Around the World in 80 Hours

Well, I just returned from my around-the-world tour, and let me tell u- It was AWESOME!!!
Ha ha- jk! Lol lol!!!! ;-)

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If I ever use 'msg speak' without comedic intent, please shoot me.

Seriously, though, I have been all around the world this past week without any need to sneak myself into the cargo hold of a 747, no physically taxing layovers, and no airplane food. With the city of San Francisco, California as my backyard, I:

-took a walk on a secluded Japanese sea cliff, and then strolled on over to
-a garden on the outskirts of Amsterdam
-went shopping in NYC
-had lunch in Hong Kong
-took pictures in Barcelona
-had a snack somewhere on the Russo-Ukranian border
-stopped for tea and bokhoor in Sana'a
-and entered the offices of a Tunisian university

Given both the climate and visible foliage in this city, and the vast diversity of its immigrant community, I can go anywhere. I can even be in America.

I am coming to terms with my home country, learning to love and appreciate it, learning to define what being American means for me personally. Being happy where I am before the wanderlust sets in again and I'm hallucinating that I've got air tickets and valid entry visas for the country my heart desires. I don't think I've ever been truly happy where I am, always wishing to be somewhere that I'm not, when the reality of a place does not match up to the idealized and glossed over version in my mind, glittering and tantalizing in stark comparison to the locale of the moment.

There are aspects of the middle east that I miss, and I'm trying to find substitutes and ways to fill the void in my spoiled existence, but for the moment it would take some effort to convince me to live there (ok, not really), but I can say that I am happy to be in America for the first time in years. I am ready to reinvent myself as a semi-normal American. An Ex-Expat if you will.

I think all I needed was to live in a city that had enough exposure to the rest of the world, enough cultures coming together that I could feel at home. After all, back when I lived in Houston, many of my friends were first-generation American, and the best treat that I could get as a reward was to pick out a snack at one of the international supermarkets. I wanted to be like all the other kids, who had things in their lunch box like dried squid strips, or brazilian tapioca in a red wine sauce. And can you really blame me if my parents used to take me to a Lebanese restaurant every Sunday for a year before I ever set foot in the middle east, where I gobbled down shwarma and stared at a poster for an Amr Diab concert, trying to pick out the letters?

My sister, on the other hand, was born an expatriate, and forms a national minority in her international school. She knows America as a mythical land whose history exists as a series of stores that might as well be fairy tales, without any concept that its varied cities and states are all part of the same land. She feels a subtle social difference at only knowing English, and right now thinks it is really cool to be from Latin America. We will see where she goes in life, what languages she will learn and how a true expatriate will assimilate back into a world she barely knows.