Tag, You’re It!

Charlotte has tagged me as part of the Five Habits Meme. Thank you Charlotte! I am finally, and truly entering the blogging community.

What was I doing ten years ago? I was living in Beijing, had a darling 6 month old baby boy, and a darling 5 year old son. My husband was teaching at the Beijing Foreign Studies University, and I was working for an American PR agency with an office in downtown Beijing, directly opposite the legendary Friendship Store.

Five snacks I enjoy in a perfect, non-weight gaining world: Milka and Ritter Sport chocolate, English wine gums, thin Belgian butter biscuits, caramel pudding, and milkshakes.

Five snacks I enjoy in the real world: Peanuts, seaweed, raisins, cheese, fruit.

Five things I would do if I were a billionaire: Sponsor my husband’s sailing trips; fund exceptional educational opportunities for my children and their friends; hire the Stones to play at my birthday party; drink better wine; move to a bigger house.

Five jobs I have had:

1. Cook for a geological expedition to the north of Canada.
2. English teacher in China.
3. PR consultant
4. Freelance translator
5. Editor

Five habits:

1. Reading the Deutschland und die Welt page of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
2. Reading Spiegel Online
3. Having lunch with colleagues from different departments at SAP
4. Crawling into bed to give my son a back rub every morning as he awakes and every evening as he goes to sleep.
5. Playing loud music in the car (Hendrix, Bruce Springsteen, Amy Winehouse).

 Five places I have lived:

1. Almonte, a small town in Ontario, where I was born and grew up.
2. Montreal, Quebec, where I went to university.
3. Beijing, China where I met and married my husband.
4. Heidelberg, Germany.
5. My current home conveniently located directly beside the A5 near Heidelberg.

People I would like to get to know better:

All stolen from Charlotte’s blogroll: Caroline, the Globetrotter Mom, Ian at iansblog2, heidikraut at ginandteutonic, Ian in Hamburg at lettershometoyou.

Seven Years in Tibet

It is an opportune time to be reading Heinrich Harrer’s Seven Years in Tibet. I found a copy in a bookshelf at our friend’s flat in Lausanne and read a few pages while visiting her. She found her copy in the library of a Swiss chalet where she begged the innkeeper to allow her to keep the book in exchange for several detective novels. I enjoyed the first few pages so much that I asked my husband, a trawler of online secondhand bookstores, to get me a copy. Just a few days after we returned from that trip, I found a 1957 edition waiting for me at home.

When I first went to China, my students in Beijing would tell me how backward and medieval Tibet was. That China had liberated Tibet, and without that liberation, the Tibetans would still be living in feudal conditions. On my very first days in Beijing in 1987, I ran into two Englishwomen who had just returned from Tibet. “Brilliant,” said one.

Despite seven years in Beijing, I never did get to the roof of the world. We toyed with the idea of going to Beijing for the summer Olympics this year, but then we decided that would be the worst time to visit China. And it still wouldn’t get me to Tibet.

But now there is a highspeed train that travels from Beijing in 48 hours to Lhasa. For our next trip east.