Surviving Trips Abroad: From Neophyte Me

To this day it still amuses me no end that I ended up with jobs that require me to travel. For one, I have no sense of direction. Also, there's not a drop of wanderlust in me:I could stay inside the house for 2 weeks and enjoy it.

I like helping people, however, and I find such pleasure in meeting people from other cultures. After several years of lugging my suitcase through airports, I am a little more adventurous than I used to be. But only 3 of those years have been spent traveling overseas, so I'm still new at this.

That's why I still resort to some kind of self-deception to make it through several days of being away from home and speaking English from morning till night. My first language is Filipino so speaking English for many days turns me a bit claustrophobic!

I flew to Burma (Myanmar) recently and that trip compelled me to hone my survival skills again. How did I do it?

Confession time!

Here's what I did...

Rearranged hotel room: Draped the bedside table with a cream cloth (the hotel's laundry bag);placed the orchid from Thai Airways on a black ceramic ash tray (the hotel's too)- my idea of a floral arrangement. Voila! It felt a little more like home.

Celebrated with the local people: The nationals I work with did such a fine job on our joint project so we went out and had a sumptuous dinner, snapped pictures,shared some laughs.

Brought pictures of those I love: Tucked into my wallet were pictures of my hubby, my kid sister and her daughter. It seemed like they were in Burma too.

Drafted my next blog post...like what I did on January 11th. I eagerly waited for the next chance to visit an internet cafe or the next time there would be electric power in a city plagued by frequent power failures so I could publish my post. But I had to wait till I was home and had some rest. So here...