What Is An Expat?

Well, we’ve made it back and are enjoying being at work again. If it wasn’t for being able to come back to work, vacation could go on forever! I took approximately 1419 pictures before the “why do you exist?” deletions started occurring. I haven’t had the chance to get through too many of them yet, but the upside is that most of my notes were actually written out instead of being notes, so a possibility exists that I may actually generate a trip report out of this. (We’ll see. )

We had a great time but should have taken a few more days. Several places cropped up where we thought “hey, we’d really like to see that” but were unable to due to lack of time. We ran in to several old friends and Uzbeks, some of whom were both. We made several new friends as well, which is always nice. Japan was very polite and friendly overall and quite a nice trip, which I highly recommend to anyone who can make it. It was much easier to get around than we had expected, though there were a few small snags here and there, but none were very bad.

Related posts

• Strange Things You Might See in Japan I (3)
• Some interesting coincidences… (1)
• Outward Bound: The Palace to Dubai (2)
• November 2004 Dubai Trip Part II (0)
• It’s Still A Small World (0)

Apparently I never wrote this one first. Oops.

Sitting in the chow hall the other day — ok, it was well over a month ago. Probably close to two. Anyway, I’m sitting there minding my own business and enjoying the tasty, delicious food that the serving guys just can not give you reasonable portions of, and by that I mean you’ll get 2-3 times what you want unless you’re an absolute pig, idly watching people come through the door, as I do, when in walks a dude who looks awful familiar. And he did, because Jason is an old friend from both the high school and college days! Hell, he was even a Bushido Brother with me and Matt.

That was pretty neat, because while you run into people in those various kinds of work fairly often, particularly ones you’ve met IN that line of work, but it’s the first time something so unexpected happened. It was really cool catching back up. Jason mentioned that he’d looked for me recently, but hadn’t found anything. I guess it didn’t help that I moved a lot further out from home than most folks usually do. I’m a lot harder to find, being way over here instead.

Related posts

• Some interesting coincidences… (1)
• Outward Bound: The Palace to Dubai (2)
• November 2004 Dubai Trip Part II (0)
• It’s Still A Small World (0)
• Back from Japan (0)

Yesterday at lunch we ended up sitting near some Army folk who struck up a conversation. As it turns out, the SFC was from Tifton GA. That’s not too far from “home” but even more interesting was that the captain doing most of the talking was from Martinez GA, quite literally down the street from where I did most of my growing up in Augusta. We pointed out several locations of mutual interest, and it turns out we’d both moved north of Atlanta — I moved to Roswell my senior year, he moved to Alpharetta sometime before that. It’s really the same area, since I’d lived way up at the very edge of town, where Alpharetta (I always hated that name) was just across the street from our subdivision. We both graduated from the same high school, good ol’ Milton. Of course he followed me by 9 years (!) so we didn’t play the “did you know sosandso?” game. Of course, since I moved my senior year and was bound and determined to hate it, I didn’t really know so many people in the first place. I definitely threw that whole year away instead of capitalizing on it.

It’s not quite the same as seeing an old high school and college friend walk up (did I post about that?) but it’s still unusual.

Related posts

• Some interesting coincidences… (1)
• Outward Bound: The Palace to Dubai (2)
• November 2004 Dubai Trip Part II (0)
• It’s A Small World (4)
• Back from Japan (0)

We are in Mexico right now. We had to leave the country before spending too many days in the USA, because then we would lose the “working and living outside the country” tax exclusion, which would cost many thousands of dollars in taxes.

So far, we have gone cave diving, skycycled over the jungle and through some caverns, swam with dolphins, paid entirely too much for the picture and DVD package of that, snorkelled (swam, really) through more underground caverns and rivers, seen jaguars, pumas, iguanas, birds of all colors, met some Turkish people who’d lived in Dubai, done some ziplining, rappelling (a short one, to be sure), visited Mayan ruins by the sea,…well, it’s been a fun trip.

Interestingly enough, this is our first actual vacation in the Western Hemisphere. I don’t really count the 2 previous trips to the USA as they were more like visiting home than doing anything new or unusual. Though I guess you could say visiting home has become unusual.:lol:

Related posts

• Thoughts On A Holiday Party (3)
• So Much For That (0)
• Recent Gallery Updates (0)
• Part I: Homeward Bound (0)
• Outward Bound: The Palace to Dubai (2)

I was listening to some music last night and thought of a song I had not listened to in a while. It is “Aisha” by the group Outlandish. They are from Denmark apparently, with members from Honduras, Pakistan, and Morocco.

I first heard this song in December of 2003 in Tashkent. Actually, there is a possibility I first heard it in October, but looking back I can’t be sure. Anyways, it makes a better story if it’s December, so it is officially December. So there! It was on or about mid-December and a friend of mine and I were on the way out on R&R. We had processed in Houston together and arrived a day or two apart. We spent a few days there before flying out. Of course this was before the lockdowns and other ridiculous stuff imposed by the company folks, so you could go out and do whatever you wanted. Out in the clubs we heard this amazing song. We both noticed it, and it was obvious that nearly everyone else really seemed to like it a lot, too. In a nutshell, it sings the praises of a woman living her life. It tugs all the right heartstrings. (more…)

Related posts

• The Trip to Mosul (4)
• Some interesting coincidences… (1)
• Outward Bound: The Palace to Dubai (2)
• A Bunch of Stuff With Ts in It (0)
• Westward Bound (8)