One of the good things about working for the State Department is that they usually do a good job of preparing you for the country where you’ll be living. Often this means language training as well as history and culture lessons, but for countries that are designated high threat, there’s a course that is affectionately known in the Foreign Service as “Crash and Bang.” The reasoning behind this will quickly become apparent.
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Well, hello, President’s Day. Where did you come from? I’m pretty sure I just celebrated Christmas…
I just finished what will probably be my last walk around downtown Nassau. I took a very similar route to my first exploratory walk two years ago. Not much has changed. The Starbucks is in a different place. But the guy outside the Bahamia store is still claiming that it “just opened” and the guy outside one of the jewelry stores is still claiming that they are having a going-out-of-business sale. And it was just as hot today as I remember it being on that first walk.
Well, the end of our tour is rapidly approaching. We have the Embassy Independence Day reception this weekend, the following weekend we will be (hopefully) finding an apartment, and the weekend after that will consist of final pack-out preparation. As usual, I feel like there’s so much to do and so little time. But in some of the time I probably should have been using to do something productive, I put together a slideshow of some of my favorite pictures from our two years here. (For those of you that want to compare, you can find something similar from our Kyiv tour here.)
The past month has felt a little hectic. Besides the impending sense of doom at the thought of our upcoming packout, here’s what else has been going on:
So I guess it’s a new year. At least that’s what somebody told me that those fireworks were a couple of weeks ago that caused the dog to pee all over the bedroom floor in the middle of the night. Welcome to 2011!
I just realized that I think I may have forgotten to mention that we have our next assignment. After all that waiting, then the research, and the discussions, the final outcome felt kind of anticlimactic. I think I kind of lost interest at some point about halfway through. Anyway, we’re back to Washington, DC for our next post. See? Pretty anticlimactic.
I’ve decided to revive my “Realities of Foreign Service Life” series — at least for this post. I should preface this all by saying that my commute this evening took 40 minutes. To go approximately 4 miles. You read that right — 4 miles in 40 minutes. As in a 10-minute mile. Or what I do on a treadmill. So you can probably see where this is headed.
The bidding process….what a difference a week makes. This time last week, we had definitely decided that we were going for Washington, DC jobs. (It was a particularly bad weekend here in The “it’s better in the” Bahamas that pushed us to that decision.) But now — who knows? We’re back looking at overseas jobs.
The bid list, that is. We finally got it on Tuesday afternoon of this week. Which means there have been many deep conversations and a general lack of sleep in our house for the past two nights. It’s going to be a long two months until bids are due.