Where to go?

We received our bid list last week. For those of you not up with Foreign Service lingo, the bid list is the list of job assignments available to me for my onward post. Although the list has about 400 different jobs around the world, because of many different limitations, there are really only about 20 that we need to be concerned with. I have to submit my list in about a month with 20 options ranked in preference.

We’re still in the research phase at this point, but we do have a few that we think we would really like. We also have a few that we would really not like. Hopefully, we’ll get on the former.

There is a good assortment from which to choose. We have your traditional “nice” assignments like Sydney, Auckland, Paris, Brussels, and various Canadian posts. We have “hard” places like Monrovia, Port-au-Prince, Algiers, Lagos, Tashkent, and Addis Ababa. We have some more exotic locales like Singapore, Bamako, Baku, Fiji, Casablanca, and Mumbai.

I wish the process moved a bit quicker. I’m already tired of thinking about it and we haven’t even turned in our list yet.