Home to Vancouver

It's been a week that we've been home now, and in some ways it feels like far longer, and in other ways I am still there, living out of my backpack and taking it day by day. It took about a week for my soul to catch up with my body, the jet lag was lame. Coming back 16 hours meant I was groggy by day, perky at night. Usually I'd wake up, hopelessly awake, at about 3 or 4am, and then just not really sleep again, and crash mid-afternoon.

Well, in some ways there are some similarities to the last few months. In a mere week I've moved around a lot, I've stayed at my mom's and my girlfriend Maya's, where I'll be living for the next few months, and now I'm at Brian and Rumi's on Saltspring Island for a few days. I have a few clothes and supplies but most of my winter wardrobe is still in storage so I'm getting by with what fits in a big backpack.

I was feeling a little frazzled and disoriented in Vancouver. Thought it might be a little easier to adjust to being home to BC winter by walking through muddy streams in rainy cedar forests, rather than grey puddles on wet sidewalks. ...and it was the right call, this feels good.

Before heading out here for a few days of photo editing and reflection I secured a new job at a cozy, tiny Franco-German restaurant called La Brasserie. I requested lunches, and they were pleased - the shifts that classically most cooks don't want because they need to get up earlier than their nocturnal cohorts, and they are less exciting to some degree than dinners. A girl who is good and ready to move to dinners will get to switch to evenings after I settle in. My motivation is that I want my evenings free so I can see the people in my life that don't work restaurant night shifts for these three months. I head back to the Lake O'hara Lodge for another season in the mountains starting June 1st. Wednesday I will be in Victoria for the day for a lunch with Daryle Lechinsky (one on one! what a treat!) and hopefully connect with some O'hara friends that live there. Back to Vancouver on Thursday, and a 35th birthday to celebrate on Friday.

Looking back at the trip I have to say there isn't much I'd do differently. In a way I wish I'd spent more time in Laos and less in Vietnam, with the time I had to work with, but there's no way I could have known that. There are such golden memories from everywhere I went.

I'm going to write a few separate entries on the food, and another last entry about our final few days on Railay and our last couple days in Bangkok.