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Originally posted on The Displaced Nation:

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By

vahiju

(Morguefiles).

Today we begin a serial novel by Callista Fox, called Suite Dubai. Recalling her childhood as a Third Culture Kid in the Middle East, Callista had a story in her head that wouldn’t go away: “There was this girl, young, vulnerable, naive, walking along a concourse in an airport, among men in white robes and checkered scarves and woman in black gauzy material. Where was she going? What would happen to her there?” Sounds tantalizing, doesn’t it? On that note, here’s the very first part of Episode 1…with 7 more parts to come. (Warning: Highly addictive!)

—ML Awanohara

When Rachel walked through the sunlit terminal at the Dubai airport, her student-loan payment was a month past due; her credit card, maxed. She had thirty-six dollars in her bank account and twenty-three in her…

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Reblogged from The Displaced Nation:

Today we begin a serial novel by Callista Fox, called Suite Dubai. Recalling her childhood as a Third Culture Kid in the Middle East, Callista had a story in her head that wouldn't go away: "There was this girl, young, vulnerable, naive, walking along a concourse in an airport, among men in white robes and checkered scarves and woman in black gauzy material.

Read more… 1,393 more words

You hear about our nation’s debt all the time. How it’s ruining our economy. How it weights down future generations. How the most important thing we could do is cut down on spending even if that means layoffs of public sector employees, even if it means a smaller investment in education, even if it means letting infrastructure and environmental problems fester. Sure, our children might have a debt clock with a lower number, but without investment in education they may not be able to compete in the global marketplace.

Here are five facts to keep in mind:

Most of the money we owe, is to ourselves. It’s true we owe money to foreigners but that only accounts for about 34 percent of the pie. The rest is what we owe ourselves: US Individuals and Institutions, US Social Security Trust Fund, and the U.S. Military Retirement Fund. So comparing our national borrowing to that of a family with a too-big mortgage or six maxed-out credit cards is a like comparing a dog to a cat or a pear to a grape. It might work if a man loaned money to his wife from their bank account to buy a car so she could get to work and because the job she now had transportation to was many hundred times the number of the money they took from their checking account…The point is, the US economy is way too complex to compare it with that of a family.

In WWII we owed a much greater percentage of our GDP than we do today. We never paid that debt back. Our economy grew so big that the debt we owed, mostly to ourselves, became irrelevant. And all that debt didn’t hamstring the economy because our country experienced years of robust growth after the war.

Yes, we owe money to other nations, including China, Japan and Brazil, but they owe us money too. And we actually earn more from our assets abroad than we pay to foreign investors.

Great Britian has had a debt exceeding 100 percent of its GDP for the last 81 of 170 years. And while this isn’t an ideal situation, it hasn’t been catastrophic. It’s important for any nation to strive for a low debt-to-GDP ratio, but it’s not more important than fixing our bridges and roads and it certainly isn’t more important than investing in education, which yields dividends for decades to come. Let’s keep the debt down, but let’s not keep our country down in the process.

Something to Celebrate

Our deficit is falling, which means we’re moving in the right direction. In 2009 our deficit was just over 10.2% of our GDP. This year it fell to 4.2% of our GDP.

“None of it was awful. They weren’t starving. They weren’t homeless. But enough days repeat themselves and you can’t imagine any one day in the future being any different than the day before. This is how people fail, she thought. A little bit at a time.”–Suite Dubai

The only time Eiger doesn’t want to eat the new kitten…

The only time he doesn’t want to eat her, is when he’s eating something else.

Reblogged from That Artsy Girl's Book Blog:

Against all odds, Rachel, an unemployed college grad, lands a job at a new 5 star hotel in faraway Dubai and finds herself caught between a boss who seems to loathe her and the young, handsome owner of the hotel - Prince Khalid Al Zari. Thousands of miles from home and in a culture she doesn't understand, she tries to convince her coworkers, and herself, that she deserves her new position, that she can throw a grand opening for a King.

Read more… 365 more words

My husband and I have a recurring argument. It’s not really an argument. Most times it’s a playful competition about who had the superior high school experience. He grew up in Austin, Texas and went to Westlake High School. I went to four different high schools in four years and flew to and from school in business class on Swiss Air.

He sat across from me in a dimly lit restaurant, leaned back in his chair, and described football games on Friday nights. The lights, the stands full of football-crazy Texans, as if there is another kind of Texan. “You’ll never know what that was like,” he said, sipping his beer. He played football for Westlake High School and when I say played I mean he mostly sat on the bench, which he blames on being too tall and skinny. Still, on game days cheerleaders decorated his locker with his number cut from wrapping paper and sometimes left a box of candy. “When I walked out onto the field an announcer said my name and I heard the people in the stands cheer…” He can’t even finish the story. “You’ll never know what that was like.”

“And you’ll never know what it’s like to have a crowd of drunk Austrians throw garbage at you from the stands because they don’t know what a cheerleader is,” I replied.

He laughed, almost spitting out his beer.  Then he looked at me with something like pity.

“Don’t pity me,” I told him. “It’s one of my best stories.”

We walked out onto that field, marked for soccer not football, with the stands half-full because Austria was playing Australia in American-style football, which is not a big sport in Austria. It is so small an event that my boyfriend, a senior who’d played football in Miami, made the national team. Our boarding school offered cheer leading as an afternoon activity so we had someone to cheer for our basketball team when it played other boarding schools in the Austria-Germany area. I signed up because it sounded better than typing or drafting and my parents wouldn’t pay for dressage. We knew only a handful of cheers. None of us could name a proper jump, let alone do one. We wore white tennis skirts and blue sweatshirts and any color of hightop Reebok we owned. When we ran out onto the field to do our pathetic cartwheels the audience was quiet, a few laughed. True, the grass was wet and my roommate Samantha slipped and skidded on her chin. We didn’t have our routine perfected. And the Europeans don’t have cheerleaders and they don’t understand why these girls are jumping around on the field when there’s a game going on. They threw cigarettes and the waxed paper envelopes from their concession pretzels. I can’t say they ever grew to love us. It’s more likely that by the end of the halftime they had either run out of garbage or their arms got tired.

My husband laughed at this story, then rested his case.

“What did you do on the weekends?” I asked. “Besides football.”

“We rode around Austin, in cars, and threw bottle rockets at people.”

“Nice,” I said. I waited, letting him think I was impressed. Then I leaned back took a dramatic drink of beer and said, “We took taxis to a pub called Odyessea in the middle of old town Nicosia, Cyprus (my first boarding school) and drank Carlsberg beer with UN soldiers there to keep the peace between the Cypriots and the Turks. I saw a guy eat glass and had to run out of that place ducking chairs and tables when two guys, French Canadians, decided to fight over a girl.

“You were fourteen,” he points out. “I mean, that’s young to be in a bar.”

“There was no drinking age in Cyprus,” I said, ignoring his larger point. “Did your school take trips?” I gave him a sly smile, because I knew he couldn’t win this round.

“The Alamo,” he tells me. “And D.C.”

“Some weekends we stayed local or went to Paphos,” I told him, “a small port town on the western side of the island, the birthplace of Aphrodite, the goddess of love, and rented mopeds and drank on the beach and skinny-dipped in the lapis blue Mediterranean. But we also went to Cairo, Rhodes, Rome and Moskow–communist Russia back then. We rode horses near the pyramids of Giza and took a cruise down the Nile and in Moskow learned to barter cigarettes for those fur hats they wear.

“I thought you didn’t go to Russia.”

“My parents said it was too expensive, but most kids went. They came home parading their hats and their stories of drinking too much Vodka.”

“School dances,” he says. “Prom. You didn’t get to experience that. You missed out on the limos rides and tuxes. It was,” he said, “a pretty big deal.”

“Every weekend after Odyessea we went to a discotheque called Africana and danced under dizzying lights until curfew then grabbed a burger with onions from the cart across the street to eat on the taxi ride home to mask the alcohol on our breath.”

We’d had this discussion before so he knew what to say next. He knew my weakness. “You don’t know where you’re from.”

I glared at him, then scraped the label on my beer bottle with my thumbnail. When people ask where I’m from I get nervous and tell them I was born in Denver or say “I lived all over the place.” My husband knows I had to see a counselor for a while after moving back to the US because I was 20 and didn’t know how to drive or what to wear and had never been to prom and when I mentioned I’d lived in Riyadh, or went to school in Cyprus, or graduated from high school in Salzburg most people just blinked; they didn’t even know where those places were. I started to feel like I’d made the whole thing up, that my past was an interesting story I was telling myself. Psychologists have a name for this malady. It’s called Third Culture Kid.

The good thing about this upbringing is, you could drop me off in a tiny village in Italy or strand me at an airport in the Middle East and I’d find food, friends and like a loyal dog or migratory bird, eventually make my way back to my parents house in Saudi Arabia.

The bad thing: my parents finally moved me to Norman, Oklahoma and told me it was time to live there. Make a life there. I wasn’t as good at that. In fact, the only way for me to get over my anxiety was to tell myself that just like all the other places I’d lived, this was temporary. That the world was still out there and I had plenty of time to get back into it.

This last weekend a group of alumni from my school in Cyprus got together at a lake house in North Carolina. We stayed up late drinking beer and talked about how easy it was to become a global nomad and how difficult it was to go home. The first year was the toughest, we all agreed. Every one of us struggled. We don’t even have to say it. No one understands us like we do.

That’s the crux of the argument I have with my husband. He says he’s never seen people hang on to high school like we do. “Let it go, grow up.” But that’s the thing. Those people aren’t merely high school friends who can’t get their heads out of the 1980s, they are like family to me. You take a young girl and put her on a plane and send her thousands of miles away from her parents and sisters and brothers and she forms a surrogate family. She sees her classmates at breakfast and before lights out and raids the kitchen with them and has them hold her hair when she drinks too much Carlsberg beer. They get stranded in Zurich together and find a fun discotheque and a bouncing bridge and have cart races in the airport.

“That’s the difference,” I said. “Those people are like family. Yours were only friends.”

At the lake house I posed the question, “Would you trade it for a normal life?”

Not one of them said yes.

I wouldn’t either. Not even the part about the garbage. It’s one of my best stories.

Reblogged from LoungeTalkRadio:

A simple two-line email - sent to me at the beginning of May from a mysterious account named "W2Drive" - was all it took to put Manal Al-Sharif and I on the same path. A group of Saudi women were now renewing the call that began in 1990, when a group of prominent Saudi women, mainly from academia and conservative Riyadh society, drove their cars.

Read more… 63 more words

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