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Post by Village Idiot on Jun 22, 2008 21:50:21 GMT -5
I spent a couple nights in Zanesville, don't ask why. An interesting place, though. I wonder if people there consider it part of the Appalachians, because I'm thinking it should be. Your Dad was in the heart of ceramics country, I'm thinking.
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Post by frazer on Jun 23, 2008 3:25:14 GMT -5
Verrrrrry cool thread! I was born in South Wales. Looking back, it seems I spent my younger years either running around Norman Castles dressed as a Crusader or playing with toy soldiers in the sand dunes at the beach. When the rain off the Atlantic eased up a little it was a pretty idyllic place to be, and I still feel the powerful pull of the sea and home. We Welsh call it hiraeth (‘heer-eyeth’). I graduated from college after three years studying art history and eventually found work at the National Library of Wales in Aberystwyth - a fairly happening but remote university town on the Irish Sea - working with old manuscript map collections and nineteenth century engineering and architectural drawings. After that I put on exhibitions back home in Swansea at an arts centre and helped to organize public arts events in Cardiff. I was just about burnt out after three years and when my girlfriend, who was from the same town but had worked all over the place, including India and Madagascar, asked me whether I’d want to come to Germany with her, I said yes. She was going to work at the UN Volunteers headquarters in Bonn. I didn’t really know what I was going to do, and eventually fell into working at the UN Climate Change Convention (UNFCCC). I had a fairly lowly position, helping to prepare the documentation for government negotiation at the international meetings that followed the Kyoto Protocol. Mind you, if I had ever screwed up, it would have been a big problem! I was lucky enough to attend these conferences in Marrakesh, The Hague and Lyon, and had my eyes well and truly opened up to the privilege of working with people from all over the world. Like UNV, UNFCCC was based in Haus Carstanjen on the Rhine, the castle where the Marshall Plan was signed. It was a really nice place to be. We used to cycle along the Rhine to work and back every day, and our apartment looked over the river to the Siebengebirge (the ‘seven hills’), which is said to have provided the setting for the Grimms’ ‘Snow White’, and the northernmost vineyards in Germany. After getting married, and spending a while learning about how great German wine can be and hanging around in beer gardens watching the barges on the river, we started our family. That’s what German wine and beer will do for you! After almost five years we moved on to New York, where I attended NYU at night and qualified as a copyeditor, and worked for a couple of years in the publications department of UNICEF. While there I had the honour of meeting and playing with some of you guys at gatherings in New York, including copyeditor-in-chief Bill and Shannon, and made a firm friendship with Howard Lee from the AG Forum. Meanwhile, our second daughter was born in Sleepy Hollow, which I thought was very cool. After three years in NYC, we came home again to Swansea for a year-long break, and the birth of our third daughter. That’s when I began freelancing, and I’ve been writing and editing, mostly for development agencies, ever since. We’ve been in Cambodia for almost two years now. We wanted to work in a ‘family friendly’ developing country before the girls need to be settled somewhere for the sake of their schooling. Where exactly that’s going to be, I don’t know. I’d really like to go home again, although I feel the hiraeth far more than my wife.
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Post by theevan on Jun 23, 2008 6:01:27 GMT -5
frazer, that's quite a story. I ould never have thought of Cambodia as family friendly but thatis based purely on ignorance. You have lived in more interesting & exotic places & doing interesting things...
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Post by millring on Jun 23, 2008 7:55:53 GMT -5
I spent a couple nights in Zanesville, don't ask why. An interesting place, though. I wonder if people there consider it part of the Appalachians, because I'm thinking it should be. Your Dad was in the heart of ceramics country, I'm thinking. Yes to both. Zanesville is westernmost Appalachia (I have a brother in nearby Granville where the very last of the range lies. And yes to the ceramics thing too. From Roseville pottery in the north to Rookwood in the south, the strata of most usable clay was upheaved along that section of Ohio and, curiously, the matching strata (with a huge gap in between) appears again in Western Indiana.
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Post by Dan McLaughlin on Jun 23, 2008 20:24:24 GMT -5
frazer, thanks for updating me (us) about your last few years. I'm really happy for you all, and still remember your kindness, friendship and music from GJ 1. Ain't life a blast?
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Post by frazer on Jun 24, 2008 1:49:09 GMT -5
Ah, Dan. That was a great weekend in a very special place! Sigh...
theevan, Cambodia is family-friendly, kinda. My kids go to a nice international school and we live in a nice house. There is a big international community and lots to do. There are great restaurants and wonderful beaches three hours away on the coast. What's more, the people are very friendly and the beer is cheap.
On the downside, in the city it's damn hot most of the time. Politically, there's a great deal of injustice and inequality, and most people in rural areas are very poor. On the home front, the kids don't really have a big space anywhere to just run around and have fun, at least without getting heatstroke or lacerations and tetanus from broken glass or any of the other dangerous crap people keep leaving around the place. And I feel very guilty about that because I know from my own childhood what freedom they're missing out on. On the other hand, they get to do some very cool things, like elephant riding in a forest in Laos, and taking boats out to tiny islands in the South China Sea.
I just hope they remember the experiences they have here.
Cheers,
Frazer
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Post by sekhmet on May 22, 2010 21:16:55 GMT -5
Frazer - you are home from Cambodia now, yes?
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