On the road to gawd only knows where

The entrance to Washington D.C.'s underwhelming Chinatown

We're off...almost. Unless something comes up at the last moment, tomorrow will kick off the start of our cross-country road trip, traveling from one Washington to the other, in the opposite direction of the trek we undertook back in the summer of 2015. When you're an American and life is throwing up too many curve balls, you answer the siren song of the open road, even if that means doing it with a wife and child in a ten-year-old Honda Accord, and not with a cool bebopper like Dean Moriarty in a 1949 Hudson Commodore.

And what has been vomited recently? A lot, for these past two years have been the roughest since I committed marital suicide just prior to the start of this century. My father died in late February 2020, unfortunately coinciding with the onset of COVID-19 in the U.S. (for the record he didn't pass because of the coronavirus). As a result of the pandemic, we left Addis Ababa under front office pressure, and ended up spending six months of our lives doing next to nothing holed up in an apartment in Arlington, Virginia, a half-year wasted that I will never get back. The coronavirus wiped out a long-planned and eagerly-anticipated trip to Japan's Chūbu region 中部地方 scheduled for the summer of 2020 - after traveling with Amber for a week in central and eastern Taiwan in 2018, we were going to do a 2½-week-long, father-daughter excursion to my favorite destination in the world. But alas, it wasn't to be. Our time in Arlington also coincided with bidding, a humiliating, confidence-shattering rigmarole where it quickly became apparent I haven't kissed enough asses cultivated a deep enough network to land any of the assignments I was aiming for (hence, the out-of-cone job I'll be doing in Beijing 北京).  When it was time to return to Ethiopia, the ongoing COVID-19 crisis teamed up with the outbreak of a civil war in the country's Tigray region to ensure that for the remainder of our tour we were marooned in Addis Ababa.

And that was just in 2020. In 2021 I learned the hard way that I have a certain heart condition that resulted in an unexpected trip to Pretoria, South Africa. Our return to the U.S. and the Washington, D.C. area proved to be less than triumphant, as two TIA's led to the discovery of an artery that needed to be cleaned out (and hopefully prevented anything worse from occurring, at least for the time being). As last year segued into this one, issues with concentration and memory retention continue, possibly cardio-vascular related, but possibly not, though a battery of psychological tests I recently undertook at least confirmed (contrary to popular belief) dementia isn't the issue. Finally, a recent sleep study concluded that the amount of time I stopped breathing (or experienced shallow breaths) during deep sleep periods was at a dangerous level, so it looks like I'll be using a CPAP machines at nights starting soon. As my sixth decade starts coming into view, so does the realization that the aging process absolutely bites the big one.

And then there's the fact that for the past seven months I've been "learning" Mandarin at FSI, i.e. being taught language I will never use for jobs that I will never perform, a waste of my time and your tax dollars. And all this in preparation to pack up and move to a country where nobody wants to be posted anymore, and which continues to adhere to a zero COVID policy, meaning we're going to be trapped in China with no escape (or at least no chance to get out and visit Taiwan, Japan et al) until the government faces up to reality and follows the rest of the world. In other words, for a very long time to come.

In case you haven't figured it out already, I'm having the proverbial existential (post) midlife crisis, wondering what the fuck I'm doing with (and have done to) my life (not to mention that of my family). Has this line of work been worth it, or would I have been better off had I not made some absolutely asinine mistakes twenty-plus years ago? Instead of dealing with bidding, EER's, front offices, language training, preclusions and all the other baggage that comes with this line of work, could I have been feeling my heart beating irregularly while contentedly watching the rest of the world pass me by in Matsumoto 松本 (or, perhaps, even Fukuoka 福岡)?

As they say, only time will tell. And according to my neurologist, if my current blood pressure readings don't change, I'll "live forever"! All I know is I'm getting too fragile old for this shit...

Photos are scant this time around. Amber is always complaining she never gets to see the local wildlife. Well, here she is encountering a deer:

My daughter has been playing Go 囲碁 (日)/圍棋 (中) ever since she started watching Hikaru no Go ヒカルの碁 while a kindergarten student in Taiwan. She didn't play much while we were in Ethiopia, but since returning to Virginia, she's been regularly going to Go club get togethers to hone her skills. She's also participated in a couple of tournaments at the National Go Center - during the most recent event she won 3 of her 4 matches, and came away with this T-shirt for her efforts:

I'm not really sure why I took this shot inside of one of the Metro stations, but it turned out rather well if I say so myself (and I do):

Speaking of Metro stations, a bird of prey keeps watch for its next meal outside East Falls Church:

Enjoying a tea and doughnut at Eden Center:

She may have come across a deer (see above), but Amber was a little perturbed when I showed her this photo taken during my daily morning stroll:

What 59 looks like:

59 also looks like this:

On our last weekend before departing into the American outback, we took the Metro into the district. D.C. has a rather pathetic Chinatown - many of the businesses there are representatives of well-known chains which happen to include their names in Chinese characters because, you know, they're in Chinatown. So when we learned there would be a community festival in Chinatown, we weren't expecting much, which at least ensured we wouldn't be disappointed. The local Go club was there to promote the game, but my daughter was too shy to go over and say hello:

We showed up just as the gentleman on stage was explaining that Lou Reed was a practitioner of the ancient Chinese martial art of tai chi 太极拳. I guess it gave something to do while he was waiting for the man:

There are remarkably few Chinese restaurants in Chinatown; according to the missus, many have closed in recent years. We had lunch at Reren Lemen, which was next door to a very non-Sino Nando's. My bowl of noodles was more akin to Taiwanese-style 拉麵 than the Japanese ラーメン I prefer:

You can question my choice of outerwear if you so desire, but note that one of the groups with a table at the Chinatown Community Festival was a Japanese tea ceremony club, staffed by kimono-wearing adherents. So there:

On a Saturday evening after sunset, the three of us went for a walk through the cemetery to look for fireflies. We were rewarded for our efforts (video courtesy of Shu-E):

What Father's Day 2022 looked like:

Although not a believer in omens, signs, spirits and other New Age/superstitious claptrap (preferring instead to take responsibility for my actions), I couldn't help but wonder if encountering a deer and three of her offspring playing in the local cemetery while on one of my last morning walks augured well for our upcoming adventure. In any event, it further annoyed Amber when I later showed her these videos. Serves her right for sleeping in:

As you can see, I was allowed to get surprisingly close:

Will this American road trip help to overcome the burnout being resulting from the existential blues? That's the RMB430,000 question. Stay tuned...

A final walk through the cemetery along with my daughter on the eve of our departure. No deer, but a lot of fireflies, none of which could be caught on camera