Auld Lang Syne

Let me jump right in.  I feel like time is rushing by, suddenly, as we wind up our extended vacation and get ready to head back to Ethiopia the day after tomorrow.

Thanks to Wina, Donica's younger brother, my family has been able to browse through thousands of pictures from our past that were rescued from water damage and - in some cases - repaired after a leakage in my dad's storage room at his Nairobi house.  Wina spent hours and hours saving our photos, and since my dad keeps every single document that ever touch his hands, and since I spent a lot of middle and high school with a camera in my hands, there were a lot of pics to go through.  Thanks Wina, you're our hero!

Wina Tesfamariam

So I thought I could share pictures of some old faces that I love, and that we got to see again over the course of this vacation.  I just know that every single person in each of these pictures looks much better now than they did 30 years ago, and no one can tell me otherwise.  There were many pictures of dear friends that aren't included in this blog, only because I wanted to restrict my choices to pictures of people we were able to see again during our travels in November and December.  

Before I go any further, let me just share a picture I took of our Masai guide through Hell's Gate Gorge, a dramatic cleft in the Rift Valley of Kenya.  The guide was explaining that the Leleshwa plant produces a cotton-like flower that can traditionally be used to hold embers that the Masai tribespeople (herders) can carry with them to their next far-flung destination and use to start a fire there without much fuss:

At the end of this blog, I will explain the purpose of including this seemingly random picture up front in what is supposed to be an exploration of old friendships.  See if you can figure it out, shouldn't be too tough.

I think I'd better proceed in chronological order of our trip, starting with Addis Ababa, where we saw my friend Zeb Mengistu.  Anyone who went to school with Zeb will remember him as a low key but extremely funny guy.  Later, he became a calm, thoughtful fellow, and later still, an influential and gifted pastor.  But I knew him when.

Zeb, an early photo bomber, in the back.  Sixth grade.

Zeb leans against the tree, Eddie leans against Zeb.  8th grade.

Zeb sits next to me, across from Micah.  Last month.

I can't wait to visit Beza church in Addis on Sunday where Zeb will PREACH.  And then I can tell my Ethiopian students back at Blair High School that I saw Pastor Zeb in action.

One of the most lovely surprises while we were sorting through the pictures was Moges's voice shouting, "Stop!  That's Donica!"  Moges is my brother and Donica is his wife, and while they love each other dearly, they didn't really know each other as children at all.  But since we were part of the same extended Eritrean community, it was inevitable that we'd have been at some of the same functions.  And since, as I mentioned, Dad keeps every picture ever taken, it was likely that she'd show up somewhere in the Gebremedhin (my maiden name) archives.  Sure enough, I scrolled back and we all saw this cute face staring out at us:

Donica is in the center.

And here she is just recently, at a Christmas carol singalong:

Donica, whose dress closet I need to raid.  Just before Christmas.

Another great pleasure was being able to relive certain high school days.  Some of my funnest memories include a trip to Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania for a sports/drama tournament.  You read that correctly.  This was in the earliest days of regional cooperation between international schools, and they were just figuring it out.  So we packed some theater types, hockey and soccer players, and swimmers onto the plane and everyone basically had to do a bit of everything.  So we had basketball jocks playing small roles in the play and some actors who'd never held a hockey stick try to get the ball going in the right direction and it was basically a hilarious free for all.  My room mate and buddy in all this was my best friend, Patricia.  Here's a picture of us taking a break between hockey matches, trying to cool off in the impossible Dar weather:

Oh man, we can still crack up about that trip.  Here's one taken of us about a month ago.  Peeking over my shoulder is her younger son Mark, who never fails to remind me of a particularly embarrassing incident from high school that Trish shared with him.  It had to do with a gluteus maximus cramp I experienced and the effects that were witnessed by the entire PE class.  I'll leave it there.  Thanks, Trish.

But check out this other picture I found while looking at photos of that trip.  When I saw it, Mark was next to me and we both cracked up because we basically didn't care about each other one tiny fraction of a bit at that time (my senior year, his junior year).  Mark had come to Dar with the basketball team, and I'm pretty sure he was forced to play some hockey too, but we barely knew the other existed.  Clearly, I was tighter with his best bud at the time, Gary.  A year later all of that changed, but how hilarious to see this picture, which I totally didn't even remember existed:

Clueless Mark Woodward, Gary Ellem, Clueless Marta Gebremedhin

A really good friend in high school and during the college, post-grad years, was a guy called Max Kelly who we used to accuse of paying girls to say "Hi Max!" to him whenever we were out.  There were that many of them.  He was on that Dar trip, too, to play basketball and maybe play some random part in the play, who knows?

Max in the awesome uniforms of 1989

Growing up in Kenya means watching and learning from the best the country has to offer, and the best it has to offer includes the excellent poses Kenyans pull for photographs.  We replicated some of these one day at school when we should probably have been in class:

Max and Trish. 1989

Trish, Pablo, Max, Marta

As you can see, two important features are key for successful Kenyan poses; first, a thoughtful posture, and second, a closeness, if not intimacy with foliage of any kind.  Here's our modern rendition:

Mark, Marta, Moges, Max at Westgate Mall.  Just before Christmas

It seems to me that if you know one Gebremedhin, you must know them all.  So it is that Daire O'Reilly, one of Moges's best friends from high school, is like a brother to us (Mike and me) and the sort of guy whose house my dad even sublet for a bit.  So it was with great delight that we noticed his handsome face popping off the screen in a yellowed and damaged photograph from Moges's college days:

Although our time together this trip was extremely short, we drank some champagne, ate some chocolate, met his lovely girlfriend Sarah, got caught up a bit, and sent him on his way to Dublin for Christmas with his family:

Moges, Sarah, Daire, Marta, Mark

The wonders never cease.  For further perusal of Wina's rescued photos revealed how uniformly bad all pictures of me through the eighties were.  I had a bad afro, truly terrible fashion sense, and very thick eyebrows.  But every so often, a picture from that era would reveal a face that I maybe wasn't always so fond of in childhood, but which became about as well loved as my bros' faces.  And so it is that I move on to Hanoi, Vietnam, where we spent time with Nathan Belete and his wife, Kristi, who I've also known since early elementary school, but whose face was not among that old stash rescued by Wina.  So I have to leave Nathan's better half out of his blog and include only pictures of him:

Nathan, Mike, Moges, Moges's Members Only Jacket.  1987?

Nathan, 1986

I remember Nathan asking me to take the second picture when we were in 8th grade, and how long it took him to arrange that white scarf so it hung just right. Geez.  Anyway, like I said, he is like a brother, so my kids don't know him as the guy who used to make me really, really mad in 6th grade; rather, they know him as Uncle Nathan who works at the World Bank and knows a lot of stuff and is really smart.  He's humble enough to tell you that he is lucky to have Kristi as his wife, especially since a certain Zeb Mengistu (see above), was at one time quite keen on Kristi.  But then, so were a lot of fellows, as I recall.

Eli, Nathan, Micah, Daniel outside Nathan's office in Hanoi. Mid-December.

Alas, I don't have very old pictures from Nairobi to share of the other beloved family members we visited on this trip - the KL Woodwards, as they are sometimes known.  But the lack of old, mildewed photos of them does not indicate a less rich love and appreciation for them in my life.  It just means I don't have any embarrassing childhood stories about them.  Now that there's a new generation of people to share these stories with, it's especially tricky territory.  Take my butt cramp story that Trish chose to share with her kids, or those things I could say about some of the other characters in these photos, but which they're already jumpy about since I may have let some things slip to their kids, causing general unease and maybe even mild distress.   But we all turned out okay, didn't we?

Before I end, I wanted to share these last pictures.  I really wanted to write this blog about how Nairobi, and Kenya as a whole have changed.  Anyone who knows Nairobi and saw these pictures would never believe that these were taken on one of our periodic walks from our Lavington neighborhood to downtown Nairobi - a tradition my dad began and one of our fondest memories as siblings (I think).  Hard to believe there were fields to cross, and little streams to jump over.  That whole area we use to walk through is totally built up.

Mike, Moges, Marta. 1985?

It doesn't look like Mike could have made it...

Typically, we would walk all the way to the Hilton Hotel and have a burger
at the rooftop restaurant.  Dad must have decided to pack a picnic lunch.
I think this is outside the Serena Hotel.

So, as I said, I really thought I'd write about the changes I've seen in Nairobi over time.  But as I looked through these photos, I realized that the old saying is really true; the more things change, the more they stay the same.  Yes, Nairobi has changed a lot since I was a kid, and in recent years I have sort of dreaded visiting, a little bit.  But rediscovering these pictures has been grounding. In a rapidly changing Nairobi, it's so good to see these faces and be anchored by the friendships they represent.  I've been struggling for a long time, like any third culture kid, to figure out what Home really means.  I've decided that it's many different things for many different people.  In fact, for most of us, it isn't just one thing, and Home is rarely just one place.  But the friendships Kenya has generated and fostered through the years make me feel rooted - and not in a geographic way, but in a...soul way, for lack of a better way to put it.  This sense of home will perhaps go with me as I return to Ethiopia, and eventually back to America, kind of like the embers held by the Leleshwa flower.  These early friendships and relationships were the landmark ones, the ones that have taught me what friendship can be.  So I take their blessings and pray I pass on some of their warmth to spark other, equally deep and meaningful friendships. 

This entire trip - from Ethiopia to Kenya to Southeast Asia to Kenya and then back to Ethiopia - has been a reminder of the richness and importance of old friendships.  But when I stop to think about these friendships, I am reminded of how vital our American friendships are, as well, and the comforting tug back there we feel when we think of them.  

So, in the spirit of the New Year, I hope we all raise our glasses and sing Auld Lang Syne with gusto!  We should all pull out some old pictures, thank God we all look sooooo much better, and relish the gift of friendship, old and new!

PS.

I lied, I have one more picture.  When dad said a lot of the pictures were damaged I thought this one might be lost.  It is a picture I think about every time one of my boys - usually Micah - wants to cook with me, and it reminds me of what a wonderful mom I had and how much I miss her.

My mother, Mehret Samuel, and me.  1978

Miracle

passports, vaccination cards, page one of the itinerary

The title to this post is probably a bit dramatic, but on this last night of our Asia trip, I have to say I feel like pulling the trip off has just about been a miracle, at least to me.  Because I didn't have anything to do with it.  I just went along for the ride.  The guy who made it all possible is this guy:

Mark has done what I could never do.  I just don't have the patience for it.  He's arranged for:

Ten flights
4 van rides
1 bus ride
5 hotels
4 countries
Plus pick ups to and from the airports, day trips/excursions, research on restaurants and evening entertainment, currency exchanges, and the list goes on.  

This list doesn't even include the Africa portion of this trip, which is quite a thing all by itself.  I watched Mark struggle for hours with the internet in Mekele just to make one hotel booking.  Then he'd go at it again the next day, and the next.  And once we actually made it to Asia, somehow, he even managed to give me three days all to myself, one in Thailand and the other two in Cambodia.

Am I spoiled?  Yeah, duh.  But as I look across this lounge (the Miracle Lounge in the airport in Bangkok, where Kenya Airways sends all its customers that have been screwed kabisa, which means completely in Swahili) by such things as 8 hour delays, I see poor Mark stretched out over two chairs trying to get some sleep and I'm sure he'd agree that in spite of how much work he did to get this trip off the ground, our entire family is more than a little spoiled to have taken this incredible trip.  And even now - as we spend the whole night in Bangkok at the airport, when we'd hoped to be somewhere over the ocean and on our way to Nairobi - I look around at this comfortable lounge with the buffet of food and the mostly sleeping people and babies and am filled with a sense that this has been something of a miracle.  That it all came together as it did, and that no one got hit by a scooter, sick from eating insects, or wounded from a skirmish that you'd think would be inevitable when five people spend almost every waking moment together navigating...well, just look at the list in bold above.  

So thank you, Mark Woodward.  You're our hero.  And thank you to our amazing hosts.  It's funny (and a little sad), every single city we visited ended with my asking Mark a little wistfully, "Don't you think we could be happy here?"  And he'd always reply by reminding me this was VACATION.  Maybe, but our hosts sure made us feel like we were right at home.

The Christmas tree goes up in the Woodward house
way later than it goes up in the shopping districts of KL

The guys and Reeve

Mike and Caroline on the Mekong River. 

In front of the Ho Chi Minh Mausoleum in Hanoi with Nathan and Kristi

Markus, Eli, Daniel, Matias, and Micah in Hanoi

Anyway, somewhat miraculously, the fun times aren't over.  At some point we will exit the Miracle Lounge and board that elusive Kenya Airways flight and go back to the motherland.  

Kenya, here we come!

For more pictures and a little photo tour I made on google maps, check out the old facebook page.  I tried to include pictures that aren't just the usual travelogue pictures and I've tried to embed the map here but no can do, and at this hour it seems my brain refuses to figure it out.  

Oh, and first place in last week's quiz goest to Jannie Armstrong, who came back to claim his rightful place as head honcho of all Southeast Asia knowledge, being a former resident of Laos, himself.  Second place goes to the amazing Nancy Woodward, faithful reader and loyal grandmother.  Alas, there can be no third prize, for there was no third entrant.  

PS, Forget Hazal.  We saw Star Wars!!!!!!  On opening day!  And it was goooood.

Another Quiz!

In Cambodia with our host

Since we've left Mekelle, the theme of this blog has changed significantly, mostly due to Mom now writing about seeing beaches and temples rather than encountering new experiences or undergoing adventures, which was the theme back before November 9th. Well, with me back in charge this week... I won't write about wild goose chases or thick skin or taking on a difficult language (references you'd understand if you were a regular reader of our blog). Those days are behind us and ahead of us, as we will return to Mekelle on January 1st. Even though we are living a very laid-back, easy life here in Southeast Asia compared to in Mekelle, the typical "here's what tour we did today" or "look at these mushy family pictures we took" - tourist things- will not be included in this week's edition. Instead, we're going to take another quiz! Yay... 

1. Who did we see in the capital of Cambodia? Give the capital's name and our hosts' names.
2. How many people were killed in the Khmer Rouge-orchestrated Cambodian genocide of the 1970s?
3. What is the largest city in Vietnam, by population?
4. How many U.S. troops were in Vietnam at the war's peak in 1968?
5. What was the name of the Khmer king who oversaw construction of the temple Angkor Wat?
6. What are the respective names of the Cambodian and Vietnamese currencies?
7. What European power was the main colonial influence on Cambodia and Vietnam?
8. What are the respective colors of the Cambodian and Vietnamese flags?
9. Name both of the insects that we ate for desert in Cambodia.
10. What is the official language of Cambodia?
11. Why is Ho Chi Minh City called Ho Chi Minh City?
12. What is the name of the delicious noodle soup Vietnam is famous for?
13.  What is the name of the French inspired sandwich that Vietnam is famous for?
14. What is meant by the Ho Chi Minh Trail?
15. How many Vietnamese units of currency is $100?

Bonus Question: Through which countries does the Mekong River flow?

1st place prize: A pair of elephant-themed fancy pants
2nd place prize: A short lesson in the language of Cambodia from our host there
3rd place prize: Fresh, deeply fried insects (to eat)

If you're not too lazy to take our quiz, just post your answers in the comments either on this blog or on Mom's Facebook post. Special thanks to Micah, my younger brother, for helping me with the quiz questions.

Just to make friends in cold D.C. jealous...This is
Lazy Beach, near Sihanoukville, Cambodia.  Mom
took a day to herself there.

Us boys snorkeling in
Sihanoukville, Cambodia.  We also cliff-jumped and went fishing
with Dad that day.

Cruising on the Mekong River

Our hotel in Saigon is in a little alley that has a busy
market in it.

Notre Dame Cathedral in Saigon

View of the Saigon River from the Bitexco Tower

P.S.: I could care less about Hazal.

A Bird's Eye View of Pants Run Amok

With Mike and Caroline at Fat Boys Burgers in Phnom Penh

As usual, traveling through Asia and trying to write a weekly blog presents some challenges; namely what can we include or not include that will give a faithful account of the experience?  Since beginning this blog, I think it’s fair to say I’ve never been so torn about what to write.  Everything we’ve experienced seems to need to be shared urgently, but none of the events and experiences would fit comfortably together in one blog.  So I’ve decided to go meta on this one.  I’ve decided to cram language confusion, sight-seeing, funny pants, more fights at religious places, seeing Mike and Caroline, and genocide under the overly generous banner of “A bird’s eye view” of a family on a trip; the highs, the lows, and the guilt. What does that mean practically?  It means trying to understand Mark’s niggling concern that we’ve been vacationing for “too long”.  It means trying to appreciate the good, the band and the ugly.  And for me, who cannot survive without laughter, it means closing my eyes at the end of a tough day and trying to focus, with gratitude, on the good things humanity has to offer; like funny pants.

Tough day?  You’re probably thinking, “How dare you talk about tough days?”  Well, anyone who knows a little about the history of Cambodia will remember the genocide that occurred here between the years 1975 and 1979.  I suppose it’s always loomed large in my imagination because I was born in 1972 and the Vietnam War and Southeast Asia in general had captivated so much of the world for so long.  So I grew up aware that something bad had happened in Cambodia, understood vaguely that a communist group of revolutionaries had swept through and decimated the country with their insane visions of a peasant utopia and egalitarian society, and that perhaps as many as 1.5 million people perished under this twisted vision.

Building A at Tuol Sleng; the Vietnamese arrived here in 1979 to find prisoners who'd been
bludgeoned to death as the Khmer Rouge fled

It’s one thing to know this in the abstract and even to write about it (which I think I did for my IB history exam). But to go to the genocide museum here in Phnom Penh and to see the rooms where tens of thousands of innocent Cambodians (men, women, and many children), were tortured to death, and to see the instruments of torture, to look at their pictures and then see pictures of the killing fields, where their poor bodies were put to a brutal end because there was no space to bury them at the site of the museum (a former school turned torture factory) - to see these things was frankly mind-blowing.  Of the thousands that passed through Tuol Sleng, which is how this particular interrogation site was known, only 7 survived.  Unimaginable that they even survived!  

It is forbidden to take pictures from inside the rooms

Here are the ten cardinal rules prisoners were given prior to interrogation:

1. You must answer accordingly to my questions.  Don’t turn them them away.
2. Don’t try to hide the facts by making pretexts this and that.  You are strictly prohibited to contest me.
3. Don’t be a fool for you are a chap who dare to thwart the revolution.
4. You must immediately answer my questions without wasting time to reflect.
5. Don’t tell me either about your immoralities or the essence of the revolution.
6. While getting lashes or electrification you must not cry out at all.
7. Do nothing, sit still and wait for my orders.  If there is no order, keep quiet.  When I ask you to do something, you must do it right away without protesting.
8. Don’t make pretexts about Kamuchea Krom in order to hide your jaw of traitor.
9. If you don’t follow all the above rules, you shall get many many lashes of electric wire.
10. If you disobey any point of my regulations you will get either ten lashes or five shocks of electric discharge.

I can tell you from the pictures we saw that ten lashes or five shocks would have constituted gentle treatment.

Tuol Sleng used to be a school before the Khmer Rouge took it over.  This was once a swing set,
and was converted into a gallows.

More than anything else, the question I left with was not “how can humanity be capable of this?”.  Anyone who’s visited the Holocaust Museum in DC, or remembers the Rwandan genocide will understand that no society is free of the potential for extreme evil.  The question I had was really, “How in four short years could so much damage be done to an entire country?”  It requires diligence, planning, discipline - all attributes we would normally praise, but which under the circumstances were applied to systematically wiping out an entire class of intellectuals, their children, and seemingly absolutely anyone else, including - eventually, and in a case of perverted justice - some of the very people who started the whole thing.  It’s shocking how quickly you can obliterate a country, if you just put your mind to it.

These are painful, important things to see, and we were glad that the boys could see them, too, though I doubt they’ll take quite the same lessons from it.  Something about being a parent makes you feel more personally connected to these kinds of events, makes you imagine the horrors more intensely.  I was not feeling well last night (was battling Mark’s juicy cold of a few weeks ago) and I was trying so hard to fall asleep but kept being awakened by the specter of those eyes from the pictures, the haunted faces in black and white.  

I am not ashamed to say that I asked Mark, who was reading up on the history of the Khmer Rouge, to show me something funny on the computer, and I fell asleep to a clip of Jimmy Fallon, Martin Short, and Steve Martin cracking each other up.  

If the bird’s eye belonged to the spirits of those departed souls from that era, what would they have said of that moment when I chose to ignore their terrified stares in favor of comedy?  I hope they’d be forgiving.

But here is where I apply a jarring change in tone, because sometimes that’s the only way to move on from traumatic imagery.  The good news is that we are safely here in Cambodia, beautiful country where my brother Mike and Caroline live and which we’ve been eager to visit for years.  They welcomed us into their lovely home late on Tuesday night, Mike wearing a t-shirt that made the following reasonable claim: “Surely not everyone was kung-fu fighting”.  They have taught us some critical Khmai words which at this moment I have trouble remembering.  We told them about some of the good conversations we’d had in Siem Reap.  Here’s but one example involving Mark who will always research a menu to death before ordering:

Mark:  I see here that you have a special Khmer curry, but you also have Amok.  What’s the difference?

Waiter:  It different.

Mark:  Yes, but how?  One is a curry, and the other is….?
Waiter:  Amok.

Mark:  Thank you.  I’ll take the curry.

All was well eventually and we finally figured out what Amok was.  Cambodians are so considerate that they even included an article about it in the Angkor Air inflight magazine!

Cambodians are so polite, so pleasant.  Mark, who has been known to be a bit of an impatient traveller, went to a ticket agent in Siem Reap to inquire when the plane was arriving to take us to Phnom Penh, and that agent disarmed him so thoroughly with questions about how he’d enjoyed Cambodia up until that point, that Mark completely forgot why he’d gone up to the guy in the first place and returned to his seat after being told, “Thank you for your admire!”

To continue with stories about Mark, it has to be said, though Mark won’t appreciate me for including this, that our family was involved in another scuffle at a religious site, this time in Siem Reap, where Micah was denied entry into a temple that would have required him to navigate a steep staircase.  Both Mark and I were outraged, since (no offense to elderly people) the frailest old folks were allowed to go up and down those stairs without hindrance.  But I, you see, made my opinion known calmly and went about my business.  Mark, on the other hand, tried to sneak poor Micah in via a side entrance.  I got a running commentary from Daniel and Eli once we were at the top of the temple and had - of course - a bird’s eye view of things.  Daniel said, “Hey, Dad seems to be in the temple grounds with Micah.”  And then a moment later, I heard Eli say, “Uh oh, Dad’s been detained.”  And I, loving wife that I am, said “Dad’s on his own.”  I feared the worst; that they’d confiscate his ticket and kick us all out of Angkor Thom entirely, maybe even ban us from entering any other temples, like Ankgor Wat!  But again, Cambodians are the nicest people, they were so polite to Mark and just asked him gently to leave.  He left, but I won’t make any comments about his comportment.

The deadly staircase of certain pre-adolescent death at Baphuon Temple

An aerial shot of Mark and Micah.  I should have known from Mark's determined stride
what he was up to...

Thank goodness, Mark didn't get the rest of our temple passes revoked.  If I had to leave without seeing Angkor Wat,
I don't even know....

Other good things: On day one in Phnom Penh, Caroline took me for a foot massage.  Now, anyone who knows me knows that I am a little wary of massages.  I always fear that they’ll break something in me.  Like I might have to say one day, “Back in 2017, I had a massage in Bangkok.  Sadly, since that day I’ve only ever been able to sit comfortably on my left butt cheek.”  What if after this foot massage, they pulled one or two toes so hard that I never again run another half-marathon?  My fears were unfounded, all my toes are in working order, and while I don’t feel like my legs could now belong to Steve Austin (ha!  See if you can place that reference, kids!), I do think it was a nice way to spend an afternoon; having toes pulled and reading about Megan Markle, thinking not about genocide but about Buckingham Palace and mixed-race royalty.

Well, I can’t end without claiming my pride in my son Micah.  Back in Bangkok, I saw a full-grown man wearing some pants which prompted me to tell Mark, “That man has relinquished the right to be called a man.”  My arrogant, sexist, American tendencies in full bloom, I challenged anyone in my family to sport a pair of such pants for one full day in public and receive a handsome reward.  Micah happily took up that challenge, and by the day’s end, we had purchased a baggy pair of elephant patterned pants that he would wear in exchange for McDonald’s followed by Dairy Queen.  

He wore these pants in Siem Reap, and I discovered how small-minded and petty I was when I saw how many people joined him in the universe of fancy pants, proudly encasing their legs in patterns and colors that would not be welcomed in their more conservative European capitals.  And so I say to Micah, good for you, my young and fearless son.  May the bird’s eye view hold you in more favor than your less fashionable mom!

These are the little things, I suppose, that right my universe.  I don’t know, Mark is probably right, we may be off work for too long; things do start to feel a little wobbly - you get a little rootless.  But then you see something that reaches into your soul and makes you glad you’ve been so lucky.  What is it that decides we are the ones who get to travel around and take silly pictures of clown pants, laughing at Jimmy Fallon and wishing Megan Markle and her freckles well, only a few decades removed from the unspeakable terrors endured in this same country?  I don’t know.  But I’ll take it, with deep, deep gratitude.

PS, Still no word on Hazal, though if there's any justice in pretend Istanbul, she'll have been sent to juvie.  Instead, I will leave you with the top twenty fancy pants of Siem Reap.  I was suffering from a bad cold, and used the opportunity to catalog these technicolor pants as a distraction.  They appear in no order of greatness.  I am emboldened by our low but faithful readership and do not fear being sued; I won't blur any of the pant-wearers' faces.  Why should I?  They should be proud of themselves.  Additionally, I don't know how to blur faces in pictures. I was about to edit/crop certain pictures before I realized that on the edges of a frame, another pair of fancy pants miraculously appeared.

PPS, Mark makes the point that many men-folks wear these pants because at temples you're not allowed to reveal your knees.  I say that it's easy enough to wear long shorts.  No, these men wear fancy pants because that's what they're about.