I went to France in August! Part the Second

There was one area where I took the "don't go to France in August" advice very seriously: Paris. As we planned the trip to France with my parents, I kept assuring them--and myself, I suspect--that we could and in fact should skip Paris on this visit. "It won't be Parisian," I said. "Everything good will be closed, and everyone there will be American," I said. But we did want to go to Dijon on this trip, and the easiest way to do that as a day trip was to stay in Paris for a few days.

Checking out the "statues" in the Louvre

You know where this is going, right? Guys. You can totally go to Paris in August. It's true, not everything is open--my favorite special-occasion restaurant (and one of my favorite places to bring my souffle-loving pre-schooler) was closed for the season, which almost made me want to call the whole thing off.

But a lot of things are open! And some of the things that are open, are un-crowded, on account of all the people not coming to Paris (and all the Parisians being on holiday somewhere else). My husband and I took advantage of traveling with the grandparents and spent a kid-free evening at a bar I love, and it was the first time I've been there that I could sit wherever I wanted and not have to vacate in time for a reservation in an hour. (It was also not air-conditioned, which may have had something to do with that. But they made up for it in special icy cocktails.)

Which reminds me: it is hot. If you're used to Irish or English weather, it's seriously hot. I kept saying it was great to have another chance to wear all the summer outfits that don't really get much use at home, but even that wore a bit thin when we found ourselves walking the 45 minutes home from Notre Dame through 90-degree heat at the end of a long day. But the other times I've been, it's been cold and often rainy, so the heat was a nice change! And a good excuse to eat lots of ice cream.

Part II: Paris and Dijon

Josephine would have happily come back to the playground
in the Luxembourg Gardens every day of the trip.

Paris is a particularly great place to take a small child in August. We've taken a baby to Paris in April a couple of times, and while it's lovely, there just isn't as much happening, kid-wise. This was the first trip where we actually found the Luxembourg Gardens playground--not for lack of looking on our other trips. (It's the first playground I've ever paid admission to enter, and it was worth it--it was also the most comprehensive playground I've ever been to.)

I'll admit: I started to get a bit parent-judgy about how closely everyone seemed to be following their kids. I've only ever parented in Ireland, and the playground approach here is pretty hands-off once kids hit three or so. But even the little-kid area of the Luxembourg playground (appropriate for up to age seven) has a lot of opportunities for a kid to bite off more than she can chew, climbing-and-sliding-wise, or even to wander off and hide; and before I knew it I was following along right behind my perfectly-capable three-year-old, too.

"We got wet! Daddy got really wet."

At least in the city center, Paris really goes all-out for families in summer. The city had built a beach along the banks of the Seine, which we didn't visit, and installed a funfair in the Tuileries, which we visited twice (because the preschooler needed one last go at the trampolines before we left Paris). She rode the mini-rollercoaster with me ("Everybody screamed. Mommy made lots of noise!" she told anyone who asked) and the log flume with her dad ("It was really surreal to see the Place Concorde and the Eiffel Tower from the top of the log flume," my husband said--and here was me thinking the surreal bit was watching my tiny child in that giant car on a freaking log flume, which suddenly looked it went a lot higher up).

Another interesting discovery: the Louvre will let you skip the line if you have a child in a pushchair with you. We joined the queue snaking around the courtyard in full sun, and no sooner had we opened our mouths to discuss maybe finding something else to do with our Friday morning, than a helpful official-looking person with a walkie-talkie ran over and said, "your entrance is over there." There was no line, and there was a platform-style lift to take us down to the ticket area--where another nice official-looking person pointed us to the shortest ticket queue. After that, we really had no choice but to let our pushchair-rider decide that all we were going to do that morning was look at statues; it was clearly her museum trip. I haven't felt so pampered since visiting Versailles when I was seven months pregnant (and also not allowed to wait in any queues).

Des fraises, des tomates, du pain, des abricots, du fromage,
les saucisses, les prunes--et la champagne, bien sur!

We took our day trip to Dijon on the Saturday of our trip, taking advantage of the super-fast TGV service from Gare de Lyon. We met our friends for a wonderful lunch at DZ'Envies and let the small one ride the carousel a few times, after spending a couple hours wandering through the marché and picking up things that wouldn't spoil before we got them back to Paris. It wasn't exactly what I'd imagined, but we did have a wonderful market supper that night in our hotel room (thanks in no small part to the hotel staff being generous with plates, glasses, and cutlery).

I will cop to having often felt surrounded by tourists on this Paris trip. This led to the one disadvantage of visiting in August versus, say, January: everyone's thinking in English. In January people I meet are, on average, happy to let me stumble through my school-French for the length of our interaction; in August they just switch to English. Heck, a lot of the time they start out in English. If you're hoping to practice your French, maybe don't go to Paris in August.

Once she got the hang of it, the bungie-trampoline
combination was the hit of the fair.

On the other hand, if you don't have any French to practice, you don't lose your cool in the city heat, and you're looking for a nice place to entertain three generations, August is probably the perfect month for your visit.

I went to France in August! Part the First

"Don't go to France in August," they said. "It's beastly hot, it's full of tourists, all the real French people are on holiday somewhere else, and half of Paris will be closed," they said.

After years of heeding this advice and going to France in almost any other month, this year August was the best time for us to go. So we went. And you know what? It was fine! It was fun, even. It was no less pleasant than visiting in November or January, and the people-watching was a lot more interesting.

Since we've lived abroad, my husband and I--and our daughter, now that she's joined us--have managed a France trip at least once a year. Paris, usually, but the last few years we've taken longer trips and visited other regions (as well as a few days in Paris at the beginning and the end). This year was my parents' 45th Wedding anniversary, and the 10th anniversary of the family trip where my husband and I got engaged, so we decided to celebrate by inviting my parents to join us for a week in France during their usual long summer visit to their grandchild.

Part I: Normandy

The Rouen Cathedral was lovely.

We did that thing I swore I'd never do again, after the last time: we flew into Paris, rented a car at the airport, and drove immediately to Normandy. When will I learn? Even if the traffic isn't completely appalling (and, honestly, this was the first trip where it wasn't--another point in August's favor), leaving Paris immediately means hours and hours of planes and cars, instead of a few hours' travel and then relaxing at your destination. We stopped at Rouen for dinner and a bit of sight-seeing, which was delightful but meant we didn't fetch up at Bayeux--where the beds and showers of the cozy Churchill Hotel were expecting us--until nearly 11 p.m.

And then, early the next morning, we got back in the car for the drive to Mont Saint-Michel. Because it was August, and the guidebooks all said we had to get there early to beat the crowds. (The three-year-old cried buckets when she saw the car waiting for her first thing after breakfast. I sympathized.)

Naptime outside the Abbey at Mont Saint-Michel

Here was yet another nail in the coffin of the "Don't go to France in August!" myth. Because Mont Saint-Michel, while indeed crowded, was also stunningly well-equipped to handle the crowds. The parking lot is clearly marked and well laid-out, and shuttles run constantly. There's a visitors' center right near the parking lot, which we didn't have time to check out because we were already getting on the bus. I even saw signs for a dog kennel, since dogs are not allowed on the island itself.

I had expected to get off the shuttle bus and find a long, long line of people waiting to buy tickets to get through the gates. And I was wrong on both counts. There's no ticket to enter the town, only to visit the museums--and, frankly, the queues for the museum we visited weren't extreme. Every time we stopped to eat at a restaurant, we were seated immediately and served promptly (though there were lots of people waiting patiently at the takeaway sandwich places, which is why we decided on restaurants). A crowded Mont Saint-Michel just meant that we were surrounded by lots of other happy, excited people on their holidays.

(And a couple of screaming, over-stimulated children. Not mine, fortunately. But considering how many kids of all ages were happily accompanying their parents up and down the steep staircases and through the narrow streets, that we only saw a few major kid-meltdowns near the Abbey almost makes one believe in miracles.)

Bringing water back up the beach for hole-filling purposes.

"Don't go to France in August!" they said, and they completely failed to mention that France--Normandy, anyway--has a coastline. And beaches. Such that going to France in August can afford you a lovely, hot, sunny morning for building sandcastles and jumping over waves near the memorial on Omaha Beach. You can even chat in French with the other families who are there doing the same thing, as it turns out that quite a few of the tourists in France in August are from other parts of France.

It was a bit weird to look around the site of the Allied invasion, with the giant memorial right there, and rub sunscreen on my kid's nose and send her down to the ocean with her bucket and spade. But I got over it. Right beside the memorial is a series of placards with the history of the beaches, and of course, being beautiful, they were a resort location long before they were occupied and then liberated. I'd hate to see a place with potential for so much happiness barred from it forever because some people were awful there for a few years three generations ago. If I were being flippant, I'd say that to close the beaches to beach-going in perpetuity would be to let the Nazis win.

A picnic-free bomb crater, with rubble.

We also saw an elaborate family picnic at Pointe du Hoc (an invasion site managed by the American Battle Monuments Commission). Right there in the bomb craters, which have been left as they were seventy years ago, to show the extent of the damage to the countryside. Our guide said that usually the staff at the memorial site will inform picnickers that they are at a solemn site, despite all the wild flowers and sunshine.

Gravestones are not for climbing.

We decided to take a tour to the Normandy invasion sights, rather than just going ourselves, because (a) TripAdvisor/Viator's marketing is effective even when it's creeping me out and (b) I was worried about things like parking at the sites, and deciding which of them to see. I ended up really glad we went that route, even though doing so with a three-year-old was a bit of a challenge (we ended up with an unscheduled break to eat frites and watch the waves next to the National Guard memorial, and later there was a bit of difficulty explaining to a pre-schooler the difference between "The Normandy American Cemetery" and "a park"). Our guide loved D-Day history and had all kinds of stories to tell (in fluent English), and we learned much more than we would have from just going to the sites and reading the placards. 

We also picked up another advantage to going to France in August: while the D-Day sites were as crowded as everything else, they were nothing, per our guide, to the lines that accrue in June, around the anniversary of the landing. Really, France in August just gets better and better.

The tour was in the afternoon, and that morning we took advantage of having Grammy and Granddaddy with us to let them explore the cathedral in Bayeux with their granddaughter (who has a thing for statues) while Gino and I saw the Bayeux Tapestry. (My parents had seen it the previous afternoon, while the rest of us napped.) Thank goodness for grandparents! There's no way the three-year-old would have let us actually listen to the audio tour, or take more than a cursory glance at the tapestry itself. Between the exploits of William the Conqueror in the morning and a tour of WWII sites in the afternoon, we had a very martial day for our last full day in Normandy.

A rope/plank bridge at William the
Conqueror's chateau

Since the young 'un had put up with a lot of grown-up sightseeing on Tuesday, we pretty much scheduled Wednesday around whatever sounded like fun for her. Wednesday was also the day we had to get ourselves from Bayeux to Paris, but we worked it out by stopping at William the Conqueror's castle in Caen on the way. Once we finally found the entrance, the chateau was pretty much all our little family needed: we spent most of the morning at the nice playground right near the entrance, took a quick spin through the Musee de Normandie's exhibit on neanderthals, and finished up with a much nicer-than-anticipated lunch at the Musee des Beaux-Arts, whose museum cafe turned out to be a fairly fancy restaurant. (Albeit with a ham, cheese, and mozzarella tartine on the menu, so even the little one ate well.)

Then we got back in the car, and--ta-da! How often does this happen?--she fell fast asleep, just as I'd planned, for most of the three-hour drive to our hotel in Paris.

Paris, of course, was a whole different adventure for a whole new blog post. But still worth visiting in August! Stay tuned.

A Dinner in Dijon

Hi, Gang! Long time no blog. Greetings to all of you who check in now and again, and a big wave to those whose Google searches have turned up my Expat Survival Kit, or who've landed here from Expats Blog. Hope you're enjoying your adventures in your new home!

It occurs to me I should write about something besides the ins and outs of traveling with a small child. It's true, this is a topic that spends a lot of time at the front of my mind--we're never sure when we're going to lose our easy access to Europe, and we still have a lot of places we want to visit before that happens, so I'm almost always planning the next trip (sometimes, even while I'm on the last one). Right now, I'm two trips ahead: planning a trip to France with my parents, when they visit us at the end of the summer.

Early spring vinyard near Baune

We manage to visit France at least once a year, and while we're in France we try to hit Dijon--wine country; cheese country; many-different-fancy-stews country; millennia-of-human-history country--for at least a day. Gino spent a term there as a student and still talks about the apple tart the mother of his host family used to make, and about his daily before-school second breakfast of croissant and hot chocolate.

Twice now his host family has had us over for wonderful meals (including that apple tart!) during our visit. We're planning another trip at the end of this summer and this time it's our turn to treat them to a nice dinner.

French markets
are some of my favorite things.

My first preference would be to cook. I don't have enough opportunities to throw dinner parties, honestly--especially not French ones. And Dijon has an absolutely wonderful market, so planning a menu and making dinner could be a complete French Fantasy Come True: shopping in the morning, getting inspiration from the stalls rather than cookbooks; spending the afternoon in the kitchen; and then cracking the crément for pre-dinner drinks as our guests arrive.

Due to logistics, this plan is unlikely to fall into place, and I'll end up using a combination of Fodor's, Lonely Planet, and TripAdvisor to find a restaurant that can accommodate eight people of three generations and two languages. (Speaking of which: it's a good thing I'm comfortable reading French, because once you leave Paris a surprising number of restaurant websites don't offer website translation, and while Google Translate does its best, as soon as you use it all the links die on you. Adds an extra layer of suspense to calling for a reservation--which I'm probably going to make Gino or my dad, both of whom speak fluently, do anyway, because my French isn't quite good enough to handle the phone.) 

But let's dream, shall we? Let's take a deep breath, close our eyes, and imagine ourselves: waking up in a rented farmhouse in Burgundy, munching on butter-and-jam tartine, drinking coffee, and scrolling through a few French food blogs for inspiration before heading to the market...

These wouldn't take up too much room in a carry-on, right?
Right?

...and because it's August and everything is in season, I've managed to come home with the ingredients to a Franco-Italian feast I can make largely from recipes and techniques in my head (since my cookbooks will still be in Ireland).

We'll start with a goat's cheese, fig, and walnut tartine from Rachel Khoo's Little Paris Kitchen, a cookbook I fell in love with after her BBC cooking show shamed me out of complaining about the stove in my Large Dublin Kitchen. (It really is a little Paris kitchen. A teeny-tiny one. This woman makes a cooking show using basically a two-burner hot plate.)

We'll have the goat's cheese and fig tartine with cured meats and cheeses from the market, of course. If we haven't snacked our way through everything we brought home during the cooking process.

My Company Dinner is a roast chicken. This has gotten more true since Gino gave me a Le Creusset casserole for my birthday a few years ago. I had already learned, at cooking class, the trick of roasting the chicken with water or broth, and then pouring in a glass of white wine twenty minutes before you think it's done. That plus the high walls of the uncovered casserole (plus the onion, garlic, herbs, and lemon you've stuffed in and around the chicken, and the oil or butter you've rubbed over the bird itself) make for a flavorful, moist bird when you take it out of the oven. I'll add white burgundy instead of pinot grigio and slather it with butter instead of olive oil, and voila! My roast chicken becomes un poulet rotî.

An actual company dinner I cooked last year:
roast chicken, ratatouille tian, Provencal roast
vegetables, and chickpea-flour pancakes. It was good.
The recipes for everything but the chicken came from
The French Market Cookbook.

The vegetable/side depends on exactly how nuts I've gone at the market, and how nuts I'm now going about time now that the chicken's in the oven. Oh, and how many sous-chefs have I? If my mom is helping me cook, and the holiday house has decent knives, we can make Clothide Desoulier's ratatouille, a melange of vegetables (eggplant, tomato, and zucchini) and herbs which, in her own nice touch, she roasts in the oven. (Actually, if I was really smart, I've made this ahead--every ratatouille I've ever made has been better as leftovers than it was the day I made it.)

Or, if I'm at the point of making things easy for myself, I bring out a recipe I've been serving to company since college: fusilli pasta tossed with chopped tomatoes, parsley, basil, olive oil, and parmesan cheese. (This is the Italian part of the Franco-Italian feast.)

And once that's staying warm, my job's pretty much done. Of course, I could make a dessert. Of course I could make a dessert; what do you take me for? But then, why on earth would I make a dessert, when I've just been to the Dijon market (and nothing I'll make would stand up to that apple clafoutis Gino's host mother makes, anyway)? We'll have ice cream, fresh from the farm. Or tarte tatin. Or house-made chocolates. Or all of the above.

Where would you go, if you could have any dinner anywhere? What's your dream feast?

This post was suggested by web-translation service Smartling. They did not pay me for this! They asked if researching local food options in a foreign country was something I'd like to write about, and I decided it was. And it's been fun! So thanks to Smartling for suggesting the post idea.

Learning from my Little One

It has come to my attention that, despite loads and loads of practice, I am not a very good flyer.

It's not that I'm afraid of flying. I used to be, right after September 11, when everything seemed so tenuous: I developed a strong conviction that if I didn't stay vigilant the whole time we were aloft, the laws of physics would cease to apply to the airplane and we would just drop out of the sky. I've gotten over that. I actually quite enjoy the "whee, we're up in the air and on our way!" part of flying.

I'm just absolutely sure that everything else is going to go wrong. Our flight will be delayed for hours, or will pull out from the gate and then sit on the runway for the length of a Peter Jackson movie. (This has happened to me before.) I will discover after the Fasten Seatbelt sign has been turned off that my seat, which in the "fully upright" position pushes me ever so slightly forward, cannot be reclined even into an actually upright position, and I'm just going to have to stay kind of doubled over for the entire seven hours to Boston. (Ditto.) The flight will go swimmingly and we will land on time, only to find chaos at our destination and watch as plane after plane takes off, while the one parked at the our gate remains stubbornly in place. (Yup, that too. Notice a theme here?) We will be two hours into a seven-hour flight and my kid will empty the contents of her stomach all over me. (This actually happened in a restaurant, where we could leave quickly and race home to the washing machine, but now I get to worry about it happening somewhere we can't escape easily.) We will deplane and get through immigration and watch all the other bags come off the carousel, only to discover that ours was somehow jettisoned over the Atlantic. (This has never happened to me - though they've lost our buggy a couple times, they've always found it again - but every time, man. Every time I'm convinced that this is the one flight our most-important bag just didn't make.)

My frequent flyer,
chillin' out with a snack and a soundless movie

My kid, on the other hand? My kid owns the air. She's been flying every couple of months since she was eight weeks old. However she feels about the rest of the world, which often seems to be begging her to run around in it, she knows planes, and she knows that she has to sit still sometimes and wait patiently sometimes and stay buckled pretty much all the time. It doesn't seem to occur to her that things won't go her way. She takes things in stride in general, and she loves rising to occasions, which gives her pretty much the perfect personality for long-haul travel. Flight attendants love her, and by the end of the flight, so do the people sitting around us, whose flights she hasn't made any more uncomfortable than they already were.

That doesn't mean there aren't things we do to make the whole experience easier on ourselves. When flying with a toddler, my certainty that everything is going to go horribly wrong pays off: I let all that dread spur me to action.

Inspired by a blog post I'd discovered on Pinterest and memories of many, many childhood road trips, I inaugurated my toddler into the long and honorable tradition of the Car Bag - or, in her case, the Plane Bag - full of new toys and books to keep her busy. (I went ahead and bought new toys and books, because there were things I had meant to get for her anyway but hadn't, and because, honestly, shopping for them was a good bit of fun. I have also heard the advice to hide some toys/books from the existing collection in the weeks before the trip, so that they're new and exciting again by the time the kid sees them on the plane.)

The Plane Bag

I really wish I'd taken a Before picture, because my approach to this bag was, if I do say so myself, a stroke of genius. Not only did I pack it full of a variety of activities - books! crayons! stickers! rubber stamps! - but - get this - I wrapped them. I wrapped each of those little pod-shaped rubber stamps. I wrapped the tiny bead coaster. I wrapped the "That's Not My Duck!" book and I wrapped the crayons, in sets of three. I wrapped each of the Peppa Pig Fairytale mini-books, which you can just barely see poking out from behind the backpack in the photo. (I didn't wrap the stickers, because let's not get crazy.) And voila! I added another 3-5 minutes of enjoyment to each activity. The toddler loved each new toy, and was (uncharacteristically) careful enough with them that I spent a lot less time than I'd expecting rescuing crayons and tiny rubber stamps from the floor of the airplane.

Let's be honest, there's another way we made this trip easy on ourselves: we didn't go out of our way to police screen time. The toddler made this easier on us by not seeming to care if she could actually listen to cartoons, as long as she could see them. So it didn't matter that they don't make headphones for one-year-olds; she was perfectly happy to watch the pictures of Ice Age 2 play for her while she listened to the hum of activity around us. That got us through mealtime and a few random cranky periods when she got bored with books and stickers.

As you can see in the picture, she also has her very own seat. Yeah, we could keep her in our arms for another six months, technically. Thank goodness for expat package travel allowances, because if we'd tried that this time I think we'd have spent the entire flight walking up and down the aisles. I could not find a CE or FAA-approved car seat for sale in Ireland, so we went with the CARES Harness, which is designed to work with the airplane seat belt. We notified Aer Lingus that we were bringing it, and the flight attendants were expecting us and very supportive of our newfangled contraption.

For our next long-haul flight, I'm going to try to emulate my 18-month-old daughter's approach to happy flying. There's no reason to assume everything's going to go pear-shaped, or that it'd be the end of the world if they did. I've lived through a ton of travel problems; it's not like I have to do some kind of hypothetical disaster plan to prepare myself for them. I already know to hit the newsstand for a huge bottle of water, the most powerful Nurofen available, and a couple bags of trailmix. I already know not to travel without change for the vending machine. I already know to stick a change of clothes in my carry-on - not just for the toddler, but for myself. Theoretically, I should be able to prepare for emergencies without getting caught up in thoughts of how awful it'll be if they happen.

Next time I fly, I'm going to trust the airline to get me where I'm going without undue trauma. If said trauma occurs, I'm going to trust myself to handle it. And if everything goes well - as it does about 80% of the time - I'm going to kick back, relax, and enjoy the ride, toddler-style.

Just Let Us Sleep: A plea/rant on behalf of redeye passengers

Well, this is... interesting.
(She didn't spend much time in the bassinet.)

Nearly four months until we go back to the States for Christmas, and the New York Times' Motherlode blog has me dreading the flights already.

The post itself is pretty mild; just a note that Singapore Air, Malaysia Airlines, and AirAsia have created child-free zones in their planes. (Some of the comments are brutal; I have to remind myself they're outnumbered.) It's just reminded me that I have to take the red-eye, and the way Aer Lingus runs the red-eye seems designed to make sure everyone on board gets the full jet-lag experience on their vacation or return to the Emerald Isle.

I don't know why it has to be this way.

First off, I should note that overall, we've had great experiences taking our baby daughter on Aer Lingus flights. They really do seem to do the best they can to make everyone comfortable: they group the parties with small children together (so at least everyone's sympathetic); they've given us extra seats on non-full flights; they're generous with bottle-warming and bottled water.

BUT. Butbutbutbutbut. They have no daytime flights from Boston to Dublin. No one has daytime flights from Boston to Dublin (and, no snark, the daytime flight from Boston to London is a consistently pleasant experience and I miss it terribly). Believe me, I would much rather not run the risk of my toddler having a sleep-deprived meltdown and ruining your chance at the airplane version of a good night's sleep. At least on a day flight, we all have the nighttime left to look forward to when it's over.

Unfortunately, Aer Lingus does not behave as though they think sleep on overnight flights is a priority to any of their passengers, not just the babies. They run their overnight flights to Dublin on exactly the same schedule as they run their daytime flights to Boston, so what was already going to be a short sleep - the whole flight's maybe seven hours, taxi to taxi - dwindles to a nap, if you're lucky. Whether you're travelling with a kid or not.

I don't know why it has to be this way.

I don't know why the red-eye isn't run as though it were happening, y'know, at night. When people sleep. I don't know why they keep the lights on for all but the middle two hours of the flight. I don't know why they give us a huge meal an hour into a short flight, when anyone with any knowledge of jet lag is fasting. I don't know why they run an active duty-free service after they've cleared dinner, keeping the hustle and bustle going for another hour. I don't know why they feel the need to make PA announcements throughout the flight. It's nighttime. In both time zones. I don't know why they're so committed to pretending otherwise.

It matters more to me because I have a kid to take care of - I used to just stick my earbuds in, maybe put on an eyemask, and get away from it all, and that's not an option these days. But I don't see any disadvantage to child-free passengers if the overnight flight is organised to promote sleep. They dim the overhead lights for take-off anyway; why don't they just leave them off? Anyone who needs light has a reading lamp above their seat. 

And while the flight we take does leave when people on the East Coast are starting to think about supper (I assume to accommodate the business travellers, for whom landing at 5:25 a.m. gives at least a chance of a shower before they report to work), that doesn't mean we need a full-on chicken-or-beef meal service. If anything, a high-protein meal will make it harder to sleep when the lights finally do go off. The airline currently gives us a full meal at the beginning and a snack at the end of the flight; would it be so hard to reverse that? Let people who need to eat when the flight takes off request a sandwich, and then serve more substantial fare before landing, when we're all looking forward to a full day of trying to keep ourselves awake.

Nowadays we buy her her own seat.
She still sleeps in our arms (or not at all), but
at least we can keep the diaper bag in arms' reach.

I understand that I'm only seeing one side of the picture here. I'm sure there are all kinds of regulations and behind-the-scenes issues that make it impractical or impossible to just leave the lights off and the environment calm and quiet from take-off to, if not landing, at least breakfast. But from my limited angle of vision, so much of what keeps the lights on and the aisles busy seems unnecessary. Dinner, if you must, but a separate drinks service before and coffee service after? Really? (I mean, coffee service? It's the middle of the night, for cryin' out loud.) A PA announcement about duty-free shopping, and one more cart going up and down the aisles, well after everyone's calmed down from dinner? Why, for the love of god, why?

On our last trip, flight attendants kept stopping by our row to marvel at our one-year-old's cheerfulness. "Wow, she's still awake!" they kept commenting, as the flight moved east and the hours pushed on towards morning. Well, yes, I wanted to answer. The lights are on full and you keep making loud announcements, walking back and forth, and stopping by to ask us things. Wouldn't that keep you up?

Expat Survival Kit II: The Toolbox

In my last post I gave a lot of general principles about moving to a new place, especially abroad, and how important it is to build a life when you get there rather than just sticking it out until you move on--but I gave very little information about how to do that. So, for my Inner New Expat, who read that post and wept, "but how? How do I make friends, and find the grocery store that carries Grape Nuts at less-than-extortionate prices, and figure out how to spend the hours I used to be at work?", I present:

The Expat Toolbox

The following are the actual items you will find in your Expat Survival Kit. Some of them are actual, and you can find/buy them. Some of them are metaphorical, and that's the hard part--you'll have to figure out how to create those for yourself.

(Note: most of these are geared toward the person who's not moving for his/her own job. If you move with a job in your own place, several of these issues--how to meet people; where to get advice; how to spend your days--will take care of themselves. I assume. I've only ever been in the position of moving sans day job.)

Before You Go:

I.  Guidebooks

You might as well start with the fun stuff. Pretend you're going on vacation, only this time you don't have to worry about "Three Day Itineraries" or "Top Ten Must Do"s because you'll be able to go see/do whatever cool stuff, whenever you want. Bask in this idea for a while.

II. Novels/Memoirs
While you're picking up your guidebooks, spend some time in the bookstore or library collecting books set in your destination. Maybe it's just me, but I find reading narrative gets me into the spirit of a place better than even the best guidebook.

Of course, it helps that both places I've prepared to move to have been literary powerhouses. (Though the downside of Dublin is that, historically, her writers have written mostly about how miserable it is there and how much they or their characters want to leave. Thank heaven for Roddy Doyle--and if anyone knows any books that present Dublin as a grand place to live, please pass 'em on.)

IIa. Movies
See II. Same principle, but even better, because you get to see the place!

Once You've Arrived:

III. Comfort Food from Home
Food is important. Eating doesn't just fuel the body; it gives the soul a sense of security. You'll have a lot of fun trying out local foods in your new home, but when you're at the end of your rope--and you will get there--you'll want that familiar-from-childhood comfort food you used to take for granted at home.

This one's tough, because you probably won't know what you'll miss most until you get there, can't find it, and miss it. This is where the next item comes in handy:

IV. A Visit from Your Friend from Home
This has to be scheduled very carefully--far enough from the date of your move that you can accommodate a guest, but close enough that the two of you will have the fun of exploring together. Not only is it incredibly reassuring to move knowing that in just a few weeks you will see a familiar face, but having a friend coming also means you have someone to bring you whatever you've realized you can't live without, and can't get in your new place.

V. Comfort Food from Your New Home
Your grocery store can be your friend as well as your biggest source of frustration. Take a break from trying to find the foods you're used to, and find the foods you're really going to miss when you move away from this new place. For me, it's sharp cheddar and tomato chutney on whole wheat; and ready-meal curries; and Turkish delight; and bite-sized chocolate rolls.

I once overheard a bunch of American college students getting very depressed in Sainsbury's because they couldn't find Hershey Kisses. I took pity and told them where to get them (the gourmet store near their dorm, of all places), but I still wish I'd told them the much, much more important secret: forget Hershey's anything and grab a selection of 1/2kg Cadbury bars. What's the point of your year abroad if you don't go back telling people, "oh, I got spoiled by real chocolate in Europe--American chocolate just tastes so bland in comparison"? (Even though calling Cadbury "real chocolate" is stretching the truth--it's still better than anything you can get at a grocery store in the States.)

VI. Club Memberships: if you're on a really good expat package, your/your spouse's company might even pay for these!

VIa. The Gym
Because exercise is good for you, and you suddenly have time for it. Also because endorphins can be your new best friends, until you meet some human best friends. And, not least, because finding your new favorite foods and building your new social life is going to involve consuming a lot more calories than you're used to.

VIb. The Expat Club
The Expat Wife is such an institution that, in certain cities, a whole infrastructure has sprung up to support her. You can start googling before you leave: "American Women's Club" [city]; "International Women's Club" [city]; "expat support" [city]. This is what your first friends in your new home are doing.

Back-to-school kits assembled by volunteers--including me!
--for students at a local primary school

This was probably my least-favorite part of moving to London. I felt like I kept having the same conversation over and over, and it just got less and less interesting. But! Going to club meetings was an excuse to wear nice clothes every couple of weeks (otherwise I could've just lived in whatever I wore to the gym in the morning); club meetings and activities gave those early, endless days some structure; other members of those groups had some great advice on living in London (it's thanks to the Kensington and Chelsea Women's Club that I could tell the college students where to get Hershey Kisses); and--oh yeah--I met some of my closest friends. So while I'm not looking forward to renewing the round of "so, have you figured out how to work your washing machine?" chat in Dublin, I know this is an important step in figuring out how to feel at home in a place, including building real relationships with wonderful people.

VIc. The Interest/Hobby/Service Group/Class
While going to museums and having long lunches with your new friends can be fun for a while, every one of my American-in-London friends eventually discovered that we needed to find a way to invest our time, instead of just spending it. Especially if you move for someone else's job, without one of your own, you will probably discover that one of the aspects of your old life that you most need to replicate in your new one, is a sense of purpose.

In some ways, this can be the hardest part of integrating into your new community. Expat clubs are, by definition, very welcoming to newcomers; it can take longer to prove yourself in an established group of locals. I sang with my choir for almost two years before I started to feel like one of the gang, and during rehearsals for my second Messiah performance last winter, I found out my fellow sopranos refer to me as "the American lady" (and my Canadian friend as "the other American lady").

Being "the American lady" instead of one of a largely American group makes me feel more at home in London. This has been increasingly true as I've joined more and more non-expat-focused activities: my volunteer group is largely American, but through them I spend a few hours a week working with local kids and teachers; in SCBWI, the important thing is that I write for teens. I'll always be "the American," but it's important to keep putting myself in situations where what I'm good at--or, in the case of the yoga and cooking classes I've taken, what I'm learning--is vastly more important than where I came from.

VII. Slack
This is probably the most important tool in your Expat Survival Kit. Wherever you're moving, under whatever circumstances, you're going to need as much of this as you can muster. The various situations in which giving yourself slack will come in handy could be their own (very long) post, but here are what I think are the two most important:

You're not from here. No matter how much advance prep you do, how much you embrace local culture, you will never have grown up in this place. No matter how many similarities you can find between the place you've left and the place you've arrived, there are going to be big, important differences, and they're going to trip you up and make you feel like an idiot. All you can do is keep giving yourself permission to just be an idiot when necessary. It sucks to learn the rules by breaking them, but the important thing is that you're learning the rules. Every dumb mistake you make gets you closer to the day when things that seem so weird now, become second nature.

Your local support system is weak. You're under an enormous amount of stress and the people who usually help you through stressful times are several time zones away. Many of your usual coping mechanisms aren't available in the new place, and you haven't figured out what will replace them yet. This is going to break through in some strange and potentially embarrassing ways. Forgive yourself for the occasional breakdown--no one you know can see you sobbing in the grocery store, anyway.

As the most important weapon in your arsenal, slack comes with a pretty major caveat: if time passes and you find yourself stuck in a helpless, hopeless, negative rut, get help. Cities with expat communities have therapists who specialize in emotional issues related to relocation: call one (or two, or a few). If you're in a place without that kind of expat support, try out a few local therapists, or see if you can set up phone/Skype sessions with someone in a more cosmopolitan location. If you're truly in the middle of nowhere, talk to the organization who sent you there about ways others have dealt with the situation. Don't just resign yourself to hating your situation: the whole point of all this is building a happy life despite the challenges of living abroad, not just enduring the various ways living abroad can suck.

Of course, this advice is all based on me and my one (so far) experience with moving internationally. I'm sure I've left out some piece of advice that's been a lifesaver for someone else. So, expat friends and relatives (and friends and relatives of friends and relatives), what have I missed? What's the most important advice you'd give to someone on the brink of an inter-cultural move?

The Expat Survival Kit

London icons, a block and a half from our flat.

And then the day finally comes. ... Although there have been moments of wondering if it will ever happen, given enough time and a genuine willingness to adapt, we will once again become part of the permanent community. ... We have a sense of intimacy, a feeling that our presence matters to this group.  We feel secure.  Time again feels present and permanent as we focus on the here and now rather than hoping for the future or constantly reminiscing about the past."

Third Culture Kids

David C. Pollock

Ruth E. Van Reken 

When I first read the above paragraph last weekend, I immediately commented to Gino, "and then it'll be time to move again."

I speak from experience.  The book I quoted is right: it's taken a lot of effort (and a lot of thinking it would never happen), but the last eighteen months or so London has truly felt like home.  I have meaningful work I love, and Gino and I have built a circle of smart, interesting, caring people as friends.  We have our favorite restaurants and things to do on a free weekend afternoon, and we've worn the "touristy must-do in London" list down to a nub.  We know the relative advantages of Sainsbury vs Waitrose and that you can buy pretty much anything you can ever imagine needing at Peter Jones.  We have become, as the book puts it in another context, competent.  We're good at London, good at being Americans in London.

And next week we'll be moving into corporate housing for a stretch, pending a move to Ireland later on this summer.

I shouldn't have read Third Culture Kids so hard on the heels of Chris Pavone's The Expats, which I downloaded to read on a driving holiday around France.  I've read a lot of books about expat life over  my life, and especially the past four years, and The Expats was the first one that had me nodding along: yep, been there, done that.

The novel made me want to create a survival pack for new expats, especially the new expats brought overseas by a spouse's career.  (The term of art is "trailing spouse."  If you think that alone isn't a blow to the ego of a competent, independent, previously self-supporting adult, you would be wrong.)  It would include a copy of The Expats, because one of the amazing things about moving to a new country is the sheer amount of free time you have to get through when you get there, and Pavone's novel could kill some of that very enjoyably, while giving you a glimpse of what you're in for.  The survival pack would include a bulk package of your favorite treats from back home, a sampler of delicacies native to your new home, and a list of the instructions I wanted to give the book's protagonist:  find some kind of work, even if it doesn't pay.  Take a class in something, anything, you're remotely interested in, or pick a hobby and find a way to pursue it in a group setting.  (And don't worry about being a cliche.  Cliches are often based in truth.)   To the extent that this is in your control, make a few friends who are native to your new home, or have lived there long-term.  Get together with the other parents at your kids' school and form a baby-sitting co-op so you can have the occasional non-parental evening, even when your husband's traveling.  Don't just get through the days--invest them in building some kind of life.  

I started to feel downright cocky about the move to Ireland: I've done this before.  I've got this changing-countries thing down.  This'll be a lark.

And then Third Culture Kids knocked me off my high horse.  No Expat Survival Kit would be complete without a copy of this book.  Seriously, even if you have no kids and no plan to have them--that just means you can skip the "schooling options" bit.  You should still read most of the book, which has tons to say about the process of relocating into a new culture, and repatriating back.  It was one of those books that told me all kinds of things I didn't realize I knew.

Holy cow.  The book stressed me out in advance.  It reminded me of everything I'd forgotten about exactly how hard it is to switch cities, let alone countries.  How you have to prove yourself all over again to a whole new group of people.  How you have to figure out where to get American products, because someday you will find yourself insanely homesick and only Betty Crocker Devil's Food Cake will make you feel better.  How you have to figure out where to get everything and how many things you didn't realize you can't live without until you decided to leave them behind.  How you have to find some way of passing the time while you slowly accumulate replacements for all the bits of your life you took for granted in the old place: Your work.  Your hobbies.  Your gym.  Your favorite restaurant that actually delivers.  Your friends.

At the same time, it made me feel validated.  All the emotions I experienced in the move to London, even the really embarrassingly immature and provincial ones, are chronicled and catalogued and pronounced perfectly normal.  And who doesn't love to have their more shameful moments--that time you burst into tears in the grocery store because you didn't recognize a single brand of peanut butter, say, or the week you bought something new every single day just so that somehow, something would be different at the end of the day than it was at the beginning--pronounced perfectly normal?

Whisky tasting at the Jameson Distillery.
Dublin will have its compensations.

But it did remind me that those steps I recommended above are necessary and the rewards of going through them really are great--but oh, they're hard.  And there's no getting away from it: the reason you know you need all that stuff, the friends and the gym and the work, is that you already had it, back where you came from.  And no one is going to hand any of it to you in this new place--you have to go out and get it all again.

Everyone I've talked to about this has noted the wave of homesickness that hits around the one-year mark in a new place.  The new glow has worn off and you're just integrated enough into the new community to know how integrated you're not.  When I was about at that point, I had tea with a dear friend who was about a year ahead of me on the expat cycle, and I admitted that I was tempted to give up on making a life and just go into endurance mode until someone told me it was time to leave London.  Since someone was going to tell me to go away eventually, what was the point of making London into somewhere I wanted to live?

My friend listened patiently, and pointed out: "if you're as heartbroken to leave London as you were to leave New York, that's not necessarily a bad thing."  And surprise surprise, she was right.  The grief at leaving London, the conviction that Dublin can't possibly be as good... I wouldn't be feeling any of that if I hadn't done a pretty damn good job of making myself at home here.  And four years ago, I didn't think that was possible, either.

About halfway through The Expats, Pavone describes guests at a Christmas party in Luxembourg:

This party was dominated by the sizable contingent who'd circled around themselves as Americans, exclusionary, flag-pin wearing.  Behaving as if they hadn't chosen to live in Europe, but had been moved against their wills, and were putting up a brave resistance.  Freedom fighters.

I've definitely met those people, and as I said, I understand the temptation.  Third Culture Kids notes that one response to moving into a new culture, recognizing that you'll always be an outsider, is to broadcast your difference and cling even more closely to the culture you know and understand.  When I first moved to London, I met several women who played a lot of bridge and went on a lot of day trips and, from the way they talked about living here, generally just tried  to endure the time before they could go home and back to real life.

Having had periods of living that way, and periods of throwing myself at London until it let me in, I can tell you: in the long run it's a lot easier to make yourself at home in the new place, than to grit your teeth and endure being away from home for years at a time.

And it's so totally worth it.  It's not exactly easy to rebuild your life every few years, and it really sucks to say good-bye to what you've built.  But you have to keep reminding yourself: this is your life.  These two or three or ten or twenty years you're spending abroad, you don't ever get these back.  Home is a long way away, in both time and space. Since you have to be here, you might as well put in the effort through the initial rebuilding process (and deal with the eventual, inevitable grief).  Then you get at least a couple years where things are easy again, and you get to go home with years' worth of amazing memories and stories and friends from all over the world.

Finally, a post about Egypt (and Israel): A photo essay

One of my favorite activities on a recent visit to my parents was going through my parents' and grandparents' old photo albums. I loved seeing the way certain themes echo through family photos: there's the "Kids Playing Piano" pictures, the "Kids Held Upside-down by Adult" pictures, the "Kids Reading" pictures. First of my father and his brother, then of me and my sister (weren't we cute?), and if you're reading this from facebook you've seen the same pictures of my nieces and nephews.

Then I got to the photo album Grandma Kack put together with pictures of the trip she and Granddaddy Joe took to Israel and Egypt, 25 years ago. There was the echo again, resounding in the pictures I took on a trip with my friend Sarah, in October 2010.

The pictures of Israel looked somewhat different from mine; I think the Old City in Jerusalem has had a little work done since the mid-eighties.

This view of the Mount of Olives from 2010 is much tidier
than the same view in Grandma's 1980's picture.
This archeological-site-that-looks-like-a-garden
looked like an archeological site 25 years ago.

Grandma took a picture of this view of the Garden of Gethsemane, too.
The olive trees, reputed to be 2,000 years old, had grown slightly between

the time she took hers and the time I took this one. Other than that--identical.

Grandma--who was there with her church, after all--
was way too polite to take a picture inside
the Church of the Holy Sepulchre,
where I snapped this photo of Golgotha while waiting in line.

I didn't go down into the chapel of the Sepulchre itself,
and this crowd they're calling a queue outside the door is why.

But Grandma's pictures of Egypt... those you could mix up in the photos Gino and I took and have a hard time telling which was which. The buildings look the same; the people are dressed the same. The major difference would be that the cars that were old when we saw them, were new then, and the buildings had fallen into twenty-five years' worth of disrepair.

Here we all are in Cairo!

I should have taken a picture of the traffic. Everyone who goes to Cairo talks about the traffic. Several of the pictures in Grandma's album are of the traffic, with labels such as "view of Cairo traffic from the bus" or "more traffic". (I'd show you one of Grandma's pictures--like I said, it looks pretty much exactly the same now as it did then--except that I foolishly didn't force the album into my suitcase when I left. I think Mom's sent it on to my cousin Carrie, the family archivist.) The Lonely Planet notes that "the crowds on a Cairo footpath make Manhattan look like a ghost town," and that's even more true of the roadways. I don't remember seeing a working traffic light the entire time I was there: the cars communicate with each other using a local language of honks and blinking lights, and pedestrians who want to cross the street just... go for it, through breaks in the traffic that wouldn't look like breaks in New York or London.

I don't think Gino intended this to be a picture of traffic,
but it gives you the idea.
Note especially the pedestrians nonchalantly wandering through it.

In fact, looking over my albums now, I realize now that I mostly took a lot of pictures of Important Famous Sights on this trip. Which is great, but it means I don't have pictures of the sights that actually made the biggest impressions on me. I could kick myself for not getting a picture of the cart selling live rabbits and chickens outside the Street of Tentmakers (though if you've watched the Pyramids episode of An Idiot Abroad--and if you haven't, you should, it's on Sky in the UK and the Science Channel in the US--you'll see Karl Pilkington remark on it, too). Thanks to a Cairo-based friend of Gino's, we had a private driver for our trip out to the pyramids, and as we drove through heavily-urban Giza we saw as many herds of sheep and goats as I usually see on a train ride through the English countryside. I didn't get pictures of that, either.

Gino took this picture of the Street of Tentmakers--mine came out blurry.

However, the poverty of Cairo is going to show up in your pictures no matter what else you were trying to capture. There's basically no view of the city that doesn't include crumbling buildings, glassless windows, twenty-year-old cars.

Actually, I guess that's not entirely true.
This view, from the balcony of the our hotel in Zamalek,
show a perfectly well-developed if slightly smoggy modern city.

This photo of the Citadel--which Gino took from the medieval Bab Zuweila--
gives a more close-up view of downtown Cairo,

as does this one, which I took from the same spot,
looking in the other direction.

We visited quite a few mosques while we were in Cairo, and I loved every one of them. I wrote in my journal while I was there that "just existing takes all my concentration." Everywhere we went there was something to watch out for: oncoming cars; aggressive vendors; friendly children. I was never more aware of the city's chaos than when I took off my shoes, entered the sky-roofed, gently-patterned square, and felt so much of the responsibility to pay attention slip away.

Al-Hakim Mosque. Ahhhhhhh.
The irony is, one of the most peaceful places I experienced in Cairo
is named after a despot whose rule was marked by his very creative
methods of torturing his enemies.

The Turkish-style Mosque of Mohammed Ali,
at the Citadel.

While Sarah was staying with expat friends Valentine and Eric in Maadi and being admirably Cairene, Gino and I had more of a touristy experience. We used the massive number of points Gino had built up during his business travel last year to stay for free at the Cairo Marriott, where, as you can guess from the picture of the pool, we did not want for comfort. (Sarah stayed with me there the night before Gino arrived, and our first morning in Cairo was the most luxurious of our trip, involving breakfast in deck chairs next to the pool before the day got seriously hot.) The Cairo Marriott is sort of Cairo-lite: they have a restaurant serving exceptionally tasty Egyptian food, but they have something like eleven other restaurants serving everything from standard Italian to "Midwestern Cuisine." They also have a shopping arcade with tiny branches of most of the stores mentioned in the Lonely Planet, including a bookstore whose main branch is right around the corner from the hotel, anyway.

Our little westernized oasis.

But, as Valentine pointed out, Westerners rarely visit Cairo as independent tourists: most of the other guests in our hotel were there the way my grandparents were, as part of tour groups: with an inclusive breakfast and a coach waiting to pick them up for the day's adventures every morning. They probably didn't spend a lot of time wandering the neighborhood of the hotel. Even in ritzy Zamalek, as soon as you step beyond the security gates of your hotel, you are no longer in tourist-land but have ventured into actual Cairo, with the insane traffic and the crowded, narrow sidewalks and the general sensory overload.

I am not, by the way, knocking the tour-group method of travel. Cairo is huge and busy and not built for tourists. Cab drivers don't necessarily speak English, have meters in their cabs, or carry change. Violent crime is low, but scams and cons are such a significant part of the local economy that they rate mentions in every section (Shopping, Eating, Sleeping) of the Lonely Planet. Everywhere you go, people want to talk to you, to sell you something, to show you a special, secret feature of the monument you're visiting (in exchange for a tip, of course). It is beyond overwhelming. We were accompanied by friends who spoke Arabic and had lived in Cairo for a few years, which kept the stress level bearable--I honestly can't imagine visiting without some sort of guide smoothing things out.

Gino's and my big tourist adventure was to take the Marriott's dinner cruise down the Nile, because I had taken six weeks' worth of belly dancing classes at my gym, and I wanted to see a real belly dancer do it.

The real belly dancer.
You can see her in An Idiot Abroad, too.

The one thing I knew I wanted to do on the trip to Egypt was ride a camel around the Pyramids. I'd read the section of the guidebook that said riding a camel was a good idea, told me where to rent camels, and how much to pay. I thought I was all set. Then, on our last day in Cairo, we actually got there.

These people would like to give you a camel ride.
Or sell you a set of postcards.
Or give you a headscarf.
Or take your picture with the Pyramids.
Or let you take their picture with the Pyramids.
Or take a picture of you riding on their camel, in front of the Pyramids.

Sarah, Gino, and I went more-or-less on our own: we hired a driver who was recommended by a friend of Gino's, but the driver spoke no English. (The Sphinx is not called the Sphinx by Egyptians. We thought we could pronounce Abu al-Hol well enough to make ourselves understood by an Arabic speaker. We were wrong. We got Ahmed to take us to see it by pointing to the picture on the guidebook.)

The Lonely Planet section on the Pyramids includes an entire sub-heading titled "The Hassle." It reminds you that "the Pyramids have been attracting tourists since they were built, and a local was probably there offering them a ride on a donkey"--which I actually found helpful to remind myself when we got inside the complex and the young men fell on us with their postcards, their scarab beads, their headscarves, their models of the Pyramids and the Sphinx. The constant attention, the constant negotiations, made it really hard to concentrate on the archeological Wonder of the World right next to us. It made negotiating for a camel ride around that wonder too intimidating to even attempt.

One of the Seven Wonders of the World.
I think Grandma got a shot like this too, come to think of it.
Gino took this one, as I managed to break my camera before we got this far.

Gino also took this picture of the Sphinx,
or Abu al-Hol ("Father of Terror," according to Lonely Planet)

On the way back to our hotel, Ahmed demonstrated the very best style of Egyptian driving by pulling up alongside a vegetable truck. The men inside greeted him warmly and handed him a cucumber with one end cut off, which he offered to Gino, Sarah, and I--a nice change from the sticky, too-sweet Cokes that had been all we could find at the Pyramids. We had time for lunch and another luxurious swim in our oasis of a pool before Sarah and I took the hotel car to the train station for the night train down to Luxor, and the next part of our adventure.

(Of which, sadly, I have no pictures, on account of my camera getting broken at the Pyramids. Oh, well.)

When Sarah e-mailed me back in August to ask if I wanted to go to Cairo, and maybe Luxor, and possibly Tel Aviv and Jerusalem with her, I gave it about twenty-four hours' thought and said, "that sounds like pretty much the definition of a once-in-a-lifetime trip, and of course I'm coming." At the time, we had no idea how once-in-a-lifetime it was, but we're both extremely pleased to have made the journey before the Modern History sections of our guidebooks went completely out of date. Our friends in Cairo are fine--you can read Eric's account of pre- and post-revolutionary Cairo here--and excited about the future.

Me, I'm just excited to go back someday.

Next time I am totally riding a camel.