ExpatExpert travel

I have way too many travel tales to count from the days I swanned around the world on speaking tours as the Expat Expert.

Given my short term memory issues, I know I will find it hard to remember all of them. Luckily, I have been reminded of a few by my best friend Mary Farmer (with whom I would faithfully correspond from the road) and I couldn't resist posting this convenient list she has provided me with:

• getting arrested in Switzerland at a conference and being the only member of the group taken away in a police car...for not having a bus ticket..

• sitting on a plane next to: pizza eater; guy picking his feet; obnoxious butt-crack guy..

• waiting to board plane and having to intervene with racist Air Canada ground personnel screaming at Chinese tour group (in Toronto)..

• the horror and dismay when I realized new security rules meant I could no longer carry my pre-departure 'mommy's juice'.. 

• any or all of the travels I made as half of the JoRo show with expat author, publisher and mentor Jo Parfitt..

• my horrific tales of encountering border, customs, immigration and security people around the globe (refusing me entry to the US because I was the only one who ever answered the question about working there honestly)..

• schlepping my books with me everywhere, to sell when I got there..

• my reception from the gracious group in Berlin who expected me to show up, in the middle of frigging nowhere, on my own, with my books..    

• schlepping said books through the London underground and then being mistaken for the catering staff when I finally showed up at the posh venue where I was the featured speaker (it was the British Foreign Ministry and they thought I was the sandwich lady).. 

• talking about how my father and father-in-law 'literally put their heads in the oven' over my marriage to Rodney to the German Diplomatic wives association at the Reichstag in Berlin..

• calling my BFF from Johannesburg to say how much I valued our friendship before I went off--thinking I would get killed by a lion--on a private safari in Kruger with two guys I met at a conference in Paris who invited me to speak in South Africa..

• the time I called her from the south of Chile where I was staying--by myself, without a single word of Spanish--at the Pucon home of my lovely Chilean friend who offered me the use of it for a week of utter silence..

• launching A Moveable Marriage in Southeast Asia at the height of the SARS epidemic because I had a new sponsor I didn't want to let down..

Thanks Mary! I'll get right on these stories.....