Abu Simble, Egypt
Abu Simble, Egypt. Moving the temple to higher ground.
January 1970
This is the real Nefertiti – and she is lovely. We saw so many ancient things today – things we had studied in your ancient history at Greengates. We are in a FF apt. right on the Nile. Your letter was here – thanks – and today we got a cable from Tim. Will go to Pyramids manana and to Karachi in aft.
Love, Mom
Cairo, Egyptian Museum. Unfinished quartzite head of Queen Nefertiti.
The day has finally come. It feels like I have been working on this book forever.
But now, here it is!
I have set up some pages to go with the book. Lots of pictures and videos. Praise from readers. And info on where to get it. Also info on how to get a review copy. Click on Much More Info below or on Echoes of a Global Life in the menu above.
ECHOES OF A GLOBAL LIFE by Kathleen Gamble
A story of survival from Burma to Moscow and beyond. Memoir. Travel stories. Living in interesting times.
Echoes of a Global Life is part memoir, part travelogue, part history lesson. Kathleen lives in a world of constant change. Moving from city to city she says goodbye to one and starts to explore the next. Never two the same. She is a survivor. She keeps on going. Through trauma, including a plane crash, and other scary times, there is also humor. Kathleen was born in Asia and lived on five continents before she was eighteen. She takes you to Burma, USA, Mexico, Colombia, Nigeria, Switzerland, and Russia. She weaves in parts of each country she carries with her. Her family lives through a coup in Burma, student rioting in Colombia, two coups in Nigeria, and political unrest in Russia. Sometimes things are fabulous. Sometimes they are not. She is a Third Culture Kid, rootless and restless. As an adult she lived in Moscow for nine years during the 1990’s where she witnessed history in the making and a terrifying exit. Life is never boring.
Minnesota usually looks something like this in winter. Not this winter. It didn’t get cold, it didn’t snow. Not to speak of, anyway. The year we didn’t have winter followed the year we had the most snow ever. We are living on a merry-go-round. What is next?
I learned the other day that the Andrews Sisters were from Minnesota. One of their biggest hits was Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy during World War II. They were child performers and won their first talent contest when the youngest was 12. The only Minnesotan who has outsold them was Prince.
Just a little tidbit to file away in your trivia drawer.
I put a slide show on my screen saver for my Apple TV that shows pictures of my recent trip to South America. It really seems kind of unreal. Was I really there? Did I really go to Easter Island? It is all kind of dreamlike. It is weird how you can have all these memories of traveling to places all over the world and be sitting in a room in front of a computer thinking about taking out the garbage and going grocery shopping and putting gas in the car. All my life I have dreamed about going to places and seeing things I have read about or studied. For example, I was always fascinated with ancient history and Egypt in particular. It was a place I knew a lot about and when I finally went there, it all came back to me. All those things I had learned all those many years ago. It was so magical. And it was just a blip. I was there and then I was back, going to work, doing laundry, cooking. Planning the next trip. When you grow up living and traveling around the world it is hard to stop, to stay in one place.
I was thinking again about my recent trip and one thing I realized was that growing up all over the world created an environment for me to experience all kinds of spontaneous cultural interactions. For example this tour had organized several “events” for the group to interact with local people in their homes. Living overseas, of course I had lots of “local” friends and often went to people’s homes. But beyond that, I traveled around the countryside and stumbled through villages and met people who invited me into their homes. A few of my friends and I would go hiking in Nigeria and end up sitting in a mud hut drinking palm wine, or on somebody’s porch eating fish stew. I never thought anything of it at the time. They were just things that happened. This recent trip made me realize how unique that was. How most people don’t have those kinds of opportunities. I just took them for granted. Silly me.
Excerpt from my book, Expat Alien: On one of our outings in Nigeria, at the end of the day, we stopped in a small village for some refreshment. There was no restaurant or store but, after having asked around, we found a house where the people were willing to sell us some beer. We sat on their porch and drank beer and the entire village came out to watch us. We bought the grandfather of the house a special drink (ogogoro – gin distilled from palm wine) from somebody down the street and we found one young boy who spoke some English to be our translator. Pretty soon the family brought out dinner for us to share (fish curry and yam paste). Francis looked like he would be sick if he had to eat any of it. I tried some of the yam paste but left the very hot curry to the others. Everybody was getting quite drunk.
.
I retired, had a great retirement party, and immediately came down with a cold. Fortunately not Covid. I hadn’t been sick in a couple of years. At the beginning of Covid I bought tons of cold remedies so I would be prepared but I never got sick. When I did get sick, they had all expired.
Now ten days later, I feel human again. Battling the system. I have yet another Social Security meeting next week. Medicare eludes me. Now the country has run out of money, by the time I get my Medicare sorted it will probably be defunded.
On the brighter side… we got another six inches of snow and I haven’t seen the sun in a while. Next winter I’m going to have to go to South America for the duration. My brother took off for New Zealand the other day. Lucky him.
Retirement. I have so many things on my to do list, I am actually feeling overwhelmed. Where to start? What to do first? Maybe it is an excuse to do nothing. I’ve been sick. I need to just take some time off and do nothing, right? Domestic chores continue to mount up. When you retire, you still have to do laundry and dishes and clean the bathroom. Really? Doesn’t seem right.
I was gifted this book called The Catch Me If You Can by Jessica Nabongo. She is the first recorded Black Woman to visit all 195 countries in the world. She did most of them in about two years. In the book she takes about 100 countries and writes a page or two about them. It gives you a snapshot, a quick anecdote, a favorite moment. She is an entrepreneur. She invented herself. Blog, travel, travel agency, promotion, London School of Economics, jobs in Japan and Benin, Ted Talk, writer. She also sells home goods, jewelry, travel accessories through a website called The Catch (although they seem to be not taking orders at the moment). One of those people who does it all and makes it look easy and seamless. The book is beautiful with lots of great photos. I don’t think I’m going to Catch her, I have like 150 countries to go.
My cousin’s husband just started a blog about his travels around the USA, either by motorcycle or camper, and all the people he meets along the way. He calls it America is a beautiful thing .
Here are a couple of snapshots a la Catch Me If You Can…
Argentina five years ago:
As we flew into Ushuaia airport I could tell the pilot was having to do some maneuvering swooping down in-between the mountains and dealing with the heavy winds. A province of Argentina, Tierra del Fuego is an island that sits at the southernmost tip of South America. Ushuaia, its capital, is on the Beagle Channel about half-way between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, 620 miles from Antarctica. The meeting of the two oceans along with the mountainous terrain creates a strange weather pattern. It was usually very windy and could rain, be sunny, be stormy, windy raining, all within the same hour. It never rained for long and usually not very heavily. We could be out walking in the rain and never feel wet.
Once we hit the ground, I started to cry. It had taken me more than thirty years to get there but I was finally there. It was an amazing feeling. And the beauty of it did not disappoint, it was even more beautiful than I had imagined. The light and color was like nothing I had seen before. The area was dominated by snow covered mountains all around. Before arriving I had been worried that the excursions I had reserved would be cancelled because the weather forecast called for rain every day. I soon realized, rain meant nothing in Ushuaia. Life went on no matter what the weather was. One of our tour guides said the only people carrying umbrellas in Ushuaia were tourists. Because of the winds, umbrellas were useless.
Egypt one year ago: Valley of the Kings
Then we wound up the hill into the valley where the tombs were hidden. One reason they picked this area is the mountain is naturally shaped like a pyramid. Only twelve of the 63 discovered tombs are open to the public at any given time and they are alternated as they are worked on and restored. We saw four of them. The whole area was still being actively excavated. Some tombs were in better shape than others. King Tutankhamun’s tomb was the only one that still had a mummy in it and it will be moved soon. It is hard to describe the experience, it was beyond beautiful so amazing to think how old they are.
I read all the Amelia Peabody books by Egyptologist Barbara Mertz aka Elizabeth Peters that span the time from 1884-1923. She wrote 20 books based in Egypt mostly about archeologists digging around and solving mysteries. As I read them, I kept trying to imagine what the Valley of the Kings actually looked like back then, or even now. All I could imagine was a vast desert with nothing much else. Well, now I know.
Have a great week!
I had a bit of an hiatus. I got hacked and then I got frustrated so I’m back on WordPress having resurrected the remnants. In the meantime my domain expired so now I’m using expatalien.blog. Such is life. I started a new blog over at postcardbuzz.com featuring my large postcard collection.
My last trip was in January to Egypt. What a fabulous place that is. I recommend it if you haven’t been. Here are a few tidbits.
One comment. The Sphinx was smaller than I had imagined. But otherwise my expectations were met.
Fifty years ago my father visited Egypt and went to Giza and rode a camel. My son went with me on this trip and my father told him he should ride a camel. We tried to re-create the scene.
Cairo had really bad smog. A city of over 20 million people. Big noisy smoggy dirty. But not as dirty as I expected. Actually, pretty clean. No open sewers, no piles of trash, no stench. Quite nice, really. In the evening I met up with an old friend I hadn’t seen in ages. He has lived in Cairo for 40 years and loves it. I have to admit, I’m a bit jealous. If you haven’t been there, I highly recommend it. I think I need to go back sometime…
That morning on our way to Giza, we stopped in a parking lot across from the Pyramids to rendez-vous with a physician. He diligently swabbed all of us and went off to do our Covid tests. This was required for us to re-enter the USA. Later that afternoon I received an email with my official document, photo and all, proclaiming I did not have Covid. That was a relief. On the way out of Egypt, the airlines did check to see I had the document but on returning to the homeland, nobody even mentioned it. All they looked at was my passport.
