Beshert

I have a problem of wanderlust. I know I’m not at all alone or unique in this, and that it obviously isn’t really a problem, except that I experience it no matter where I am, like the opposite of living in the moment. I can be somewhere new and exciting, like Honduras, thinking about how I want to go to Vietnam (still never been). A small thing in terms of actual life problems, but maybe also some kind of comment on my inability to truly enjoy myself or be where I am. Oh well.

I mention that only because I started watching “Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat” today on Netflix as a way to give myself more places that I need to go, even though I’m in Switzerland, about to go to America next week, planning with Kasey her trip here and if we’ll go to Innsbruck and/or Munich and/or Strasbourg. As in, maybe I could focus up on what I’m doing. The first episode, Fat, is in Italy and pretty much just made me realize that I need to visit Italy more often. It also has falsely convinced me that I can learn Italian through pure osmosis. The second episode, Salt, takes place mostly in Japan, which has recently been high on my list of places to go. This list is ever-changing. There was a point in time where I was obsessed with Mongolia. Australia has been inching its way up, even though a few years ago it was way down at the bottom. Namibia was up there for a while, but now I’m more interested in South Africa. Vietnam and Laos have always had strong showings but now, since Sam went to South Korea for the Olympics last year plus reading Pachinko, South Korea is way up.

But I digress. Anyway, as I was watching the host of the show, Samin Nosrat, learn about miso and soy sauce in Japan, my brain did this thing where it tried to listen to a language that it has absolutely no understanding of. I’ve always had this dream/secret belief that my brain, that way it did when I was a toddler, will be able to hear a language and if I listen to it long enough, will be able to learn that new language purely by hearing it. It was something I believed when I was in Argentina just starting to date Sam and he would speak German with other classmates, that if I just listened to them, it would take. It did not, not really anyway.

So as I tried to absorb the Japanese through Netflix while simultaneously thinking about how much I want to go to Japan and who might want to come with me, I thought back, as one does, to seventh grade. In seventh grade, we started a third language (English being the first, French being the second. My French is terrible FYI). I chose Chinese because, and this is true, in fifth grade we watched a documentary about people in China who lived on houseboats and I thought that might be something I’d like to do one day, in which case, Chinese would definitely be super helpful (I would’ve been learning Mandarin – I have no idea if that’s what the people on the houseboat were speaking). After a week however, they cancelled the class due to lack of interest and gave us the option to join another language class: Italian, Japanese, or Spanish.  

I don’t really know I chose Spanish. I guess because it seemed the most useful and after my week of Chinese, I decided to return to a Latin alphabet. Italian just didn’t seem that useful - ironic, since now everyone where I live speaks German or Italian. This seemingly small decision comes up in my brain now and again. Obviously it did today because I was trying my darndest to understand Japanese and failing. And sometimes I think about it because it would indeed be very useful to speak Italian right about now. But of course, had I taken Italian, or Japanese, I might not even be here, in Silvaplana, Switzerland, because I only met Sam because we were in Spanish school together in Argentina, and I don’t think I would have gone to Spanish school in Argentina to improve my Spanish if I didn’t have any Spanish in the first place.

To be clear, even though I named this blogpost Beshert, which is Yiddish for “meant to be” or “pre-ordained,” I don’t really believe that things are meant to be. I don’t believe that if I had studied Italian and gone to Italy instead that I would have met Sam there. Maybe I would’ve met a nice Italian, or in another case of meeting someone from the wrong country, someone from Bulgaria or something. Or no one. But it is weird to think that something so small, a class decision I made in seventh grade, actually kind of changed my life. 

Clearly this extra-long winter has taken my brain to some fun places. Really, the winter here has stretched on far too long and the novelty of skiing-on-demand and walking across a frozen lake has worn off. We had about a week of warmer weather so I settled into the idea of spring, just to be jolted back into winter with heavy snowfalls and grey skies. To make matters more fun, on top of moving, Sam and I have gone through a variety of non-life-threatening illnesses: flus, fevers, stomach viruses, and scratchy throats. All in all, I think we’re both more than ready for a little time away from Silvaplana. 

Which is good news, because in a week, we’re gonna get it! We’re going back to the USA! For Sam, it’ll be the first time since he moved away in August 2017. First time he’ll get to flash his fancy blue passport at the border! We’ll be visiting Boston to see friends, then New York for a wedding, and then North Carolina to see my parents. Then he’ll fly back here, home, and I’ll spend an extra week in North Carolina and Washington, DC. 

For all of you in any of these places, we’re excited to see you! And if you’re not in those places, I guess you’ll just have to come visit us here in Switzerland! We just moved to a new apartment which has bunkbeds behind this weird wall panel in our living room with your (whoever you are) name on it. And despite the depressing weather we’re experiencing now, summer, fall, and winter are quite lovely here (just don’t come in November. It’s garbage).  

A rare ray of sunshine in a cloudy and snowy couple of weeks