally earning my keep. After being last week in one department, I’m for the next three weeks in the executive section, which is really busy. The people are nice and so far I haven’t screwed anything up. My counterpart has been very helpful and I’m trying to soak up tips and knowledge in the three weeks I’m in there.

It’s still planned to be only two weeks, but I’m not convinced that’ll be all of it. We may have some staffing gaps coming up and I am just hoping that they don’t mess up what’s arranged. I mean, for me, it’s six of one, half dozen of the other, but the other place is expecting help and it would be a real bummer if they suddenly had to fly by the seat of their pants for the gap.

Next week will be a bit busier, if just by virtue that there’s no holiday but also because someone’s coming back from leave and that moves things around. We’ve basically called up people for the last few weeks and now the top one is due to return, so everyone (except those on leave) return to their normal spots. It means a shifting of personalities, but not a great one. Right now, the office of seven has three of us subs, so we’ll be down to two. We also have sort of a random person from another office that closed and right now no one knows how he will fit in to the long-term mix.

But yes, I am totally thankful that so far it’s been really good. I was a bit scared of this one; I’ve been in the executive office before but that was in the consulate, not an embassy. And even though Guangzhou was a ginormous and Istanbul a huge consulate, there’s still another layer when it’s an embassy.

One example is the first and second in charge both have residences that can be used for meetings and such, and working in the executive office means you have a hand in facilitating the planning. Not the planning so much (at least me), just coordinating with the people who want to hold it, the people who will invite and the people who will prepare the site itself and the food.  This is one of the things I’m trying to learn from my counterpart; how this whole process falls into place. It’s an element in most embassies, I think, but I haven’t seen it yet. And I’m really glad I am getting this chance to get familiar with the process. Next week will be a bit more complicated but I think I’m acclimating all right.

Two months in and I’m still enjoying it here. Yesterday, Thanksgiving, I had a great meal from the outside world with the office I worked for last week, then had traditional turkey in our cafeteria, which really does a good job for the holidays. My little group of four saw another younger guy sitting by himself and pulled him in and had a great conversation with him.  

Today I have to head into work in a bit, but not for long. I’ve finally gotten a little bit of OT but not enough to kill me; some people here work insane hours.

And I’m still planning my first R&R, which is coming up in a couple of months. I’d been waiting on a credit card to make some reservations so now I need to get to it.

Not having a ball this weekend

In addition to it being Zippy’s birthday, our Marine Ball Was Friday. It was a nice start to a three-day weekend, but of course I wasn’t about to go to the ball itself. This elicited surprise from some, though I can’t imagine why. It’s pretty clear by my day-to-day attire that I’m not a dress-up person. As much fun as the salsa class is, I suck, and I’m not a drinker. Those three factors mean I’m not a prime candidate for the ball. I do like birthday cake, though.

But I’m all about helping out, even if I’m not going to partake. I met up with a group in the morning to help set up after my morning run. There were something like 300 people going, and we fixed up the room, which included laying the place settings and, get this, dressing the chairs. Our chairs are these plain things and somewhere, someone created little clothes for chairs. That person probably is raking in the bucks, because we had 300 of these blue stretchy fabric things that went over the chairs Maybe they were slipcovers; I never thought about slipcovers having feet and these things did. Anyway, by the time I left, the room looks ball-ready.

I’d also volunteered to help take down, but I think they shut down the party earlier than expected (or, rather, shifted it to Baghdaddy’s earlier than expected) because when I got there are the pre-arranged 11:30 p.m., the take-down was almost complete. Instead, I grabbed a piece of birthday cake and headed back to my apartment.

Since the venue is the cafeteria, we’re sort of getting by on the food this weekend. There was no sit-down on Friday, so people were wandering around with Styrofoam containers full of whatever. I went the “grab and go” for lunch and got a turkey sandwich and celery/carrot sticks before turning the corner and realizing there was real food, so I went ahead and took green beans and a pork chop for supper.

I finally think that I have stopped gaining weight from all the food here and might have started losing, but it’s still utterly depressing. We have a TDYer here who’s a lot of fun and basically convinced me to go two weeks without carbohydrates. I’ve no idea how people do this, because everything good is a carb. The experiment lasted a total of two meals, because they had fish and chips the first night. I passed on the chips but ate the fish, which had some kind of breading.

I am trying, though. Breakfast is the worst because even though I would never eat grits, potatoes and a biscuit for breakfast, I want one of them with eggs and bacon. Lunch is hard because I am huge fan of the soups. Bypassing the chicken noodle – it’s fabulous – for fish of some sort (tilapia, maybe) and roasted veggies just wasn’t that great. I’m not a big of big lunches.

The idea is to do this for two weeks to try to jump-start weight loss, but we’ll see what happens. I really didn’t know practically everything was carbs and had yogurt for breakfast. I’m not really good at this.

Plus, seriously, who can live without rice? Why would you want to? A riceless world is not a pretty one. Or a tasty one.

It’s also a long riceless weekend since Veterans’ Day is Sunday. We’ve got a ceremony planned and a 5k. We seem to average one of these a month and I plan on running. One of the people who helped set up for the ball this morning runs at about my pace (which is pretty slow) and we’re plan on doing it together. I’m still kind of vague on the track and need to keep someone in my sites or I might make a wrong turn. The courses for the two previous races were the same but they change it up here and there, I’m told. You do two loops around, but the second loop cuts some part off and that’s where I get confused, plus at that point I’m pretty much sucking wind behind everyone else.

It looks like my job, the actual work part, will kick in for real next week. My job is to fill in for people who are on leave and someone’s finally leaving. At some point, this was going to happen, so I’ve tried to enjoy the lull as much as possible. Starting Monday, I’m pretty much booked through mid-February. That  includes and R&R but it’s still nonstop. I’m glad. Lulls are nice but it’s been something like six weeks. I’m ready to be busy.

Saving money, but not on purpose

I’m trying to plan my first R&R, which is planned to be to Australia in a few months. As someone who mostly takes trips over long weekends, trying to plan a three-week excursion has been a different, especially since there is no package tour involved.

Those are easy, as demonstrated by the fact I’ve already put a down payment on a cruise for January 2020. Write a check or give a credit card number and you’re done.

It’s a little harder when you’re trying to piece together different countries (I transit Amman) and multiple cities.

It’s really hard when you don’t have a credit card.

And that’s the situation I’m in now. Late last week, I went to buy a train ticket and realized my Visa card expired at the end of October and one debit card had expired in September (not that I want to use those on the internet). The new ones, I’m sure, went to Tallahassee but Zippy hasn’t seen them and likely accidentally shredded them. I spent time on with the State Department Federal Credit Union to see if I can get new ones, so hopefully that’s fixed.

Although Visa is “everywhere you want to be,” my card of choice is still American Express. This is a bit difficult sometimes, because it’s not accepted everywhere. Like the Australian train ticket, for example. But AirBnB takes it, so I’ve been happily making reservations in Cairns and Airlie Beach.

I’d intended to try to plan the rest of the vacation this weekend and decided to see what damage I’d done so far this month with American Express. You know it’s your preferred card when you not only have the card number, that little secret number, the expiration date and the card closing date by heart. I might have to look up my SSN, but I can fire off that number pretty quick. Just ask Amazon.

Before making any more reservations, I wanted to check the account. In doing so, there was an unfamiliar charge. Holy smokes.  I called AmEx (best customer service on the planet) and had the card canceled. After thinking about the charge, though, I realized it was from the same place I stayed over two years ago while on vacation. I have no earthly idea why they would have charged me again, or why my number would have been still accessible. I went in February 2016!

So the next step was to get a new AmEx card, which is harder than it seems it should be. The problem is I don’t have a phone number that you can call and I’ll answer. Now, I don’t understand why that’s a stumbling block to get something mailed, but OK. Personally, I have no problem with having no answerable phone because I can call out with few issues. However, even though I the Google Voice number and all, for whatever reason, it doesn’t ring and therefore I can’t answer it. While I’m not going to worry about it, it freaks people out. And I get it, really. I mean, I’m talking on the phone to a customer service rep trying to explain that I don’t have a phone. Why should they believe that?

Anyway, due to some policy, I can’t get my new AmEx sent directly to me; it has to go to my home of record first. So now I have to wait on it to travel the world, and in the meantime, I have absolutely no way of spending money.

It’s a really weird situation so I hope nothing comes up. It already occurred to me that my internet comes due on the 20^th, so hopefully by then I have something that works. But it’s a strange feeling, knowing that I’m pretty much unable to spend any money. I mean, if push came to shove, I could figure it out, but I’m hoping it doesn’t come to that. It’s not a bad thing to go a couple of weeks without placing an order from Walmart, Target, Amazon or some other place. I’m not even a big shopper but knowing I can’t makes me want to.

It’s a process

Going a month in Pooh’s Hundred-Acre Sandbox, and life’s pretty easy. That sounds weird, I know, what being in a war-torn country and all, but I really feel that I’m in an insulated bit of it.

But settling in is a process. So far, I feel like I’ve yet to start my job. Technically, my job is to substitute for other people when they go on leave, and the leave rotation really hasn’t kicked in yet. In a month it will be nonstop action. Tomorrow, not so much.

But as soon as the bell rings, I’ll super busy. I’m just tired of waiting for it.

Come to think of it, I have heard bells, though. We’ve had what I think were small kitchen fires in the last two weeks and when one happened in my building – oh my God, the bell. The fire alarm is not eight feet from my desk and it scared the bejesus out of me.

Anyway, I’m just trying to be patient and find stuff to do while I’m waiting for the job to really kick in. By my estimates, that would be mid-November at the latest.

In the meantime, I’m waiting on more to settle down, like my weight! It’s hard to get used to the abundance of food, and to pace yourself accordingly.

As happened between my first two posts, I gained weight in the U.S. Once in [insert name of country here], though, I got back on the treadmill and weight came off again. A month into it, that has not been the case here. It’s still creeping up.

The thing is, if you look at what I’m eating, it’s not much. I’ve had multiple people comment on my lunch, saying it’s barely enough. In general, it’s soup, rice/broccoli/mashed potatoes/some other little side dish and a piece of unbuttered cornbread.

I have to stop here to mention that the soup is fantastic. I’ve yet to have a soup that I’d deem subpar, although I have noticed the chicken noodle in one building is superior to one served in a different building. They’re both excellent, but one uses spaghetti noodles and one uses one of the curly noodles. I like the curly more. Anyway, I’ve had Indian Dahl, minestrone, vegetable, chicken vegetable, beef noodle, roasted pepper (oh, the roasted pepper!), turkey and rice, chicken and rice, and seafood bisque. Seriously, one day last week I had three different soups, one for lunch and two for dinner.

So I’m eating a lot of soup. That shouldn’t pack on pounds, right? But I feel like I’ve continually gained since I arrived. It’s hard not to, but I swear I’m being conscious about what I eat. (Although, I admit, after skipping any sort of dessert for a week and then getting on the scale and hitting a new high for the decade, I caved and ate Ben & Jerry’s because it just doesn’t seem to matter.)

Now I am wondering if it’s because I’ve always bought food on the local market and now I am back to eating food that’s been processed in the U.S. I noticed this in Morocco, when I are basically rice, macaroni and popcorn for meals. People would tell me I was losing weight and what was I eating, and I was thinking pretty much just carbs. But the food wasn’t as processed as it was in the United States. Same with Turkey and China.

So now I have to figure it out. This past weekend, I didn’t drink anything except water and unsweet tea, with the exception, as planned, as an end-of-weekend soft drink. I’ve been trying to figure out where the intake has been coming from, and all I have been able to figure is the drinks. There’s tea and lemonade, and even though I mix the sweet and unsweet teas together, in Istanbul I always did stevia sweet tea. The lemonade is just super sweet, too, and there’s only cucumber water to dilute tit.

And I’m doing fitness classes up the wazoo. It’s just baffling me, but I guess, like the job itself, everything will kick in at some point. It’s all a process, right?

At sea in the sandbox

Happy first three-day weekend! It’s kind of like being on a cruise that’s at sea. There are a whole bunch of scheduled stuff going on, but no real purpose, like, you know, a job.  Me, I need that dock so I can go aboard and take in the sights. Day three of the three-day holiday has been pretty darn boring.

I hadn’t really counted on three-day weekends anyway, so this was kind of a surprise. Most people here work six or seven days a week. At some point, I probably will, too, but my job is to stopgap people and right now everyone’s here so there’s no need to stopgap.

So, this non-docking cruise ship in a sandbox is one, right now, of routine, but man oh man, the routines you can build. Fridays, which are our Saturdays, are the most packed but Thursday nights (our Friday nights) are packed.

I went directly to the gym after work to hit the rowing machine for a half an hour before abs class, then agreed to kickball before I realized kickball was immediately following abs class. I had penciled in eating for that hour, since Bible study started right after that. Instead, I darted off to grab some Froot Loops (Marriott got me addicted) as a meal for during Bible study. Not exactly healthy, but compact with little cleanup.

There’s not a lot of retail therapy in this sandy version of Pooh’s One Hundred Acre Wood. We have two little stores with stuff like cleaning products and toiletries (but no vitamins) and another with a different variation of that, plus booze. The first one also has a limited supply of random things with “Baghdad Embassy” on it, though as of yet I haven’t seen any clothing I need.

After an attempt to run outside, though, I did cave and buy a $13 ball cap to run in. I have one, but it’s orange and since some of my running stuff is blue, I just can’t mix those. I got a tan one with a U.S. flag. No “Baghdad” on it anywhere.

One of my major goals this weekend was go buy a shower curtain liner, which is something not offered in any of the little stores. But Wal-Mart and Target deliver, so why not, right? I figured I’d pick up a few other little things. Well, this turned out to be waaaaaay harder than it should have been. Apparently a shower curtain liner is somehow too dangerous, or something, to go through the diplomatic pouch, which is how I get mail.

I tried various combinations of stuff to try to land on some safe-enough version of a shower curtain liner (seriously) and came up empty until one certain combination from Target. As a RedCard holder, this was perfect, until the automated system refused to acknowledge my new address. Now, the addresses are pretty standard, and it basically just changed one set of four numbers to a new set of four numbers and then switched a box number. The ZIP code changed two digits.  When I went to change it, though, no matter how I put it in, the system insisted I had entered an invalid address for some city in Jersey that I’ve never even visited, let alone gotten mail in.

After three calls to Target directly, I gave it up and hit up Amazon. I hadn’t tried it before because I tend to wind up with a lot of stuff that’s deemed unable to be sent to the dip pouch, like books. But it let me send the shower curtain, although not the vitamins. Win some, lose some. I topped it off with enough “I’d have bought it eventually anyway” stuff to qualify for free shipping (Thanks, Eric Church!) and will hope for the best. I’ve no idea how long it takes to get Amazon stuff here.

Mostly what I’ve done this weekend – besides agonize over the Noles, how awful was that? – has been to edit a friend’s doctoral thesis. Originally it was due in April, so when I got it in August I sat it on the back burner until I arrived. Then he turned in the first draft, and I guess it was so clean they said he could turn it in a semester early, or Oct. 15, to get his doctorate early. Yikes! We cranked it up and, hopefully, it’s almost done. Either way, it’s in his court at the moment; I sent up my latest version yesterday and am awaiting two things before I can send up what it, hopefully, the final version.

The stepped-up timeline will be a coup for me, because as much as I’ve jumped in feet-first here, I’ve held off on a few things that I planned on doing after the paper. If it’s done by the end of October, that’s all the earlier I can get going on the other stuff.

As I’ve said, there’s a full slate of stuff you can do, both formal and information, regular and one-time. The kickball, for example, is as a warm-up for a tournament that’s coming up. I don’t think it’s an ongoing thing. (We also have a Balls of Steel Ping Pong tournament coming up, too.)

And if you don’t see it on the calendar, you can find a space and stick it on yourself. And that’s what I hope to do with guitar. I bought a little one in Istanbul with the hope of figuring out how to pick it, but wanted to wait until the paper was done. Not only does it look like I will have the time before April, but I’ve already found someone else who also has a guitar but no clue.

How, exactly, I’m going to fit it in is an unknown; this long weekend notwithstanding, I’m unbelievably busy with stuff, and I keep taking on more. This week, I added tae kwon do (hi Riley!) to my list of things I want to try, which is taught by one of the salsa guys.

I don’t think the salsa guys recognize me as a lost cause just yet. So very optimistic, they seem think that one day I will suddenly become coordinated and graceful. As I’ve been me for almost five decades, I’m not as optimistic, but I’m willing to humor them by joining the other classes they seem to think will turn me into a swan. I enjoy the step classes, but after each class I apologize to the instructor for sucking so bad. At this point in the game, I’m too scared to even step across the little stair thing for fear I twist/sprain/break my ankle. I stick to the up-and-down on just the one side. It’s kind of repetitious, but I haven’t turned any body parts bruise blue yet.

Abs class is pretty much ditto. Due to the shoulder surgery (or so I tell myself), I just can’t do a side plank, and some of those other moves just don’t mesh with rehab, either. Sometimes I find myself having to modify the modified version. Between shoulder and foot, the left side of my body doesn’t work every well.

It’s a little like kindergarten

We have reminders similar to this at all our food spots.
It's a lot like kindergarten.

Anyone who has more than one child knows that if one gets sick, the other gets sick, and then the parents get sick and then it cycles all over again.  God bless school teachers. I have no idea how they’re not sick every single day of their lives. Little kids are germ spreaders.

The best thing to do, of course, is to continually wash your hands. Forget those sanitizers. Studies show that hand-washing is the best thing to do to prevent the spread of germs. With all those kids sharing space, it’s the proven way of halting germs.

This place doesn’t have any kids, but we’re teeming with humanity. Many times, it’s hot and sweaty humanity, but even on the best air-conditioned days, it’s still a bunch of people sharing spaces. So when one person gets some kind virus, like a cold, it has the potential to shoot like wildfire to the rest of us. For the most part, we all congregate in the food spaces, especially. There’s more than one of them, but most people, at least twice a day, are going to congregate in our feeding halls.

To combat fast-spreading colds (or worse), we’ve got to wash our hands. One way to make sure we all do this is to not let us eat until we do. I’m not sure if this would work with kindergartners, but boy, it seems to work for hungry adults.

Prior to every meal, whether we eat in or take out, we have to do two things. One is swipe our food cards, and that’s just because the government counts everything. We’re not billed personally for our food, but somewhere at pay grades higher than mine, someone has to calculate who ate what. My guess is somewhere someone sets an average price for a meal and that our little cards tell some system what my hiring mechanism is, like if I am a contractor, direct hire or what. The bill, I suppose, goes from there. I really don’t know; I just know that I have to tap my card before I can grab a tray and go through the line.

Similar to a photo on the rotating announcements screen.
It says something like, "This person forgot to wash her hands.
"Don't be this person!"

But before that, I have to wash my hands. It’s just kind of silly to me, because, in general, the last thing I did before heading to the food room was go to the bathroom and wash my hands. (Tip I heard this week: always pee before you leave a building, because you never know what will happen before you arrive at your destination.) But once I get to the food place, whichever one it is, I have to wash them again.

And they make it obvious and easy. There are signs everywhere to wash your hands, reminding us of the evil diseases that can spread. And there are sinks. Many stations of sinks, like maybe a dozen. These bewildered me at first, because there’s no handle and I thought that meant they were motion-detected.  The first meal, I waved my hands under one after another, trying to turn one on. Finally someone bailed me out; there’s a foot pedal. You pump it, add soap, wash and dry. And you can’t eat until you do so.

Honestly, I have no idea how the person at the card-tap place can possibly check everyone, because he or she is always busy assisting with the take-out containers, but apparently they have been known to catch people trying to sneak in with dirty hands.

There are several TVs going in the main food hall, and one of them runs slides of announcements. There’s once slide with a photo of a woman with her eyes censored out so you can’t identify her. I haven’t sat close enough to that TV to read the fine print, but from what I understand it says something about her not washing her hands. We’re into shame, I guess. But hey, if you didn’t learn it in kindergarten, there’s just little hope for you now and maybe shame is the best way to go.

Simba is lion

My world shrunk. It’s now the size of a tiny college campus and I live in a dorm. Well, I guess most dorms don’t have kitchens and mine does, so maybe it’s an apartment. Although there's nothing in the kitchen except a Twix bar, a tea bag and a packet of microwave popcorn I took from the Marriott in Rosslyn. That's pretty dorm-y.

Whatever the little place is, it’s home until May 2020, inchallah. After a three-day journey that encompassed three planes and a helicopter, I arrived in Baghdad on Thursday. It was a little worrisome getting out, because Florence was still hanging around the DC-NY path, which was my first leg. The flight left about an hour late and I had a tight connection but wound up leaving for Amman from a fairly close gate and even had enough time to grab another bottle of tea before hopping on the 10.5-hour flight.

Since, more or less (mostly less), the flight from Amman-Baghdad was a charter (VERY “less;” this is a pretty generous description but I’m not sure how else to classify it) that leaves in the morning, the itinerary calls for coming in the day before and staying at a hotel (hi, Marriott!) and then turning around the next morning for the last airplane flight and short helicopter ride.

A word about the Marriott: Oh, man. There is a world of difference between a regular Marriott breakfast and a Marriott Residence breakfast. There was so much to choose from! Not a lot of time, since it opened at 6:30 and my ride left at 7, but still. It was fabulous.

The evening before, I was so tired from the overnight flight from JFK that I didn’t bother trying to go out and scrounge food. I ate right at the sports bar in the hotel, Champions. They had several games going on, but I don’t follow “futbol.” I chose a seat in the decidedly American display section, sitting under autographed pictures of Nolan Ryan and Wayne Gretzky, even as the music played “Daydream Believer” by the Monkees. My stay in Amman was short, surreal and sleepless. Totally jet-lagged, I crashed heavily at 9 p.m. but woke up three times between then and midnight and couldn’t get to sleep at all after that.

So, by 1 p.m. the following day, I was nearing zombie-like status but tried to keep up with my sponsor, who showed me around the place.

The post here has been described to me as “a cruise ship that never docks,” a high school or college campus, Communist Russia and a minimum-security prison. I think those last two are because there’s a lot of security, a lot of cameras and we have to wear our ID tags everywhere.

But this place is fantastic. My apartment is laid out nicely, has two TVs with American channels and water I can drink straight out of the faucet. I’m also conveniently located across from the building that houses the smaller (and less intimidating) gym, the pool, post office, little shops and the place that’s called Baghdaddy’s, which is a cross between a bar and a multi-purpose room.

This place is not all Americans and Iraqis. There are contractors here, and they are from, quite literally, all over. Some are TDYers from other embassies and will be here for 3 months to a year or so, and some have resigned from their embassy jobs to take spots here as contractors and have been here for years.

There is food everywhere. This is where the “cruise ship” part comes in. Each meal is served for a number of hours every day, but if you miss that or just want something small, there’s another place to go to grab that, too. And it’s good food. The first night, I had Jamaican chicken and couscous. I split a cinnamon roll with someone this morning and it was fabulous. I also had pancakes, grits and bacon. I had soup and collards last night, mostly because I was stuffed from the spinach, chicken and mashed potatoes I’d had for lunch.

Fortunately, there are two gyms. I missed spin class today because I was either in the wrong gym or the wrong room, but I got back on the elliptical for the first time since leaving Istanbul. So today I hurt, but I earned the half a cinnamon roll.

Since the weekend here is Friday-Saturday (meaning I haven’t gone to work yet), Today (Saturday) is our Sunday. As a result, I had the opportunity to go to church, which is held in Baghdaddy’s. There is a Protestant service and a Catholic service, plus several others for other religions.

I’d gone to a Bible study my first night here (too jet-lagged to remember much) and was expecting a similar crowd, like maybe 10 people or so. Instead, there was a room full of people from all around. It was pretty cool. It was a real church service and not a substitute, which made me happy. We weren’t allowed to go to church in Istanbul.

After three or four contemporary hymns and an intro, a group of black singers came up and sang an African gospel song, in some African language. They had the translation up on the screen and it was the same phrases over and over with different African countries listed. Think “God bless Uganda!” “God bless Botswana!”, etc.

The them was something about a lion, and today I learned that “simba” is “lion” in whatever language it was. While I saw “The Lion King,” I didn’t know the translation was literal.

It looks like I have the potential to learn a lot on this tour, and I’m not counting work. The possibilities here are mind-boggling. So far, I’ve been to Bible study and attempted a spin class (I’ll find it soon). There is a knitting group (Baghdarners, I think it’s called) that I’ve already asked about and today at lunch I sat with some folks who were doing salsa. One was the instructor (an Air Force guy) and one a student. She was an Iraqi-born Michigander who’s back in the country for two years as a contractor doing something in addition to learning salsa, but that’s what we talked about.

They were so enthused about it that I somehow got looped into it. This is definitely going to be a unique tour.

A little loopy

It’s my last week in Washington and I’m officially down to the wire to get stuff done. I have a little list next to me that’s got more crossed off than left on, but it’s still substantial. Monday is going to be a big day.

As bad luck would have it, I discovered on Friday evening that there is a Chick-Fil-A in Foggy Bottom. This is on me; I have no idea why I didn’t think to search earlier. I’ve spent a lot of time in the area, but I tend to walk right out of the metro, and Chick is on the left. And Thursday evening, the evening before I had the brilliant revelation to search for a place, I was right in Foggy Bottom, leaving a get-together famished. I could have used a six-pack of nuggets, but I didn’t know.

Today I thought about going, but after a visit to the Library of Congress with some friends, we hit up the food trucks for lunch and that was just too much good. I mean, not enough food to forfeit swinging by Georgetown and stopping for cupcakes at Baked and Wired, but too much to think about another meal. There’s always room for cupcakes.

Since going to Chick is out of the question tomorrow, I’m planning on going both Monday after lunch (don’t judge: I’ve got two more appointments after lunch and will grab soup to take home) and probably Tuesday as my last meal.

It’s been a big week. Beyond fighting a cold and sitting through a class with talking head after talking head and the air conditioner set for what felt like like 52 degrees, I met some new folks and, most importantly for next week, got my passport back. My visa arrived last Thursday and I’m good to go; I even had time to run by the Global Entry place and get it registered, which was as big “cross off” on my calendar. No point in paying for the program if you can’t register the passport you travel on, right?

Fortunately, Florence has stayed away from D.C. and it looks like I’ll still be good to go on Tuesday.  Unfortunately, it looks like I might be flying into the path of residual rain. We’ll see how it goes. This past week I met several people headed to post who were leaving earlier and were a bit panicked. It’s kind of exciting that it’s all coming together.

I’ll be there until May 2020, inchallah. I hope all goes well. I’m not concerned about the situation in Baghdad; I’m concerned about me adjusting to a job and not being able to get away on a short trip every month. Instead, I’ll have long trips every four months or so. For me, that’s something to get used to.

It’s also a long time on the road at one shot, although not as long as I’ve been in DC this go-around. God bless Marriott, but I’ve hit my limit for hotel nights in a row. I’m in my third hotel room since August 12 and really tired of the same breakfast every day.

It’s not that it’s bad and I to vary it up, but you can only vary scrambled eggs or pancakes so much. This morning, instead of toast, I had an English muffin and tomorrow, if their Sunday menu holds, I’ll opt for a biscuit and gravy.

They also have the standard cereal option, although they don’t have what I find in most hotels, which is corn flakes. I’m not capitalizing that because I’m fairly confident that although Marriott appears to go with Kellogg’s, I seriously doubt some of the other places I’ve stayed in spring for the name brand.

They have some healthy option, Rice Krispies and Froot Loops. I don’t do healthy and Rice Krispies without marshmallows and butter taste kind of like sugary (because I add sugar) air, but crunchy. Which isn’t bad, but I decided to have a bowl of Froot Loops my first day here. I haven’t eaten Froot Loops since they added green, purple and blue and figured what the heck. (Looked this up: 1990s.) I wanted a little something sweet after the (likely from a powder) scrambled eggs, toast and sausage. I took a small bowl and crunched away, because milk in cereal is just gross. Use a glass, people.

And now I am a loopy addict. I probably shouldn’t admit this, but I’ve now eaten Froot Loops daily at as a little dessert after breakfast. You’re only as old as you feel. I don’t even bother with a spoon.

Summer camp and back-to-school shopping

In a word, yesterday was expensive.

Back from my summer camp week – more on that later – I met a friend at the Tyson’s Corner mall, which is a huge, fancy schmancy mall that’s (thankfully) on the metro line. The trip itself took about half an hour and cost $3.40, but it was a drop in the bucket compared to what I’d eventually spend.

Heading out, I swear I really did need a bra, and like LL Bean’s Perfect Fit Pants to much (I wear a different color each day at work) that I wanted to get a pair of the capris. But that was all I planned on, and, honestly, the bra was an iffy purchase. I still can’t get my arm around my back so I wanted a front-closure one but they’re such a pain to buy.

The plan had been to meet up with a friend around 2, and while on the metro, she mentioned Victoria’s Secret had bras on sale. Not having any memory of the layout of the mall, I suggested meeting there around 2:15. The Internet wasn’t playing fair and she didn’t get the message until much later, after I’d located Vicky’s and was ensconced in bra-shopping.

The mall was teaming with people, and I swear 30 percent of them were in the store. It was absolutely packed, perhaps drawn in by the $35 bra sale. I’m pretty claustrophobic and had to control breathing to go in, searching for front-closure bras. Not much to choose from, but once in the “sports” section, I saw one and immediately salesperson asked if I needed help. I explained the situation and she asked what size. I guess I stammered and she offered to measure me. Sure thing.

Well, turns out I’ve been doing it wrong. She said I had D-cups and I almost choked. Really? I just had to laugh. But in the end, holy smokes, it worked. Of course, “in the end” was a full 45 minutes, three changes of close and, no kidding, about eight different salespeople later, I walked out with two bras that, even on sale, are the most expensive things in my wardrobe.

That started a cascade of shopping, which I normally hate, but I’d met up with my friend and it made it tolerable. She found a dress for a wedding -- $20! – and stalked LL Bean like there was no tomorrow. I found the one color Perfect Fit Pants that I didn’t have but had trouble finding the capris. After asking in the shoe section -- $90 boat shoes for $35! – I learned that if they had any, they’d be in the clearance section. I’d hit the clearances but not really the pants since I’m almost set there. I really need shirts.

Anyway, lo and behold, a pair of $40 Perfect Fit Capris lay waiting. They were $15 before the extra 25 percent off. So, somewhere in the $186 that I gave to LL Bean, I got the one pair of pants that I wanted, drastically on sale.

I’m running out of shampoo and I really J.R. Liggett’s but Whole Foods, darn them, don’t sell it anymore. I’ve ordered some but don’t have it yet, so I thought what the heck, I’d buy a bar of Lush’s and see how that worked. Of course it’s staggeringly expensive (and not on sale) and they have a separate conditioner bar. Twenty-eight dollars for four months of shampoo and probably a year of conditioner.  I don’t think that’s good, but I splurged.

Eddie Bauer also had a 50 percent off thing going and I finally got some trail pants that I wanted but don’t really need, plus some socks and a green shirt. I love green but don’t have much.

Couldn’t find a 2019 calendar at either of the dollar-ish stores I went in but found stuff I wanted in each, and, to top everything off, I’m going to two parties this weekend so I went and bought something to bring to each of them. And, mental note: cupcakes really should be kept top side up. They’re no longer pretty.

I haven’t checked with American Express to see the damage that I did, but it was substantial. Now I am going to have to ship a box to myself, I think, because I don’t have room in my bag to take them. And I learned I need a watch battery late in the day so that’ll have to get fixed later.

The splurge came off of a week of “summer camp.” Really, it wasn’t that, but a five-day class. It’s not in DC proper, so large group of people get transported in what are essentially modified school busses, split into groups and given a program for the week. It really smacks of summer camp, but of course it’s a work program. No crayons of kumbaya involved, although I think at one point, karaoke was an unofficial option for one evening. It’s just kind of funny because there’s even a color-coded bracelet and an end-of-camp event, so to speak, on Friday.

And now school begins again. I still have a couple of weeks remaining here before I head off to the real program, and I’m glad to have Labor Day (and football season) here.

Playing catch up

For everyone who works in foreign service, being back in D.C., whether it’s our hometown or not (more often than not, it’s “not”) is a series of reunions and blasts from the past. People we’ve worked or trained with, for however long and however long ago, appear before us, prompting a series of catch-up conversations, happy hours and other events.

Even if the person crossed your path briefly, it’s a time to find out where the person has been, where they’re going and why they happen to be in D.C. And you don’t know when the reunions will occur. Usually, it’s at our little college-like training center, the main office building or any random hotel where we congregate (in my case, Marriott Residence in Rosslyn), but they happen all over the D.C. area. For example, Trader Joe’s (the one in Clarendon) seems to be a place where all us posted overseas come back for a fix and we run across each other there.

Last go-around, I left Guangzhou on a Friday and had a class on Monday morning. When I arrived, I discovered the person teaching the class had been one of the TDYers who had come to work in my department. I didn’t recognize her at first, but we both thought each other was familiar and discussed it enough to figure it out. When realization hits – THAT’s where I know you! – suddenly, you’re old friends catching up. (In that case, we had yet another commonality: she’d just come from India the Friday before and we were both jet-lagged like nobody’s business.)

Since I’ve been here, on a daily basis, I’ve met up with at least one new person from my past each day. Two of my colleagues from Istanbul randomly showed up for their own trainings, and both brought their wives and little girls. One of the wives is one who worked closely with me before she went on maternity leave. I’d thought I’d seen these people for the last time in my life, and then suddenly, we’re having breakfast together every day. It’s just random and wonderful.

Some of the people you catch up with, you’re seeing for the first time. A reunion of someone you’ve never met sounds odd, but we have so many e-ways of communicating that you can know someone without seeing them in the flesh. On Monday, when I walked into my classroom, I found I knew via e-measures three people plus had met one before my first tour started. Of the others, one was headed to where I was going and another to the same country.

It’s all very incestuous. When you ask someone where they’re going or where they’ve been, your brain jumps around, trying to find the people you know who might know that person. Invariably, there’s someone.

In an effort to track down everyone, we do things like plan post reunions and throw out a net to invite anyone who might have walked through the post when you were there. I’ve got two such get-togethers on the calendar, one for Guangzhou and one for Istanbul. I’m looking forward to both equally.

It’s a small world for us in foreign service. Today, I took a bus to a different site. There was a woman struggling with her bags – she’s headed out to her new assignment after this training and didn’t have a place to leave it – so, after loading them up, it seemed natural that we sit together and chat. 

Turns out, we’d both been through Guangzhou. She whipped out her photos and showed me some. In the very first one, one of my friends, whom I’ve made a point to meet with since I’ve been there, beamed back at me. That person had been in Guangzhou a year after me, and the lady started to show me more from that trip.

The sights were familiar; she’d lived in my same apartment building and had similar photos to what I took. She also went to one of the hot springs while she was there, a trip I made twice. In viewing the photos on her iPhone, I took a look at the dates and realized that she’d been in Guangzhou in February of the same year I was there, and I left in April. We overlapped and didn’t realize it.

In one of her hot springs photos, I thought I saw another familiar face, albeit behind a pair of sunshades. I took the camera and did the englarge-y thing with the fingers and confirmed that yes, in the small world of foreign service, that was indeed me in the photo.

I’d been catching up with a colleague without even realizing it.

Getting back at it

 Home leave is an amazing thing. It’s a time mandated by Congress that I spend in the U.S., getting back in touch with the country I represent overseas. For me, it’s something to take seriously, which is why during both of my home leaves so far I’ve spent a chunk of time on the road. The first one, I drove to Nashville and then Disney; tell me that’s not an All-American thing to do. This time, I went to Birmingham, Orlando and then Prescott, Arizona, taking in a lot of the country.

 

Of those, I think Universal Studios in Orlando was the most fun. I met a Foreign Service friend and we stayed with another friend on Disney property, so it was kind of the best of both of those worlds. I’d never been to Universal and loved it; it’s a bit edgier than The Mouse.

My favorite was “the Mummy” roller coaster: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ZhW1wBCA7I. We did that one twice. Honestly, the Rock N’ Roll one was probably better, but it kept breaking down and there was no single rider line. It took us well over an hour to get through it. Had it taken half the time, it would have been No. 1. The start is straight up so, literally, after that first drop, it’s all downhill after that. The fun thing is you select the song you listen to as you ride. I went with ZZ Top’s “Sharp Dressed Man,” and it would have been fun to try it with a few more genres. I mean, c’mon. It was a chance to hear KC and the Sunshine Band again: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5NQHNDCAF6k.

I did all the roller coasters I could, but wasn’t a fan of The Hulk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OsjdYQJc748. Maybe it was the time of day or something, but it didn’t do it for me. The Rockin’ one and The Mummy, though, I’d go back again and again.

What is with the virtual rides? There were so many of them, like King Kong, the Simpsons and the New York thing with Jimmy Fallon. I think it was Jimmy Fallon. Those, more than the roller coasters, make me a little sick. The Harry Potter ones were pretty bad, but I thought the Simpsons was worse. However, I loved wandering down through Springfield.

Universal has thoughtfully now included stationary seating for some of the 3-D shows and man, I just wish they’d have put a little more thought into it. We opted for the seating for the Minions because it was a 5-minute wait vs. a 90-minute wait for the “lively” seating. Now, note: the seating is just seats. They move, but they stay in one place. So the bounce, lean up, down or sideways but you don’t go along a path in any way. The show is on a movie screen, and the stationary seating is on the very first row.

This was a mistake. While it’s true you’re not moving, you are craning your neck straight up. Honest to God, it made me more nauseous than the roller coasters combined. Oh, man. Done in by Minions.

The purpose to the trip, as much as there was one, was to check out Harry Potter Land. I can’t remember what it’s called, so I just referred to it as Potterville. It was pretty amazing, I must say. My friend got chosen to do the wand selection and played along well.

Wandering around Diagon Alley and taking the Hogwarts express was just too fun. There were so many people; it was by far the most crowded part of Universal. Everyone wanted a piece of Potterville. Gosh, it was so much fun.

We stayed on Disney property, though, which was also a lot of fun. I hadn’t been to Pop Culture before and thought it was a trip going back through time. We were in the 80s building; the one with Rubik’s Cubes framing the staircases.

We stayed in the 80s. Good times.

We did two days at the park, dining at City Walk around 6:30 p.m. and then going back into the park to finish it off. The Hard Rock didn’t have fish and chips and I wasn’t into burger so I took a chance on this spicy chicken macaroni and cheese and holy cow, it was fabulous. I couldn’t believe how amazing mac and cheese could be. And I got my fill of fish and chips the next night at Margaritaville, so all was good.

On the third day, my Foreign Service friend had planned on doing Disney but I was just going to hang out by the pools at the hotel. However, my Foreign Service friend was a stranger to Florida humidity and by day three was not up to yet another theme park, so after a late start she headed to Disney Springs. I hung out by all three pools and finished my Janet Evanovich book before meeting her at a movie (Jurassic World; it seemed appropriate) and finishing the day at Disney Springs.

That was about halfway through home leave and I decided that every Foreign Service person should meet up with a colleague halfway through home leave. We live such an odd life that is hard to explain to our pre-service friends; it’s nice to decompress halfway through with someone who gets that part of your life.

It’s almost comforting to get back to the work routine, and that’s where I am now. It’s still this in-between part of my world, but I’m in the “training” phase prior to my next deployment. This means I head to DC and go to class in one of a handful of different locations before I am shipped far, far away again.

I only arrived on Monday but got right to it; it really is nice to be back into a routine. It’s sort of a twilight zone. I’m working but kind of not, because the hours are 9-4 with an hour lunch and a 15-minute break both in the morning and in the evenings. There’s a shuttle to the worksite, so it’s kind of this grade-schoolish thing. I’m taking a school bus and, next week, plan on bringing my lunch. There’s a cafeteria but I ate there this week and not only was it expensive, it was bad.

Especially compared to food in the area. DC is a smorgasbord of good food. Today I had a three-hour brunch at a place called Farmers Fishers Bakers, which is owned by North Dakota farmers. We left around 4 p.m.; four hours later and I am still utterly stuffed and cannot think of ingesting another morsel lest I explode. The night before, I ate at this wonderful place called Nando’s; it’s a South African-based restaurant that I discovered while in Malaysia. Before that, it was a Vietnamese joint. And I’ve eaten at “Tonic” twice already; it seems to be the place many of my colleagues head to for lunch, so I met two on back-to-back days there. The salmon chowder with a side of tater tots was a smart choice!

I’ve got several more weeks in the DC area before I head off to my next post, so I’m open to dining suggestions.

Red light, green light

I’m on a side trip now and thoroughly enjoyed the interstate, even though the scenery on I-10 isn’t exactly spectacular. Part of the enjoyment, I think, was that there aren’t any red lights on the interstate.

To get to my parents’ house – I guess now “my mom’s house” – you have to take one of the main artery roads in Tallahassee and drive a stretch. The “truck route,” as longtime Tallahasseeans call it, is a heavily-traveled road most hours of the day. And my mom’s house entails several left turns.

There aren’t left turns in Turkey. There aren’t really stoplights at all, really. There are a few, but mostly there are crazy intersections and mirrors, with some roundabouts thrown in. On day, walking to work with a colleague, we got to the five-way intersection that I walked by every day, and he looked me dead in the eye and said: “I’m going to die at this intersection.” There were a couple of mirrors – the intersections are totally blind so without the mirrors it would be a total leap of faith – but that was all. No stop lights, no stop signs. Basically, the main rule, as much as there is one, is “first come, first serve.”

It’s chaotic, but once you look deeper, it’s controlled chaos. Well, sort of. There are rule of thumb – but not really a rule – is that bigger ones have the right of way. “Bigger” can mean either cars or balls.

Istanbul traffic. It makes sense in its own way.
Photo from:
https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcSJstVmD6fBp_3ylMgQ3ppzvdBw5w9RFw1mlt8g8RjebgVKdjNq

I figured this out driving through that intersection. There were four roads intersecting, but not in a star shape. There was a “main” road, or main road-ish thing, so coming from both directions, then two roads coming off diagonally; you turned one way and there was another road immediately there; it was impossible to tell which one people were aiming for. (Apparently, blinkers are illegal in Turkey.) To top it off, there was a large apartment building with a driveway there.

Taking a taxi home from one direction, I’d have to give the direction, “right,” and then “straight, no straight right, but not that straight right.” The turn was some kind of geometric angle gone wrong, but I usually got it right.

And walking was frightening, but driving no less so. With no stop signs, I felt back on my American mentality, which is, again, wrong in Turkey. In America, people don’t have “the right of way.” Laws, at least in Florida, are written not as “this person has the right of way” but “In this circumstance, this person yields the right of way.”

So silly me, I get to the main “T” of that intersection (meaning I’ve held my breath past one of the roads and the driveway) and to me, I’m on a secondary road approaching a main-ish road, so the main-ish road people have the right of way. However, in Turkey, if I get there first, I am expected to go first. This seemed to me to be even in the case where there were cars coming – quickly, I should add – from both directions. Since I was trying to turn left, this would mean, in America, I have a little wait in front of me before I can turn, because both those guys – as well as the guy behind one of those guys – should have the right of way.

But in Turkey, this is not the case. If you hesitate, like I did, the guy behind you will get pissed off but not honk. Honking is only done when you have no other move, like when you really are at a stoplight and it turns green. In that instance, even if you’re 17 cars back, the Turkish rule is that you lay on the horn immediately, as you’re powerless to do anything else. But if you’re at an intersection and some let-me-yield-the-right-of-way-to-these-two-fast-moving-cars-coming-at-me idiot, the correct thing to do is swerve around the idiot and turn in front of him/her in front of the fast-moving car(s).

As a result of this, although I miss Istanbul, I do not miss driving in Istanbul. However, you gotta say, if those rules work, there’s something to them.

The first come, first serve method would save me a lot of time on the way to my mom’s house. The heavily-trafficked artery is full of left turns, and since there’s so much traffic, you have to sit and wait forever on the green left turn arrow.

Probably 20 percent of my home leave has been sitting at left turn arrows stuck on red. I don’t understand it. I get there first, but I have to sit and wait for minutes on end. Sometimes as I drive up, I can see the darn red left turn arrow from afar and by the time I get there, it’s still red and I still have to sit and wait. It’s especially aggravating at the little tiny crossroads, like the last one I have to cross, because it takes forever for enough cars to pile up to register that it’s time for the light to change.

We can learn from Turkey on this one. First come, first serve, biggest balls win.

Back Home

Back in America for about three weeks now, and so far it’s been pretty shitty. My father died.

#Whataburger celebration. More at
https://www.facebook.com/carol.wartenberg

This, I guess, wasn’t a total surprise, but it was unexpected. He’d been in kidney failure and on dialysis (at home) but in the roughly 10 days I’d been home, he’d been doing better. He had been getting up and making me a little bacon biscuit for breakfast each day.

He died on Monday, 7/9. On Saturday, Zippy and I went to Gainesville to pick up Zac for the next week. He didn’t have a camp to go to so he was going to hang out with us, so we headed down there, met the family for an $80 Red Robin lunch and turned around and came back.

Since the new house has considerably less space than the old house and there’s no Den of Sin, I opted to go over to L&D’s house for the week. They were headed on a road trip to celebrate their 20^th anniversary so I accepted the offer to house-sit and get some peace and quiet.

At midnight, Zippy called and asked me to meet her at the ER because Daddy couldn’t breathe. She’d called 911. I jumped up, got dressed and waited and then she called back because she couldn’t get my car started. I was driving hers and in my car the clutch has to be pressed in all the way.

Anyway, I said never mind, that I’d pick her and Zac up since I felt she had no business driving. She said the ambulance still hadn’t left, but by the time I got there, there was one paramedic-ish vehicle left. Apparently there had been at least three and seven people.

One at the hospital, we were taken to the trauma ward, where we learned Daddy had lost pulse twice up to that point. They’d done CPR and brought him back, but upon arriving to the hospital and checking his records, realized he had a do-not-resuscitate. So it went downhill from there. The first doctor came in and told us about the CPR, stressing that only 3 percent of people who have CPR recover, and warning us that since he’d lost oxygen to his brain twice there was no telling what would happen should he recover.

Who could turn down this face for a tummy rub?

So we waited for a room in ICU, not really able to do anything. Daddy was completely unresponsive and had no idea who was there.  At some point, I took Zac back to the house because all he was able to do was play video games, I brought Daddy back a new shirt because his had been ripped during CPR. Around 4 a.m., a different doctor came in and started talking about “in the days ahead” and listed different doctors Daddy would need to see. At that point, I wondered if I’d misheard the first doctor (whose shift, I guess, was over) because it sounded to me like there would be a tomorrow.

Since that felt a little better, I went back to Leanne’s, reasoning Zippy would stay there and then I’d get some sleep and take over, but, about an hour and a half later, she called and said his heart was failing. I rushed over there but missed – he’d died.

For us, this is really the first death in the immediate, local family and we had no idea what to do, but Zippy had lined up someone at a funeral home so she called her and got that ball rolling. We opted for just a visitation since Daddy really didn’t do much outside the house.

Zippy, though, does, and the visitation was like some kind of reunion for old GCA teachers and ERS employees, plus softball and pickleball players left and right. I mean, I think we overwhelmed the funeral home; we just took over the place.

Since there were so many people and we just wouldn’t leave, someone proposed heading to Whataburger, Daddy’s favorite restaurant, after the visitation. Twenty of us went, which I think freaked them out a bit – a line out the door that came out of nowhere – but the staff was so nice.

Since then, it’s been one thing after another, just trying to get a grasp on what’s going on. Fortunately, some stuff made sense and has fallen into place. Unfortunately, some other stuff hasn’t.

Finally, though, I’m starting to do some of my originally proposed home leave stuff. Last weekend, I went to a martial arts competition to watch Little Bit in her first tournament, which happened to be Tiger Rock’s national event. (Her dojo.) She kicked butt, literally.

Next weekend, I’m doing the crown jewel of home leave – a visit to Universal Studios Orlando to see Harry Potter land, or whatever it’s called. I’m not a fanatic, but I do like HP and I’ve never been to Universal.

In the meantime, I’m fulfilling what Batgirl assumes to be my purpose on earth – rubbing her tummy.