last visits

"we own time, but time also owns us."

i will miss the poetry on the streets of oslo.

sometimes when you leave a place, you know it's your last visit, at least for the foreseeable future. when i left oslo a week or so ago, it was with a light heart for that fact. i'd enjoyed the city for nearly two years, but commuting via plane will wear you down. especially if you don't get what you need from those around you when you're there - intellectual stimulation, exciting tasks, being included, being consulted on areas of your expertise, drawing on your knowledge and network, positivity towards your ideas (for which they claimed to hire you), managerial support, belief that you are capable of your job despite your gender, i could go on, but i think you get the idea. so leaving oslo, i felt happy that it would be the last time i would be there, at least for the foreseeable future. sometimes life is like that.

but other places, you don't realize that you won't be back anytime soon. like the philippines. i've been there 16 times since december 2004. so it feels really strange that i didn't go there at all in 2009. and i find myself really longing for it. it feels like something has been missing in this year (singapore was NOT close enough and is definitely NOT the same) because i haven't been there. it makes me wonder whether i enjoyed it enough when i was there last november. did i realize that it might be the only time i ever buy a fresh coconut from a young boy who paddled up on his coconut-laden surfboard? did i fully appreciate the uniqueness of that experience at the moment i had it?

and although i returned to manila many times after my visit there in september 2005 with husband and sabin, did i appreciate how great it was to be there together with them? and did i realize it might not happen again? i don't think so. tho' i loved the experience, i didn't place anything extra in it, thinking it might be a once-in-a-lifetime thing. i took for granted that we'd go again. and probably we will, so maybe this angsty feeling is for nothing. and maybe i just have this overwhelming sense of nostalgia  because i keep thinking of that house we looked at on sunday and how sadly frozen in time was.

i know one place that i didn't appreciate enough because i definitely didn't think it would be my last visit and that's Cape Town. of course, there's still a chance that i will go back there at some point, but when i was last there, i didn't realize it would be later rather than sooner.  i didn't realize how very long it would be before i was lounging at moyo at the spiers winery, chatting away on the phone and enjoying a fabulous glass of wine. sigh.

i worry a little bit that the world is changing so much with all of this talk of climate change and that long haul flights (except perhaps to the US), are largely behind me. and i'm changing too. i no longer want to have a job where i travel 150-200 days a year, where i'm away from my home and my family. i want something different from life now. i had great experiences, but maybe now they are just memories. memories of times i wonder if i appreciated enough.

of course, there are places that you hope you don't visit again, despite how colorful and amazing certain aspects of them were. like chennai. honestly, it's quite possibly the most uncharming place on the planet and if i never go back there, i'll be quite ok with that. phuket is another one of those for me. they can keep phuket. tho' i had a fantastic afternoon there, playing in the waves that had so cruelly killed so many less than a year before. it's one of those memories where i was conscious at the time that it was a wholly unique experience that could never be duplicated.

when we left singapore this past summer, husband was quite clear-eyed about it not bothering him at all if he never went back. i feel a bit that way too, since singapore is disneyland with nationhood. tho' if remain in shipping (which i wouldn't rule out), i will likely go there again. but i guess the whole point of these musings is that we never really know what the future holds and where it will take us.

secret 22 - i'm a bad, bad mom

so, a few years ago, when sabin was still going to her børnehave (kindergarten or pre-school as we'd call it in the states), i was in mumbai, trying on gorgeous sparkling loungewear. just moments after this shot was taken, my phone rang. it was the børnehave, calling to say that sabin hadn't been picked up and well, they'd really like to close, so could i please come and get her. oh the horror!! i was three (and a half) time zones away and may as well have been on the moon, rather than the couple of blocks away i'd have been if i'd been home.  thankfully, while i was on the phone with them, our neighbor girl, who picked sabin up regularly and was a kind of nanny, showed up. she'd been scheduled to pick sabin up that day and had been delayed leaving her real job, so she was running late. so my panic subsided.

but it did cross my mind that maybe i should be there for sabin a little bit more on a daily basis, so that she wasn't the last kid picked up every day from school. it took almost two years for that to sink in and become a reality. but you'll be glad to know that i'm a much slightly better mom today. these days i only occasionally put her on a trans-atlantic flight by herself, make her sit in monkey class, force her to stay in dumpy eastern european youth hostels with no room service or leave her all alone as the only member of our family in the country (just for a few hours).

oh, and after all those gorgeous things i tried on, i didn't end up buying a single thing.

p.s. picture is from december 2005, so hopefully i look nothing like this anymore...hair is quite a lot longer in any case.