The Displaced Nation

A home for international creatives

Talking with author Dave Prager about his — deliriously unspiritual — expat experience in India

4 Comments Posted by on January 24, 2012

Reading like the work of a hipster Bill Bryson, Delirious Delhi is an account of Dave Prager and his wife Jenny’s move from New York to Delhi — the largest city in India by area and second largest by population — as they become what they term “New Delhi Yankees.” On arrival in their new home they, like so many expats, started a blog: Our Delhi Struggle. Detailing ther occasional bewilderment and occasional delight as two thirtysomethings acclimatizing to life in Delhi, their online musings quickly became popular.

Dave set about expanding Our Delhi Struggle into a book, and Delirious Delhi was the result. Those eagle-eyed among our readers may recall the book being featured under “expat memoirs” in one of the lists ML Awanohara compiled of 2011 books for, by, and about expats.

Earlier this month I spoke with author Dave Prager to discuss his book and his thoughts on Delhi — including the extent to which the expat life he and his wife led in India fits the Displaced Nation’s January theme of spiritual reawakenings.

How did you end up in Delhi and then later on Singapore?
I volunteered. My company needed a copywriter in Delhi. A week later I found myself in the city for the first time. We left Delhi for Singapore because we weren’t ready to return home to the US just yet, but we knew that if we didn’t force ourselves to leave India, then we’d never experience living anywhere else in Asia. So we quit our jobs in the middle of the recession, left Delhi, and flew to Singapore where we were both lucky enough to find work.

What made you decide to write a book telling the story of your transition to living in Delhi?
We had so many growing pains when we first moved to Delhi that we started our blog to share our lessons with everyone who would come after us. It became very popular — not just with expats, as we expected, but with Indians. As we were getting ready to leave, someone suggested we write a book. So I did. Ninety percent of the book is fresh content, never before seen until now. It’s very different from the blog. The blog posts are 500-word essays, where this is a single, 100,000-word narrative.

Delirious Delhi is your second book. Any plans for another one?
I’ve had some ideas I’ve been noodling away at. I have an idea about an American who finds himself living in rural India and doesn’t have a clue what’s going on. Which is how I felt every time we went out to the villages.

No plans to write about your time in Singapore?
There’s no plans for anything about Singapore. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed my time there, but it didn’t get my creative juices flowing in the way Delhi did. It didn’t inspire me like India inspired me.

What audience did you have in mind for the book?
When I was writing, I knew exactly who my intended audience was and I pictured them in my head as I wrote. It was two people that I know. The first was an American friend who was back in the US and was curious about India and my experiences; the other was an Indian co-worker who was always fascinated with how I — as an American — found life in his country.

I noticed you did a brief book tour in Delhi. Did you experience any negativity to your views?
Generally the response has been really good. There’s a minority who takes exception to a Westerner writing critically about India. But the book is not a criticism of India, it’s a recollection of the experiences — the good ones and the bad ones. Every country has good and bad, including the US. It’s disingenuous to focus on one and not the other — in both extremes.

This month’s theme for the Displaced Nation is the quest for spiritual enlightenment. At the beginning of the book, you say you would never describe India as “spiritual” as many do. What do you think of writers like Elizabeth Gilbert who present India as the ideal place for spiritual tourism?
It’s not that I wouldn’t describe India as spiritual — it’s that I never found it to be spiritual. Maybe because that wasn’t what I was looking for. In many ways, India is a blank slate, and travelers paint it with the colors they want to see. If you go looking for poverty, you’ll find it. If you go looking for wealth and globalization, you’ll find it. If you want spirituality, you’ll find it. India is the perfect place to find whatever it is you seek. The question is, what else do you have to ignore in order to see only one aspect of the country?

One of the most powerful parts of the book for me was the part where you detailed your wife Jenny’s work for a school that lifts girls out of poverty, and how shocked you were by the poverty. Did you find that after your time in Delhi you more politicized than when you first arrived?
Good question. I certainly arrived in India with a very liberal Western outlook of the world. My approach to the world was one of moral relativism — that everyone can to a certain extent be justified in their views. But the longer I stayed in South Asia, the more I began to believe that they are moral absolutes and that there can be certain aspects of a culture that are simply morally wrong — the treatment of rural girls in India being a case in point. So that really is how I changed politically over those 18 months. I moved from moral relativism to moral absolutism, in certain circumstances.

In the book Delhi reads like the main character in a novel  — with an ever-changing personality that is hard to truly get to know. Is that how you saw it?
One of main points with Delhi is how little you can understand it. It really is what you make it to be. New York, by comparison, is easier to understand. With New York you can find a narrative. Every New Yorker thinks that they are the star of the city, and the city aligns itself around them. Delhi has no overarching narrative; you’re more rooted to your neighborhood rather than the city as a whole and so everyone in Delhi is having different experiences and coming to different conclusions. I don’t think there’s a shared Delhi experience like there is a shared New York experience.

Now that you are back in the US, how do you see Delhi?
I have a sense of wasted opportunity. I think about all the things that we didn’t do when we were there, all those Saturdays when we went to the mall rather than explored different parts of the city. That I didn’t attend a cricket match or that I didn’t travel to a village outside of Delhi that’s famous for its Indian wrestling. And now thinking back on it all, I sometimes have an overwhelming sense of missing Delhi.

And how have you found it as a “repat” in the US? Any reverse culture shock?
What’s struck me is that the US just seems so empty. It’s not that India is always intensely crowded; rather, it’s that India you’re never completely alone. There’s always someone to be seen walking or selling something or cooking chai. Outside of a few select cities in the US, it’s not like that here. We now live in Denver and some mornings I find myself wandering around the middle of the city and I have moments when I stop and notice that I’m alone. I look around me and I just wonder where everyone is. All these tall buildings and nobody around.

Delirious Delhi can be purchased here.

STAY TUNED for Wednesday’s post, an interview with Chicago acupuncturist Jennifer Dubowsky, who believes the West can benefit from importing Eastern concepts of natural healing as an alternative to more invasive medical treatments.

If you enjoyed this post, we invite you to register for The Displaced Dispatch, a round up of weekly posts from The Displaced Nation, with seasonal recipes, book giveaways and other extras. Register for The Displaced Dispatch by clicking here!

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Images: Used with kind permission of Dave Prager

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Travel yarn: The Holy Land, transformative art — and Michael Jackson?!

5 Comments Posted by on January 23, 2012

We welcome Joanna Liss to the Displaced Nation as a guest blogger. A veteran of volunteering overseas, she recently went to Israel with the voluntourism group GoEco — on a quest that can best be described as quasi-spiritual.

I must confess I do not consider myself a particularly spiritual person. I have been on what would qualify as a spiritual retreat only once — about 40 years ago, when spending a weekend at a Zen center in the mountains of New Mexico. I was a student at the University of New Mexico at the time, with a religious studies minor (though a non-religious person, I was fascinated by religion’s folkloric aspects).

We were assigned to our dorm accommodations, given sparse meals of miso soup and bread, spent many hours sitting still and meditating — interspersed with breaks of walking and meditating — and were instructed not to talk, at all, all weekend.

My major memory of that experience was a dorm companion gesturing, rather frantically, and graphically, in a charade that I finally interpreted as a request for a tampax. I had a hard time stifling giggles for the rest of the weekend.

An unholy visit to the Holy Land

I have traveled to many places but never, until recently, to Israel. I never, honestly, had much of a desire to go — perhaps ironically, because my heritage is Jewish. It is difficult for me to sit through a Bat or Bar Mitzvah service, and my religion-related endeavors consist mostly of cooking potato latkes and matzoh brei.

I also admit that my politics do not necessarily align with those of the Israeli government. I wasn’t interested in religious travel, and there were too many other places that called to me more.

What finally prompted my visit to the Holy Land was an online listing for a volunteer project in a gallery of Arab art in Umm el-Fahem, an Arab city in Israel. I was ignorant enough to not have realized, beforehand, that there were Arab cities in Israel, or that a full 20 percent of Israeli citizens are Arab. I had thought of the Israel-Arab conflict as between Israelis and Palestinians, complicated enough, without knowing that it was made even more complex by the situation of Arab Israelis. (I asked around and was somewhat comforted, perhaps wrongly, to learn that most of my friends, even those who are Israeli Jews, were not aware of the Arab Israeli situation.)

And so, I set off for what would be a rather unorthodox Israeli experience, as a Jewish woman living, for six weeks, in an art gallery in an Israeli city where I was the only Jewish person.

Yes, I not only worked in the gallery but actually lived in an apartment on the rooftop third floor, surrounded by the whimsical sculptures on the rooftop patio outside my apartment. This living space afforded a spectacular view of the city, and several times daily the steep hills of the city echoed with the sounds of the muezzin calling out their amplified prayers.

If I were to call an experience spiritual, I suppose this would be one, especially when the amplified voices of the muezzin blended and harmonized, intentionally or coincidentally, I couldn’t say. It would probably have been a less moving experience for me, though, if I had been able to understand the words.

Travel as a source of personal renewal

I’ve heard, often enough, a person say she or he wasn’t religious, but spiritual. But what exactly is spirituality, especially of the secular kind? According to my prime informational source, Wikipedia, secular spirituality can be experienced as a source of inspiration or orientation in life, without necessarily accepting belief in a divine being. It can encompass compassion, patience, tolerance, contentment, responsibility, forgiveness, and concern for others.

In that sense, all my travels can be considered spiritual experiences, at least in secular terms. So maybe I am more spiritual than I thought?

Still, for me renewal comes not from retreat but from immersion in a new experience — be it a hot spring in the snow, watching the Eiffel Tower’s midnight light show from my garret apartment, or enjoying a leisurely breakfast at home of my favorite cereal with plump fresh blueberries and the sun shining in through the window.

Travel renews me, certainly — when I’m viewing an architectural or natural wonder, a work of art and, most of all, when I’m interacting with interesting people I might not otherwise have encountered.

The mystery of the falling headscarf

Back to Israel: I had many experiences in Umm el-Fahem that might fit the spiritual bill. Let me relate a couple. An artist on exhibit while I was there was Fatima Abu Rumi, whose meticulously detailed paintings deal with issues of self-identity. She paints herself repeatedly, totally veiled, with hijab (head scarf) hiding her hair but not her face, with the same scarf around her neck in quite a modern style, without any scarf at all.

Almost every school day, groups of young local children visited the gallery with their teachers and some mothers, the women all wearing the hijab. After some discussion Halima, the gallery educator, would bring out a basket of scarves, and all the children, boys and girls, helped by the adults, would don scarves, on their heads, over their faces, over their shoulders, as they chose.

Morning after morning, I descended from my apartment and watched, mesmerized. Some children were shy, some posed for my camera. I was as fascinated by the positive reactions of the adults as by the children. I only wish I could have understood what Halima had told them.

In a small niche hung a headscarf, black and white, identical to the one Fatima had repeatedly painted herself wearing. One morning, before my eyes, the hanging scarf suddenly fell off its hook on the wall. There had been no draft of air. I debated whether to pick it up or leave it. Later that month, when we delivered one of Fatima’s paintings to a prominent Jewish art collector, I noticed that the scarf had been tucked into the back of the frame, and told him the story.

Transformative art

Another significant moment came at the Haifa Museum of Art. We had gone to watch another Umm el-Fahem artist, Farid abu Shakra, do a performance piece. Farid is the younger brother of Said abu Shakra, the founding director of the Umm el-Fahem Art Gallery. An artist and an art teacher, Farid also curates some of the gallery’s exhibits.

At the end of the piece, Farid took two pieces of cloth that were hanging on the museum wall, a tallit (Jewish prayer shawl) and a keffiyah (the black and white cloth worn as a head covering by some Arab men). He tied them together. The message was clear. No words were necessary — and no religious belief — to feel the power of the moment, as well as to demonstrate the power of art to transform people, a major goal of the gallery.

(Amusingly, when I later showed my photo of the connected cloths to Farid, he commented, “very powerful image” — as if he were complimenting me, when the image was his.)

Farid also shared with me a series of maxims he had written in English. Here is my favorite:

He said to me, are you happy with your life? And I said to him, first explain the meaning of happiness, and then I tell you my reply.

Further mysterious sightings

On my next to last day in Umm el-Fahem, I visited the nearby ruins of Tel Megiddo, aka Armaggedon. It was just after a certain American minister had re-predicted the coming of the end of the world, realizing he had miscalculated the first time around. The site, and the world, were still intact when I visited. The ruins were interesting, and peaceful, aside from the surly saleswoman in the gift shop. We walked through the ancient stables and down into a huge stone lined cistern. I do feel a heightened intensity of place where historical events have occurred, and Tel Megiddo has had its share of events and battles over the millennia. The now quiet ruins actually might not be a bad place to spend the world’s final days.

Israel, of course, is replete with places of intense spirituality, to folks of many different beliefs, and it impossible not to feel the significance, historically and religiously, particularly in places like Jerusalem and Nazareth. Although I was not there for spiritual reasons, there are, wherever you turn, places of extreme importance to many. One encounters ultra-religious Jews in their dark clothes, side curls on the men and boys, head scarves on the women, Christians walking the literal stations of the Cross shouldering large wooden crosses, Muslim houses painted with what looks like graffiti but is actually a mark that the owner has made the pilgrimage to Mecca.

I went to the Western Wall on the day before Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, along with thousands of others. It was crowded, of course, but, surprisingly, not very difficult to make one’s way, after security, to the wall itself. I did make the mistake, at first, of heading toward the men’s side, and was kindly directed to the other side. There were women of all ages and kinds, some with strollers, some with canes, most praying, some just being tourists like me.

I walked up to the wall and touched my hand to it briefly; it seemed like the right thing to do. I did not write a prayer on paper and stick it in a crevice the way most people were doing, although it was tempting. I do like rituals at times, and mysterious things.

Here is the biggest mystery of my Israeli sojourn. On the women’s side of the wall was a woman (man?) who was a dead ringer for Michael Jackson. No kidding. I have the photo to prove it. S/he was standing next to more normal looking women, complete with quasi-military jacket, brass buttons and epaulets. There are many mysteries in the world that may never be solved. But please, is there someone who can explain this to me? I am hoping, and praying, that someone will.

Readers, can you relate to Joanna’s description of her secular spiritual travels — or do we need to come up with another term for it?

Joanna Liss has been traveling from the time she was a child in the Bronx, first to exotic destinations such as Brooklyn and Manhattan, later on family car trips up and down the East Coast, to places including Maine, Delaware, Montreal, and Miami, through all of which she professed that she could never live anyplace but New York. That all changed when she moved to Paris after high school. She has been traveling ever since. Her trip to Israel with GoEco marked her eighth adventure volunteering overseas; the other seven were with Volunteers for Peace. You can follow Liss’s adventures at her blog: Joanna’s Journey. Next stop: Havana.

STAY TUNED for Tuesday’s post, an interview with Dave Prager, author of Delirious Delhi, on our list of 2011 books for, by and about expats.

If you enjoyed this post, we invite you to register for The Displaced Dispatch, a round up of weekly posts from The Displaced Nation, with seasonal recipes, book giveaways and other extras. Register for The Displaced Dispatch by clicking here!

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Images (top to bottom): The view from the rooftop of Liss’s apartment in Umm el-Fahem, Israel; the artist Fatima Abu Rumi (note the Hello Kitty tee shirt) with one of her paintings; the keffiyah and tallit tied together at the Haifa Museum; and the Michael Jackson lookalike Liss spotted at the Western Wall in Jerusalem (women’s side).

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Yak-skin footware & the youthful quest for spiritual wisdom

8 Comments Posted by on January 20, 2012

We welcome back Lawrence Hunt to the Displaced Nation, who wrote a popular post for us in November about why the UK’s educated youth seems so preoccupied with voluntourism. Today he broadens this theme to include the quest for spiritual enlightenment.

At a comedy night I went to last year, the comedian’s most popular jokes were aimed at a student who’d made the mistake of sitting in the front row in sandals:

“He spent so long trying to find himself that he lost his shoes!”

As the number of people taking time off to travel has rocketed over the years, so, too, have the numbers of those in my age category (late teens, early twenties) who come back claiming to have achieved their ultimate epiphanies of self-actualization, forcing the fact of their higher spiritual consciousness onto the rest of us in the form of yak-skin footwear.

Meanwhile, companies like STA Travel make millions every year capitalizing on the appeal of the youthful spiritual quest — have a look at the description of one of their most popular holidays, the India Spiritual Trek:

Come face-to-face with a spirituality far removed from the shallow complexity (my emphasis) of the Western world, as you interact with some particularly special people in some truly unique places.

A recurrent theme in pop culture

One of Wes Anderson’s most financially successful films so far, The Darjeeling Limited, is about three rich brothers who board a train from Darjeeling to rediscover their lost kinship with each other.

So begins a strict itinerary of traditional rituals and indulgence in the simplicity of the local lifestyle, as Owen Wilson’s character throws out the odd patronizing comment: “These people are beautiful!”

My mother’s response on finishing watching Darjeeling with me was to promptly drop her jaw and say, in a low voice: “We have to go to India and see those mountain temples, Lawrence.” (My mother has talked for a while now of taking her own gap year, much to my concern — the men in Darjeeling have a mother who joins an Indian monastery and refuses to come home.) Fortunately, she is also able to laugh at Mitchell and Webb’s “gap year backpacking idiots” sketch.

And let’s not forget teen dance queen Alanis Morissette‘s hit single ‘Thank You,” which she released after taking time out from non-stop touring to travel in Cuba and India. At one point, she sings: “Thank you, India.” Did she actually imagine a billion voices chiming out as one from the subcontinent: “Any time, Alanis — we’re here to help”?

A recurrent theme in history

The idea of self-improvement through travel has existed for hundreds of years in such romantic idealizations as the Wild West, Darkest Africa and the Orient. It arises out of a conviction that as our civilization develops, we lose touch with our true selves, what life is all about. And if civilization is to blame, then it is elsewhere, in uncivilized cultures, esoteric religions or even ancient history where we find “reality.”

Jean-Jacques Rousseau believed that in the large European states, man had become alienated from the authentic self and preoccupied with meaningless duties, such as the duplicitous regard for manners that hid an underlying ruthlessness in bourgeois society. Primitive man — the so-called the “noble savage” — had been happier and more self-sufficient.

These trends coalesced in the hippie movement of the 1950s and 60s, which directed criticism towards almost every aspect of modern society: its dull consumerism, the system of capitalism itself, our susceptibility to totalitarian “brainwashing” and the war technology which had lain waste to the entire world during World War II and subsequent wars. What was demanded was not reform, but in fact a wholesale replacement of Western culture and ways of thinking.

Probably the most crippling flaw of the sixties counterculture was the total inability of its adherents to agree on a dominant theory of what should actually be replacing Western culture and politics. In fact, one of the defining values of this movement was that one should be free to choose one’s own alternative lifestyle. Everyone was encouraged to practice their own form of escapism.

Some rebels escaped through the fantasy literature of J.R.R. Tolkien, yearning for an enchanted world that existed in a time before the “rule of men” had begun. Others experimented with drugs, hoping to reach new planes of existence mentally. Some even tried to live the life that Rousseau had idealized, living primitively off the land in communes.

And still more looked for escape through non-Western cultures, where magical practices still proliferated, repressive Western structures were not in control, and religion was more spiritual, in touch with the flow of the universe. The Book of the Dead and the I Ching became new Bibles, and a huge amount of longing was directed vaguely in the direction of the undeveloped, non-Western world.

Eastern religions and their mystique

This last form of escapism received a fillip in the early 1980s with the publication of Duane Elgin’s book on voluntary simplicity — which spawned a movement that continues to this day.

On the recent BBC programme How to Live a Simple Life, Peter Owen-Jones pointed to Elgin’s chart comparing the “Voluntary Simplicity World View” with the “Industrial World View.” The latter sees material acquisition as a primary life objective and determinant of social position, while the former seeks a balance between material and spiritual needs, concentrating on conservation and frugality as mediated through self-sufficient communities and a process of “inner growth.”

Interestingly, in Elgin’s survey of “inner growth” processes, only 20 percent of those questioned cited traditional Western religions, while 55 percent claimed to use techniques like Zen or Transcendental Meditation.

What is it these religions offer that Western faiths don’t? According to Elgin, traditional churches are hierarchical institutions of mass society, something he resolutely opposes. By contrast, Eastern religions like Buddhism, Hinduism and Taoism are religions of liberation, in that they aim to alter our consciousness through self-reflection.

Let’s get real

These opposing views of East and West are widely taken for granted in our culture, but how far do they reflect the reality?

In my own, admittedly rather limited travel experience — I was a gap-year student in China for six months — the perception of the East as a place where spirituality is generally prized above materialism is pure fairytale, the world of Beat literature and Kung Fu movies.

I remember my first day off the train in Beijing. It was April 2008, and Wángfǔjǐng, the shopping district in the city centre, was buzzing with the anticipation of hosting the largest Olympic Games in world history. The atmosphere of national pride was tangible, present in every colorful corner of the street. Buildings were plastered with billboards from companies proudly claiming to be sponsors of the games. Most of them featured the smiling face of Chinese national treasure Jackie Chan — Jackie Chan water, Jackie Chan ice cream, Jackie Chan baby wipes. I found myself wandering through a dazzling labyrinth of colorful street vendors and market stalls, heckled constantly by cries of “You want to buy souvenir? You want to buy hat? Come see!”

Some vendors refused to take my bewildered, negatory smiles for an answer and grabbed me by the hand, trying to hold me in place. “Buy everything” I read on a sign above my head in yellow lettering in English and Chinese. Presumably a poor translation of “We sell everything,” but I didn’t take long to be convinced. That said, I’m not sure they were selling any yak-skin footwear!

A banquet to write home about

Something which I noticed when staying with some Chinese friends was the pride they show in wasting food, something that’s anathema to my Western upbringing. My host, when taking me out to a restaurant, ordered an extravagant number of dishes — including shark fin soup, which they paid a huge amount for but no one touched for the entire meal. Out of politeness, I had a small bowlful — it was unbearably bitter, and the family laughed cheerfully as I struggled with it.

The dish had been ordered merely because it was expensive and they had wanted to impress me. It struck me that by contrast, my parents would never have allowed us to order anything they didn’t fully intend to finish. If anything, the attitude at home towards consumption is marked by its lack of brazen excess.

At the risk of becoming the thing I’ve set out to ridicule, let me offer some closing words:

True happiness flows from the possession of wisdom and virtue and not from the possession of external goods.

Who said that? Why, Aristotle, a philosopher whose ideas gave birth to the so-called shallow complexity of the Western world.

Readers, what do you think of Lawrence Hunt’s thesis? Are Eastern cultures more spiritual than ours, or are we too easily swept up in the allure of the exotic?

STAY TUNED for Monday’s post, a travel yarn on spiritual escapes by a guest blogger.

If you enjoyed this post, we invite you to register for The Displaced Dispatch, a round up of weekly posts from The Displaced Nation, with seasonal recipes, book giveaways and other extras. Register for The Displaced Dispatch by clicking here!

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LIBBY’S LIFE #35 – A big piranha in a small pond

Leave a comment Posted by on January 19, 2012

Even a week after the ultrasound, I can hardly take it in. Twins? Me?

I phoned Mum to tell her about it, of course, and regretted it immediately. She means to be helpful and encouraging, but it never works out that way.

“You’ll probably have a Caesarian,” she said, sniffing. “Everyone does in America, from what I’ve read. But it runs in families, you know, twins. Auntie Doris, my grandmother’s cousin, she had twins. At least, I think she was a cousin.”

Or possibly not related at all. Grandma-Great was from a generation that called all older females Auntie.

“Was everything OK?” I asked. “We must be talking pre-National Health Service here.”

“Heavens, yes. Auntie Doris outlasted Grandma by ten years.”

“I meant the twins.”

“Oh, I see! Well, it was New Year’s Eve. The midwife had had a bit too much gin by the time she got to Doris’s house, and passed out on the floor at a critical moment. Uncle Harry was down the pub, as men did back then, so he was no help, and the twins didn’t survive into January. But since yours are due in May, I’m sure they’ll be fine.”

You see? This is my mother’s idea of making me feel better. I can never decide if she was always like that, or if forty years of marriage with dad has taken its toll.

“It’s OK, Mum. I don’t think nurses are allowed to turn up drunk to work nowadays, whether it’s a bank holiday or not. They get sacked, and sued, and stuff like that.”

“You say that, but only last week in the Daily Mail, I read about a Romanian nurse in London – ”

“If you’re going to start quoting Daily Mail hysteria at me, I’m going to put the phone down. I need to take Jack to nursery school anyway.”

“How’s he doing there? Does he like it? I don’t think it’s right, sending little ones off to school when they could be at home with their mummies.”

I rolled my eyes and started to tell her that of course he liked it there – then stopped. Last week he’d twice had a tantrum when I left him there. And yet before Christmas, he was going happily. Maybe it would take him a few days to get him back into the routine after the Christmas break.

“He’s fine,” I said, crushing the little niggle of doubt.

All the same, I thought, as I put the phone back in the charger, I would have a word with Patsy, his teacher.

* * *

I’ve tried to avoid Patsy as much as possible since Jack started at nursery. It’s partly because I still have nightmares about being roped in for Play-Doh sessions with Playgroup Mafia Mums, and partly because I sense she doesn’t like me. Or at least, she thinks I’m not worth spending time on.

How do I know this? Because I know the sort of girl that Patsy Traynor used to be at school.

She was the one with lank hair and unfashionable clothes, who used to tag along with the pretty, popular, calculating girls. She’d hang on their every word, laugh at every unfunny, airhead comment they made, massaging their already inflated egos and trying to be their best friend. In return, they would let her think she was a friend, but in reality they were keeping her on a string, waiting for the day when she might be useful in their social-political games. The sad thing was, everyone knew this except Patsy.

Now that she’s grown up, you’d think she might be wiser – but no. She has her favourites among the mothers – those who are disgustingly well-off, those who display potential PTA leadership qualities, those with interesting quirks to set them apart (but only in a good way; tattoos and body-piercings don’t count except negatively) – and as I have none of these traits, I’m an also-ran in Patsy’s eyes. Thankfully, Jack talks about “Miss Patsy” with enthusiasm, so I hope her disdain for mediocre parents doesn’t extend to their mediocre children.

When I arrived at the school, she stood in the classroom, chatting to another mum. I caught her eye, mouthed “Hello” and raised my eyebrows to indicate that I needed to ask her something, but my body language was lost on her. She had already turned back to the mum who, even by looking at the back of her perfectly highlighted head, I could tell was just the type with whom Patsy would have ingratiated herself thirty years ago.

I helped Jack take off his coat, but instead of wandering across the room to play in the toy bus as he had done before Christmas, he stayed close to me, staring warily around the classroom.

“Don’t you want to go and play with your friends?” I asked.

He clutched the hem of my jacket and shook his head.

I bent down to his level. “Why not?”

He glanced around again, put his mouth to my ear, and whispered, “Tom.”

“Tom?” I was bewildered. Tom was a little fair-haired boy with glasses and a lisp, incapable of anything more frightening than swatting at Jack with a Milky Bar. “What has Tom done to you?”

Jack shook his head and wouldn’t elaborate further.

What on earth am I doing, having two more children? I can’t comprehend the one I’ve already got.

I decided to be firm.

“Whatever Tom has done, I’m sure it can’t be that bad.” Could it? These boys were only three, after all. “And if you have any trouble with him, you tell Miss Patsy. That’s what she’s there for.”

Jack nodded uncertainly, then wandered off to the Transportation Play Area (translation = toy cars on a frayed rug) where, to my exasperation, he began to race Hot Wheels cars with the very child he’d complained about.

But since I was here, I’d have a quick word with Patsy and mention my concerns about Jack’s reluctance to go to school. She was still chatting, and as I lingered nearby waiting to speak, I realised the other mother had an English accent.

Patsy glanced at me and I heard her say, “This lady here is also British. I think I’ve seen your son playing with her little boy.”

The mother turned around, and I saw with a shock that it was Caroline, the pregnant tiger-mom discussing 4-carat diamond earrings at a coffee morning last July, whom I’d last seen at the Christmas party looking puffy and tired.

No puffiness now, though. She could have been an advertisement for Chanel’s Spring Maternity Collection.

“We’ve met,” she said to Patsy. “Two British mums, both expecting! When are you due, Libby?” She shot a look at my stomach. “Very soon, I do believe…next month, is it?”

You know, it’s fine for me and Oliver to make fun of the size of my bump. But it’s not at all fine for some superior tiger-mum to do it, especially when I distinctly remember telling her my due date at the Christmas party.

I smiled with as much sweetness as I could manage. “May.”

“You poor thing! So huge, and still four months to go! You should get your husband to send you to this marvelous spa in Vermont that I went to at Christmas. I went there with swollen ankles, had seaweed wraps every day, and came out ten days later like this.”

She pulled her trouser leg up a little way to reveal one defined, bony ankle above shoes that she and only Victoria Beckham would wear in late pregnancy.

“I’ve only got another three weeks, thank the lord. I think I’d kill myself if I had four months to go.” She laughed, then abruptly stopped as a small boy charged across the room and head-butted her three times in the thigh, making her wobble slightly on those ridiculous heels. “Dominic, sweetheart, remember what we talked about this morning, about making good choices? Do you think that was a good choice?”

“Yes!” the monster shouted, and raced off again.

“Oh dear.” Caroline sighed. “He’s so boisterous. But I believe in letting children be children, don’t you?’

Umm, no. Children are like weeds. Without due care, vigilance, and regular cutting back, they grow out of control. But you can’t say things like that any more, otherwise you’re not being “supportive”.

Pasty put her hand on Caroline’s arm. “Don’t worry about it. Or, you know, the other issue. The other mother was quite certainly exaggerating, and the school felt they had to make an example of him – quite wrong, in my opinion. Bullying isn’t a problem among three-year-olds. It’s always the parents, believe me – certain types of parents, anyhow. I’m glad you chose this school for him. He’s settled in very well.”

Interesting. Could I infer from this that Caroline, a new parent at this nursery school, had been forced to withdraw her child from another? She’d be all right here, I could tell. She was on Patsy’s list of VIP parents already. Amazing what a big rock in each earlobe would do.

“Libby, did you want to speak to me?” Patsy asked. “We can talk briefly now, or if it’s not urgent I’d be happy to see you after school one day next week.”

Caroline didn’t attempt to move away, and I didn’t feel like discussing Jack’s problems in front of her. “After school on Monday would be fine,” I said.

As I turned away, Caroline’s monster-child ran up behind her again, this time knocking her into Patsy’s arms.

“Dominic!”

It wasn’t quite a shout from Caroline, but it wasn’t far off. She went a little red, presumably embarrassed to be caught not allowing her child to be a child.

“Boys will be boys!” Patsy sang. “Well, time for school. Goodbye, ladies.”

As Caroline and I walked out to the car park, Caroline said, “I’d appreciate it if you didn’t mention anything about what Patsy and I were talking about. To the other Brits, I mean. Some of those women like nothing better than to bad-mouth Dom. Jealous, I suppose.”

Jealous of what? I wondered as I watched her drive away. Diamond earrings that could be cubic zirconia? Give me a break.

Then something else registered. Tom…Dominic…Dom. Dom? Is that what Jack had been trying to tell me, that someone called Dom was making his life hard?

I wasn’t on Patsy’s VIP list. With her shiny hair, sparkly earrings and posh accent, on the other hand, Caroline most definitely was.

Oh dear. Poor Jack.

To be continued next week

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Next: LIBBY’S LIFE #36: Filthy cash, dirty deeds

 Previous: LIBBY’S LIFE #34: Shadows on a screen

Click here to read Libby’s Life from the first episode

STAY TUNED for another post from TCK Lawrence Hunt.

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Image: Travel – Map of the World by Salvatore Vuono / FreeDigit

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The Displaced Q: Can travel and the expat life lead to a healthier diet?

17 Comments Posted by on January 17, 2012

Part of the formula for feeling better about oneself — TDN’s theme this month — is eating a healthier diet. Today Tony James Slater, the newest addition to our team, poses a Displaced Q on the eating habits of travelers and expats.

I’m not sure what qualifies me to pose a question about food, since my idea of healthy eating is using low-fat mayonnaise on a full English breakfast — but hey, I’d love to hear your side of the story…

I think I have what you might consider to be a rather controversial point of view, which is that traveling and leading an expat lifestyle can lead to a healthier diet — but for the most part do not.

WAIT! Before you hit the comments with that vitriolic reply — hear me out. I may be wrong (my past wrongness is legendary), but I believe I have a point. Tell you what — I’ll lay out my opinion (which I’ve put a lot of thought into), and then you can tell me if I’m talking out of my asparagus.

Chopping veggies: too much like hard work?

Plenty of people see travel as a way to reinvent themselves. I should know, I did exactly that, as explained in my last post about volunteering in Ecuador.

But reinventing your lifestyle is one thing — your diet is something else. I think statistically speaking (and I’m no expert) 99.9% of us have struggled with our diet at some point or other.

It’s not a change like deciding to make more “me time,” or adding the beach into your daily itinerary. We struggle because changing our diet requires that dreaded thing: commitment.

And the enemy of commitment is convenience.

Ah, convenience…the single biggest factor driving the fast-food phenomenon worldwide. Is it easier to swing past KFC on your way home from work than it is to get home and start chopping vegetables?

You bet it is.

What’s more, this instant gratification factor appeals not just to the terminally lazy — like me — but to an awful lot of people in a world where free time is increasingly under pressure.

The food you know…

So you’re in a new country. You tour the neighborhood. What’s the first thing you’ll recognize — whether in Cairo, Bangkok, Buenos Aires or Paris? Chances are it’ll be a fast-food joint. It’s just so easy. Nothing new to challenge you — either your palette or your linguistic skills. Just point and grunt, to be rewarded with something you could have bought within five minute’s drive of the last place you lived.

Don’t get me wrong. As I travel I make an effort to eat everything — including, on occasion, things I shouldn’t. (Apparently, the wings stay on the locust, even if they have got most of the soy sauce on them — who knew?)

Still, there is the part of me that, after a few days dining from street vendors, really craves a burger. Or a pizza. Something Western, that tastes of home.

As British writer George Miller once remarked:

The trouble with eating Italian food is that five or six days later you’re hungry again.

Asia — the exception?

There are certain countries with a deserved reputation as a mecca for healthy eating — yes, I’m talking about Japan here. In fact, most Asian countries are considered to have a healthy yet appealing diet, with an emphasis on seafood and simplicity.

For the better part of a year in Thailand I lived like a king. Fresh fruit for breakfast every morning, compared with jam on toast, bacon and sausage back home — score one for healthier eating!

Simple meals of chicken and rice, or noodles from street vendors were my staples. They were as cheap as they were delicious!

And yet… It was all fried. The rice was fried. The chicken was fried. The noodles… Is it possible to overdose on MSG?

I had no control over how my food was cooked and no kitchen to prepare it myself. Back home I fry things occasionally, but I’m a path-of-least-resistance kinda guy. My food isn’t always healthy (burgers, schnitzels, chips) — but I’d stick it in the oven or grill it. So the score…is tricky to say on this one.

And then there’s the booze…

Thailand is famous — at least amongst the 18-35 age group — less for its culinary marvels than for its parties. Score one (a large ONE) + a whisky chaser for the unhealthy diet.

Do you drink more when you travel? Cocktail by the pool? Glass of wine or two in the evening, because why not — you feel so free? Yeah, you do. Don’t worry — so does everyone else. But that’s another nail in the coffin of a healthier diet…

(And yes, I know all about anti-oxidants. That’s how I justify red wine too.)

* * *

In my experience, to eat anything decent, you have to work for it. The easier food is to find, and the more recognizable, the less healthy it tends to be.

If you’re prepared to experiment with different recipes and ingredients, different cooking apparatus and utensils, to learn a few words in the local language and risk using them in the market — then you can manage it.

But if you’re prepared to do all that for the sake of eating healthy, chances are you do it at home too, in which case you’ll eat healthily wherever you are. And probably outlive me by at least a decade.

So, as I said at the beginning: can travel encourage one to adopt a healthier diet? Well, I think it can…but doesn’t.

Am I full of carp? Am I talking sushi? What do you think?

TONY JAMES SLATER is a self-confessed adventureholic. For the last six years he’s been traveling nonstop around the world, working at a variety of jobs including yacht deliverer in the Mediterranean, professional diver in Thailand and snow boarder in New Zealand. He even deprived the world of sandalwood one tree at a time in Australia (though he still maintains it was an accident). Last year, Slater published his first book, That Bear Ate My Pants!, an account of his misadventures while volunteering at the animal refuge in Ecuador. (The book was featured in The Displaced Nation’s list of 2011 expat books.) He is currently working on a second book set in Thailand, while exploring his new home in Perth, Australia.

STAY TUNED for Wednesday’s post, an opinion piece by Lawrence Hunt on what drives today’s young people to seek spiritual enlightenment abroad.

If you enjoyed this post, we invite you to register for The Displaced Dispatch, a round up of weekly posts from The Displaced Nation, with seasonal recipes, book giveaways and other extras. Register for The Displaced Dispatch by clicking here!

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Image: Tony Slater with his girlfriend (now wife), Krista, in an open shack-style cafe in Kuta Beach, Bali, Indonesia. Krista is eating nasi goreng, a Balinese veggie curry (over fried rice), whereas Tony has ordered a burger (but will it be too Asianized for his tastes?).

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Travel for excitement, not enlightenment

7 Comments Posted by on January 16, 2012


As I write this I am in a well-known brand of coffee shop. When I stop and think about it, it is all busy, a regular footpath of traffic. Office workers stream in and out for a shot of caffeine to get them through their Monday morning. In between customers the two baristas discuss the smaller one’s mother-in-law (she looks so young that I am surprised to discover that she’s already married); the two open top buttons on the shirt of the man at the table next to mine reveals an interesting chest tattoo of an eagle; a policeman walks in — he carries two guns. All this takes place over a minute or two to the unlikely soundtrack of Tony Bennett’s recording of “A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square,” which the well-known brand of coffee shop is piping into its store.

The reason that I mention all of this is that I need to actively stop and think to notice the interesting things around me, those moments of local color. As an expat if this had happened a year or two previously I would have been fascinated by this scene. I would have been alarmed, even repulsed by my close proximity to two firearms.  Now it has all become quotidian. I have lived in cities on three continents and it is remarkable how quickly the exotic turns into the mundane.

For most of us we sleepwalk through life, it is one of quiet monotony — and that isn’t necessarily a bad thing. For many of us we have a life of traffic jams, of unpleasant bosses, of evenings in the grocery store and weekends in the mall. You may be in a city of six million or a town of two hundred thousand, live alone or with your wife and 2.4 children but for many points it may feel as if one existence of mundane solitude.

Last week on this blog ML Awanohara posted her top 10 expat and travel posts on spiritual escapes, about the need many people feel to search for some “me” time. One of the articles that she linked to was “The Joy of Quiet” by Pico Iyer that was from the New York Times.

ML had previously mentioned this article to me and thought that I might enjoy it, or at least find something of interest to it. And, in fairness to her, I did.

Admittedly on reading the opening sentence, which drips with name-dropping, knowingness and smugness  —

About a year ago, I flew to Singapore to join the writer Malcolm Gladwell, the fashion designer Marco Ecko and the graphic designer Stefan Sagmesiter in addressing a group of advertising people on “Marketing to the Child of Tomorrow”…

— I was ready to throw the article across my living room. In fact, I almost did throw it across the room at full force until I remembered that this wasn’t the dead tree edition of the NYT that I was reading, but a digital subscription read via my iPad.

(As someone who has always taken to heart Dorothy Parker‘s adage that this is a book that “should be thrown with great force,” I’m still not entirely happy with reading in the digital age as throwing a kindle or an iPad with great force will only serve to void you of your warranty.)

So not wishing to break my iPad, I kept reading. Iyer is concerned that technology is bombarding us and with that comes an increasing need for us to seek quiet, to try and mediate, to seek some form of solace from the “noise” of the modern world.

There’s nothing particularly original, per se, about this idea nor does Iyer claim so. Perhaps the greatest work in American literature (though other opinions are available) is Thoreau’s Walden. There has always been a desire to escape. We can go way further back than Walden– Christ and the Buddha both headed out to the wilderness. When we couple this desire as Iyer does with the tech writer Nicholas Carr‘s hypothesis that the Internet is shortening our attention spans, altering the very way in which we think, there is a desire to be a modern Canute and try to stop the advancing waves of technology.

That brings us to this month’s theme which concerns itself with the search for solitude or for a transforming experience, which some may class as being spiritual. Often this, as seen with the likes of Elizabeth Gilbert, means taking a rather patronizing view of the country that you are visiting that I find entirely unpalatable.

To me it seems that Iyer is in the Gilbert new-agey BS camp. Returning to the “Joy of Quiet” he writes:

For more than 20 years, therefore, I’ve been going several times a year — often for no longer than three days — to a Benedictine hermitage, 40 minutes down the road, as it happens, from the Post Ranch Inn. I don’t attend services when I’m there, and I’ve never meditated, there or anywhere; I just take walks and read and lose myself in the stillness, recalling that it’s only by stepping briefly away from my wife and bosses and friends that I’ll have anything useful to bring to them. The last time I was in the hermitage, three months ago, I happened to pass, on the monastery road, a youngish-looking man with a 3-year-old around his shoulders. . . .

Now most of us can’t be as amazing as Pico Iyer — that’s just the burden we have to carry through our lives. We can’t just move to rural Japan and fetishize solitude. We will still spend our evenings in the grocery store, our weekends in the mall, they will still be those 2.4 children and those bloody traffic jams — as David Byrne sang,“same as it ever was.”

What I am going to do try and do in 2012 (and yes even though it’s mid-January I still feel it is early enough to mention resolutions in a post) is to take advantage of technology to find some solitude. I’m not going to posture by lighting an incense stick as if the path to personal enlightenment lies in sniffing in something called Egyptian Musk. What I am going to do is take advantage of the quiet moments that my everyday life provides by sitting and concentrating at a task and deriving satisfaction from that. It may be by learning programming, a foreign language, or taking advantage of the sheer, vast number of books that are now available for free on Google books. In this well-known brand of coffee shop while Tony Bennett plays to me and the tattooed man and the policeman and the baristas return to talking about the smaller one’s mother-in-law, I have on my iPad access to a library of books greater than the Bodleian — reason enough not to throw the iPad across the room when I’m annoyed by Iyer.

So, I’ll be making a greater effort to sit and read. Return to my first love. I do read a lot, but my attention span has suffered in the Internet age to what it was before. But when I listen to David Foster Wallace in the embedded video (2 minute 14 seconds in is the pertinent part in my opinion), I am inspired to make a greater effort. That will be my act of meditation. My escape from the mall and the grocery shopping.

Travel will not be an escape from the noise, from the barrage of imagery. It will remain a escape from the quotidian, a retreat from the banal. It will be where I go to barraged by sound, sight, people, history, culture — thank God for that.

Hmm… Readers, do you agree that travel writer Pico Iyer belongs in the Gilbert new-agey BS camp? And do you travel for excitement or escape from excitement? Where are you on the continuum?

STAY TUNED for Tuesday’s post, a Displaced Q on healthy food by new TDN writer Tony James Slater.

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Top 10 expat & travel posts on spiritual escapes

12 Comments Posted by on January 13, 2012

As the holidays draw to a close and a new calendar year commences, many of us find ourselves desperately in need of some “me” time — a chance to reassess our “to do” lists and decide which of our life goals deserves top priority.

Gah?? Did I just write that? Talk about understatements! If you’re like me, you are lucky if you can remember that you used to have personal goals at one point. (My only aims for the past few weeks have been writing x many cards, wrapping x many gifts, hosting/visiting x many relations…)

That could be why Kate Allison’s post on Monday — announcing that The Displaced Nation has dedicated this month to spiritual escapes — was a goad to such debate. Does the quest for spiritual enlightenment require geographical displacement, away from the demands of family and everyday life? And what about those who are already living far away from “home” — do they need to displace themselves even further, to the most obscure corners of the globe? (Wait, aren’t some of them already living there?!)

Having tracked this topic on social media for several weeks, I would like to share my top 10 findings as further food for meditation, so to speak… My hope is that these writers can help us disentangle our thoughts — which might otherwise come to resemble advanced yoga positions — on the best techniques for getting in touch with the innermost core of our beings.

As usual, and as befits our blog’s slightly irreverent tone, they’re from a mix of indie and conventional publications.

1) Meditation vacation
Author: Matthew Green (@MattGreenAfPak), a reporter covering Pakistan and Afghanistan and author of The Wizard of the Nile
Publication: Financial Times, Life & Arts (@FTlifeandarts)
Why it’s helpful: Spending so much time in war zones, Green desperately needed the kind of retreat where alcohol, email — and talking — are all banned. During his 10-day “Buddhist boot camp” at the Himachal Vipassana Centre in the Himalayas, he ended up weeping harder than he could remember, for a reason he couldn’t fathom — but he also had to bite his lip to stifle the kind of giggles he hadn’t felt since school!

2) The Joy of Quiet
Author: Pico Iyer, British essayist, novelist, travel writer, and Third Culture Kid (born in Britain to Indian parents, he grew up in California), who once said: “And if nowhere is quite home, we can be optimists everywhere.”
Publication: New York Times Week in Review (@nytopinion)
Why it’s helpful: Iyer suggests that there’s something in the zeitgeist to make us all in need of stillness at this particular moment — that the more ways we have to connect, the more desperate we become to unplug, and would pay almost anything for the privilege. (Hmmm… Perhaps I should end this post right here?) I also found it interesting that as a writer, he prefers to live in rural Japan,

“in part so I could more easily survive for long stretches entirely on foot, and every trip to the movies would be an event.”

(Presumably the other part, which he doesn’t mention, is that his wife is Japanese.) Almost needless to say, Iyer has never tweeted or gone on Facebook.

3) The Threshold
Author: Catherine Yiğit (@Yarzac), a writer who was born, bred and buttered in Ireland but who now lives as an expat (also mother and wife) in northwestern Turkey near the mythical city of Troy.
Publication: The Skaian Gates: Notes from an Online Wanderer (Yiğit’s personal blog)
Why it’s helpful: If you’re serious about bringing change to your life, sometimes it helps to take a “tough love” approach. Yiğit found the kick she needed for empowering herself after stumbling upon a program for women writers called “A Year with Myself.” The approach, she says, is gentler than that taken by the unmercifully profane Chuck Wendig (@ChuckWendig), he of the author-advice blog Terrible Minds. (Ironically, Yiğit cites a post by Wendig that I’d shortlisted for this top-ten list: 25 Things Writers Should Stop Doing Right F****** Now. But then I found Yiğit’s post — and could relate to her yearning for some blend of toughness and forgiveness to help her cross the threshold…)

4) A year in awe over the fabulously mundane
Author: Lauren Alissa Hunter (@SankofaMeLately ), world traveler, former expat in China, and blogger (SankofaMe Lately), currently in search of a publisher for her WIP.
Publication: She Writes (@shewritesdotcom), a virtual workplace for women who write from all 50 states and more than 30 countries.
Why it’s helpful: Wannabe novelists, before making any major changes to your life this year, take heed of this rather cautionary tale. A year ago, Hunter upped and quit her job and booked a one-way flight to China in hopes it would spark her creativity as a writer. But instead of finding serenity, she found “intense loneliness, terrifying introspection, emotional vulnerability.” Still, at least she discovered where “home” is — her native United States. What’s more, she currently finds the mundane simply fabulous.

5) The (hateful) ties that bind: Expats and cultural criticism
Author: Camden Luxford (@camdenluxford), an Australian traveler and freelance writer who is now an expat in Argentina. Note: Luxford has been one of TDN’s Random Nomads.
Publication: The Brink of Something Else (Luxford’s blog)
Why it’s helpful: In her inimitable style, Luxford raises the vexed issue of why some expats can’t resist slagging off the countries where they live. Though she didn’t design the post as a contemplation on the January blahs, it dovetails neatly with TDN’s current theme. Are some of us feeling low simply because we can’t stand the thought of starting a new calendar year in the same old same old country? Or because we’re no longer that thrilled about being a world traveler? Burn-out is a serious condition. If you think you might be a victim, I would suggest adding to the comments on Luxford’s post as a first step to recovery… (In this connection, it’s also worth taking a look at the post Struggling in Seville by Ayngelina on her Bacon is magic blog. Ayngelina was traveling solo through Latin America, ended up in Spain — and then decided she was done with being a nomad and would return to Canada. Her post attracted a whopping 168 comments!)

6) 10 of the world’s best yoga retreats 2012
Author: Susan Greenwood (@Pedalfeet) — Guardian writer, bike rider & blogger (Pedalfeet)
Publication: Guardian Travel (@GuardianTravel)
Why it’s helpful: One of the things that always puts me off considering a yoga retreat is the cost — for which you’ll need some controlled breathing even before you’ve learned the proper technique! Greenwood claims that the retreats on her list qualify not only as inspirational but also affordable. I’m not sure if that’s true, especially if you had to add the cost of airplane travel to the cost of the retreat (most of these places aren’t exactly offering bargain-basement prices). Still, the Yoga Barn in Bali seems surprisingly unpretentious and good value — eat-pray-love, anyone?
Worth noting: This Saturday’s Guardian Travel has a special issue on healthy holidays and “courses that will change your life.”

7) 5 magical places in China to disconnect from the world and recharge
Author: “travelingman” Troy on GotSaga (From California, he is now planning a trip to Peru.)
Publication: GotSaga (@GotSaga), an online community for sharing travel sagas, tips, and destinations.
Why it’s helpful: Having been to Mainland China several times, I wouldn’t put it first on my destination list for spiritual escapes, though it’s such a large country it’s bound to have a few spots that are conducive to contemplation — especially if you’re willing to venture to the back of Outer Mongolia. Though Troy doesn’t completely persuade me — some of his proposed retreats sound rather touristy — I do like the idea of glimpsing rural life amid the bamboo forests of Huzhou, which also boasts the distinction of having the world’s only museum devoted to bamboo. As I rather like things that are in bad taste, I might even be tempted to take home some kitsch bamboo products along with my white tea, for the memories. (Listen, if you can find peace of mind in today’s China, you can find it anywhere! No need for fancy yoga retreats…)

8) Happy New Year and the Clutter-free Home
Author: Jennifer L. Scott (@jenlyneva), author of Lessons from Madame Chic, a how-to book based on her experience of living in posh apartment in Paris for a semester while a student at the University of Southern California. (NOTE: The book was featured on our 2011 expat book list.)
Publication: The Daily Connoisseur (Scott’s popular lifestyle blog)
Why it’s helpful: I love the idea of someone deriving powerful life lessons from a study-abroad experience and then distilling them into a “Top 20” list for the benefit of wider humanity. (I’m also rather jealous — have always wanted to do something like that with my years in Japan…) And what better time to contemplate such life lessons than in January — beginning with the need to declutter. Because they understand the pleasure of only using the best things you own, the French apparently excel at getting rid of excess belongings (or not buying them in the first place). Les gens extraordinaires!

9) Quick and Dirty Japanese: It’s What’s for Dinner
Author: Larissa Reinhart Hoffman (@RisWrites), a former expat in various parts of Japan, with a WIP entitled “Portrait of a Dead Guy.”
Publication: The ExPat Returneth: A place to express what you miss about living abroad (a new blog just started up by Hoffman — she hopes to recruit other writers eventually).
Why it’s helpful: Have you included healthier eating in your New Year’s resolutions? Then you ought to be eating Japanese food, Hoffman states. She also gives short shrift to complaints that it’s too hard to tackle their cooking, insisting that if she can handle making Japanese food (she was a late bloomer to cooking), anyone can. While living in Japan as an expat with her (American) husband and their two girls, Hoffman developed a repertoire of what she likes to call “quick and dirty” recipes (the Japanese might be horrified by the latter adjective!). Her main message:

You don’t have to be Martha Stewart to make home-style Japanese food.

Thank God.

10) The Buzz in Mexico
Author: Melina Gerosa Bellows, editor-in-chief of National Geographic Kids and Huffington Post blogger
Publication: Jan/Feb 2012 issue of National Geographic Traveler (@NatGeoTraveler)
Why it’s helpful: Bellows spins the yarn of her recent trip to Tulum, Mexico. She was on a mission to follow the path of the stingless Melipona beecheii bee, which is now endangered — a cause of concern to all those who value traditional Mayan culture. As she explains:

At risk of dying along with the insect is a beekeeping tradition that for centuries has been sacred to the Maya for its spiritual benefits.

In the process, she slows down and learns to value the art of “just being” (pun intended?). Her story is a reminder of how peace of mind can hit you over the head when you least expect it — in Bellows’ case, while on a work assignment (albeit to a very agreeable part of the world, where even bees behave in a civilized manner).

* * *

Question: Can you suggest any other works that should have made the list?

STAY TUNED for Monday’s post, a contrarian perspective on spiritual escapes from TDN contributor Anthony Windram.

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Image: MorgueFile

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LIBBY’S LIFE #34 – Shadows on a screen

3 Comments Posted by on January 12, 2012

After a Christmas far away from her family, Libby is wondering if she is ready to face the new year without her loved ones. The foods she has been forced to abandon, that is.

Happy New Year!

A bit late, I know. It takes me a few days to get into the ‘Happy’ part. Until then, it’s just another month of winter, minus whatever food or beverage I’ve resolved to give up.

This year was different because I’d given up every nice food or beverage already, hijacked as I am by this alien growing in my midriff. Brie, prawns, coffee, every type of alcohol – you name it, and I have sacrificed it at the altar of pregnancy, although I’m thrilled to report that my taste for tea has unexpectedly returned. But give up chocolate for New Year? I think not. Not with Pinot Noir off the menu for another five months or more. Pass the Cadbury’s – lots of it, and now.

So, here we are in 2012, the year of our second child’s birth. I will be so happy to be rid of this bump. Have heard that babies get bigger the more you have of them, but I always imagined the increments would be more gentle. This one already has the proportions of a fully grown Oompa-Loompa. Still, twenty-two weeks down, eighteen to go, assuming this baby gets out of bed on time, unlike its brother who would have been happy to stay there until his peers were taking A-levels.

In a couple of hours, though, I will be able to stop calling it “it” or “this baby” because it will have a gender and proper name. (More on the dilemma of name choices later. I’m convinced it’s a girl, who is therefore going to be called Megan. Oliver is only contemplating a boy called Sam.) Oliver and I – obviously I, but we’re taking joint ownership of this pregnancy seriously – are going for our first ultrasound scan. I was supposed to go a few weeks ago, but what with Thanksgiving and Christmas and falling off ladders while decorating fir trees, I didn’t quite get round to it.

Such is the cavalier attitude of a second-time mum. Dr. Gallagher’s receptionist was horrified to find I’d only seen a doctor twice in half a pregnancy. I don’t know why. The baby is still there, isn’t it? It’s not as if I’ve put it down somewhere and forgotten it. Although I did that once with Jack when he was a few weeks old in his car seat. I went to Sainsbury’s cafe with Mum, put Jack on the floor next to the table, drank coffee, got up to clear the trays away, and…left.

But the important thing is I came back. The lady wiping the tables down was all set to ring social services, or so she said. Mum tipped her ten quid, and she shut up, but I always went to Morrison’s cafe after that, just in case she wanted another ten quid.

Oops. Time to leave for our appointment.

* * *

Tapping at a computer keyboard with her left hand and staring intently at the monitor’s mass of swirling, indecipherable grey shapes, the technician runs the gelled transducer over my bulging middle. She’s warmed the gel, so the pressure is not an unpleasant sensation, although the baby doesn’t agree and I feel a gentle kick of protest from within. It’s still very gentle, not much more than a flutter really, but it’s there all right.

The technician mutters to herself and types in numbers as she measures and remeasures the distance between various blobs.

“They’re very thorough over here, aren’t they?” I say in a low voice to Oliver, who is also concentrating on the picture on the screen. “I swear Jack’s ultrasound didn’t take this long.”

Oliver looks at me, a little cleft appearing between his eyebrows. “You’re right. It didn’t.” He clears his throat and raises his voice. “Is everything – you know, all right?” he asks.

The technician stops tapping the keyboard and moving the transducer. She smiles at Oliver and then briefly at me. She doesn’t look me in the eye.

“It looks…fine. So far,” she says carefully.

I don’t like her tone. She’s hiding something.

A couple of seconds later, she snatches up a handful of tissue paper, scrubs some gel off my abdomen, and covers me up with a sheet, which after two seconds feels cold on my skin, gooey from the residual gel.

“I’ll be back in a few minutes. I just need to speak with the doctor.” She pauses. “You say you’ve only had two checkups with your doctor so far in this pregnancy?”

I nod, not trusting myself to speak because of the lump of fear swelling inside my throat.

As she shuts the door behind her, I turn to Oliver and whisper, “What does she mean, she needs to speak with the doctor? Does that mean there’s something wrong?” Thoughts of my unknown sister, who survived only four hours, rush around my brain.

I’m willing Oliver to say something reassuring in his usual bluff way – “Don’t be silly, Libs, of course there’s nothing wrong! She said so!” – but he doesn’t.

He looks at me, then at the screen with the frozen picture of what I assume is a part our baby’s anatomy – a leg? A heart? Healthy? Not? – and says, “I don’t know.”

Neither do I. So much for a mother’s instinct.

And here’s the thing.

Despite all my brave declarations that nothing would change my feelings toward this child if it turned out to have a disability like my sister did, I find myself praying and bargaining with a god I don’t believe in.

Please let my baby be OK. Please let my baby be OK. I’ll be nice to Sandra. I’ll stop shouting at Fergus. I’ll even be nicer to Melissa if you let –

The door to the exam room opens and the technician walks back in, her white shoes making squelchy noises on the grey tiled floor. Behind her, in a white coat, is a tall, athletic man who looks as if he should be playing basketball rather than messing around with medical Photoshop. “Dr Holden,” his white coat says above the breast pocket, in blue italic embroidery.

The two medics go into a huddle in front of the computer monitor, checking numbers and flicking between images. I can’t make out what they are saying, let alone understand it.

I gaze at Oliver, then squeeze my eyes shut as he reaches for my hand and we lace fingers, as if by doing so we can weave a magic spell that will make everything all right, the same as everything was two hours ago.

“Mrs Patrick?”

I open my eyes in surprise. The doctor’s voice is high and reedy for someone of his build, and in another situation I would have laughed.

He looks from me to Oliver, and I see he understands what we’ve been thinking.

“There’s nothing to worry about,” he says. “Really. Nothing is wrong.”

I close my eyes again, this time in relief, and feel two tears slide down either side of my face toward my ears.

“But all the same,” his voice goes on, “this news may take a little time to get used to.”

* * *

I collapse onto our sofa. “Tea,” I say in the weak quaver of someone demanding water in the Sahara.

Oliver, like the well brought up English husband he is, heads to the kitchen to turn on the kettle.

A perfunctory knock at the front door is followed by Maggie bursting into the house with Jack, who rushes at me for a hug.

Murmurs and a little cry of surprise from the kitchen as Oliver tells Maggie our news.

Maggie brings in my mug of tea and sits beside me on the sofa. With difficulty, I lift Jack off my lap and sit him on my other side.

“Darling,” says Maggie. “Oliver’s told me all about it. What a shock.”

I nod.

“But in a few days, it won’t be.”

I start to sob, because “shock” doesn’t begin to describe my feelings, and I try to double over – but my bump is in the way. No wonder.

“I could have coped with anything but this! Three thousand miles from my mother, and Oliver keeps going on business trips…and that bloody dog…”

“Shush,” says Maggie. “I’m here. You have me.”

I sniff.

“And on the bright side,” Maggie says softly, “your mother-in-law is not here.”

I sniff again, and this time it’s more like a snort of laughter.

“And it is a cause for celebration, of course,” she persists.

I fumble in my pocket for a tissue, wipe my eyes, and noisily blow my nose. “Yes.”

“A toast, then?” Maggie gestures at the wine rack.“Just one?”

I look longingly at the bottles of Pinot, but pick up my mug of tea instead.

“No. I feel as if I’ve cheated Fate once today. Wine might be pushing my luck.”

Besides, I’ve read about these American pregnant women who get labelled as child abusers just because they ordered half a Bud Lite in a bar.

Oliver comes in with mugs for Maggie and himself, and a sippy cup for Jack.

Maggie raises her mug. “A toast, then! To…do we have any names?”

I glance at Oliver and smirk. “Sam.”

He clicks his Batman mug against my Toy Story one. “And Megan.”

“Sam and Megan,” we chorus, and sip tea politely.

I sigh. Typhoo it might be, but Pinot it is not.

“Somebody pass me the Cadbury’s,” I say. “Lots of it, and now.”

.

Next: LIBBY’S LIFE #35: A big piranha in a small pond

Previous:LIBBY’S LIFE #33: Fairytale of New England

Click here to read Libby’s Life from the first episode

STAY TUNED for Friday’s post – a summary of tweets on this month’s theme!

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Image: Travel – Map of the World by Salvatore Vuono / FreeDigit

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I traveled in search of adventure — and ended up embracing a simpler life

16 Comments Posted by on January 11, 2012

Today we welcome Tony James Slater to The Displaced Nation as the newest addition to our team. He makes his debut with a post about his trip to Ecuador for the purposes of volunteering at an animal sanctuary in the Andean Mountains — an experience that led to some deep (as well as humorous) reflections.

My first real trip abroad was to Ecuador. (I made a trip to France once, but since I’m from England, that doesn’t really count.)

I went there in search of adventure. I sure wasn’t going to “find myself.” If I had any deeper motive, it was to reinvent myself — ideally as Indiana Jones.

(NB. If you’re going to Ecuador — take cheese. The stuff they have there has the same taste and consistency as soggy toilet-roll.)

I’d planned to volunteer in an animal refuge; it was my way of doing something more meaningful with my life, of giving a little bit back to nature.

And I was absolutely terrified.

There were reasons for this:

  1. I’d never really traveled. (As mentioned, France doesn’t really count.)
  2. I spoke no Spanish.
  3. I had no experience with animals, other than owning a pet rabbit when I was nine.
  4. I was, it has to be said, a pretty weedy human being.

But nobody in Ecuador knew me. I could cast off the bits I didn’t like — and that would start with the fear.

It helped that the setting was gorgeous. The refuge, called Santa Martha Animal Rescue Center, was surrounded by cloud-forest, halfway up a mountain in the Avenue of Volcanoes.

Talk with the animals…

I felt an immediate connection with the animals, who were in the sanctuary because they’d been victims of animal trafficking. I even connected with the monkeys, who escaped so often I spent more time chasing them than feeding them.

But you can’t have an adventure inside your comfort zone. That’s like nipping next-door for a cup of tea and calling it a night out.

First I had to strip everything back. My computer couldn’t make the trip as it was the size of a small building. My phone survived for less than a day before committing suicide from the top bunk-bed, but it was only good as an alarm clock anyway.

(I didn’t even need an alarm clock; I had a rooster for that. Which was great, except it went off an hour early every morning.)

Before I knew it I’d slipped into a much simpler pattern. Get up. Feed the animals. Clean the animals. Tend the wounds I’d received whilst feeding and cleaning the animals. Then chop, dig, carry, nail…

The boss would show me a task that needed doing, give me the tools and then leave me to it. Build a cage. Fix a cage. Build a parrot perch…

Generally the tasks were simple, manual, and I got better each day at handling them. (Except one Saturday morning when he tried to teach me welding; I made the mistake of looking at the torch at the exact moment it flared up, like a miniature sun. In fact I did this every time it flared up. As a result, not a lot of welding got done, and I was blind for the rest of the weekend!)

At the end of a long day I could feel how hard I’d worked; tired in body and nothing in mind to concern me beyond wondering what crazy job they’d get me doing tomorrow. I could just kick back in the hammock and day-dream…

As Albert Camus once philosophized:

But what is happiness except the simple harmony between a man and the life he leads?

Swingin’ in a hammock

Ever notice how when people think of “paradise,” there’s almost always hammocks? No corner offices or Mercedes Benzes. Even shoe shops rarely make an appearance.

It’s that idea of “getting away from it all” that holds the allure, I think; relaxing on a beach wouldn’t be the same if you were doing your tax return while you were at it.

Hence the hammocks. Symbolic of the chance to do — and think of — absolutely nothing; at least for as long as your sojourn lasts.

Perhaps I was in fact searching for a simpler life? Perhaps we all are?

In any event, I loved it.

I was getting stronger, more confident, with every week that passed.

(I was also getting bitten, clawed and mauled by everything that could bite, claw and maul, from monkeys to crocodiles — but that’s another story.)

I was learning to focus, to take my time looking for a solution to a problem and to work at it until it was right. I owned less and less each day as my clothes got shredded through work, but it didn’t matter. I wasn’t out to impress anyone, at least not with my fashion sense.

Best of all I had an identity. It didn’t need explaining — I was “that guy from the animal place.” It was a good job to be defined by. It felt positive and honest.

Reality bites as well

Returning to the “real” world back in the UK was like a wet fish in the face — all of a sudden people had places to be and a time-limit for getting there; everyone seemed so busy, so stressed out about it and so worried that something, somewhere was going wrong.

I don’t think a single one of them was about to be eaten alive, but a lot of them acted like it.

I hadn’t even realized what I’d been a part of until I saw it from the outside — and frankly it scared me more than removing the remnants of a jaguar’s breakfast.

I had two choices at that point. I’d gone “back to basics” and knew how rewarding that kind of lifestyle could be. Or I could rejoin my native society, get a real job, get a career even — go corporate.

It wasn’t too hard a choice to make.

Another Albert — Einstein — famously had

Three Rules of Work: Out of clutter find simplicity; From discord find harmony; In the middle of difficulty lies opportunity.

In Ecuador I’d found simplicity and harmony, wrapped up in the most difficulty I’d ever faced, and it had indeed led to opportunity.

I sold my body to medical science (and that’s not even a joke!), bought a one-way ticket to Thailand and spent the next nine months working in an animal clinic that really was in paradise. I didn’t wear shoes for the better part of a year.

I had found myself after all. I’d made my decision not to rejoin the rat race and I’ve been traveling ever since.

Which is probably why I’m broke.

But I couldn’t be happier!

TONY JAMES SLATER is a self-confessed adventureholic. For the last six years he’s been traveling nonstop around the world, working at a variety of jobs including yacht deliverer in the Mediterranean, professional diver in Thailand and snow boarder in New Zealand. He even deprived the world of sandalwood one tree at a time in Australia (though he still maintains it was an accident). Last year, Slater published his first book, That Bear Ate My Pants!, an account of his misadventures while volunteering at the animal refuge in Ecuador. (The book was featured in The Displaced Nation’s list of 2011 expat books.) He is currently working on a second book set in Thailand, while exploring his new home in Perth, Australia.

STAY TUNED for tomorrow’s episode from Libby’s Life. Did the absence of her mother-in-law at Christmas compensate for the absence of Libby’s own mother — and, come to that, the Mother Country? (What, not keeping up with Libby? Read the first three episodes of her expat adventures.)

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Image: “Hammocks are not just for humans” — Slater took this photo of Machita, the dog he befriended at Santa Martha, the Ecuadorian animal sanctuary.

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Dear Mary-Sue: A brimful of ashram and other travel-related spiritual quests

2 Comments Posted by on January 10, 2012

Mary-Sue Wallace, The Displaced Nation’s agony aunt, is back. Her thoughtful advice eases and soothes any cross-cultural quandary or travel-related confusion you may have. Submit your questions and comments here, or else by emailing her at thedisplacednation@gmail.com.

And here’s to a happy 2012 to all of my peeps out there! I hope you all had a wonderful Christmas — I know mine most certainly was. It’s always non-stop craziness in the ol’ Wallace homestead and Christmas 2011 was no exception — let me tell you! “Light of my life” (Ha! You should see me rolling my eyes as I type this) Jake went a little crazy with the Christmas lights this year. You’d have thought Rand Street, Tulsa, was in fact Vegas such was the amount of illumination we had going on. As I mentioned in my last column, New Year was spent unwinding and destressing in Iceland, but Christmas itself was all about Tulsa and the family. Of course, I was missing all my peeps. (I don’t like to think of you as mere readers, you’re all more than that, you’re buddies, you’re my peeps. Am I right? ‘course I am!) Well, anyway as I spent the yuletide period honey glazing my ham and making just the sweetest gingerbread men Rand Street ever did bite their teeth into, I was happiest knowing that 2012 would see me tackling all of your problems and sorting out your travel-related messes.

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Dear Mary-Sue,

I got a new Kindle for Xmas and downloaded a book I’ve always wanted to read, Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert.

I get the eating and the love parts, but am not so sure about praying — especially if it entails spending time at an ashram in India. Do you think that could be good for me?

Sharon, Cut and Shooot, Texas

Dear Sharon,

A Kindle!! How exciting! What a great present. At the risk of not being my usual super-modest self, you should check out some of my stuff on there. My new historical novel The Sigh of the Bosom is available to buy on there. It’s about a young orphan called Molly growing up in Colonial America. Don’t want to spoil too much of it for you, but little plain Molly gets quite the surprise when she discovers she isn’t in fact an orphan at all, but the true heir to the King of England. It’s gripping stuff, Sharon.

As for going to an ASH-ram, well as a committed non-smoker I am not sure that you should be doing that! Ha! Just a little bit of Mary-Sue Wallace humor there. More seriously, should you go to an ashram? Well, ol’ Mary-Sue Wallace mentioned this to her pastor, Rick. Rick, who might I add plays a mean guitar, is my go-to guy for all things spiritual — as well as for chilli (Rick makes a mean chilli). Anyhoo, Rick told me that spirituality isn’t about flying half-way across the world. Prayer isn’t dependent on location. While it might be nice to seek solitude, and who among us doesn’t crave that at times, what is important is the act of thinking, of contemplation.

I see you live in Texas. Why not go for a hike, take up watercolors, just do something that connects you to your local nature. If you just want to escape and have a change of scenery for a little while then sure, why not go all the way to India and visit an ashram. But if it’s about trying to reconnect with yourself, then I don’t think the answer lies in a plane ticket to India. Things just ain’t that easy.

Mary-Sue

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Dear Mary-Sue,

I’m headed to India next week to try connecting with my inner spirituality. What do you think I should wear? Or should I buy an outfit once I get there?

Roseanne, Spunky Puddle, Ohio

Dear Roseanne,

A little fashionista birdie tells me Daisy Duke-style denim shorts are THE thing to wear in India in 2012.

Blessings,

Mary-Sue

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Dear Mary-Sue,

I’m thinking about taking a gap year next year and, because I’m so fed up with the rampant consumerism of the West, I’d like to go somewhere that could put me in touch with life’s spiritual aspects. Can you recommend anywhere — apart from India, that is, as I’m afraid of getting sick on the food?

Chad, Cheddar, South Carolina

Dear Chad,

Be a trendsetter and think outside the box. You sound like the sort of young guy who shouldn’t be following in the footsteps of others, you should be forging your own path. You know what you don’t hear people say very often? “I’m going on a pilgrimage to Maine,” that’s what. You can start that trend. This site seems to be a great place to start: http://www.visitmaine.com

Mary-Sue

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Anyhoo, that’s all from me readers. I’m so keen to hear about your cultural issues and all your juicy problems. Do drop me a line with any problems you have, or if you want to share your fave meatloaf recipe with me (yum! yum!). As they say in Italy, “ciao!”

Mary-Sue is a retired travel agent who lives in Tulsa with her husband Jake. She has taken a credited course in therapy from Tulsa Community College and is the best-selling author of Traveling Made Easy, Low-Fat Chicken Soup for the Traveler’s Soul, The Art of War: The Authorized Biography of Samantha Brown, and William Shatner’s TekWar: An Unofficial Guide. If you have any questions that you would like Mary-Sue to answer, you can contact her at thedisplacednation@gmail.com, or by adding to the comments below.

STAY TUNED for Wednesday’s post — a firsthand account of how travel can lead to a simpler life.

If you enjoyed this post, we invite you to subscribe to The Displaced Dispatch, a weekly round up of posts from The Displaced Nation, plus some extras such as seasonal recipes and occasional book giveaways. Sign up for The Displaced Dispatch by clicking here!

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