Making My Way Home (Written in Flight from Barcelona to Istanbul, December 11, 2013)

I am on a plane from Barcelona to Istanbul, as usual, happy as a clam to be flying.  I will be in Ljublijana, Slovenia, tonight. I am excited to be going to Slovenia. It is a new country to add to my list, and those are fairly hard to come by. I have been to over thirty countries this year, yet I think only Japan, Korea and soon to be Slovenia are new countries on my list of countries visited.

So this was not by flight to Istanbul... but
some flight on November 22.
Seemed a fitting picture anyway.

I have such a weird wonderful life.  I have just spent a whirlwind of 17 days onboard a ship I once called home. I got off the ship all of an hour and a half during those seventeen days, mostly because my mother insisted I get her a postcard from Casablanca. And I, as usual, bought a bag. (For a girl who virtually NEVER carries a handbag, I seem to have a strange fixation with buying them.) And though I love the ship, I would have loved to have gotten off more. But the project I led turned out to be about six times the amount of work anticipated.

There is so much interesting to say about this past trip I hardly know where to start. Strangely, I think I will start with making my way home.

This was added after my original post
thanks to a friend who had it on Facebook.

I got off the ship in Barcelona and stayed, for a day, with my girlfriend Kathy who has a flat right off the water front.  I am flying through Istanbul, which will make it the fourth or fifth time I have been in Turkey this year, I think. I am in transit to Slovenia, where I will work a few days in my company’s office there. From there I am headed to Zurich “for dinner” with friends.… and then finally from there I will fly home. I have friends all over Europe asking why I am not stopping by.  I would love to visit everyone, but as Christmas nears, the ticket prices soar and I would like to be home for a traditional Christmas dinner, which, naturally means Chinese food. (I am not Chinese; I am Jewish. Google it: Christmas Jews Chinese Food. It is a thing.)

In regards to going to Zurich “for dinner,” as quoted in the sentence above, I should say the quotes are intentional.  Much as I wish I could say, I am flying to Zurich “for dinner” with Louis, Pia, hopefully Dan but regretfully not Michael, it is more that all flights from Slovenia to California passed through Zurich. Thus I am taking advantage of a layover and having dinner with friends.

But it sounds SO much more posh to say, “I am flying to Zurich for dinner with friends” so let’s go with that.

I want to say I have a thing for countries that start with the letter S. Sandra in Sweden, a gaggle of friends in Switzerland, my endearing friend Ruth technically in the UK but I am going to skirt her in under Scotland, and my coworkers in Slovenia. That is just Europe. I have so many friends in South Africa, Facebook thinks I am from there.

It was snowing in Istanbul when I landed.
Snowing in  Istanbul!
I didn't even know that was possible!

In re-reading this post, I cringe. Kathy and I were talking about our lives and how we really do hide our crazy traveling lives. (And I should go on record as saying I am significantly less traveled than Kathy.) This whole post reads as a brag… “Isn’t my life awesome!”

The post reads as, “Isn’t my life awesome!” because I think it is awesome. I love this life. But it could just as easily be a complaint about being on the road for over three weeks, with crazy flights including a STUPID twelve hour layover in Zurich, that I missed Thanksgiving with family, so I could work 17 hour days, half a world away on a ship under re-construction with no air conditioning and was thus sauna hot, that I have been subjected to conditions that the UN has banned as arguably "torture" (blog on that to come), etc and so forth.

Making my way home is a strange statement too. I stay at my parents’ house when I get back to California. I have given up on having a place of my own. As someone who has been out of the country more of this year than in it, add to that hotel stays all over California and a trip to Florida, it just makes no sense to have a place called home.

It is not a life for everyone.

But it is the life for me.

Isn’t that awesome.