Going Home to Not Home

One of the people I hung out with for one day, forgot their name, and his home. (Melaka, Malaysia)

I've always been one of those people who tosses around the word "home" rather carelessly.  Home is wherever I plan on sleeping that night.  I will call my mother's or my father's house "home" just as quickly as I will call a hotel room or a friend's sofa "home."  So, I guess I am "home" now.  I'm "home" in Beijing, and of all these places I've been, I'm very much aware that I am using that word incorrectly.  This too-white apartment with the paint crumbling off the walls, non-potable water,  and floors that are always dirty is not home.  

My apartment a few days before I went for summer holiday. (Beijing)

I own a house, as much as a person with another 15 years of mortgage payments can say she owns a house.  It's a decent house.  It's not too old, 1997, with a two-car garage and interior walls painted the color I wanted.  You know.  The American Dream or whatever sans the dog and husband.  But one day I realized I owned two sofas, TWO SOFAS, and freaked out.  All my stuff is in storage, there are renters in my house, and I don't think... I really... ever... need/want to live in that house again.

Yep, more than half paid off.  It's not a bad little house, really.

I have typed up and deleted this post a few times over the past week.  Yes, I have been back in Beijing for a week now.  Now, I am not terribly clever (as you have probably picked up if you don't already know me in real life), but I didn't think it was odd that I was sleeping a lot these past seven days.  And drinking a lot.  And not eating.  And just laying in bed.  And not interested in leaving the apartment or getting dressed.  Oooooh.... I'm a little, I dunno, post-travel depressed.  Ah, well.  Okay then. Now that THAT'S labeled, I am really glad I never shared any of the other posts I pecked out on my phone.  Mostly, the theme was, I'm not in love with Beijing.  Okay.  Fine.  Let's take a little time to revisit and process this incredible summer vacation you had limiting yourself to just looking at the different "homes."  

My first "home" outside the US when Jeremy and I lived in a dorm over a pub.
(London, 2006)

Japan.  I didn't really take any pictures in Japan this last trip that I want to put here. It seems kinda rude to post pictures of people without their permission even if your not exactly internet famous.  Japan has always felt like home.  I did a summer-study there back in, I guess, 2007?  I spent in a year in Numazu, and returned the year after that to live in Tokyo again.  I love how easy it is for me to get from one place to another via train, subway, bus, or plane.  I love that, while I DO NOT speak Japanese, I speak a HELL of a lot more Japanese than I do Mandarin or Khmer.  I am really comfortable in Japan and visiting Japan, I think, will always feel a bit like visiting that one aunt people like in TV shows.  

My storage-space-accessed-via-ladder/bedroom,
Tokyo 2007

Mt. Fuji from my apartment
Numazu, 2012

Fangirled hard in Tokyo, 2013

Japan wasn't really even part of the vacation as much as the pre-game.  The vacation started in....K.L.
I didn't bother to take a photo of my hotel, I don't think, in Kuala Lumpur.  I remember it was clean.  The bathroom was SO MUCH NICER than my apartment (flushing your T.P.?  No problem).  It was a generic, dull, business hotel with just one little perk that stands out.  

This was my neighborhood for a week (Brickfields, KL, Malaysia)       

I don't want to actually go back and re-read my posts from the time.  My memories of Kuala Lumpur where of good Indian food, interesting shops, Bollywood movies, and that Middle Eastern architecture I love.   This picture, along with a few pictures of parks and my walk into K.L.'s downtown, is my memory of Kuala Lumpur. Colorful.  Great smells from the flowers and food.  The call to prayer in the background.  I say I want to go back but I REFUSE to ruin my great memories.

Let's see... next, we hopped on an over night plane to... Melbourne.  Oh yeah.  That AWFUL hostel.  I did one night above that terrible bar and discovered Air BnB.  I should have taken pictures with my hosts!  I went from that dingy, uncomfortable, freezing room to...

A heater! Blankets!  An assortment of teas!  Civilization!!!
(South Brighton, Australia) 

Not only did I love living in the posh area of Brighton outside Melbourne, but my hostess was a charming woman who seemed to like my boring stories. We chatted every evening by an actual fire while her giant dogs lolled about on the floor.  In the morning, Rainbow Lorikeets and other parrots flocked to her garden and made a grand noise.   My hostess let me blather on about my skydiving adventure and how much I was loving the Australian wildlife.  I was reluctant to leave not expecting to make a friend with my host as easily in my next destination, Sydney.

That white building with the red roof?  My home for a week.
(Kurraba Point, Australia)

I had two options for getting into the city center in Sydney.  One, take a ferry that passed directly next to the Sydney Opera House (which I did MANY times and took MANY pictures), or walk 3 miles into town crossing over the Sydney Harbor Bridge.  Almost unbelievable.   My hostess, again, turned out to be a lovely woman--who worked way too much and was rarely home--so I really felt like I lived in this incredible apartment on the bay with the world's best flatmate who drove me to the BEST THAI I'VE EVER HAD my first night there.  See that patch of green grass by the water?  A couple of nights I plopped on that grass and watched the boats and ships pass by when I found myself a bit deep in my own head.  Melbourne was pleasant, but Sydney felt RIGHT. After realizing that military time is just more practical than the stupid A.M./P.M. system and almost missing my flight, I headed up the planet, across the equator, and back into Asia in the middle of summer.

This not terribly impressive photo actually shows a lot of the reasons why I love Taipei.

The fact I remember my host's name while I stayed in Taipei, at another Air BnB location, is kinda wondrous.  Henry was like the less racist, less angry, version of my Grandfather O'Brien.  Gruff, always correct, thought I was a damned fool more than twice, but actually liked me.  Now, I think I am the bee's knees.  I think I am cool, and my parents will usually agree with me, but... I've been told a lot, by many different people in many different countries, that I am not terribly likable.   I've been given descriptive words such as annoying, loud, boisterous, bitchy, and all sorts of other adjectives to describe my personality.  Okay, well.  So be it.  So, when I meet someone who actually likes me?  And, like, still likes me on day two?  Three?  FOUR?  That's... that's really cool.  In Taipei, I never spent a day alone.  I made friends left and right with Emotional Unstable French girls and The Most Interesting Man in the World.  Any hour of the day was a perfectly reasonable time to head out, early or late, and there were so many water options!  Rivers to bike along!  Boiling mud pots to photograph and hot springs to soak in!  Beaches to burn at!  Waterfalls and streams to hike to!  And with the free wifi and everyone's seemingly endless patience at my crap Mandarin, I felt like I could do anything and go anywhere.  I hated leaving Taiwan.  Leaving Taiwan meant I was over halfway finished with vacation, but now I was going to what I thought would be the more impressive, the more exotic...

Floating home on the Mekong (Vientiane, Laos)

 Ah.  The more on-the-hippy-trail.  At least Vientiane was, for most of the Europeans with the matching Deuter backpacks, just the transfer city.  In Vientiane, I had my own "apartment" which was really just a hotel room with a kitchenette.  In Vientiane, you can see all there is to see in one day, two if you eat a lot, and I had five days to kill.  And kill them I did.  I walked everywhere.  I sat along the river (which you may recall became something of a friend to me maybe because Vientiane was the only city I could spend an entire day and never say a word). More than any other place I have every visited before, I let myself be bored here and just watched the light change or a thunderstorm pass by.  Somehow, I quickly established a routine more than I did anywhere else.  I had My Walk.  I had a street with cafes and restaurants I liked (though I wasn't really hungry in Laos and only ate one proper meal a day, if that).  I had my favorite artists at the night market.  Five days was too much and too soon.  Off for the final leg...

This is as bad as the weather got.
(Siem Reap, Cambodia)

While I was in Cambodia, maybe because I spent a decent amount of time hanging off the back of a scooter or chilling in the back of a tuktuk, I really noticed all the different houses, all the different HOMES, people had.  The diversity of housing, from scraps of sheet metal and hope thrown together in a stagnate pond of run-off water and waste, to beautiful homes with giant, intricately carved, wooden doors, to... places like this.

Somewhere off a side road off route 67, Cambodia 

The poverty in Cambodia was, of course, just as bad as you might think in some places, but that rumored hospitality you hear about, those stories of people who have little but what they have, they have to share, was very apparent.  When I found myself temporary stranded on a dirt road in the middle of Nowhere, a family of farmers offered to let me sit under their house to get out of the sun and offered me some of whatever they were eating.  My tuktuk-driver-turned-friend invited me to his place for a few beers and apologized for the state of his plumbing (primitive toilet).  He then explained that, while the tap water is no good in Cambodia, that everyone in his little... collection of houses (tucked behind some trees behind a tourist restaurant in the Angkor Wat complex.  Technically illegal, but...), gathered rain water and told me very seriously that rain water is delicious. Community.  There we go.  It wasn't just houses and families where I wandered, but communities.

And now I am back in Beijing.  I don't have the colorful backdrop of K.L.  I don't have the exchange of stories by the fire like Melbourne or the everyday wow-factor of Sydney.  Beijing is too large, never mind CHINA, to just explore like Taiwan nor is it as easy for me to meet interesting people.  With the pollution, litter, and human waste on the sidewalks, Beijing's attractions have nothing on the simple beauty of Vientiane's uncelebrated temples and the Mekong River.  And while China has the hutongs, Siem Reap had the floating villages, the houses on stilts, and French Colonial apartments and hotels in town...  And while Las Vegas, Nevada or Mineral, Virginia may not be places I think of was home, the closest things I am ever going to have to community are there.  

And then you realize that, while all these places are nice and had aspects that could be home, none of them WERE home.  I don't have a home.  I might never have a home, or if I do, it will always be in hindsight, with the forgiving haze of erroneous memory to soften all the jagged edges.  People like me, who form such weak and fragile attachments to other people, can spend their entire life laying just the shallowest of roots before going off to the next place.  

Okay.  Home is going to have to just be where I sleep tonight.  If I am lucky, that place will have hot water in the taps and cold beer in the 'fridge.  If not, I can always hope the next Home will.