The Foreign Circus

Most commonly heard/repeated/groaned at phrase: "It depends"

Training for the foreign circus is a surreal experience. One week you are "learning" how to send emails, the next finds you running through a forest. Seriously...running through a forest, ask me about it sometime! You spend several days in a windowless basement room completing Microsoft trainings. Another day you are giving a presentation on immigration, in French. You want to talk about ANYTHING but work, yet it's the only thing you are capable of talking about.

The result is that your conversation is either fascinating (briefly to those who know nothing about your job or where you are going and your colleagues who are equally interested in talking about work) or you have become a total bore. I am capable of talking for hours about the cafeteria at the training center, the logistics of packing and shipment overseas, household issues in foreign countries, if I do or do not plan to hire a cook, gardener, house cleaner, etc. But the number of people capable, let alone interested in listening to such a discourse is limited.

Thankfully, when you join the foreign circus you suddenly find yourself in a weird carny-esque tribe. Every last one of your colleagues has also signed up for this crazy deal. So despite the fact you almost never receive a direct answer to a question and everyone has disparate experiences following processes that are supposedly the same, it does feel like home. In a strange, you can't wait to get out of here, but are glad to have met everyone sort of way.

The training center is a much nicer place without snow!

Au Revoir Pacifica

Today might be Christmas Eve, but it's also the day I move back home after 3 months living with my father's parents. I don't finish work until January 9th, but there is not a single free weekend left before the movers arrive at my folks to pack all my possessions. Thus, after the family holiday party this evening we'll load up my car, my parent's car, with all I have in the basement. And that will be it. It will likely be the last time I'll see my grandparents before I leave. Strange realization. Goodbye goodbyes.

I have loved living by the ocean these past few months. Before darkness took over the evening it was always the highlight of my day driving down from the top of the hill into Pacifica with the Pacific ocean stretching out infinitely.

No filters here, no Photoshop - it's simply perfect. 

After I received my formal offer and invite to DC, I tried to make a point to stop here in the mornings and afternoons when I got off early. Though I'm sure I'll live by other oceans, in other places, I don't want to have taken this one for granted.

Thankfully I've got one or two more ocean related excursions planned before I depart (one which might give me my fill of oceans for a long time) so today isn't really goodbye. But there is something about the beach you've been acquainted with your entire life (even when your father would yell when you got more than a few inches into the sea foam) and a city that will forever and always be associated with both sets of grandparents who lived there and memories of the brief years you lived there yourself as a child.

I'll remember the eucalyptus trees, the golf course with my Shirley Temples at the bar, the wooden playground down the street, picking flowers in the front yard for crowns, playing dress-up, doll house parts, classic movies, countless holidays. Hopefully today won't be the last one. 

Through The Years

Judy Garland has been absolutely reducing me to tears and small sobs when she comes on the radio.

I don't think this is just me, but I have several favorite Christmas movies which aren't Christmas movies at all. Little Women is one. Meet Me in St. Louis is another. Almost purely for the scene where Esther sings, "...have yourself a merry little Christmas" to Tootie. This year, more than any previous, I'm sympathizing with them and their sadness over leaving so much of what they love.

Someday soon, we all will be together

If the Fates allow

Until then, we'll have to muddle through somehow

So have yourself a merry little Christmas now

I suppose I've got to make it as merry as possible now, while I can. But maybe I'll be lucky and manage to get home from country X every year for Christmas. I'd take every other year. Or even some years. 10-20 years seems like a long time to miss Christmas. Lots of muddling. 

Note - I am thrilled about the new job, and leaving - but that doesn't mean it isn't tinged with sorrow.

Maps at SFO

When I fly out of SFO and I find myself in Terminal 2 there is always a incredible exhibit just after security. Earlier this year it was vintage board games. This past weekend it was a collection of maps of San Francisco from the David Rumsey collection. It's pretty fantastic.

One of my favorite taglines from the description is: "San Francisco was at once improbable and inevitable."

Or the following: 

"The water is so scarce that it is scarcely sufficient for the few families that reside at the Presidio...timber is found at a distance of twelve or fourteen leagues, and pasturage for the little stock of the garrison is only found at a distance of five or six leagues. Therefore, I am convinced that the worst place or situation in California is that of San Francisco for the establishment of such a villa...:
- Don Pedro de Alberni, in his report to the Viceroy on July 1st, 1796. 

Contrasted with:

"Few cities int he world can vie with San Francisco either in beauty or in the natural advantages of her situation; indeed there are only two places in Europe--Constantinople and Gibraltar--that combine an equally perfect landscape with what may be called an equally imperial position."
- James Bryce, writing in American Commonwealth, 1889.

The bay looks chaotic.

This one is an insurance map breaking down the entire city block by block and noting the sizes and make-up of each building on the block. It'd be pretty interesting to peruse.

Love the title on this one Paradise Found.

I'm pretty certain one of those red brick buildings by the docks is the building I currently work in. Located right below the hill (not quite a cliff anymore) in one of the old ice houses that used to sit on the edge of the docks before the peninsula was built out.