Jet Lagging

I just returned from my first trip back to the US since I moved to Oman and I have to say the jet lag is killing me. Against my better judgment, I spent all day yesterday in bed sleeping, which is sure to screw me up for this entire week. I'm pretty sure it's karma, since I was bragging that I had no jet lag going to the US (and even wondered whether all of my recent travels have gotten my system so used to traveling that now I don't get lagged).

It was also an incredibly whirlwind trip, since I was "home" for only 7 days (I actually consider Oman "home" now). I was there for a work conference and to spend a few days catching up in the Houston office, but I also needed to do a tremendous amount of shopping, as well as squeeze in doctors and dentists appointments. And yeah, you hear shopping and you think fun and glamorous stuff, but I was really shopping for routine things like cold medicine and heating pads and hair products and shampoo and other incredibly boring and mundane things that you don't think about needing...until you can't buy them because you live in the freaking desert. In my haste to leave Houston last Thursday, I even forgot to pack a 6-month supply of prescription meds as well as my Omani liquor license! Fortunately my tenant is sending me everything, but geez, talk about forgetting the critical stuff (and here's hoping the package makes it through customs)!

 

Since this was my first trip back and since I'd had a rough couple of weeks in Oman with no running water or internet (my water is working again, though still no internet), a few people wondered whether my trip back would cause me to want to stay back in the US. Not even a little bit. Look, it was nice to see my friends, it was great to be back in my nice house (with running water and internet and even shower pressure!), it was nice to drink gallons of Diet Coke and wander the glorious aisles of Target, but none of that made me want to move back to Houston permanently. I really like being an expat, despite all the trials and tribulations in living in a place like this. Also, as crazy as Omani drivers are, driving in Houston was so much worse because of the traffic, the enormous highways, the oblivious drivers, the narrow lanes and the sorry state of the roads. It was flat out terrifying.

 

In addition to the jet lag, I think I'm also just exhausted from all the traveling. A few weeks ago I was in Japan for two weeks, then here for one week (dealing with all the house maintenance issues), then the US for a week, then I'm here for one week, then a week off work (I'm thinking of going to Germany if I can figure out all the details in the next few days), then here for two weeks, then a week in Romania, then here for three days, then the US for a week...I got tired just listing all that. And my poor cat. But after the first few weeks of November I'm not planning on going anywhere for a good, long while, so I need to make the most of these opportunities while I have them. And because I really need to go back to the US in November so I can hug my dog.

Tours R Us

You may have noticed that I had some nifty maps for my trip to Borneo and Japan showing the route. No, I didn't create them, I took tours and stole the maps from the tour companies. Since a lot of people ask me about traveling with tour groups or how I pick them, I figured I'd tell you all about it.

 

It happens to be really hard for me to find people to travel with. For one thing, I want to go weird places that not many of my friends want to go to (Turkmenistan anyone?). For another, most of my friends either don't have money to travel or don't have time off work to travel. And finally, as we grow older, more and more of my friends are settling down and choosing to travel with their significant others rather than with friends. So a long time ago I realized that if I wanted to see the world I'd either have to go by myself or go with a tour group.

I don't actually mind traveling alone, but here's the problem - I could go the entire week/two weeks/vacation without speaking to another person since I'm just not sociable enough to strike up conversations with strangers. I recently had a day to myself in Tokyo and I didn't speak to a single other person who wasn't a waiter or a salesperson. I enjoyed the freedom to get lost in the city and go where I wanted and nap on a bench when I was tired...but I also was pretty bored after a few hours. And, unless I'm willing to take some hated selfies, it also means that I won't be in a single picture. It's also a lot of work to plan the itinerary - where to go, where to stay, how long to stay in each place, what to see, what to eat, how to get from place to place, etc. Traveling independently (even if you're traveling with a friend) is exhausting and requires a lot of planning.

 

So over the past 10 years, about 90% of my travel has been with tour groups. When I was younger I did mostly Contiki trips, which are designed for 18-35 year olds. The perk of a Contiki trip is that you're with similarly aged people and if you're traveling as a single person they will pair you up with a roommate. You also have to do zero planning or research, other than figuring out your plane flights to the country. I did 5 trips overall with Contiki: New Zealand, Southeast Asia (Thailand, Laos and Cambodia), Vietnam, Eastern Europe (Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Bratislava and Budapest) and Croatia Sailing. The problem with Contiki is that it gets a bit of a well-deserved reputation for being party tours. And I have always been too old of a soul to enjoy being with a bunch of drunken 20-somethings partying all night and puking all day. I loved my Southeast Asia and my Eastern European trips, but I think that's partially because I had really good groups of people for those two tours. I pretty much hated my Vietnam trip (people were literally vomiting on the bus every day from their hangovers) and Croatia Sailing was underwhelming (despite how awesome it was to sail around Croatia). Finally, while the idea is that you're with similarly aged people, there is nothing similar between a 19 year old and a 34 year old. That age gap is just waaaay too big. And creepy when you factor in the number of drunken hook-ups that occur on a Contiki trip.

 

Not the classiest way to see Europe

 

Last year, after a tremendous amount of research, I found two other tour companies that are designed like a Contiki, but perhaps for an older crowd. Both G Adventures and Intrepid are good for singles since you can get your own room without paying a huge single supplement or get a random roommate. They also offer tours in a ton of weird and random places and range in price all the way up to some ridiculously expensive tours to the North Pole or Antarctica (one of my complaints with Contiki is that all the trips felt like budget travel and sometimes you just want to stay in a decent hotel).

 

So last year I took a trip to Peru with G Adventures (Machu Picchu and the Amazon) and went gorilla trekking in East Africa (Kenya, Uganda and Rwanda) on an overland trip with Intrepid. This year I did Borneo with Intrepid and Japan with G Adventures. With the exception of my Africa trip, I have been underwhelmed by both tour companies.

 

First, Contiki trips had better organization pre-trip. Prior to joining a tour, Contiki would send you via snail mail a package with your tour itinerary (and your specific dates of travel), a trip-specific packing list and a few other relevant documents. G and Intrepid just have general packing lists for all their trips, but the gear you'd need on an overland Africa trip is completely different from what you might need in Japan, so you wind up with people being ill-prepared for the trip they're on. The detailed itinerary that G and Intrepid give are just on their website and don't necessary have your dates (just say Day 1, and so on). I was absolutely panicked in the airport on the way to Africa because, based on what the internet itinerary was saying about my trip, I was going to be a day late for the tour start (turns out it was an internet glitch). Not fun at all.

 

Second, with the exception of my Africa trip, the Contiki tour guides overall were more impressive (of the 5 Contiki tours, I had two phenomenally excellent guides, two shitty ones and one so-so one). For starters, before one can become a Contiki tour guide you have to spend about six months in training learning about the countries, the cultures and following other tour guides around to learn the ropes. The Contiki tour guides are also generally from the UK, New Zealand or Australia, so they understand the perspective and concerns of many of the travelers (Contiki is also often criticized for this since they're not using local guides, but everywhere outside of Europe we had local guides when I traveled with Contiki in addition to the Contiki guide). G and Intrepid pride themselves on using local tour guides - while it's great that they support the local economy, there are language barriers and cultural issues with having a local. The range of experience of the tour guides also varies a lot - on my Japan trip we had a retired engineer as a tour guide who had never led a tour before and spoke very little English. Not only was he frustrating, but I didn't learn nearly as much about Japan as I would have if I'd had a Western tour guide who'd spent the last 6 months learning about Japanese culture and history.

 

And look, no matter how well traveled you are, sometimes you need to be babied. In Laos we all got really swollen ankles and our Kiwi guide told us we were dehydrated because we weren't getting enough salt (we're used to consuming so much salt that when our food doesn't contain salt, we get dehydrated no matter how much water we drink). We immediately started adding salt to our food or buying salt tablets at pharmacies and we felt better quickly. A Laotian tour guide might not have realized why we were so dehydrated. In Peru I was absolutely appalled at the idea that I couldn't flush any toilet paper in the toilets (something I didn't realize until about Day 3 of the trip and I'd been flushing TP prior to that). I had a lot of questions/concerns about it ("You mean to tell me even the fancy hotels don't let you flush TP?!?!?") and it was awkward asking my Peruvian tour guide about it since that's all he's used to.

 

The groups on all tours also is completely hit or miss. While my favorite Contiki trips were solely because of the awesome group of people (and while I disliked Vietnam because we had a shitty group of people), overall you kind of knew what you were getting. Young people who wanted to party. The crazier the country you went to, the greater the likelihood that there'd also be some people on your trip who wanted to experience the local culture. The four non-Contiki trips I've done recently have had all completely different groups. The group in Africa was fantastic and everything I'd hope for when traveling with people - well traveled, interested in learning about the local cultures, interested in experiencing everything and not big partiers. The group in Borneo was frankly the worst group I've ever traveled with - too many complainers, very few people were prepared for the trip (no cameras, no pants, no hiking boots, no malaria medicine, no apparent realization that we were traveling to a jungly Muslim country) and many seemed not at all interested in the country we were visiting and just wanted to sit on a beach (even though we weren't on a "beach" trip).

 

The sole exception to all these criticisms was my Africa trip. It was an overland camping trip, which means you basically live on this big truck, which pulls off to the side of the road to cook meals and you camp in tents at night. The tour guide, driver and cook were all fantastic and the group was largely amazing (except for a few weirdos). Because all of my other tours lately have been so disappointing in comparison, my conclusion is that Africa is one of the last few places that most people don't feel safe traveling alone. So seasoned adventure travelers will travel to most of the rest of the world on their own, but Africa they still feel the need to go with a tour company. That's why the only people that show up for tours to non-African places are either weirdos with no friends (like me) or inexperienced travelers.

 

I'm also running out of itineraries that I really want to do. I can't even count the number of hours I've spent trolling the G Adventures and Intrepid websites looking for tours to do on all my leaves and I'm seriously running out of tours that I can get excited about. For example, I've been seriously considering Nepal and Tibet for my leave in March/April, but the only tours available aren't that appealing - I don't want to spend 8 hours traveling on a bumpy bus everyday just to see 240 different temples. I'd be templed-out almost immediately.

 

So I have one more tour this year (Transylvania for Halloween - totally going to be full of [hopefully] the good kind of weirdos!) and then next year the only tour I'm thinking of at the moment is an overland camping trip through Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan, which I assume would only attract seasoned adventurers (since that trip is even crazier and less popular than going to Africa). And I am so excited about that trip that I managed to convince my dad to come, so at least if the group sucks we'll have each other.

 

But the problem is, if I eliminate tours, then what? Where do I go alone for my two week leaves?

Land of the Rising Sun Part 2

In Part 1 of my post about my trip to Japan, I talked about how much I enjoyed Koyasan and learning about the Buddhist monks. But because I didn't have all of my photos yet (due to not having internet at my house for the past week (still no internet)), I made do with what I had on my iPhone. But here's a photo of the morning fire ritual performed by the monks:

After Koyasan we headed to Hiroshima. As many of you know, Hiroshima is the first place where the nuclear bomb was dropped by the Americans during World War II on August 6, 1945. The epicenter of the bomb was over the Genbaku Dome, so while the area around the dome was completely flattened, the epicenter wound up being the "safest" part of the blast since most of the building remained. The remainder of the dome, now dubbed A-Bomb Dome, is a UNESCO heritage site and is now the center of Peace Park, which is a memorial to the victims of the nuclear bomb and a reminder of the horrors of nuclear war.

While visiting the A-Bomb Dome, one of the other Americans on the trip (there were only three of us) turned to me and asked if I felt guilty witnessing the effects of the nuclear bomb.  And I said, "Not even a little bit." Less than three weeks before I'd been in Borneo and visited some of the World War II memorials that were erected due to the horrors that befell the communities conquered by the Japanese. The Sandakan Death March is perhaps the grimmest reminder of what the Japanese did to prisoners of war - because the Japanese did not believe in surrender and felt that one was morally weak if he surrendered, and because the Japanese had not signed onto the Geneva Convention and therefore owed no duties to prisoners of war, the conditions in the camps for capture Aussie and British soldiers was abhorrent. When the Japanese began losing the war, they needed to get rid of the 2500 prisoners in the Sandakan camp, so they set them off on a death march across Borneo. By the end, only 6 survived and it's only because they escaped. The atrocities the Japanese committed during the war were no less severe than the Germans; they just managed to kill less people and less methodically than the Germans.

Additionally, I truly believe that the nuclear bombs were the best option the American military had at the time. It is estimated that approximately 250,000 people died as a result of the nuclear bombs (both those who died as a result of the bombing and those who later suffered radiation sickness) and the US believed that far more people would have died in a land invasion of Japan. Furthermore, for a culture that doesn't believe in surrender, it had to take something truly debilitating for Japan to surrender and the nuclear bombs were our best option. So no, I don't feel any residual American guilt for the bombings.

In addition to the sobering history of Hiroshima, we also visited Miyajima Island. The itinerary said there'd be monkeys on the island, which is pretty much all I cared about, but it turns out that there's wild deer all over the island. They wander into stores, try to steal food from humans and don't particularly mind being pet. While they weren't as exciting as monkeys, it was still nice to get a little bit of nature and be that close to wild animals.

We then took the bullet train to Kyoto for a couple of days of serious sightseeing. Kyoto was formerly the capital of imperial Japan for more than 1000 years, so there was definitely a lot to see. The main Shinto shrine complex we visited was the Fushimi Inari Taisha Shrine. Shinto is the main religion of Japan and has literally thousands of deities - animals, trees, plants, ancestors, etc. As best I could tell, supplicants visit the shrines (which are meant for specific deities), give an offering of food or money, ring some bells, clap their hands and, at least in the case of the Fushimi Inari Shrine, climb a thousand steps. The Fushimi Inari shrine's deity is the fox and the shrine is supposed to grant good luck in agriculture and business. What the shrine is really known for is its 10,000 toriis (the vermillion shrine gates). What no one told me was that you had to climb a freaking mountain of stairs to get to the top of the shrine - my FitBit said I climbed 80 flights of stairs and burned enough calories to eat an entire cow. It also didn't help that Kyoto was about 90 degrees with 90% humidity, so I swear I've never sweat so much in my entire life. It was cool to walk through all the torii gates, but I'm not sure it was worth the pain, sweat and tears to get all the way up there.

The vermillion torii gates

On the way back down from the shrine there's Japanese writing on the torii gates. I like to think they say things like: "Good job, you made it!" "Eat all the cake!" "Achievement unlocked: go stuff your face!"

Kinkakuji Temple (also in Kyoto)

Fushima Inari pretty much wore me out for Kyoto and the rest of it is sort of a blur of temples and castles. Japanese castles aren't nearly as cool as European ones - all the rooms look the same, everyone sits on the floor and the only decadence is in the paper wall murals. So yeah, I got "templed-out" pretty quickly.

The other real highlight of the trip for me was Hakone. I really want to go in the winter when the snow monkeys play in the hot springs, but I was hoping at least to get a glimpse of Mt. Fuji. Unfortunately the weather did not cooperate, so we didn't get to see Mt. Fuji, though we did get to see the hot springs. The sulphur in the springs can make black boiled eggs, which the locals say can add seven years to your life.

Black sulphur boiled eggs - tasted like a normal boiled egg to me

I could definitely see going back to Hakone in the winter (and not just to see monkeys). 

And finally, Tokyo. I did not expect to like Tokyo and…I didn't. It was just a really big, really crowded city. I felt like I spent hours on the subway going to and fro everywhere. I thought Harajuku Street (where all the anime and cosplay kids hang out) would be much wilder and there wasn't really much I wanted to see in Tokyo. By my second day there I was completely bored - I even sat down in a Starbucks for an hour and read a book (to be fair, I sprained my quad muscle on the Fushari Inari hike from hell, so I was in a lot of pain when standing or walking). 

Determined to find something interesting to do in Tokyo, I wandered over to the War Memorial, which wound up being my favorite thing in Tokyo. As I mentioned earlier, in Shinto there are thousands of deities and the Yasukuni shrine was dedicated to the soldiers who lost their lives in defense of their country and who, through their sacrifice, became deities. So if you ever thought people would have to be crazy to be kamikaze pilots, keep in mind that if a Japanese soldier lost his life in combat, he could become a deity and be worshipped forever more. Might be enough to get young boys to sign up. 

In addition to the shrine there was also a war museum (Yushukan), which was primarily devoted to World War II. The guide book warned me that many people found Yushukan really controversial as a result of their depiction of WWII, but I found the spin on the war fascinating. The museum detailed how Japan was forced to invade the neighboring countries and how America's actions gave Japan absolutely no choice. And after fighting valiantly and trying to give the poor people of Southeast Asia freedom from colonialism, the Japanese finally lost the Greater East Asian War. Yup, they don't call it World War II, they call it the Greater East Asian War (much like the South still calls the Civil War the War of Northern Aggression). So all in all, Yushukan kinda saved Tokyo for me, though it's also where I fell asleep on a bench in the museum for about an hour or so. 

In Part 1 I described all the reasons why I didn't really want to go to Japan, but it turns out I really enjoyed the country and learning more about the culture. I'd like to go back in winter and see everything covered in snow and also check out some of the more rural areas (and maybe spend some time at a mountain monastery). 

Koi feasting

Land of the Rising Sun

I'm a little late in writing about it, but I spent the first ten days of the month traveling around Japan:

It's a bit weird that it took me so long to get around to visiting Japan, but I have to say it was never high on my destination list.  Crazy, I know, but here's why:

1) Japanese Tourists. I hate traveling to places where there are hordes of Japanese tourists, snapping photos of everything while they grin and make the "peace" symbol. Two years ago I visited Auschwitz and I was practically in a homicidal rage following around a pack of Japanese tourists who gleefully took photos of themselves (and the ubiquitous peace symbol) in front of everything.  All while talking (and giggling) loudly on their cell phones. Anyway, I just figured that if Japanese tourists were so irritating, I wouldn't want to be surrounded by a country full of, well, Japanese people.

What do all major tourist destinations have in common? Japanese tourists and their cameras.

Seriously, just google images of "Japanese tourists", it's so worth it

Scooby (or Godzilla, as I'm
sure the locals thought of him)

2) The first year I lived in Los Angeles I lived in the part of LA dubbed "Little Tokyo". It was a cute part of town that had a ton of sushi restaurants and where the street signs were primarily in Japanese rather than English. The cuteness wore off pretty quickly as I was kept up late at night by the favorite pastime in the local bars - karaoke (or, as I like to pronounce after living there, "karra-oh-kay") and the smell of tempura-fried food. My fondest memories of Little Tokyo were walking my 90 pound wolf dog while the tiny locals ran in fear - I dubbed them my Godzilla moments.

Yeah, kinda like that.

3) I figured I'd hate Tokyo. I just assumed Tokyo would be crowded and hectic with lots of neon signs and anime kids and annoying girls trying to pull off the Lolita look. And while saying I don't want to go to Japan because I'd hate Tokyo is like someone saying they don't want to visit the US because they'd hate LA, it still felt like a relevant reason to not want to go.

4) Japanese culture is very "other". In college I minored in anthropology and loved studying other cultures (part of why I love to travel and see different cultures firsthand). In one of my classes we did a segment on Japanese culture and, of all the cultures I studied, Japanese culture was the hardest one for us to understand and accept. According to that long-ago class, it was still socially acceptable to commit suicide if one shamed their family - and "shame" could be as simple as getting a bad grade in class or losing a job. I suspect the recent recession has lessened that somewhat, but that mentality still felt so foreign to me. I also learned more about Japanese culture while studying World War II - one of the reasons the American military felt that the nuclear bombs were so critical is because the Japanese did not believe in surrender (see Part 2 of this post for more on that).

All of that being said, I did really want to learn more about Shinto (the Japanese national religion) and to see rural Japan. I figured the temples and shrines in the mountains must be gorgeous and well worth whatever frustrations might be caused by Tokyo. Plus, I couldn't think of anywhere else I really wanted to go for the first two weeks of September.

The first main stop of the trip was Koyasan, which is the center of Buddhism in Japan. Shingon Esoteric Buddhism, to be exact. Koyasan is on Mount Koya, so to get there from Osaka we took a bullet train and then a cable car up the mountain. Koyasan is a quaint little town filled with monasteries and temples and loads of monks. We stayed at the Ekoin monastery, where we slept on the floor, ate vegetarian food on the floor (lots of mushy soy products) and learned a little bit about Shingon Esoteric Buddhism. Shingon Esoteric Buddhism involves a lot of meditation and chanting and practitioners believe that the founder of this sect of Buddhism is still meditating in a temple in Koyasan.

The first afternoon in Koyasan, after viewing what felt like endless temples, we attended a meditation class with the monks. Gotta say, meditation isn't really my thing since I spent the whole thirty minutes thinking of how much my legs/hips/ass hurt from sitting cross-legged on the floor. And then dinner was also on the floor...

Our vegetarian dinner at the monastery. My hips and legs hurt just remembering having to eat on the floor.

Our vegetarian dinner. I ate a little of everything, though we were all hungry again about an hour later.



After dinner one of the monks took us on a tour of the local cemetery, which was enormous and included both Shinto and Buddhist elements. What is interesting is that most people in Japan are both Shinto and Buddhist, since both are polytheistic religions and pretty accepting of other paths to enlightenment/heaven. My favorite part of the cemetery was the monk explaining some of the grave markings - for example, many had a depiction of the moon in one of its phases. The idea is that, like the moon, humans also have different phases. Some days we're happy, some days we're sad and so on, and it's important to remember that we will wax and wane just like the moon.

 

The following morning I woke up at the crack of dawn to view the monks' morning ritual and fire ritual. Because none of the monks spoke English, I actually have no idea what the rituals were for (though I'm assuming the fire ritual was for cleansing and purification). All in all, I wish I'd gotten to spend a little more time learning about Shingon Esoteric Buddhism. I had so many questions for the monk (How young were you when you became a monk? Was it your choice or your parents' choice? How did you learn English?), but there were just too many people around for me to hog his attention.

 

Apart from the weird food and interesting accommodations, we also got to try a traditional Japanese onsen, or bath. (Remind me to tell you guys later about my experiences in public bath houses.) Ekoin was helpful enough to provide us some directions on how to use the onsen, since it's a bit overwhelming for us prudish Westerners.

I sort of thought that the people sitting on the tiny stools was an exaggeration. Oh no, you definitely squat on tiny stools in front of mirrors. Awkward!

The onsen in our monastery. You bathe while squatting on the tiny stools to the right in front of the mirrors and then get in the massive shared tub to the left.

While awkwardly trying to figure out what to do and how to bathe myself while seated and in a crowded room of women, I was lucky enough to sit next to a brazen Aussie woman. When I looked befuddled, she turned to me and said, "Don't forget to wash your bum!

Well, this turned into an epically long post, so stay tuned for Part 2!

The First Bout of Homesickness

So I got home from Japan last Wednesday morning and I thought I had the perfect plan - spend a couple of days resting and relaxing, catching up on tv and posting pictures before returning to work yesterday. And while the plan worked perfectly for a few hours on Wednesday, pretty much nothing else went according to plan.

A few weeks ago I noticed black mold growing on my patio and inching ever closer to my living room. I had my company's maintenance people come out and they discovered that the pool room (which is directly below my moldy patio) had water literally dripping from the walls due to lack of ventilation. Oh, and lots of big electrical panels were also located in the soaking wet room. So for the past few weeks, I've been trying to get someone out to the house to fix the mold and figure out how to ventilate the pool room. Someone finally told me that maintenance would be out Thursday morning between 9-10 am to address the mold. While maintenance wasn't exactly "rest and relaxation", at least I didn't have to take time off work to meet them at the house.

So Wednesday evening my internet and phone stopped working. Internet is my lifeline to the world - it's how I call home (Skype) and how I watch American TV. So without internet, I just decided to read a book and go to bed at about 8:30 Wednesday night (also good for the jet lag). Thursday morning I immediately notified maintenance that my internet was out and sat and waited for maintenance to come. And waited. By 11 I started sending emails to see if the maintenance crew was still coming and, if so, when. And waited some more. Around 2 pm the internet guys showed up and said they couldn't fix the problem and that we'd need Omantel to come out. Problem is it took Omantel 6 weeks to show up when I first moved here, so that news was pretty depressing.

No one ever showed up to deal with the mold or even let me know that no one was coming, so I sat around the house all day Thursday waiting. With no internet, tv or phones.

Then, Thursday evening I noticed that the water coming out of the sinks was only a trickle. I thought it was weird but didn't think much of it until I tried to shower on Friday and couldn't because only a trickle was coming out of all of my faucets. I called maintenance again on Friday and when they showed up Saturday they said my water pump was broken. No ETA on when it would be fixed and no sympathy for the fact that I couldn't shower. When I tried to impress upon the maintenance guy how much I needed my shower to work he looked at me and said "Get a bucket."

So by Saturday I was cranky and, for the first time, homesick. Nothing was working in my house, I wanted a shower and to watch tv or call home or any of the other things I'd planned to do with my four days off after Japan. And I was frustrated that nothing was getting fixed and that the best I could learn is that things would be fixed soon, inshallah.  And we all know what that means.

Yesterday I spent most of the day bitching to HR and at the house with maintenance showing them everything that's falling apart in my house (which was apparently constructed using chewing gum and duct tape). Apparently the water pump will be fixed today, but I'm not holding my breath. No clue when the internet will be fixed. But at least HR is on it now and if things don't get fixed then maybe I'll get to move to a different house that would hopefully have somewhat less maintenance issues (although apparently the quality of construction over here is so poor that almost all of the houses have mold issues, not to mention the myriad of other things wrong). I also have the option of staying at a hotel until the water is fixed, but I hate to leave my cat at the house alone.

But, in the meantime, the homesickness has hung around. I don't miss Houston per se, I miss the ease and efficiency of living in the US. If my internet went out Wednesday night back home it would have been fixed by Thursday. Same with the water. Or at least you'd get reasonable ETAs from vendors rather than hearing inshallah.

I think I'm just cranky and am really looking forward to my visit back to Houston this weekend. I'm only going for a week (Friday to Friday), but hopefully that's enough time to rejuvenate me. Or at least drink as much Diet Coke as humanly possible in seven days.

* Don't worry, I haven't been stinky and unwashed for the last four days. I have a trickle of water that comes out of the spigot in the shower, which is about two feet above the ground. While it's humiliating and uncomfortable, I have figured out how to bathe myself while squatting/sitting on the floor of my shower. Washing my hair is a bitch and a half, so I'm really stretching the number of days I can go between hair washings, but at least I'm mostly presentable.