Check out my food blog!

I love food, traveling, photography, and writing! I tried to embrace the four things I love this week and update my blogs.  My food blog "Bleu Cheese and Red Wine" is not updated very regularly. I thought I would write much more about food than I do but now I'm trying to do more of it.

So I have created five posts filled with my Japanese travel's food photos. I won't be putting these on facebook (except for the one's I already instagrammed) since I keep hearing of a backlash about people posting food photos on facebook.

It's very difficult to take good photos of food, I know. I don't flatter myself to be a good food photographer. But I like looking at photos and learning about meals people had that they enjoyed. So I hope you'll enjoy checking out the meals I had in Japan too.

Stay tuned in the next five days to get a post a day about the Food in Kyoto and Tokyo. And feel free to browse further for photos from my trips to Paris, the Loire Valley, Vietnamese and Laos cooking classes, and trips to Thai food courts! 

Reading, Emotional Healing, and 2012

I've joined a virtual writing group developed by my friend Saleem and I'm quite enjoying it. 2012 has been marked by a feeling of disengagement and detachment and being connected to friends in far away countries has been very helpful for me. We were discussing the books that we read in 2012 that we liked a lot and I adapted my response for the blog to share with you all - faithful readers.

I like Goodreads (a social network for readers and writers) because it fits the "librarian inside" of me... I can sort the books I've read by categories, analyze trends, keep track, and challenge myself. I'm in a challenge this year to read 43 books. Last year I only managed 25 - an all time low for me but also a symptom of a pretty unhealthy year - spending hours on social media feeling lonely and unattached from the world and being strung along in a pretty unfulfilling relationship. It seemed like a marker of unhealthiness... I could only process short things online and my attention span was getting shorter and shorter.

And this year, I notice that I started out with very easy to digest books (which coincides with me leaving my job at the UN and coming to terms with the fact that I didn't have a full time job or attend school full time for the first time since I was 18 years old.) So as my mental health got steadier, I notice that my reading got deeper. And then I re-approached it as a pleasurable activity again.

But I also like knowing what my friends are reading. I miss my book club from Washington DC and in my sad little Asia expat life, I find that no one here reads. They may have read 50 Shades of Grey or the latest UN communique but who is reading anything else? I'm not even sure how to go about finding other readers because I'm sure they are here.

So my Goodreads feed has my bookish friends in it. I can comment and discuss with my friend Celeste and her husband in Ireland about the latest Booker winners, I was following a War and Peace reading club with another Irish friend, an Italian friend has plunged into obscure Polish novels and now I'm intrigued, a virtual friend from Germany reviews feminist novels for her grad school, and a friend from South Carolina is always reading funny things and writing great reviews.  My DC bookclub friends were on it for a while but they seem to have disbanded so I guess they are not reading either. So for me, Goodreads helps me keep in touch with literature in this shallow bubble in Bangkok.

So - no big thundering novels from 2012's infant terribles this year but the books that I liked that I read in 2012 include:

Jeanette Wintersen: Why Be Happy When You Can Be Normal?
(loved Oranges are Not the Only Fruit and the Passion... I want to re-read them now)

William Boyd's Waiting for Sunrise (I quite love William Boyd - I've been hooked since the Ice Cream War)

Marguerite Duras: The Lover (beautiful and tiny and exquisite) plus I read it while going down the Mekong..

Hillary Mantel's:  Wolf Hall (a book I had schlepped along to probably 12 countries before I just plunged in and then I couldn't stop)

Arundhati Roy's God of Small Things.  I had a snit for a few years where I didn't want to read Indian novels by Feminist writers because it seemed like such a cliche. Instead I wanted to read books by old white men -prferebly English. I do still love the way of writing that the old masters from the turn of the century have but I'm starting to open back up my mind again and not be judged by what people think about what I read.

I love the humor and humanity of Colin Cotterill's Dr. Siri novels aboul Laos in the 70s. I love Henning Mankell's dreary and resigned Kurt Wallendar. I like the funny and dry Inspector Van Wetteren from Hakan Nesser's books. I like a good psychological thriller like Eric Ambler's books. And I like the sensation of being drawn into a book, being unable to put it down and caring so much about the characters.

This year, I can chart my emotional healing through the novels I've read. I started out with adolescent literature - the Hunger Games. It allowed me to accept the angry adolescent inside - its not fair! why does it happen to me? I'm helpless! and then I slowly turned to the mystery genre - I'm solving problems, I'm in an odd situation but I have to make the most of it, and the soothing repetitiveness of my favorite detectives - Kurt, Dr. Siri, Inspector VV... and now, I'm back: Into Tudor England with Anne Boleyn, Going through the crazy Soviet regime of The Master and Margarita, into Kerala where women are not free to have the lovers they want and seek help from the God of Small Things, in McCarthyite Asheville North Carolina longing for Frida Kahlo in Kingsolver's Lacuna, and now discovering the elegant and intriguing expat world of Mavis Gallant (thanks to my friend Saleem). It feels good to plunge back into books again and turn my back on Facebook and Gawker and re-experience what it feels like to lose myself in another world.  

Changes in 2011

As you may have noticed - 2010 was not a great year for me as far as writing and being creative... I was on sick leave for five months due to a combination of stress from work (non stop travel, Haitian earthquakes, and human resource problems at my org) and from personal grief over the illness and death of my father in 2009 and it definitely impacted my ability to put my thoughts down on paper (or the computer!).

Although I had adventures and traveled a lot in 2010, I couldn't find it in me to write as much as I used to... for the record, I did manage to hit several new countries this year and most of them were for pleasure and fun, not work*.  It was odd not to visit Africa this year - although my time in Haiti and India were certainly memorable.  2011 should bring some big changes... I've accepted a job with the Norwegian Refugee Council and will be seconded to the United Nations as a Gender-based Violence Regional Training Manager for Asia. I'll be working on building capacity in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Nepal to fight gender-based violence and I'll be moving to Bangkok, Thailand!

Its a big change - but I think I needed something. Although I have learned a lot in the big humanitarian agency where I currently work, its never really been a good fit for me - the lack of prioritization on women's issues, the reluctance to do advocacy, and the byzantine office politics and proud refusal to professionalize has undermined my own belief in my abilities and I feel stagnant.  I'm not sure that this new job will be perfect - are there any "perfect" jobs out there? And I will miss Amsterdam and Europe and my lovely colleagues from my current job but I am ready to try something new. Thai cooking classes, meeting Afghan women's organizations, and working for the Scandinavians... lets see how it goes! Wish me luck and pack your bags and come to visit in 2011!!!


*Here's my travel itinerary from 2010:
January: Kerala, Delhi, and Manipur India
February: Istanbul and Selcuk Turkey
March: Port-au-Prince, Haiti and London and Liverpool, UK
April: Columbia and Charleston, South Carolina
May: Edinburgh, Scotland, Paris, France and Texel and Verschelling in the Frisian Islands of Holland
June: Berlin, Germany and Gdansk, Poland
July: Paris, France
August: Copenhagen, Denmark
September: Tuscany, Italy and Bologna, Italy
October: Berlin, Germany and Prague, Czech Republic
November: Ghent, Belgium, Maastricht, Netherlands and Berlin, Germany
December: London and Swindon, UK

Other Social Media

I haven't been very prolific in writing this summer - probably a sign of my burnout. But I am doing a lot of reading and you can follow some of my thoughts in other ways too if you so desire.

On Tumblr
http://smartipants.tumblr.com/

On Flickr
http://www.flickr.com/photos/60783800@N00/

On Twitter
http://twitter.com/smartindc

and there is always facebook but we're probably already friends there if you have a facebook account!

Writer's Block

I've been suffering from writer's block. I suppose its not unusual, after all, I'm still struggling to accept my father's death and work and its accompanying dramas seem to suck up all the time and energy I have. However, here's a short run-down of all the things I'd like to write about or post but haven't had the energy to do yet.

My trip to Tuscany and the fabulous food
My trip to Normandy with my sister to visit the D Day sites - very thought provoking, particularly since I then went on a course on International Humanitarian Law in Brussels immediately after.
The use of anthropologists in Human Terrain Teams in Afghanistan
The encroaching winter time - it's 7am and the sun isn't up yet. I'm not sure if I'm prepared for this!
The rest of the photos from my trip to the midwest. Espescially the Corn Palace in South Dakota and my speeding ticket in Nebraska.
My love for pre-WWII espionage novels

Anyway, I'll try to carve out some time and inspiration.