Settle down

My job last year taught me a lot. I can turn 100 + e-mails into an organized to-do list with next steps and follow up dates within an hour. I’m an amazingly relaxed flyer, and I can get through a security line at the airport faster than the character in the movie “Up In the Air.” Sorry, Clooney. I am also, great at living out of a suitcase. It’s an art form really: the skill of being able to unpack enough for a convenient, easy stay but not enough to become so comfortable you forget where you put everything. I have to say, Shira was not as skilled. Hour one in a new hostel and it would look like she purposely shook her bag upside-down, like an animal marking its territory. She got better though – and pretty much had to with all the moving around we did. Over the course of four weeks we stayed in 10 different places, never staying at any one more than three nights. Thrown into the mix were also a few too many overnight buses and one overnight train ride that I’m still not ready to re-live yet. Even if the plastic seats had been nailed properly to the ground, and even if it hadn’t been a steady 40 degrees, it wouldn’t have mattered because I spent the night with aggressive food poisoning, making best friends with the squat toilet.  

            Even this past week, spending time on the beautiful southern islands of Koh Phangan and Koh Payam wasn’t necessarily a “settled” existence, as we were doing things each day that we’d never done before. Scuba diving through schools of electric-colored fish, navigating the circus that was the Full Moon Beach Party, even unabashedly skinny dipping on a beach, on an island, with nobody else around. These aren’t things you do when you’re “settled down.”

            But now, I’ve seen Shira off, and the next few weeks I’ll be living, actually unpacking, and volunteering in Chiang Mai. I guess living at a backpackers isn’t settled, really, but I envision myself getting to know the area, making friends and even having a favorite place to get spicy papaya salad. And that’s as settled down as I’d like to get.