Let’s just say that I went somewhere that I desperately wanted to talk about but didn’t want to call by name. Let’s just say that I did not feel like discussing the reasons for this publicly. Let’s just say that I chose to call that place Elsewhere and asked you to call it that, too. Let’s just say, OK? Okay. Adelante!
Yearly Archives: 2015
all shot up and ready to go
It’s looking increasingly definite that my contract, and thus my health insurance, will end on December 31. So before going on vacation I made about eight doctor’s appointments, all for the last three weeks of the year, to get my medical ducks in a row before losing my benefits / leaving for Senegal.
February 15, 2016 is just shy of two years from the day I promised myself to do a French language sabbatical in Senegal within two years, so I’ve set that as my target departure date. But there’s nothing forcing me to go then – I don’t have my plane ticket yet, I still haven’t signed up for the immersion program, there’s no job waiting for me there afterwards. At times, I harbor doubts about my ability to step out into a much more nebulous unknown than ever before. I wonder if I’ll actually go through the motions of booking the ticket, scheduling the classes, pitching myself to the people who could give me work in West Africa.
But I realized this afternoon as my needle-phobic self walked back to work from the latest doctor: there’s nothing like paying $340 and rolling five band-aids deep after three travel-related vaccinations and two blood draws in 24 hours, to redouble your commitment to the thing that necessitated all that anxiety and expense.
As I rubbed my sore arms and staunched the irrational fear that my throat would close up from an allergic reaction to the typhoid, meningitis or polio inoculations, I also smiled gleefully with the knowledge that I’d be damned if I let the never-ending-needles ordeal go to waste. Today was one more baby push out the door to go abroad.
And on that happy note, have a lovely weekend!
[Photo: Chhor Sokunthea / World Bank]
(get over the) hump day inspiration: Terry Pratchett edition
I don’t actually need any hump day inspiration considering that I got back from vacation last night and did literally nothing at work today but hang out and hyperventilate/chatter about said vacation while extremely high on espresso and life.
I’ll share photos once I sift through all 1,500+ of them and find the gemmiest of the many, many gems… Because where I went, it was eye orgasms every which way you looked.
Hasta pronto, mis amigos! No puedo esperar para mostrar mis fotos del más magnífico vacaciones en la historia de vacaciones! (I’m still high on that coffee, fourteen hours later.)
adios, amigos!
It’s 1:57 a.m. and I have to leave for the airport at 5:05. Part of the reason I’m still awake is that tomorrow today is the last day of my Spanish class, during which there will be a final exam. Because I won’t be there, my teacher provided me with instructions for taking the exam online on some special site. So in addition to my usual last-minute million things to do, tonight before packing I took a 1 1/2 hour Spanish test.
Which I failed miserably. Not because I did badly per se, but because something went horribly wrong when the timer ran out on Part One while I was still typing, which somehow triggered the entire exam to submit itself without giving me a chance to move on to the more heavily weighted second essay. And apparently once the exam is submitted, there’s no way to reverse course and continue working on it.
The submission confirmation page showed me what the second essay question was, so I typed something up in Word and emailed it to my teacher, along with a little note beseeching her to show me mercy.* Since I’ll barely have Internet access during my trip, I won’t actually know whether she did or not til I return from what will be the true test of my Spanish skills.
…In approximately twelve hours I’ll be in Mexico City, trying desperately to be understood. And wishing desperately for a nap.
Back in a couple of weeks. Hasta luego!
*I care about my grade not because of pride or perfectionism but because if I don’t pass the test, I don’t pass Level 3 Spanish, and I can’t move on to Level 4 if I ever come back to work here after my current contract ends.
what not to do when planning an international trip
1. Buy your airline ticket.
2. Vaguely look into visas and decide you don’t need any for the countries you’re visiting.
3. Wait a month.
4. Two days before your trip, think to yourself, did I adequately check whether I need a visa for that one country?
5. Do a quick Google search.
6. Convince yourself a visa may be necessary even though the vast majority of the information online claims that you can get it in the airport… But there are those one or two sites that differ.
7. Panic.
8. Call the airline and attempt to ask in Spanish (yes, it had to be in Spanish) whether it is in fact possible to get the visa in the airport.
9. Further panic when the customer service guy wants to look up your ticket first, but can’t find it. (Yes, panic, even though when you click on a link in your ticket confirmation email, it takes you to a second confirmation page directly on the airline’s site. And even though the reasonable explanation for the confusion is that you can neither correctly spell your name in Spanish letters nor intelligibly articulate dates or times in Spanish numbers.)
10. Miraculously understand when the guy tells you he’s going to attempt to find someone who speaks English because the conversation will be too complicated otherwise.
11. Wait on hold for fifteen minutes, worried.
12. Call back when phone gets disconnected. Wait on hold another twenty five minutes.
13. Finally get on the line with someone who speaks English, and within the space of two minutes, confirm that your ticket is just fine and that you can get the visa in the airport before your flight, no problem.
14. Hang up the phone, and close ten Chrome tabs on which the same information was written, but which you chose to ignore because you court anxiety like it’s Vitamin C and you’ve got scurvy.
I’m just loco like that
The chapter we’re studying in my Spanish textbook is called “Ida y Vuelta,” and it’s travel-themed. Yesterday, we split into two groups for an in-class activity in which each group had to come up with a travel adventure plan to present to the other group. Details were to include where we’d go, what we’d do, how long we’d prepare for the trip, and how we’d finance it.
I sheepishly reported to my group that I have a real-life travel adventure plan I am hoping to put into action soon. When I told them what it was, it sounded so much like fantasy that I started passing it off as such to hide my embarrassment. “Primero, voy a ir al Senegal para practicar mi francés, y luego voy a ir al Argentina para seguir aprendiendo mi español, y voy a ir de un país al otro país por, erm… no sé… viajar alrededor los otros países del mundo, quizas?” Which, if I spoke proper Spanish, would translate to, “First I’m going to go to Senegal to practice my French and then I’m going to go to Argentina to continue learning Spanish, and I’m going to get from one country to the other by traveling around the world, maybe?”
We ended up fusing that plan with everyone else’s much more modest travel fantasies (tomar el sol en Florida, conducir por México, viajar a Praga para ver los museos) and decided we would finance our now wildly-untenable trip by working really hard in a restaurant for two months beforehand and selling our travel photos to National Geographic during our trip – which actually sounds much more plausible than the idea of me circumnavigating Africa in-between language immersion stints.
At one point while trying to explain the plan, my classmate asked the teacher, “Cómo se dice, ‘crazy'”?
I piped right up, “Loco!” Because if you harbor a dream as far-fetched as mine, you’re going to know that word in many languages.
[Photo: Fumigraphik]
setbacks
Setback one: After spending day after day checking airfare alerts for the best deals (and there were many: $525 to Seoul, $400 to Hong Kong, $330 to Paris, $275 to Martinique), I ended up buying two decidedly non-deal tickets to the two places I wanted to go to most: Mexico City and, erm, somewhere else nearby.
I leave next Thursday. Last Wednesday, I ran too far in my newish running shoes that just don’t fit very well, and I’ve been increasingly hobbled by my big toe since then. While the day after the run it merely ached, today it is so bad that I’m limping around wondering if I might have somehow broken my toe simply by running on it.
I had planned to spend the entirety of my vacation wandering aimlessly around the streets of the cities I’m visiting, as is my wont, but now I’ll be lucky if I can even step into and out of the taxis and buses I will be relying upon to haul me around. Panicked! Calling a doctor tomorrow…
Setback two: It’s time to register for my next semester of Spanish at work. In order to do that, I need to submit an updated letter from HR saying that I’m expected to be contracted through the end of the course. Problem is, in the pursuit of this letter I found out that my contract will almost certainly not be extended past December 31.
I’ve been at this job long enough to know that anything is possible, including that my contract will be miraculously renewed month by month until April 19, at which point I’ll have filled the post for the full year that it is allowed to be held by a temp. Even if that happens though, what’s fairly certain is that I won’t be able to take a free Spanish class next semester.
Nadie va a escribime la carta, y sin lo [la?? ella??], no puedo tomar el clase. I wrote that without the help of Google Translate! This class has taught me so much, it’s the highlight of my Mondays, Wednesdays and Thursdays, and I’m so, so sad that I won’t be able to continue with it in the new year.
what can I say? not much.
I feel weird writing anything new on a blog about all things foreign without acknowledging first that what has transpired abroad over the past three weeks – in the air over Egypt, in Beirut, in Yola, in Paris, in Bamako, and in many smaller terrorist attacks that didn’t make the front pages – is a tragedy on the order of which no words, or at least not mine, can do justice. (Which is why I didn’t try to write any at the time.) The subsequent backlash against refugees – people who are themselves fleeing terror in their homelands – as well as against Muslims in general, is another sickening attack on our shared humanity.
Many years ago, a colleague told me that on the advice of some spiritual counselor or other she had chosen a three-word mantra to repeat every day. (Of course this was in Los Angeles.) I liked the idea and thought long and hard about what mine should be, before settling upon “courage – tolerance – compassion.” For awhile I would whisper the words to myself once or twice a day, and it did have a very grounding effect, though the habit didn’t last long. Seems like a good time to revive it. I believe in the primacy of those three words now more than ever.
Aquavit
A couple of months ago I found myself out late, hungry, and in a self-indulgent mood in Midtown East. Conditions were ripe to finally go to Aquavit, the two-Michelin-star Swedish restaurant on 55th Street that I had been wanting to try for years but had never gotten around to because the last neighborhood I’d choose for an occasion is Midtown East.
So I grabbed the chance to pop in without a reservation at 9:30pm on a Tuesday and sidled up to the bar to order the tasting menu.
I love Swedish food to such a degree that even Ikea’s meatballs taste gourmet to me. So, actual gourmet Swedish food was sort of mind blowing. But the best thing about the meal was the cultural fusion that took place when I realized the man behind the bar was from Manila and I told him about my trip to the Philippines last year.
Because Joey is the classic bartender/storyteller hybrid, this led to him sharing a crazy tale about crushing on his older brother’s friend’s girlfriend as teenagers hanging out in Marcos’ abandoned office in the presidential palace on the night of the revolution (since both of their fathers worked for the opposition leader). Joey moved to America as a young man and didn’t see the girl again until a serendipitous encounter many years later. He picked right up where he left off with his crush, and after a long-distance romance, she moved to New York and they got married.
This incredible story, with too many plot twists to count, unfolded over eight courses of the tasting menu, all of which were presented like works of art.
They were almost as amazing to look at as to eat. The chef took traditional Nordic dishes and spun them in totally inventive and delightful ways. It was a (very) expensive meal but well worth it, once in a lifetime, for the experience of being transported from the everyday to the extraordinary – by way of Sweden, the Philippines, and – most surprisingly of all – Midtown East. More and more lately I’ve been reminded that even in one’s decade-plus home, it’s always possible to see the world with a foreigner’s fresh eyes.
it wasn’t so easy this time
Sleep-deprived two Speakeasies in a row. I guess my beginner’s luck had run out because this time the words did not magically flow from my uncooperative brain.
As I was expending copious amounts of energy trying to say anything like something an actual French person would say, I was simultaneously having an out of body experience in which I was hovering above myself taking great pride in every single word that came out of my mouth, because here I was speaking another language, which is just nuts considering I don’t speak another language.
At the same time, I realized with a jolt that the person across from me was opening his mouth and effortlessly releasing words that flowed intuitively one from the other. There was absolutely no struggle on his part because he had been speaking this language from infancy the same way that I had been speaking English. For him, French is neither fun, nor frustrating, nor anything other than utilitarian.
It struck me as utterly bizarre that his native language was my foreign language and vice versa – that what I experience in a French conversation is 100% different than what he does. It’s not as though I have never thought about this before, but at that moment it felt like when you repeat your own name over and over until it sounds completely unfamiliar.
I should really get more sleep before I go back to one of these things…
[Photo: Valeri Passon]
talk foreign to me 