Tour of Vacation

So this one is a little late, but I wanted to get it up nonetheless. After all, I made a promise to Slim about contributing to the blog, and I'm definitely only going to break the promise a fair amount rather than entirely.

Growing up, I was obsessed with Viet Nam. One of the first movies I remember was Platoon and the first television show I really remember watching over and over again was Tour of Duty. If you're not familiar with it, it rain on CBS for three seasons from 1987 to 1990. Season 3 is preposterous and not worth watching, but Season 1 in particular tells some solid stories following the members of 2nd Platoon Bravo Company at Firebase Ladybird. The show can be cheesy at times, but as a child, it helped me create some sort of reference for what I thought my father might have gone through.

It's absurd, but when I landed in Viet Nam, I couldn't shake the idea of my father landing as a 20-something almost fifty years earlier. I kept looking for a deuce and a half hauling soldiers down a dirt road and imagined a whole world that in most ways has disappeared. It was the first time I had ever been in a country about which I had such strong preconceptions. I knew Viet Nam would be nothing at all like the movies about a war long since ended, but I couldn't help but try to reconcile the two and was surprised by feelings of nostalgia for a place I had never lived and a life I had never experienced.

In Hanoi, there were men walking about in the old NVA helmets and plenty of people wearing peaked hats. On our way to Halong bay, there were plenty of rice fields and a few water buffalo to be seen. Outside of Ho Chi Minh City/Saigon, the Cu Chi tunnels still exist and were particularly eerie to see during the Tet Holiday. But the NVA helmets were worn by armies of people riding on motorcycles going to and from work, home, and God knows where else, the rice paddies dotted a well-traversed highway leading to a tourist destination and one of the most beautiful places I've seen in my entire life. The tunnels no longer serve guerrillas, but teach Vietnamese children about their country's long and violent history and the path to reunification.

I can't wait to go back. We, of course, have a laundry list of places to go in the region, but a return trip to Viet Nam is a strong possibility and I wouldn't mind serving in Hanoi or Saigon for a couple years. I'm still going to replay the old Tour of Duty episodes, but I can't wait to see more of what the country has to offer outside of the film reels.

So its been awhile....

March 26th. That was the last time I posted anything. That was only 8 months ago and only like 3 people even know this site exists so far. However, because one day I will print this into a book for us to have, I figure I should do a short update on the last 8 months.

Since I last posted....
- PM and I have gotten married, not once, but twice. We made it legal in April so we could get all the paperwork started with the State Dept so I can go to China as an EFM (Eligible Family Member) and not an MOH (Member of Household). This was crucial as it means I have health insurance, plane tickets, and the government will ship my stuff too. At our first wedding we didn't have any family present, so to appease them all, we had wedding round two (the white dress one) in October.

- I was offered a job with Arlington County directing one of their summer camps and I spent all summer hanging out with some crazy kids in south Arlington.

- PM studied his little butt off for his Mandarin test. All that studying paid off as two days before the BIG wedding, he not only passed his tested, but did so well, he receives a special language bonus.

- We have said "see ya later" to countless Foreign Service friends who are now all over the world. The good news is if we ever find ourselves in Caracas, Cairo, Sao Paolo, Mumbai, or Abuja, we have friends!

- I learned that the foot and ankle pain I had been having for over a year was due to a fracture. I got the lovely fortune of spending the entire summer wearing a lovely walking cast.

- We received our housing assignment. If you remember, my last post was about the housing options and I mentioned the place with a pillow and blanket menu. That is where we will be living! All of our friends going to Guangzhou had received their housing assignments. Everyone but us. We figured they had forgotten about us, but knew they wouldn't put us out on the streets, so we didn't make a fuss about not knowing four months in advance. The waiting and patience paid off as we received what we have been told is the nicest housing in Guangzhou and some of the top housing in all of the Foreign Service world (minus Ambassador's residences). We would have been happy as long as we had an actual bed rather than a Macedonian couch bed, but no complaining here!

- We received our fancy-smancy Diplomatic passports (yeah, we are pretty excited to show those things off) and I used that to model an American Girl doll sized Diplomatic passport with Brazilian visa, Brazilian money, and boarding passes for the daughter of some FSO friends.

- Both PM and I have taken the Basic Consular Course at FSI (ConGen). It was a required class for PM, I just had the luck of getting a spot in an earlier class so I could take it too. Taking ConGen was one of the first steps in our plan to see if Slim should become a consular officer herself one day.

And that is the last eight months. I mean, there may have been a few happy hours, trips to the midwest, and weekends spent exploring the D.C. area thrown in there, but you get the gist of it.