A Christmas Letter
Dear Family and Friends,
Having seen my parents write a Christmas letter for years, I always wondered what it would be like to write my own. The genre seems like a challenging task--to encapsulate an entire year of palatable news into a page or page and a half. Now that I have a bit of a nuclear family myself including a wife and a kitten, I feel up to the task.
In general news, Jena and I finished up our time in Turkey over the past year from January to July. We spent lots of time with our American friends, Paul and Cece, and with our Polish friend Justyna. With Paul and Cece, we often went on adventures to Cappadocia and to the coast. Paul and I, and sometimes Jena and Cece, would go on night-hikes in addition to day-hikes because hiking at night is a wonderful sensory experience. One night, we were trying not to bust or slash open our ankles on sharp white boulders that were lit up by the moon; in the distance were dark castle-y outlines of Roman ruins and the Mediterranean Sea. Spending time with Justyna was of a different nature, though she also went hiking with us at times. Each week Justyna and I would meet in the instructor lounge at our university and discuss the poems and short stories that I had assigned for my American literature class. It was akin to a book club with only two participants; in addition to these meetings being intellectually refreshing amid the day-to-day grind of teaching basic English, they also helped me prepare my lessons.
In August, after a brief and very pleasant trip back to the States, Jena and I moved to Thailand. When we rode from the airport to our hotel in our university's shuttle van, what struck me were similarities among developing countries. Due to my travels in North America, Mexico serves a baseline for comparison, and as much as Turkey reminded me of Mexico, so does Thailand. But this time instead of opening my eyes to an industrial city in the desert surrounded by hills and a drastic, dragon spine of a mountain, I was seeing the chaos of the tropics: tuk-tuks speeding down the shoulder of the clogged up highway, messes of power lines on the telephone poles, and more shades of green than I have ever seen in my life.
Overall, life is better for us here in Thailand. The university we work for is more developed, the society is less conservative, and the climate is perpetually warm. As I write, I am sitting on our balcony in a tanktop, and birds are chirping from the green trees rising up from a grassy green lawn. It's in stark contrast to scenes like this:
To wrap up this letter attempt at a concise Christmas letter, I had better dedicate a paragraph to each of the other members of the family, Jena and Egg. Work at our new university is better for Jena. After a semester of demonstrating her skills as a writing teacher of General English classes, she has just found out that she will be teaching a rigorous Reading and Writing class to English majors in addition to her other classes. During our last six months in Kayseri, Jena learned to drive stick-shift on the lawless roads of Turkey, and she now drives our pickup confidently around our Chiang Rai. She continues to make me feel lucky that she's my wife. On a daily basis, she helps me stay in touch with reality by challenging my frugal ascetic lifestyle with her insistence that we make our lives more comfortable and sustainable by buying things like a water-heater for our shower, a washer for our clothes, and a couch for our living room. Overall, she's a daily inspiration to me.
Egg. ... Egg is our kitten. He was born in mid or late August in a town that borders Myanmar, and our best guess is that he's mostly a Burmese Shorthair cat. Each day he grows larger, and I worry that he'll outgrow the small cat door that I built for him this weekend. We have begun to allow him to explore the world without a leash or constant supervision, and he has taken a liking to patches of sunshine, the smells of the gutter, and staring at ants. His is loving, playful, and quite chatty with his little chirps.
Jena and I look forward to another year together at our new home in Thailand. What we may lack in salary, we make up for in the quality of life. I remember a day in high school when my French teacher went around the room asking us what we needed for a good life. The purpose was to solicit use of the phrase, "J'ai besoin de" (I need). Most of my classmates provided cliché answers like, "For a good life, I need a big house." "For a good life, I need a nice car." When it was my turn, I wasn't sure whether my grammar was correct, but I said, "Pour une bonne vie, j'ai besoin d'être content." I think my teacher had to correct the grammar, but she and I seemed happy that my answer was out of the norm. Here's to another year of looking for moments of contentment in a sea of bizarreness and mundanity.
Best,
Alan
Paul, Cece, and I searching for an entrance to an underground city located underneath a castle in Nevşehir
In August, after a brief and very pleasant trip back to the States, Jena and I moved to Thailand. When we rode from the airport to our hotel in our university's shuttle van, what struck me were similarities among developing countries. Due to my travels in North America, Mexico serves a baseline for comparison, and as much as Turkey reminded me of Mexico, so does Thailand. But this time instead of opening my eyes to an industrial city in the desert surrounded by hills and a drastic, dragon spine of a mountain, I was seeing the chaos of the tropics: tuk-tuks speeding down the shoulder of the clogged up highway, messes of power lines on the telephone poles, and more shades of green than I have ever seen in my life.
The hills of Kayseri (left) and the perpetual construction of Thailand (right)
Overall, life is better for us here in Thailand. The university we work for is more developed, the society is less conservative, and the climate is perpetually warm. As I write, I am sitting on our balcony in a tanktop, and birds are chirping from the green trees rising up from a grassy green lawn. It's in stark contrast to scenes like this:
Paul and his freezing hair while skiing and snowboarding on Mt. Erciyes
Jena and I on a winter hike with Justyna in Cappadocia (left) and Jena on our second day in Thailand (right)
Jena and Baby Egg
Egg. ... Egg is our kitten. He was born in mid or late August in a town that borders Myanmar, and our best guess is that he's mostly a Burmese Shorthair cat. Each day he grows larger, and I worry that he'll outgrow the small cat door that I built for him this weekend. We have begun to allow him to explore the world without a leash or constant supervision, and he has taken a liking to patches of sunshine, the smells of the gutter, and staring at ants. His is loving, playful, and quite chatty with his little chirps.
Jena and I look forward to another year together at our new home in Thailand. What we may lack in salary, we make up for in the quality of life. I remember a day in high school when my French teacher went around the room asking us what we needed for a good life. The purpose was to solicit use of the phrase, "J'ai besoin de" (I need). Most of my classmates provided cliché answers like, "For a good life, I need a big house." "For a good life, I need a nice car." When it was my turn, I wasn't sure whether my grammar was correct, but I said, "Pour une bonne vie, j'ai besoin d'être content." I think my teacher had to correct the grammar, but she and I seemed happy that my answer was out of the norm. Here's to another year of looking for moments of contentment in a sea of bizarreness and mundanity.
Me 'n Egg
Best,
Alan
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