Next leg, another flight

Tomorrow I am set to get on a flight to go back to Ontario and to the farm.
I leave Kelowna (which I just found out was listed last year as Canada's cocaine capital) at eleven in the morning and arrive at half six in the evening. It is a three hour flight but, of course, with a time change I fly into the future and lose three or four hours. My folks will be there at the airport to pick me up at half six on the dot, so they say, and then I'll be whisked off to the bright lights and bustling streets of Port Colborne where big news is "guess who sipped a little extra wine at church last Sunday!" and "did you see that big boat that went through the canal yesterday!"

I look forward to the challenge ahead. Fortunately this will not be so mundane as 'what do I do in a one-horse town like this?" but rather the race against time which begins as we start to get ready for the auction sale.

Pictures in the next week will prove to be interesting...

:-)
Mark

Tom and Susana's blogs can be found on the right side of my blog under LINKS

Quick Add-on

In the process of posting this weblog I am slowly learning more and more about how to do it. One of the things I am slowly figuring out is how to write code and add links to other websites.

For those of you who would like to improve your Spanish and meet one of the most fantastic people I have ever known, go to suxiaozhen.blogspot.com

For those of you who want to read intelligent and thoughtful commentaries on photography, visit the site of a good friend of mine, Tom Hayton at web.mac.com/tomhayton/iWeb/Site/Blog/Blog.html or just type tomhayton.com/blog in the address field of your internet browser. Tom took some photos of me before I left Malaysia and he has posted a few there.

Incidentally, Tom, I was in a Starbucks yesterday and a woman came up to me and told me that she ran an art gallery nearby and I 'had a very interesting face'. She wondered if i had ever considered doing modelling for photographers! It floored me.
I didn't really take what you said seriously but maybe I have a future!!

"I'm ready for my close-up Mr. DeMille!!!"
At the top of this post, you'll find a stellar photo taken by Tom....

Almost done at the zoo

It's Saturday here and I am going back to Ontario tomorrow.

The zoo has been a blast but the 5 cats and 2 dogs are enough!

There is not much to tell here. Kelowna has been beautiful and cold. Visiting my sister and her partner Jodey has been great.

And, we got great news actually yesterday.

Rebekka (sister) got an offer for full-time employment as the western Canada Q&A trainer for a company she worked for back in Ontario, and I got notified that I was shortlisted for the posts in Morrocco that I applied for.

They have asked me to name a time next week when I could do a phone interview on either Wednesday or Thursday. I have yet to respond but I am emailing back today to confirm and then prepare for the interview.

Three things that made me happy recently:
1. My friend Lennard who never fails to make me laugh
2. Introducing people here to good asian movies
3. Seeing a night sky full of stars

will post again soon.
Mark

just a short entry

Three things that have made me happy:

1. my new jacket I bought yesterday from LuLuLemon
2. watching the sci-fi channel
3. telling my sister about the weekend with Jane and Alan in PD

jetlag - the sequel

At this point I am writing as a personal release.

This morning I was woken up by this handsome beast. Believe me, I have done much worse...

Being back is sinking in and I feel less and less like this is a vacation. Spoke to my mum on the phone a few times and she is excited for me to come home, and I am, of course, excited to be going.

The folks have found a place to rent/move into while the auction takes place and the farm is being turned upside down. My sister and I have mixed feelings. We bought a video camera today that will help us document the last days of our family history on the farm.

Jetlag is going well. I have discovered that if I drink lots of water jetlag is less traumatic, lots of coffee makes it worse as dehydration runs you down.

We had a dinner of asian vegetarian food tonight that consisted of fried taufu with sweet red sauce, taufu wrapped in seaweed smothered in sweet red sauce, taufu steak covered in a layer of sweet LEMONY red sauce, and fried wantan with taufu inside drizzled with something like thousand island dressing. Pretending I was French didn't help this time around.

"Yeah, this sauce is really..... mmmm, it's hard to describe. I can't recall the last time I had anything like it..."

Gimme a nasi lemak and fried kway teow anyday!

responses to posts

hey there, just read some of the posts. Thanks for that Terri, Noriza and JK. I will respond to posts on the same thread instead of on the mainpage just so you know.

cheers,
Mark

The wonders of jetlag

Well everyone, the drama is over and the real boredom begins.

I am awake at 3:45 am local time in British Columbia and my body is telling me that, basically, I should be in another time zone.

Instead of waxing poetic, probably better to just regale you with stories of the trip.
Korea was interesting and reminded me of Taiwan insofar as every gift shop quoted prices in USD and no one spoke very much English but they all tried very hard. I had a great dinner (at the airport) of Kimchi and pickle with a bowl of rice and IT WAS SO NICE! I'll really miss Asian food already. The hot and sour taste of Korean hotpot was lovely as the five degree air was getting to me even in the airport.

I could feel myself getting closer to North America even then because as I walked along the indoor mall, two largesse men with arms flailing and overly loud voices chatted (though 'chatted' implies a smaller voice than what they used) about their last dinner...
"SO THEN I SAYS 'HOLY JEEZ, THAT'S A BIG HONKIN' STEAK, EH!' SO I GETS THE BIG HONKIN' FORK AND KNIFE DEY BROUGHT WITH IT AND I STARTS EATIN IT".

I debated walking up and telling these two gentlemen that they needed to set a strong example for the people around them by not using verbs with a third person 's' conjugated with first person 'I'. The last thing people needed was a weak model of English. I debated it, and then I just turned around and decided to pretend I was French. Trying to decide how either large cuts of meat or eating utensils could be 'big and honkin' brought stifled guffaws out of me. I was at the 'just get me on the plane' stage of the trip by then.

What I found very odd was trying to buy bits of kitsch and souvenirs from the airport. It was Seoul after all so I had changed my money into WAN to buy a few things. Yet everywhere I went, lovely young women insisted on quoting prices in USD.
"It is 12 American dollars, sir."
"How much is that in WAN?"
"Mmmm, I don't know (laughing) let me get my calculator..."

Things like that made me guffaw even harder. (just get me on the plane)

Luckily on both legs of the trip, I got an entire row of seats to myself. Having four seats to lie down on was a blessing. The travel fairy was really looking out for me this trip.

It's 4 a.m. now and I can hear my sister's dog scratching at my door needing a wee. Animals have that innate sense of finding who can meets their needs at any one time.
As my good friend Pete once pointed out though, one of my biggest failings in that I don't know how to say 'no' to people. I have to agree; it's always been a weakness of mine.

Sadly, I'm not sure the dog will understand me if I do refuse.

next installment with pix....

and it's technically the same day....

THIS IS ME AFTER I LANDED!!!
After about 30 hours of travelling, touchdown in Kelowna, British Columbia was welcome and at the same time daunting. That feeling of being removed and displaced, homeless and without an idea of belonging, those are feelings of being lost. I imagine it is how a ghost feels walking through twilight. What makes it all okay though is thoughts of friends I have in various nooks of the world. They make me feel like I have a home with them wherever they are.

And, if it makes sense, knowing that I have lived a life less ordinary and trivial than most helps one endure the feeling of loneliness. Then again, I'm probably just jetlagged and this will all feel normal by Friday.

I would rather have this than a plodding life, not sure of why some people always stay in the same place doing the same thing with the same people. Though, to be honest, I am not sure how strong I am to do this 'moving around the world thing" many more times! Moving so often is akin to voluntary psychosis. But in the words of Susan Sommers, that immortal piano key-toothed American actress (I think she actually stole the quote from Liberace)
"They can't miss you if you ain't gone!"

My sister and her girlfriend Jodey are great as well as the two dogs and five cats they have who promise to sleep on my head and suffocate me tonight. Between a vocal malamut and a chatty siamese I expect no end of entertainment between now and Sunday when I go back to my folks' place in Ontario.

That will be when the real fun starts. AUCTION SALE TIME!!!

first leg Part 2

here's me feeling the pain (sympathetic of course)....




...and reaching for a panadol... (already)



One kimchi dinner later and about 20 degrees Celsius lower, I am feeling good and ready for the next flight. Just need a snickers bar to cut the burning in my mouth and I will be ready.

With luck the next flight won't have any movies featuring pop stars. I really don't relish saying "yeah, I saw Crossroads -- ON THE PLANE, ONE THE PLANE -- I SWEAR!!" People just think less of me really fast...
:-)

first leg

Here's the part of the trip that I have never liked -- the transit stop.

All those old kung-fu movies had it wrong. It's not about standing on a mountain contemplating a riddle, or balancing a rock on your right shoulder while standing on your left leg doing "the crane", or counting the grains of rice you have in your bowl. If Master Pai-Mei wanted to teach a student patience all he had to do was make him sit in a transit lounge for about six hours and watch him go mental. I've been here in Korea for eight hours, luckily I got used to this a couple
of years ago.

Last night was fun. I nearly bawled my eyes out several times when leaving. Luckily I had friends like Susana, Lennard, and Angie there to make me laugh. "You go ahead and cry", Lennard said, gently "I'm a heartless bitch so I'll just watch!" Lennard, as usual, made me laugh. Ching-thut actually met me at the airport to see me off. In some ways I wish he hadn't because he had to go home alone after that and I know how sad you can end up feeling. I've been that person several times.

By the time I got on the plane, I was exhausted. LOVELY! Before the journey even starts you feel like a zombie. Thankfully I wasn't the only one.... (see above)

My Last Day in Malaysia

One of my favourite actresses once said, "Good-byes are horrible, just horrible. Nobody likes them; nobody wants them. We're just animals really, going on instinct. We have moments where find ourselves sobbing, uncontrollably, and we don't even know why. They're just horrible."
That has been me in the last few days.

Leaving home and making another country your home for several years feels like an adventure in the beginning. Finally making the choice to leave that country and go home feels right at the time you decide to do it. But when you have to say good-bye to all the people that you have come to know as a surrogate family, it's just agony. That's because, unlike your real family some of whom you may or (let's face it) may NOT get along with, your surrogate family overseas is made up entirely of people you really like and mates you have chosen to keep with you.

People like that are hard to say good-bye to.

This blog (weblog) will chronicle my trip home, not only the flight from Malaysia to Canada but a much longer journey. It will be about the end of an era in our family.
Packing up the farmhouse, dismantling the grain bins, selling off the farm implements in the auction, the last christmas we'll ever have at the farm, and saying good-bye to 200 years of Augustine family history.

Tonight at one o'clock in the bloody morning I'll be getting on a plane to head back to Canada. Six hours to Korea, followed by ten hours IN Korea, then another ten to Vancouver. After that, another three in the Vancouver airport and finally a one hour flight to Kelowna, BC where I get to see my sister for the first time in two years.

Nobody ever said that the road home was a short one...