Back to basics

Well, hello there! It has been too long. I don't have any good excuses so please just accept my apologies. I have written several posts lately, but am not quite ready to put them out there. I guess I am still just processing it all.

My husband and I had dinner with two of our closest friends here in The Netherlands and one made the comment that, before she knew it, it was as if their three month long trip touring Italy had never happened. I find myself feeling the same way...and I have been home less than two weeks.

And then I will have these completely random flashbacks or space out and my mind will wander to a cooking class in Chiang Mai or the tailor's shop in Hoi An. Today it wandered to Phonm Penh, Cambodia. I was riding my bike home from Bikram yoga. (Yes, I have gone back...more on that later.) It is just the strangest feeling to have images of the busy Phonm Penh streets rolling through my mind as my eyes see a group of five preteen Muslim children playing and flirting on the sidewalk just down from my street or I move out of the way of our local mechanic backing a car out of his tiny repair garage. The smells briefly come back to my noise and the heat even momentarily flushes my body. It is like being awake during a dream. I love it. And I commit myself today to trying to hold on to that and cherish it as long as it continues to happen.

The pictures posted above are moments caught in Phonm Penh. The hundreds of ceramics clung perilously to wires and hooks at a stall in the local market. The slums were a ghastly reminder just around the corner from our school of just how far Cambodia still needs to go. And the fruit which I have already forgotten the name of was actually pretty delicious. I finally got the nerve up to try it in Indonesia when another guest explained what it all was to me and how it should taste. My favorite has to be lizard skin fruit. That is the fruit in the first picture. It all reminds me that there are more kinds of food and people and families and lifestyles out there than anyone can imagine...and some of them are pretty sweet.

Today I had my first interview. Sitting there with a finance headhunter, it was all a bit too much to take seriously. We walked through my career history, breezing over my 'holiday' abroad. I want to stop him and point out that I did most of that trip on my own. It is something I am very proud of and still quite can't believe.

If I have to answer what I got out of it all, I guess I could say that, today, sitting in that interview, it gave me a cool, quiet confidence like I have never had in an interview. I was always one of those people that wants to put my best face forward and treated the interview like a performance. I said what I knew they wanted to hear. There were a few times where I had to consciously not do that, but the nervousness was gone. I could, with a straight face and conviction not only talk about myself, but also say that it was really important to me to work for a socially responsible company.

And, for the first time in a job interview, I told someone that I want to work for a micro financing institution and, if that is not possible for a non or for profit company that takes social responsibility seriously and has stayed committed even when it isn't convenient. There were a few things I didn't say or didn't quite say correctly, but I know that's okay. I am pretty sure he felt the same way. Don't we all? So that, today, those are the things my trip has given me.