Fashion (hell) week

When you work for a job that sends you off to difficult places like remote African nations, one of the things that is always covered in your induction is how to deal with culture shock. I always brushed these sessions off, because I don’t think I’m terribly affected by culture shock. My feet hit the Seattle airport, and the next thing I want to do is go to Target. If you ask Jorge, of course, he claims that I have spent the last week glassy-eyed and slack-jawed, overwhelmed by all my options every time we enter a shopping center or department store. But don’t you listen to him, I’m doing just fine, thankyouverymuch.

There are definitely some things that it takes a while to adjust to, every time we move back and forth, though. And this time, it is the fashion. Either fashion is completely hideous right now, or Irish women are hideously unfashionable. Either way, I am completely perplexed by people’s choices in clothing.

It started in the Amsterdam airport. I thought it was a fluke when I saw my first pair of hammer pants. But then not five minutes went by, and I saw another pair, and this time in a hideous floral print. Floral hammer pants. My God, what has this world come to?

Apparently in the 6 months I was off in Africa, someone decided that the 80s, skin-tight jeans, and cut-off shorts were all due for a comeback. Apparently this person was not alive in the 80s, or they would know how horrible it all was the first time around.

Remember when you had to lay down on your bed to zip up your jeans? I caught a woman a couple days ago who couldn’t squeeze her cell phone into her pocket.

And the cut-off shorts… [shudder]. I could understand if your jeans were accidentally shortened in some kind of horrible industrial accident, and you couldn’t afford to buy new ones – but actually paying for booty shorts and then trying to winterize them with black tights…no. I cannot forgive you that, my friend.

Irish women also seem to be laboring under the misapprehension that one can actually wear black tights with anything. One particularly egregious example was a woman wearing a white floral skirt, white shoes…and black tights.

Today I found myself walking home behind a woman in an unbelievably short dress (over black tights, of course), and thinking, not for the first time, “but where are her pants?” I realized that life in Africa has left me very conservative when it comes to fashion. For me, wearing a tank top in public is like going out in your bra. Leggings (especially when your ego will not allow you to buy the size that actually fits, leaving them stretched out and translucent) to me are the same as walking around in only panty-hose. I tried to go shopping the other day, but found everything to be either too tight, too ugly, or much too short.

It figures. I’m finally in a developed country, for once not pregnant or recently post-partum, feeling great about my body, and ready to shop…and I can’t find anything I would be willing to spend money on. That is life’s way of telling me to save my pennies, I guess.

Crappy Thanksgiving

Oh, yesterday was a crap day. So bad, in fact, that I blogged a long post all about it - and then my session timed out JUST as a I hit "Publish" and the web ate my whole post. It was that bad.

Which I take as a sign that the Universe just wanted me to put it all behind me. Which I did today by spending a lot of money at H&M (although that was an ordeal too, with all of the ATM machines and credit card readers out of commission in the WHOLE TOWN. The Universe, apparently, also wants me to wear last season´s fashions).

But a little bit of advice, should you ever come to Portugal:

• Make sure you get a map with details of the main cities. Trying to find your way around town when the city is the size of a potato bug on the map = not easy.
• If you ever come to Coimbra, WALK. Do not drive.
• When asking for restaurant recommendations at a tourist office, always ask for detailed directions. Do not settle for a scribbled note in a general region on a very crappy free tourist map.
• If an alley looks really narrow, it is actually much smaller than you think. Turn around. Do not enter. Really, I mean it. Your ckutch will thank you.

Tonight we are in Porto, which I like MUCH better than Coimbra, even without a decent city map. I mean, there is even a mall here which stays open until 9 PM! Hallelujah!

So, I restored my spirits today with some retail therapy, and, I am not embarassed to admit - a McDonald´s Sundae. Do you know how long it has been since I had one of those? I have no idea what they are actually made of - although I´m certain it ain´t dairy - but when you have lived as long in foreign parts as I have, sometimes all you need to settle your soul is a little cholesterol-enriching American fast food. It´s better than meditation, yoga, or herbal tea combined.

Tomorrow we are hoping to find ourselves a nice little farm in the wine country to stay on for a couple days, to unwind. And then very soon it´s back to reality. Sigh. I´m not ready!

Milo's first haircut

Milo was born a bit of a baldy. Well, actually, he was born with hair, then two weeks later most of it fell out, leaving just a Michael Bolton-esque fringe around his neck.

This was disturbing to his Colombian family - where is his hair? why doesn't it grow in? what is wrong with this boy? After all, your typical Colombian child bounces out of the womb, cushioned by a glorious afro of thick black hair.

No, Milo got my hair. Thin, light-colored, and nary a kink or a curl. We put off cutting his hair for such a long time, because it seemed sort of pointless to go to the trouble just to remove a few errant wisps from around his ears.

While we were in New Orleans, we thought it would be fun to go someplace nice and have it cut. So Jorge went to Aidan Gill, an upscale men's barber, to ask if they cut children's hair.

Yes, indeed, they do. In fact, they have a special 'first haircut' package for babies. Jorge asked how much it cost. And then stood there, dumbfounded for a few minutes, jaw literally dropping: $500 dollars. Yes, you read that right. 5 big'uns. Or maybe it was even more than that, I can't fully remember. The haircut comes with a framed print by a professional photographer. They had samples of the photos, some 30 of them, in the salon. Jorge couldn't speak for a while because he was too busy counting the pictures and trying to figure out what kind of sucker would spend that much for a picture of a child being groomed.

That was before Milo went to Colombia. By the time he got back, he was getting a bit of a mullet. I suspect Dora, my mother-in-law, was putting the same nasty herbal tonic on his head that she tried to get me to use after my hair fell out from chemo. Jorge did say that Milo smelled kind of funny. So we finally took him to get his hair cut on Saturday, at the same barber shop Jorge goes to. Milo was very well-behaved, I got some photos, and the whole thing set us back 300 Kwacha - about 2 dollars.

Before the haircut. Milo liked getting sprayed with water.

Although Milo was very good overall, he wanted to look around. The barber resorted to this vise grip to get him to hold still. I love Africa!

And here's the finished product! Isn't my boy handsome?

I think I have consumption. It won't be long before I am pale and weak, coughing blood into a dainty hankerchief while lying fetchingly on a chaise lounge. Wait, that was "La Boheme"... At any rate, I have a nasty cough. It keeps me up at night and my voice is shot. I can't even begin to describe how much it sucks.

Oh, also, I am in Ireland. Hey, surprise! Isn't my life one interesting turn of events after the next? I had an interview today (with the organization I already work for), and they wanted me to interview in person, because it's a pretty high profile job for them. I think I did alright, but do you know that feeling when you leave an interview, and you have no idea what you actually said? It's all sort of a nervy blur. So what do I know, maybe I was a total ass. I guess I'll find out in a few weeks.

It is cold here. This has clearly not helped my tuberculosis. But on the plus side, I have free wireless in my hotel, and I have done a bit of shopping, which is really the important thing. Organic baby toothpaste! Quinoa! Gnocchi! Yay!

Tomorrow I fly back to Malawi, which means I will have spent about 60 hours traveling, and only 44 hours in Dublin. Not a good balance, really.

My second-favorite souvenir from Thailand

OK, you already know my favorite souvenir. But here's a picture of him/her at 18 weeks, just in case you forgot (lord, I can't believe I'm actually putting this on the web):




But the very-next-best-thing in the whole world right now are my jellies. How do I love them? Let me count the ways:

• They are oh-so-comfy and flexible
• They go well with all colors: black, brown, navy, pink...
• They have sparkles
• They look great with both pants and skirts
• They cost a whopping 3 dollars
• You can walk straight through puddles in them without worrying about messing them up

I don't know why we ever let jelly shoes go out of style. Those Thai people are so smart. That's why they do better on math and science tests than us silly Americans.

My new toy!

Had a call from Jorge today. Who knew there was cell phone coverage on the rim of Ngorongoro Crater? What a world we live in now – imagine Teddy Roosevelt, calling his wife back in Washington to tell her he’d bagged himself a big buffalo – and that he was sending photos of it to his blog over the phone…

Anyway, he sounds as though he’s having a great time, and that they’ve seen just about every animal he could imagine. “I’m almost sick of lions,” he says. They have one game drive left, and they’re hoping to see a rhino, as that’s all they haven’t managed to catch a glimpse of yet.

But let me get back to the subject of my post. My new toy – I finally caught up to the 21st century and got a digital SLR camera. I was probably one of the last film hold-outs in the world. And I really mean that - I'm such an old fuddy-duddy that I still use a camera from the 1970s.

I had an even older one, the OM-1, which was fully manual – you had to select the aperture and shutter speed on your own every time, based on the light meter, and then focus on top of that. Man, that camera took good pictures. It disappeared while I lived in New Orleans – I think it was pinched during a party. (One of many, many things stolen or destroyed while I lived in N.O. What a black hole that place was.)

I have clung to my poor little Olympus OM-F for as long as I could, but the quality of photo printing has declined so much over the last five years, that even if I took a great shot, it still came out looking fuzzy and green all over. It's just time to move on.

I’m still learning the ins and outs of the new one, but I've posted a couple shots I like so far. Maybe it's just me, but none of the new cameras compares with the clarity and beauty of the photos from my old clunker, though. I think it's that there's too much to fiddle with. It used to just be camera, lens, photographer, and what you did with those three things made all the difference. Not that I'm a particularly good photographer - but at least I want the camera to pull its weight, you know?

Anyway, I'm toyless for a bit - Jorge has taken the camera off to Tanzania, so hopefully I will have plenty of photos to share of his trip soon.

Puppy! My neighbor's dog.

And Jorge, always willing to oblige with a pose.