expat

Friday Photos

I am featuring random photos each week that pertain to my upcoming book, Echoes of a Global Life. Here are a few from Europe during the 70’s.

With my teenage passport photo thrown in.

Other things… I had Jury Duty this week. I spent all day Monday sitting in a windowless room with a bunch of people I didn’t know. Then I had to check the website twice a day to see if I needed to go back in. That was the extent of it. I was glad I didn’t have to go back and sit in there but I was kind of looking forward to being on a Jury.

Books.

There has been a lot of talk about The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store. Several people told me I should read it. I’m sorry to say I couldn’t finish it. I just couldn’t get into it. It seemed very long and drawn out. Same with This is Happiness. It seemed to go on and on and nothing happened. There were parts I liked and enjoyed but they were broken up with lots of nothing. Just my opinion.

I really liked Miss Benson’s Beetle. It was a real mad cap adventure and held my interest throughout. Of course it was subject matter I could get into, relate to on some levels. I Hope This Finds You Well also held my interest and I enjoyed it but I think it could have been shorter. It kind of dragged in parts. It was almost funny but not really. Sad/Funny. It is about office dynamics – good, bad and ugly.

I read From Here to the Great Unknown by Lisa Marie Presley and Riley Keough. It is a memoir of Lisa Marie’s life. I found it hard to read. It kept jumping back and forth from Lisa Marie speaking to Riley speaking and it was often hard to tell who was talking. Not very well edited. And when it started to just list all the celebrities they spent time with, I jumped to the end. Actually I just looked her up on Wikipedia to find out what happened.

So that brings me up to the current book I am reading – The Chancellor – about Angela Merkel’s life. So far very interesting.

Have a great weekend!

Friday Photos
With my mother in Colombia

I am featuring random photos each week that pertain to my upcoming book, Echoes of a Global Life. My photos seem to be fewer and farther in-between during this period. Can’t find much. Here are a few of Africa during the 70’s.

Friday Photos – Mexico
Olmec Head, National Museum of Anthropology, Mexico City

I am featuring random photos each week that pertain to my upcoming book, Echoes of a Global Life. 

I lived in Mexico City from age severn to fourteen. I went to a British School and wore a uniform. We traveled around Mexico a lot.

School Uniform
Picnic at base camp Popocapetl Volcano

Acapulco

Teotehuacan

1968 Olympics

Determination
don t quit message
Photo by Leeloo The First on Pexels.com

Last night I watched the film “True Spirit” about Jessica Watson who sailed around the world solo, non-stop, at age 16. I would say that is determination. First of all, who wants to do that? It takes a certain mind-set. It was her dream to do it and she was able to succeed. It almost killed her but imagine how it felt when it was over. A huge high. At 16, I would image you spend the rest of your life trying to live up to it all. But she learned a lot about herself, life, death, and the sea. She will always have that experience. The film was quite moving. It is available on Netflix.

Another film I watched recently was “Lee”. It is about Lee Miller who was a highly sought after Vogue model in the 1920’s. When she left modeling, she picked up a camera and spent time studying with Man Ray in France and photographing her socialite friends. When the war broke out she was an established photographer living in England with her husband, Ronald Penrose. She became a war photojournalist for Vogue and managed to talk her way to the Front. Miller took thousands of photos and was one of the first photographers to enter Dachau. It all had a profound effect on her. The film covers a short period of her life but shows her determination to succeed in a man’s world. Kate Winslet does a good job in the starring role. It is available on Netflix.

For the TCK in you, I came across a couple of new books.

“Blue Feet Monsoon” by Cynthia Green. It takes place in post-colonial Singapore, Anoushka’s seventh country – Peru, Brazil, India, Philippines, Japan, Colombia and Singapore. Anoushka decides she really likes Singapore so she pretends to volunteer at the elderly ward of a hospital in order to find somebody to teach her to speak Hokkien. She thinks it will make her fit in to her new country. This kicks off a series of adventures. The book is fast paced and a fun trip through adolescent ups and downs. I enjoyed this fast paced book about change and movement.

“Between Worlds: An Expat’s Quest for Belonging” by Inga Aksamet. Inga has written several books about hiking, camping and travel. This is her memoir about growing up TCK. She starts out in Pakistan at age four. She crisscrosses the globe always returning to California between postings. She evacuates from Pakistan and Bangladesh because of wars. She searches for her own identity through all the changes and challenges of constantly being uprooted. In the end she finds her calling as an oncology nurse. I enjoyed this story of self discovery. As I traveled through Inga’s world, I could relate to her adventures and traumas having lived in Asia, South America and even Oakland myself. It sounds like it all worked out very well for her in the end. I recommend it.

Shopping in Moscow

I lived in Moscow, Russia for nine years in the 1990’s. It was a brief moment in Russian history that will probably never come again. 

In February 1994, on a Saturday, I went to the grocery store to do the weekly shopping with my backpack and a cloth bag. In Moscow you always had to have your own bag. I took the metro as usual. I walked about half a mile from my apartment to the nearest metro station and rode it for five stops. February in Moscow is cold and often snowy and usually messy. The metro floors are wet with everybody’s boots tracking in dirt and snow and ice. My metro station was one of my favorites, Novoslobodskaya. It has thirty-two stained glass panels designed by a Latvian artist. When it was empty, I enjoyed sitting down and taking them all in. 

Once at the store, I found pretty much everything I was looking for which didn’t happen that often. The store wasn’t too crowded, so everything was looking pretty good. I was thinking how great it was that so much stuff had fit into the backpack, and I only had to carry a couple of light things in my hands. As I approached the entrance to the metro, I felt the pack shifting as if something was not quite right. At the station I pushed my way through a huge crowd to get past the turnstiles and decided I should take the pack off and check it before I got onto the escalator. As I was taking it off it opened wide and everything fell out onto the muddy wet floor of the station. I dropped everything and chased a can as it rolled away from me and managed to gather everything into a pile. I hurriedly crammed my sugar, flour, juice and tomato sauce back into the backpack. The cheese and sour cream had been in a separate plastic bag, so I just shoved that into my cloth bag and proceeded to the escalator. Through all this, people were stepping over me and around me and somebody actually stepped on my sour cream, so it was smeared all over the inside of the plastic bag. Nobody had missed a step to even think about offering me any help. My bags were filthy from lying in the muck on the floor and my hands were also filthy from gathering everything up off the muck on the floor. I was cursing the metro, the Russian people, the Russian Federation, my husband and anybody else I could think of and I plotted all the way home that I would just pack my bags and get the next flight out of this god forsaken place.

When I got to my apartment building and entered the elevator that rarely worked properly, a woman followed me in with her dog who she had just been walking. After establishing which floors we were going to she commented on the fact the elevator was in such poor working order. I agreed wholeheartedly. She went on to say that I should really wear a hat because I might catch the flu in this cold weather. I said it really wasn’t that cold.  As she got off, she smiled and wished me well.  Continuing up the elevator all I could think of was what a country filled with contradictions.

I managed to salvage everything but the sour cream by transferring things into non-muddy containers. I set the backpack and cloth bag aside to be dealt with later and cleaned the apartment from top to bottom and washed all the floors. I felt much better when I was done.

Friday Photos – To Ithaca and Back again

I am featuring random photos each week that pertain to my upcoming book, Echos of a Global Life. We left Burma when I was three and moved to Ithaca, New York. When I graduated from Nursery School, we moved back to Burma. After only one year, there was a coup and we had to leave. We took our time on the way back to the US and ended up in Rye, New York.

While living in Ithaca we traveled around the East Coast to Virginia and Washington DC with my grandparents.

Shenandoah National Park
Niagara Falls

That chair currently sits in my living room. I like it.

When I was five we moved back to Burma.

On the left is a Chinthe. A Chinthe is a Burmese “lion”. They don’t have lions in Burma so this was what they thought a lion might look like. They guard and protect the temples. In the background is the Shwedagon Pagoda in Rangoon. On the right I am practicing my Burmese dancing.

That year we took a trip on the Irrawaddy River and spent some time at an elephant camp where I got to ride an elephant.

On the way back from Burma we stopped in Taipei.

And Tokyo


Bus tour in Tokyo


My new Japanese Dolls

Friday Photos
Shwedagon Pagoda, Rangoon, Burma 1950’s

My postcard collection is done and I am back here at ExpatAlien.blog. I wrote a memoir about ten years ago and self published it. I recently decided I wanted to do better so I have re-written it and updated it and found a publisher and it will be rolling out pretty soon – Echos of a Global Life. Leading up to the great reveal, I have decided to launch a bit of a teaser. There won’t be tons of photos in the book but I have lots of photos. So I am going to feature random photos each week that pertain to the book with a short description. At least I’m going to give it a try. Friday seems like a good day for it. Friday Photos.

Here we go.

The 1950’s. Pyinmina, Burma.

I was born in Burma to Expat parents who were living on the campus of an Agricultural Institute. Top left is “Tigger”. My father always told people he killed the tiger but he didn’t. Back then it was a lot more common to find tigers in the area. If they were killing livestock or getting close to town, somebody would kill them. They are known as the Indochinese Tiger and are currently critically endangered due to poaching and habitat encroachment. They were originally found throughout Southeast Asia and in 1970 there were thought to be about 40,000 of them but now there are only about 200, mostly in Thailand.

I lived in Burma the first three years of my life and I enjoyed it.

Books Books Books
books in black wooden book shelf
Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

Lives and the Courage to Live Them: Thoughts of a Third Culture Kid Therapist by Dr Rachel Cason

Dr Cason is a British therapist who is also a Third Culture Kid (TCK) and caters to TCKs. In this book she touches on all the things TCKs celebrate and struggle with. Trauma, change, moving the furniture, resilience, loss, boarding school, language, relationship, balance. It is a very real and helpful book that is easy to read without a lot of professional mumbo jumbo. I highly recommend it to anybody with a nomadic childhood.

Africa in my Soul, Memoir of a Childhood Interrupted by Cheryl King Duvall, PhD

Cheryl moves to Nigeria with her family when she is eight. Her parents joined a Christian Mission and are sent to Lagos. Soon she is sent off to boarding school at the missionary school in Miango northeast of Lagos. The school is very strict and confining with no privacy and even her letters are censored. She has a difficult time adjusting. But when not at school, she takes every opportunity to soak up the sights and culture of this African country. She falls in love with it. She also lives through the start of the Biafran war and sees people gunned down in the streets. She struggles to come to terms with her family’s decision to move there, her difficult time at boarding school, and her return to the US. Even through all the heartache, I came away with a positive feeling.

The Black Attaché, Vignettes from a Life by JK Cheema

JK Cheema was born in northern India when India and Pakistan were still one country. She shares her loving memories of visiting her grandparents in a small village when she was a child. And the confusion when her mother managed to get them on the last train out before the border was closed on the newly formed Pakistan. As an adult she is accepted into a PhD program at the University of Michigan in International Development. From there she joins USAID and works in Burkina Faso, Kazakhstan, Armenia and Eritrea. She shares memories of each country along with visits to her own India. This book is a lovely stroll through JK’s life.

Happy Third Culture Kid Day
aerial photography of body of water
Photo by Asad Photo Maldives on Pexels.com

Apparently it is Third Culture Kid Day. I can’t find any information on why it came about or what the date means, if anything. It used to be simple. Third Culture Kids are people who grew up outside their passport country because of their parents’ work. Now pretty much everybody and their mother is included under the umbrella. 

I remember we used to celebrate Children’s Day in Mexico when I was growing up. We got an extra treat with our juice in the morning at school. I suppose there must have been some kind of monetary benefit with sales on toys etc. 

I found a publisher for my memoirs so I am working on re-writing them and updating them as well as incorporating a few of my mother’s letters. My parents went overseas in 1952 and my mother wrote home every week for the next thirty years. My grandmother saved most of them. Unfortunately it was not until after my mother died that I got my hands on them so I could never ask her questions about them. 

I guess I’m having a rather cynical day today. 

Apparently they thought the Maldives would disappear with global climate change but they are not disappearing. Quite the opposite. Maybe I can emigrate there….

Happy Mother’s Day

My mother died in 2019. I don’t like to remember the last years of her life and it has been difficult moving on from that. I do try to remember the good things. 

My mother taught me to be adventurous in the kitchen. Living overseas she became the queen of improvisation. She could find a substitute for (almost) anything. This was her signature dish for dinner parties.

Ragout of Beef

My mother was always entertaining and sometimes the crowd was big. This recipe is scalable and delicious. It has French origins and is also known as bœuf bourguignon. It is basically beef stew in wine sauce. In “The Art Of French Cooking”, Julia Child’s book, the recipe has a few more steps, cooks for longer, and uses oil and bacon instead of butter, but it is basically the same thing.

2 lbs round steak, cubed
3 Tablespoons butter
1/2 lb mushrooms
12 small whole onions (pearl)
6 carrots, sliced
1 clove garlic, minced
2 Tablespoons chopped parsley
1 quart red wine (this is about a glass more than a bottle). The wine should be drinkable and full bodied.
1 cup stock (as needed — you want the liquid to cover everything, I make 1/2 a bouillon cube with a cup of water but don’t always use it all)
1 teaspoon tomato paste
1/2 teaspoon salt to taste, (remember you need less salt if using a bouillon cube)
1/4 teaspoon pepper (to taste)
1 Tablespoon flour

DIRECTIONS

Brown steak in butter and remove from pan.
Brown vegetables in the same pan and return meat to pan.

Add garlic, tomato paste, flour, parsley, salt and pepper.
Mix well and let cook a few minutes until flour starts to brown 
(4-5 minutes).

Add wine and stock.
Cook in Dutch oven (big pot with a cover on top of the stove).
Simmer for 1 1/2 to 2 hours

Serve over rice or noodles (or potatoes, mashed potatoes?)

Serves 8