from 2014 to 2015

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2014 is behind us, and 2015 has started with fresh vigor. Happy New Year! I’m left with a couple in-between days of down time and a whole lot of feeling reflective…so back to the blog it is.

2014 started in Tanzania, and it will end in Tanzania—very. happily. so. It seems unfair to sum up the travels, experiences, sights, and sounds that I’ve come across this entire year (and especially to sum up those that occurred in the latter six months, where my posting on the blog was irregular, at best), but let’s try anyway, shall we? Consider this post my end-of-year letter that would have, twenty years ago, been mailed right to your door. Mambo from Africa!

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2014 marks the longest I have spent abroad without having gone back to the US. This is less a complaint and more of simply a cool fact, and also propelled by the fact that I know the end date to my expatriatism (which, Microsoft Word does not think expatriatism is a word, according to spellcheck).

2014 bent time and space, creating a weird time warp bubble that is simply every day life in Dar es Salaam. As I write this, I realize that my arrival in May 2013 seems ages ago, and that since my being home, babies that have been born and new jobs attained and relationships started and ended. Lots of new babies that I can’t wait to hug and kiss and smell their babyness (also, not a word)!

2014, though, was very much focused on my corner of the world (to me), and in this time warp bubble, things are all good. I was particularly bad at being in touch with friends this year, but like many things I blame it on the weird Dar space-time continuum. It took awhile to get to know and love my new home, but in the last several months I’ve really come around. What was hard is now easy, what was frustrating is now easily managed. The DiploMan may not be as smitten as I am in this place, but he is happy here, too. He is doing his suit-and-tie thing during the day (although at Embassy Dar, more like khaki-and-button-up), fighting the good fight. As just one of two Americans in his office, he still manages to take significant time off to travel and have fun, and not bring any work home with him or allow bureaucracy and Embassy dynamics skew his view of work and life. I envy him for these seemingly carefree qualities. Having a better grasp on work-life separation is one of my goals for 2015.

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2014 allowed us to call Dar home, and it’s been a good home indeed. Our equatorial setting means year-round weather ranging between the very pleasant 85-95 degrees F, with daylight a fairly constant 6am-6pm. It’s a blessing and a curse, for although I have become an avid ocean creature and my skin dewey in the above-average humidity, I do miss my sweaters and boots and coats and beanies and scarves.

2014 allowed me to experience small-town type living. I miss big-city living, but this small-community certainly has its rewards. In our second year here, we have come to meet some really great, inspiring, and true friends. Some have since left, but we know they are ones we will know forever. Like our first post in Guangzhou, where we met some of our best friends, I know we will continue many friendships long after we leave Dar.

2014 was a good year for work, too. Home, climate, and social life aside, I found good opportunities that allowed me to grow in confidence and abilities. For most of the first year, as I somewhat reported in this blog, I was freelancing and writing copy and articles for various small companies and magazines around the web and world. I got a few big jobs in Dar, editing a local city magazine, as well as writing press kits for a local fashion designer. I also had the very exciting pleasure to hone my photography skills on a variety of projects, including an intensive five-day commercial photo shoot for the first Tanzania-based fast food concept, Bongo Flava. I’ve since eaten at Bongo Flava more than I’d like to admit I eat fast food, but it really is very tasty, so I’m quite proud to have supported that project.

2014 capped off my freelance work with a part time job at the Embassy, as a CLO (for those of you familiar with FS-life) which was rewarding but all-consuming. As my freelance work dropped off and I found less time and energy to blog, I decided that I wanted to get back into media, communications, photography, and writing. I had planned to return to freelancing, but quite fortuitously, I was able to score a contract with the US Agency for International Development (USAID) and work in their communications department, full time. I am thoroughly enjoying this work, as it feels it finally combines many of the skills I have learned in my decade-plus of seemingly scattered work.

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2014 brought me outside my comfort zone, not only in work, but in play. It shuttled me around to places I never imagined I would, like the Serengeti. I climbed volcanoes, trekked through forests, camped amidst wild animals, boated to remote islands, and in general, explored the grandeur that is the country of Tanzania–and beyond. I wish I had the time and the energy to write posts about each and every adventure—which I always intended, but never got around too. Perhaps they’ll stay stored in my memory and I’ll one day share. I actually do intend to.

2014 also invited a slew of friends and family in Dar to experience some of these majesties with me, including visits from my parents and my sister. The recaps and photos from these trips I’ve meant to share for some time, but again, it’s a matter of getting around to it.

And now, what lies ahead?

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2015 will bring the very best of my time in Tanzania, and then will close the chapter. With a departure date set sometime around May, it will be sad, but also a welcomed ending. I like it here in Dar, but I am looking forward to what is next. And frankly, this town is a bit small for me! So soon, we’ll be back in the US for some travels and time off, then spend some months of training in DC. After that, we’re heading back to China!

2015 and beyond is going to be crazy. China wasn’t the plan, but things often aren’t. This time we’ll be in the sprawling metropolis of Beijing, one of the greatest and most important cities in the world, both historically and contemporaneously. I can’t say I’m particularly excited, although I am very eager to live there. The recent bidding process for the DiploMan was a beast. High on our list were cities like Rangoon, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Kiev, Bratislava, and Athens. The Diploman was very close in getting some of those (unfortunately, being a second choice isn’t quite the as consoling as one would think) and very distant in others, but the final offer was for Beijing and for that we’re pleased.

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So, on a very satisfied and positive note, I raise my coffee mug to the year 2015. Hopefully it includes a lot more blogging. And a new iPhone, which was gone along with 2014.

Asian Thanksgiving

Each year the full moon that appears on the eighth month of the Chinese calendar calls for great celebrations, heralding the past year’s harvest or praying for the next year’s bounty, and celebrating the full moon in the sky. In the old days, royalty and peasants alike would take a break from their regular routines to celebrate with friends, family, and feasting. Called Mid-Autumn Festival (Zhong Qiu Jie) in China, Chuseok in Korea, Tsukimi in Japan, and Tet Trung Thu in Vietnam, this year the lunar holiday falls on this date, September 8.

Me, full on erudite in Chinese, circa 1983.

Me, fully erudite in Chinese, circa 1983.

Those who knew me growing up are familiar with my 12-year struggle in the once-a-week Friday night torture session that was more formally known as Silicon Valley Chinese School. (How better to traumatize a high school student than to rob her of her Friday night dances?) But of course, like all things your parents say you will eventually thank them for in the future, of course I now thank them for sending me to Chinese School; for instilling a good sense of Chinese language, both spoken and written, and for the various aspects of culture it cemented within me. It was at Chinese School, in addition to at home, where I learned the romantic folklore surrounding the Mid Autumn Festival, telling of a famous archer who shot down nine out of ten suns in the sky to save the earth from the scorching heat, who was subsequently rewarded with a magical elixir of immortality. The story continues to tell how the love of his life then drank this elixir and was transported to the moon for the rest of eternity–along with a rabbit, although how this rabbit came to be in the moon, my memory fails to recall.

Myself aside, many of the Chinese diaspora who have since emigrated to countries such as Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, the Philippines, and elsewhere, brought this holiday and its lore to their overseas communities. Unbeknownst to me until this year, the Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese cultures also celebrate this harvest moon, though with different folklores and slightly different rituals.

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Streets of Hong Kong during the holidays

Chinese culture is something I rarely recall in my life here in Dar, other than the fact that Tanzanians always scream out “China! China! Japan! Japan!” When I pass by them on the streets of City Centre. I actually tried speaking Chinese the other day, only to find myself stumbling over the most basic of words, and leading the Chinese man who asked me where the milk was in the grocery to ask/accuse, “You’re not Chinese….? What are you?” A bit offensive, but unsurprisingly Chinese of him.

I find myself yearning to celebrate holidays so heavily traditional and culturally rich as they have in China. Here in Tanzania, Muslim holidays aside, the year is chock full of non-celebratory bank holidays: Workers’ Day, Independence Day, Nyerere’s Birthday, Boxing Day…you get the point.

A typical Asian potluck--too much food.

A typical Asian potluck–too much food.

This year, myself, a Korean friend, and a Singaporean friend decided that we needed to round up the Asian population in Dar for a feast in celebration of this great festival to the moon. We called it Asian Thanksgiving– because how much more appropriate could you call this Pan-Asian merging of family and friends and supreme feasting?

We had what was likely to be Dar’s all-time best Asian cuisine: An Asiatic mix that included Japanese pork belly, Korean bulgogi and fried chicken, Vietnamese chicken salad, two different kinds of Philippino Adobo and fresh homemade buns, Thai Green Curry and coconut fish stew, and tons of homemade noodles, and rice. Best of all, we had sweet sticky rice and moon cake for dessert. Moon cake, here in Africa…what a treat!

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I was too busy running around the party to remember to take detail shots of the party, but here are a few overview shots of the group. Happy Mid Autumn Festival….or, more appropriately: 中秋節快樂!

My Asian family here in Dar.

My Asian family here in Dar.

Happy International Workers’ Day!

May 1 is International Workers’ Day, celebrated by most countries except for, ironically, the country in which it stems from– the U.S., of course (for more information, read up on the Haymarket Riots).

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Doorways and Alleyways in City Centre. Portals to entirely different worlds in Dar es Salaam…no flight necessary!

We are going away on a super super exciting trip for the weekend, which I’ll be sure to blog about after the fact. Actually, the entire month of May is going to be filled with travel, too– after about a year of being more or less stuck in Dar, we’ve got some exciting trips ahead. Finally!

Superbowl Sunday XLVIII

Anyone else call this ‘Superbowl ex-el-vee-ei-ei-ei‘?

There are a few holidays that make me feel very American abroad, and where the two official holidays are Fourth of July and Thanksgiving, the one unofficial holiday is Superbowl Sunday. Though, I could strongly argue for a case to make it a day off, a bank holiday, because I’ve seen the lengths at which men and women abroad will go to watch the game. In fact, my Superbowls abroad might be celebrated with more ceremony than my Superbowls at home.

In China, we had two Superbowls; that’s two years where we watched football at 7am in the morning. The first year was my favorite, it was when the DiploMan and I hosted, playing a mediocre quality TV feed projected onto our pull-down screen, complemented by breakfast and Irish coffees. Our curtains were drawn for the occasion, and since our group of friends all took the day off from work we ended up spending the day indoors, curtains drawn the whole day, playing card games and watching ridiculous adult comedies.

The next year we decided to go out and watch the game, at a popular Irish pub in Guangzhou who fed us a big English Breakfast. Beers and Beans at 7am, yum.

This year, when I caught wind that the Superbowl would play between the hours of 2-6am, I thought surely no one would be crazy enough to watch the Superbowl. I figured a delayed feed it would be, that I would wake up to a Facebook feed of activity as I do every other morning.

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But no, I was wrong, and there was not just one, but two Superbowl parties here in Dar (and more that I’m sure I just wasn’t invited to). Never underestimate the determination of Americans! Only here in Dar, can I say that I’ve had a 2am rooftop viewing of the Superbowl. With one television playing a crispy clear version aired by AFN (Armed Forces Network), and another screen projecting the a low-quality Slingbox broadcast, important for us only for the occasional glance at commercials, I thought to myself, we sure as heck make for a compelling argument to declare Monday a day of rest.

Christmas thoughts, after Christmas!

It’s been a little quiet around this blog lately. I’ve been wanting to write lots of updates about new finds around town and places I’ve visited and novel things I’ve done…But somehow these ideas for blog posts always seem to come up in the shower, or in the car, or other places where it’s not terribly convenient to start writing. And like everyone else, the usual end-of-year scurry to finish whatever work is left to finish, is combined with end-of-year holiday procrastination. Because I won’t lie, I’ve been occupying myself with things like cookie decorating parties, tree decorating parties, liver decorating parties…leaving myself no option but to say, I promise that next year will start off with a bang!

In the meantime, back here, my blog posts that I have written as of late have hinted at how it just doesn’t feel like Christmas around here. But then, all of a sudden, during these last few days in Dar I’ve felt a frenzy of Christmas spirit. And yesterday, Christmas Day, the roads near my house were quiet and sleepy, parking lots typically jam-packed were lonely and deserted, reminding me very much of Christmas back home.

Christmas in Nashville, 2012

Christmas in Nashville, 2012

 

As for our little family of two, the Diploman and I, rather than exchange gifts (we rarely do), we gifted ourselves the luxury of sleeping in. We went over to a friends’ and had a low-key but spot-on Christmas Day supper, starting at 2pm, complete with ham that was hand-carried from the States and where the DiploMan was called a “spot-on fellow” by one 70-some old woman. Leaving me very envious of old-timey speak.

Christmas in Guangzhou, 2010

Christmas in Guangzhou, 2010

We went out on a long long walk in the afternoon, since we’re dog sitting for two families, and Merry Christmas greetings were exchanged with each person we passed– no matter foreign or local. In the evening we skype’d our families–or whatever families were available, and then we gave ourselves our second Christmas gift of the day and ordered pizza. We’re very easy around here, as you can see. And after our pizza dinner, we cozied up in our living room for a Breaking Bad marathon, and in between episodes (when I wasn’t saying WHAT or OH MY GOD or THAT’s CUH-RASZZY!!) I spent some time reflecting on the day and thinking about how lovely and perfect and Christmas-y it all was, despite the lack of immediate family, despite the non-existant snow or cold, and despite the absence of any wrapping paper or visits from Santa. And then I thought, waitaminute, maybe I was the one not really feeling in Christmas spirits lately, because Christmas was definitely around yesterday.

Christmas in Tahoe, 2009

Christmas in Tahoe, 2009

When we have kids, we’ll most certainly do up the whole Christmas thing. We’ll figure out a Christmas tree situation, we’ll actually plan ahead to get gifts for one another, we’ll send out Christmas cards, and we’ll maybe organize some sort of Christmas party…maybe. But for this year, it’s been quite a pleasantly nice Christmas. Hope you had a good one too, wherever you are!