twenty-something years of "what have you been up to?"

Author: place2place

  • I’m Really On My Way!

    No matter how well you try and prepare in advance, time slips away and you spend your last minutes running around trying to get everything done. Leaving Niamey was no different. But in the end, I got done what was needed.


    I was supposed to do early check-in at the airport so that after the 4th of July celebration, I could take my time and not have to sit in the hot airport 2 hours before take off. But the expeditor forgot me which only added to my already stressful day. Seeing Pierre and Zourie for the last time had already made me a wreck.


    Running late to the fete at the Ambassador’s residence, I put on a borrowed suit. The jacket was a bit snug and I tied the tie forgetting to look at it in the mirror on my way out the door of my office. There were a lot of people (more than I could say all my personal goodbyes to) but it was quite nastalgic with the Ambassadors’ speech and the Marines carring the flag to the bugles playing our National Anthem. It was sweltering with humidity and they ran out of ice early on. Everyone was dripping with sweat. The view was fantastic though; overlooking the river and the table top bluffs on the other side which I had run during the hash.


    At 9PM, people were starting to leave and I was anxious to get back to my office, grab my luggage and get dropped off one last time at our residence to take a shower before being taken to the airport. As I entered the hall in the health unit, I saw myself drenched in the full length mirror. The knot in my tie looked remarkably well considering I tied it without looking. But it extended too long beyond the last closed button, giving the appearence of a striped arrow pointing down at my crotch. Nice exit strategy!


    After my shower at home, I took one last look at our home. It served us well for two years. Amina and Kasumi drove me to the airport and dropped me off. Every camel and Nigerien we past I tried to take in for the last time. Fighting back tears, I said my thanks and goodbye to Amina who made this tour an “E ticket” ride (back in the day, Disneyland used to reserve the “E” ticket for their wildest roller coaster rides).


    The plane lifts and I kept every last light reflecting from Niamey in my sightes until they where no more.


    I arrived this morning in Paris to a world that seems light years ahead in time. Not so much a parallel universe but more like an intersecting one with rare bisecting lines. The young woman in a mini skirt with an open crash helmet and those huge fashionable sunglasses on her vespa with her dog at her feet made me look. But Niamey is such a nunique place. I will always remember.

  • apple pie, chocolate raisins, root beer

    Photo+130 Random thoughts, sitting at my sister’s cabin at Donner Lake. My sister made yogurt parfaits for breakfast. The dog really wants one.


    Guess what country is the least green in the world? Newsweek article.


    Peter is sitting in Niger with his fourth day of no electricity. The generator is running non-stop and he says he invited everyone without a generator over for shower. Should I be worried?


    Idol tour opened last night, I can’t wait. Look.


    Stefan is playing cards with my parents and drawing all the lucky jokers. Zero is his favorite number, he tells us.


    Fire, fire, everywhere. When we landed in San Francisco I thought it was foggy, but smoke from so many fires in Northern California had made its way to the coast. Yesterday when we got to Donnor Lake the smoke in the air made the place look like a Bierstadt painting. Today the sky is blue but tens of thousands of acres continue to burn all around northern California.


    My sister says I have to get off her internet connection and do my laundry because we have to go exercise, or my rent will go up.

  • Memory cells

    Our last weekend was busy but enjoyable. Camille had horseback riding and then brought over 4 friends for a sleep-over until the next afternoon and the only reason her party ended was because they had – you got it- more horseback riding! Dina and I were invited to our Nigerien friends' house for lunch and then the DCM's for a very nice dinner with a few other embassy colleagues. The African food was so good, only to be followed by a sit down cous-cous. I discreetly loosened my belt to the last hole. We arranged for Stefan to be dropped off at the Marine House to watch, "Horton Hears A Who," so everyone was happy.

    On Saturday, Dina made blueberry pancakes for the slumbering slumber partiers who each kissed me on each cheek and loved the pancakes so much that they asked for more! Leopold came and made them burgers and fries plus a mango fruit salad for a late lunch. Dina and I touted around Niamey running a few errands and enjoying the sights as we found them. Then dropping the girls off back at the equestrian club and checking our emails before going to another dinner party to welcome the new School Director of the American International School. It was very nice. The host made escargot and everyone brought a variety of dishes to share; none the least was true romance.

    Sunday was down time. A day of liesure. But we did manage to get do visit the people we sponsored who took two of our kittens so we could see them one last time. They are more bulk than Mignon (their brother). Maybe it's that American Fancy Feast they feed them? As opposed to our Nigerien Lizard Gizzard. But they were fun to watch and we all went to watch the sun go down and have brochettes one last time at the Grande Hotel.

    Monday escaped me. Dina closed down her office only after firing off her final Sahel-O newsletter. Tuesday was also a blurr. We made a trip to Wadatta to shop for Toureg jewelry. I took Camille and her friend Marielle to the equestrian club one last time to say goodbye to her favorite horses. She fed them carrots and I watched her pet them and whisper, "remember me" in their ears. On the drive back she said, "I didn't realize I would miss Niger so much!" But that is what this place does to you: it attaches itself to your back where it seeps into your soul so that you don't see it. But you feel it and it becomes a part of you.

    I watched them walk away as they entered the airport. I called Murielle who manages the restaurant upstairs to let her know they were departing. She came down and somehow got me in. More hugs with tears in our eyes. Once they got through the x-ray Murielle invited me upstairs to the restaurant where we could see the entire plane sitting on the tarmak. She made me a gin & tonic (a double) and I watched them board the aircraft. Once it started scooting towards the runway, we left. And as I drove out onto the road towards Niamey, it took off and flew right over us. Goodbye my dear family. Be safe.

  • time of our lives

    Had Camille's slumber party on Friday, kind of hard to have a party when you don't have any of your stuff. We are camping in our own house, using the Embassy welcome kit, with the sheets made of sandpaper. We fly on Tuesday at midnight. Camille has already arranged playdates on the plane, we are flying to France with about half her class.

    I will miss shaking hands one hundred times a day. I love the soft handshake of Niger. If someone is too far away to shake your hand, the shake their own hands over their head. If they are on their moto, they clasp an invisible hand overhead, the black power salute. Try it, it's fun. If they are feelin' it, the men touch their chest when they shake hands, . Peter does this and it cracks me up, it's almost as good as everyone calling him "Patron." Some people snap fingers after shaking hands, or bump their fists together in a super cool secret handshake, but I am not cool enough for someone to do this with me. I make the kids do it with me though.

  • homing from work

    In a week and a half, I leave Niger as I found it: without internet access.

    Unable to even get a call through to our internet non-provider, I finally sent our gardener, Pierre, out with the car to go ask, WTH? He came back with news that last Friday's huge storm had knocked down their tower, and with an uber-Niamey kind of repair schedule: it won't be fixed tomorrow, maybe the next day, which is a polite way to say maybe never. Or maybe really the day after tomorrow!

    Meanwhile the number of admin details overwhelms.

    The kids and I leave for Paris on June 24th. Stay two nights, land in Sacramento June 27th. Which confuses me, because I only have two nights of hotel reserved. Another thing to look into. Spend until the 10th in Sacramento-Donner Lake area, depending totally upon the kindness of my sister and brother-in-law. Drive to Portland with my parents. Peter arrives in Portland the 8th. Peter plans to drive back down to Northern California to do the Mt Shasta-San Francisco-Disneyland?-Davis circuit. I don't know that I will go. Right now I'd rather just sit by myself in Portland, although I do want to see everyone, I remember how awful I felt last year after doing that same grand tour. Everyone was mad at us, I felt we slighted everyone, we'd lived out of suitcases and were exhausted when we left. I'm thinking of just staying in Portand and riding my bike around, seeing friends there and wandering the aisles of Powells, stocking up on little things to send to Moscow. Peter will drive up to Portland around the 28th and we are there until the 10th of August, when we go to DC for a week. We leave for Moscow the 16th, arrive the 17th.

    I was going to get off the plane in Sacramento and buy an iPhone, but I guess now I'll wait until the 11th. Arrrggg.

    What are your summer plans?

  • frumpy attempt at an old-fashioned floral

    Q: How many notes can you shoehorn into the drydown of Allure? A: One to many.

    Good-bye brunch today for Emily at Richard's, otherwise known as St. Richard. (Say Ree-shar, in French.) Emily is our lovely, lovely National Hospital Fistual Clinic worker–I've been trying to post my Embassy newsletter article with pix on the Niger photo-a-day site for days, but I'm having issues. Richard is full of hilarious stories, remind to tell you the one about him being robbed in Brazil on Christmas Eve. 

    I was feeling completly out of my league story-wise and perused his bookshelves and ran across Perfumes, the Guide. They describe perfumes with all these fabulous metaphors, like, "as shocking as Dylan going electric." They review maybe a thousand perfumes in the book, and the long detailed love letters are wonderful, but the disses are probably better.

    Kenzo pour Homme Fresh: I'm not saying there's nothing charming about the orange-spice oriental lurking in the this fresh woody flanker…I'm just saying that's it's basically soap that doesn't get you clean.

    And this about Kouros, (Peter won a bottle as a door prize and we gave it, without opening, to Leopold, our cook): It smells like the tanned skin of a guy stepping out of a shower wearing a pre-WWI British dandified fragrance: citrus, flowers, musk. It has that faintly repellent clean-dirty feel of other people's bathrooms, and it manages to smell at once scrubbed and promissory of an unmade bed.

    And about Creed's (Creed! I thought they could do no wrong!) Vetiver: Deserves some sort of prize for managing to make whatever vetiver it contains mostly imperceptable.

    They give five stars to only twenty perfumes, one of them being 100% Love, which I have never heard of, and Timbuktu, of which I am going to start ordering a case, based on the discription.

    One of the delightful properties of intelliegence is its ability to counter dumb questions with smart anwers. This is how they describe a perfume! Yeah, this book is cheering me up. 

  • award winner

    Peter_award

    While Peter was in Ouaga, the U.S. Ambassador to Bukina Faso, Ambassador Jackson, gave him an award for outstanding service.

  • mad dusting skills

    So the desktop computer gave me the weirdest message in the world, and then died. Bricked, as my computer fixing nephew says. I tried everything while having a two-day panic attack and all I could get was the bong and the fans. The end of Idol and I lose my computer? In a country where I am the only mac resource? Wah! So I've been living off the laptop for a week. Yesterday I came home and the computer is up and running. Perfectly. Zoueha says she dusted it and it came on. This is not the first time she has repaired a piece of electronics she knows nothing about by dusting. She is starting to scare me.

  • what’s with the toilet seats in niger?

    Are you sliding off the toilet, being pinched on the bottom, having to go without a toilet seat or being bounced off the toilet by your toilet seat? You might be in Niger!

    On about day two Peter's sister Nina, who is visiting from Alaska, posed the title question. Good observation Nina!

    The toilet seat in our master bathroom is off its custom hinges and bounces you sideways off the toilet every time you sit down. Was it a good idea to install toilets with a customized toilet seats so that the seats are unreplaceable? All the toilet seats in our house are either sliding off the broken hinges or missing because we have traded them up to more-frequently-used bathrooms. Then Nina comes to visit us at work, where out of the three toilet options, one has a missing seat, one seat is cracked and pinches your behind hard everytime you sit down, and the third toilet has a normal seat, but don't use that one becuase the toilet sprays water out the side in a gusher of a fountain when you flush.

    I'm sparing you by not posting a photo today.

  • time of our lives

    We have exactly a month left in Niger. Everything we do now is the last time, so everything is bittersweet.

    So I'm weepy. Good bye, good bye, and good bye.

    Among some of the lasts this week: The end of American Idol, Season 7. David Cook, my dear, go kick some guitar playing butt in the music industry. I haven't been able to get enough of your gorgeous voice and raw emotion, although my family will tell you they have had too much of it. I will miss the weeky dose. I know what it's like to live one's dream. It happened to me. Good bye sports class, it was so sad to have the last class in our trainer's packed-up house. The class has been a weekly highlight for the two years I've been here. I really need her voice to come on the iPod every once in a while (between David Cook songs) and say "hold in them abs."  Stefan, you were Mr. Personality during your first piano recital yesterday. The biggest round of applause went to a six-year-old boy who has only been playing five months and pulled off Beethoven. Final bows all aournd.
     
    Stef_mur