The cold. The snow. The winter! MT, USA

Every so often I get home to visit the US.  More often than not, this happens to coincide with my least favorite season of the year: winter.  It's not that I really have anything against winter as a season, except that it's cold and snows constantly.  This year, I was unlucky enough to be visiting a friend of mine in Montana during this unfortunately non-tropical time of the year.

To be fair, I haven't always been a cold hater.  As a child, my parents used to think I was impermeable; I would run around in short dresses, sandals, and never a coat to be found.  In fact, I remember endless fights with my parents (then ultimately just my mother who insisted my lack of clothing made her cold).  Then puberty hit, and my nearly-naked winter romps came to an end as I developed inferior circulation and susceptibility to the cold.

Flash forward to today- after many years of living in the tropics, my body has become well adjusted to over 40 degrees C or 105 degrees F.  In fact, we rarely turn on the AC, even on the hottest summer days, and that can get up to 45 degrees C but feel hotter with the island's 110% humidity.  I like the heat, and I've grown accustomed to drinking copious amounts of water to stay hydrated, and generally sweating my butt off to stay cool.

Visiting the US in the winter then, is rather obviously not my cup of tea.  With wind chill, it's not unusual for it to feel like 15 below zero (F), and then of course there's the pesky snow.  Sure, it's beautiful at the beginning of the season when you still miss it from last season, but pretty soon everything has been white for weeks or even months and you feel like you're trapped in an asylum slowly going insane.

Now that it's officially spring, I can say that I have endured US winter and survived, though admittedly I have been rather cranky about the entire experience.  Even so, it has made one thing crystal clear: pursuing a job on the Arabian peninsula is the right decision.  Desert sands, palm trees, and warm breezes all year round; the only snow will be safely tucked away within an artificial ski dome, where it belongs!

Teaser 5: Name that place!

 Hi!

It's been a while, but it's time for another teaser!  This time, the country is the US...

Hints for this week:

1.  This is a prime spot for fishing.
2.  This is lake is just down the road from a ski slope.
3.  There is an abundance of camping sites around the lake. 

Can you guess where this remote place is?

Hiatus

Grasses and pasture, MOE USA

So,

I have admittedly let my blog fall by the wayside, as many of us do, when life gets to be a little too chaotic.  I apologize to anyone who periodically checks in and wondered what happened, but I assure you the full story (coming soon), is a rather epic one, though full of a very different kind of adventure.

The Diploma: 2.5 Years in the Making

You see, I mentioned before that I was still in school.  I say was and not am, because I finally passed my oral exam for a MA in Anthropology at the end of January and received my diploma at the end of February.  Since my last blog post, I finished writing my 95 page thesis, defended said thesis, re-wrote a good chunk of my thesis to focus on another subject, submitted said thesis (which was probably the hardest part because the library system continued to reject it until the very last day when I had to get help from the library staff to beat the deadline!), printed hard copies of my thesis in bound, book form and ran them to various departments in exchange for stamps, and finally submitted the stamped paper for my Chinese diploma (I still had to wait a week for the English copy).


Of course, this whole process took several months and involved a number of convoluted steps in between, but in the end I managed to get my diploma, only to find out my visa was being canceled immediately and I needed to leave the country or get deported.  This also created a lot of chaos, and ultimately I found out it was possible to extend my visa, but by then I had already booked a ticket back to the US.

Back on the road, MOE, USA

So here I am, back stateside for the time being while I find out about jobs and my future.  In the meantime, I will be releasing the numerous back posts I drafted but never finalized or published.  I'll also be posting more on the US and my responses to a variety of "standard American" experiences because a lot has changed since I last visited over five years ago, and I mostly feel like a foreigner in my native country (more on that later... plus Cinnabon!).


I promise more is to come, and all will be explained- check back in the next week or two for the release of travel back-posts!