Today marks five months of traveling. “Five months is big!” Emily kept saying yesterday.
We still have more in front of us than behind us, but five months is a lot. With the exception of our two weeks when Emily went to Los Angeles and I “waited for her” in Cannes, we have spent every single day together.
We initially imagined that we would go our separate ways for our work days – as if we were each going to our own office and then meeting back in the evening. That has rarely been the case, though. We usually find a place to work and sit with one another, writing, teaching, getting frustrated at some computer system or an Internet slowdown. We support one another through the glitches that inevitably occur from time to time in most places and most of the time in Nepal. Glitches take a nasty toll.
We have spent every weekend doing something – getting everything we can out of wherever we are. We’ve done a lot of that in evenings and sometime afternoons too. Emily and I spend a ton of time together and amazingly, problems are very few and never serious.
With Turkey, Greece, Israel, France (just me), Turkey again, and Nepal behind us, we’ve done so much. It feels like SO long. I was worried that it would all fly by us. Luckily, we seem to have the opportunity to feel and savor the time and experiences.
At the same time, we feel the distance and absence of our friends and family more as the months go on. We miss the get-togethers, holidays, casual phone calls, happy hours, and just sharing the moments of life.
Being together so much has been almost surprising. We get into situations we ordinarily wouldn’t. For example, in our current hotel situation, the bed is backed into a corner. Emily now just crawls over my back getting in and out of bed – as if I was a trampoline.
On Crete, our hotel bathroom was so screwed up that it was very easy to flood the bathroom floor when showering – particularly if you’re a girl with long hair and not a lot of inclination to control your shower spray. We argued about shower etiquette for a bathroom with no shower curtain and no floor drain. If anyone needs the etiquette guide, feel free to inquire.
With a few odd and occasionally smaller-than-preferred beds, we’ve also discussed beditquette and let’s just say that when it comes to cover-sharing and somnatic domestic violence (aka wapping me in the eye with her elbow during sleep), my wife has very poor bediquette. She would say the same of me when the iPad and I work in bed – as well as that one baklava in bed accident….
Still, we’re doing great. We don’t get bored of each other. We’ve learned to accommodate each other’s idiosyncrasies. Occasionally, we’ve negotiated boundaries and figured out where we each can overstep or where we need to be more clear or vocal.
I would say we function amazingly well – not just in the easy environments like Patmos, but through the craziness of travel days and the altogether bizarre and rough places like in India and Nepal. I’d like to think that the couple who can slum it together has it down.
Perhaps just as interesting as how we’ve done with each other every single day for most of five months, is that we’ve lived in hotel rooms for every single day for almost five months. It’s one of those parts of the trips that we of course knew would exist, but never deeply thought about.
For an entire year, we’ll have no home. Each place is a new layout and different experience. Some have worked very well – like Nicholas Studios on Patmos which made Emily say, “I love our home here!” every night as we walked down the road to our place.
At the Hotel Evsen in Istanbul the small room was more than made up for by the comfort of the room, the great staff and the convenience of the location. On a cold fall morning in Istanbul, we struggled to get out of our exceedingly comfortable bed. And then there’s Vajra in Nepal – our port in the storm where we loved the ambiance and were treated so well.
Other places have been more…odd. We weren’t sure if the bedding was at all clean in our first guest house in Kathmandu where the owner, his friends and half the guests smoke hash on the roof all day.
And there was that bathroom situation in Crete along with the fact that the hotel’s door locks didn’t always work and the very nice owner regularly forgot what he was saying mid-sentence he was so stoned. “Yeah, we can get you a….taxi….yeah….where did I put that….yeah….oh, yeah, the number….I have it somewhere…..we used to just have it here….I know one of the drivers….so, yeah…..”
He had lost our pre-paid reservation and we arrived to him having no idea we were coming.
Living in hotels makes life interesting – but sometimes a little cold and impersonal. Our current hotel is clean, nice, well-located and absolutely sterile feeling. So, neither one of us has developed much sentimental attachment to it. Yet, it works perfectly well.
In the course of five months, we’ve done a lot. Some of my most anticipated parts are yet to come. Returning to some of my favorite spots – especially Bali – is exciting. Speaking some Thai in Thailand and chowing down on spicy green papaya salad made to order will be fun. Seeing more friends and family as well go along – such as my friend Jay in Bangkok, Tony in Singapore, my buddy Chad as well as my mother-in-law and her sister – the beloved Aunt Penny – in Bali. The people are always the best part.
However, today I have one important, but unrelated topic. We have a Faloodah follow-up. Here in Mumbai, our work is never done.
In the “Parsi Proper” post, I discussed how the Persians – known here as Parsis – brought their wonderful dessert invention Paloodeh, known among common Farsi speakers as Faloodeh, to Mumbai. Here, the locals now have a dessert drink called Faloodah involving rose syrup, milk, rice noodles, tapioca balls, ice cream and sometimes kulfi – a super-hard Indian ice-cream with uniquely Indian flavors.
Though it looks odd and is a complete bastardization of the Paloodeh my friend Mazyar’s mom and aunt make so skillfully, I tried it – because these are the things that must be done and recorded.
Faloodah is what would happen to if instead of rosewater, you used rose syrup and then you took milk and poured it on top of Paloodeh. The results….in Emily’s words, “It’s the most fascinating beverage in the world!”
Having the rice noodles of Paloodeh in a milky drink, going up a straw as you sip….odd. Taste – like strawberry milk, only rose-flavored. Indian ice cream flavors make it unique.
Final conclusion – it’s more fun to watch someone else drink this strange beverage. While there’s nothing inherently wrong with it – I prefer Paloodeh Proper.
As I said, our work here is never done. Or at least not until June 27, 2011.
People stealing water out of the back of a clean-water truck stopped at a light.
Sent from my iPad
