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?
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