A story must be the ax for the frozen sea within us. - Franz Kafka

Perhaps it's the same for every expat, that tiny twinge in the heart that zaps each time their first home abroad is mentioned. I lived in Prague for just under a year, far less time than I've spent living in any other city, yet my memories from Prague are among my most vivid from the past decade.


I've spent two short weekends in Prague since moving away in midsummer 2002, both times with friends keen to explore the city. But this time was different; M's first time, my chance to show off the city that began the choices that led to us.

I tried to see it through his eyes, and the eyes of our friends A & G who joined us. After finding our accommodation, then chatting to the extremely excited owner whilst staring at our watches, knowing the Scotland v Czech Republic match was about to begin, we ambled to Staroměstské náměsti, the old town square, home of my favorite church spires in the world (the Tyn, below). Here we found a big-screen TV outside a pub, with chairs beneath heat lamps and blankets for cold customers. We watched as clean-up crews vacuumed up the litter left behind by the 8000-strong Tartan Army. We were given stellar American service by a girl from Florida. It only took an hour in Prague to remind me why it was so easy living there.

Ghosts plagued our two days of meandering. I could hear the laughter of my friends hurling around darkened corners, could remember stumbling into the light and fresh air after an evening in a dingy, arched cellar pub. My head hurled with stories I'd forgotten, with voices I'd not thought of in years, with promises made and friendships born. I'm still close to many of the people I met during my time there; two came to my wedding, and one sent a toast that made me cry.

There's a heightened sense of reality when trying to fit into a new country. It makes every tiny incident seem as big as the world.

Of course things have changed. But Prague's soul is rich, and her centuries of stories are more everlasting than any expat's first year abroad. But she respects how my story weaves into her fabric, and the stories of my friends, and of those who are just beginning their Prague story. She is enticing and coy, and she knows I'll be back.

The sun is elusive here, but it's mighty.

It's Prosecco season. Living in the north of an island known for being soggy, foggy, and groggy means getting used to limited sunshine. But when the sun does come out (to scorch the land to a stifling 24 degrees) the UKers are out in all their glory.

Cultural Divide no. 144: sunshine = limited clothing. I recall my first Scottish spring, in 2008, when the sun gave us a balmy 19 degrees on a random February Wednesday. And out came the flesh. It's a British Tradition: If the sun is out, your skin is, too.

I rather admire those who bulge beyond their short-shorts and minidresses and tank tops (or bare chests, usually limited to men). Throwing all caution to the editors of Vogue, these brave souls bare their every roll and end up with fuchsia skin. I've always been one to fear bikini season (I want to spare others from the shock of my pasty-white, jiggly skin); Britain has taught me that this is a silly, unnecessary stress. Let it hang out, sister! Enjoy the sun! Bare it all, Prosecco in hand!

So, happy spring. May the goddesses of weather grant us enough sunshine to pink the skin of everyone, and enough Prosecco to make the pain of sunburn go away.

Glasgow is a rockin' place.

Dear Glasgow,

Thank you for being the coolest people on the planet.

Last Thursday, my UK visa was denied. I'm married to a Scottish guy, I've lived in our flat for the requisite two years, I pay taxes, I passed that silly exam where I had to learn the percentages of races, religions, occupations, and political parties. I left the visa office a crumpled mass of tears and frustration, desperate to go back to America.

I trudged around Govan (not the finest of Glaswegian neighborhoods) looking for the underground and wailing. The map function on my iPhone was even confused. When I finally stomped down the steps and slid into the narrow carriages, I completely lost it.

During the six stops to Buchanan Street, three people offered me tissues. Once above ground, I had a choice: drink a bottle of wine, or get a facial from Origins. I chose the latter; they had no space, but booked me in at a rival store. There, the lovely Christine pampered and tutted and hugged and reminded me that 'it's just a blip, hen. Just a wee blip.'

Christine is in her 60s and looks 45. She's got a 'miracle baby' son who is 18. Her first husband - well, who cares, because her next husband asked her to marry him on Valentine's Day after six years. Every customer and colleague waved to Christine as they walked by. Some stopped to chat, making me smile with strange stories and silly anecdotes. And Christine didn't charge me for the facial. 'Dinnae be a stranger,' she said. And I won't.

The two loneliest times of my life since moving abroad: 1) The Saturday after I failed my driving test for the second time. 2) Last Thursday, coincidentally my dad's 65th birthday. Alone in a city where I know people but don't know them well enough to call them crying over a denied visa. But everywhere I went, people were kind. 'Chin up', the underground ticket lady said. 'Aye, y'allright', one of Christine's friends said. Few places in the world are as friendly as Glasgow. They don't get in your business; they just want you to know that it'll get better. Life sucks sometimes, and we move on. Happens to everyone.

So thanks, Glasgow, for making me smile, putting up with me freaking out about this, and reminding me why I love living in Scotland so much.

I go back for a re-assessment on Thursday. Hopefully I'll get to stay here.

The Knox trial

I've been following the Amanda Knox/Meredith Kercher case for the past two years with sympathy and horror. In a nutshell, Knox and Kercher were roommates; Kercher was stabbed to death; Knox didn't do herself any favors afterward. But the evidence isn't strong enough; the extraneous circumstances and shocking tactics used by Italian investigators were pointed and manipulative. (The most disgusting? Telling an incarcerated Knox that she's HIV-positive, asking her to write down every man she's slept with, then telling her oops, we made a mistake and passing the list of men to the press.) I don't think Knox did it.

I won't go into the whole 'it's anti-American' rant coming from Stateside, or the fuzzy circumstances surrounding the case. But what resonates most with me is how alone Knox was in this whole ordeal. She was 20 when this happened; an exchange student from UW; a wide-eyed girl abroad for the first time, tasting the newness and embracing the curiosities and independence of living in another world. I've been there; had I been there at age 20, who knows the trouble I'd have got myself into.

When I moved to Prague I was 27, but still naive; I'd been lucky, growing up in the Midwest and living in places where I had good friends and good people around me. I went to Prague with this same attitude. You trust everyone. You just assume nobody would do anything weird, or put you in a compromising or dangerous position. At parties, you ignore the guys shooting up in the corner, you smirk at the guy puking in the kitchen sink, you don't ask when you see a friend kissing a girl you've seen soliciting herself on street corners. You roll your eyes if something seems dodgy, chalking it up to a 'cultural divide'.

My flat in Prague housed five of us. Great people, all, but one had a boyfriend who hobnobbed with the neo-Nazi crowd, one brought a different guy home every weekend, and the drugs and booze were plentiful. After I'd left, the guy who took my place brought a girl home one weekend, and everyone woke up to find their handbags, wallets, iPods, CDs, and even their pricey underwear gone.

One of the flats where I stayed in Lisbon wasn't much better; my windowless room was in the middle of a 1960s block of flats, and only one of the doors to the room locked. The owner was a weird Portuguese woman who kept large bags of hash in the cupboard; I often found residue of cocaine in our tiny bathroom. I ignored her until she began to invade my privacy, asking where I was, who I was with, etc. Then one night I came home to find her rummaging through my things, and I moved out without telling her the next afternoon.

I'm not sure I would deal well with the legal systems of any country I've lived in. I never spoke the languages well, never really understood the relaxed manner of the police and their selective interest in broken laws. I feel for Knox, for her bewilderment after her roommate was murdered, her inability to understand the nuances of Italian or the misreading that can happen when two people attempt to solve a problem in two very different languages. Had the police raided either of my former apartments, I would have been an accomplice. How would I have fared?

A young British girl is dead, stabbed in the throat. A gossipy, drama-loving Italian town has now put three people in jail for the same murder. Now, a 22-year-old American girl will be in jail for the next 26 years.

Maybe Knox saw it happen; maybe she heard it; maybe she found herself in a surreal moment that felt more like a horror film than Roman Holiday. She admits to smoking weed on the night of the murder; depending on her reaction to the stuff, maybe she thought it was a bad trip, that the murder was happening in her head, not in real life. But 20-year-old exchange students don't just stab their roommates in the throat. Especially girls like Knox, who did stupid things like any 20-year-old girl (I am so thrilled that the internet didn't exist when I was a teenager; YouTube never dies.), but certainly wasn't harboring fantasies of killing anyone.

I feel for Knox; I can't imagine the fear throbbing through her body when she heard the verdict last night. I can't imagine the heady whirl of the terror of the past two years as she tried to make sense of a night she doesn't remember well. It's a cautionary tale to everyone living abroad, on their own. Yes, it's freeing; you can be whoever you want to be. And so can everyone else.

Narcissism and self-deception are survival mechanisms without which many of us might just jump off a bridge. - Todd Solondz

Note to self: planning a wedding (sorry, a wedding and a party, on different continents), renovating a flat, learning to drive and finishing a novel while working part-time doth not make light work. This is not a pity-me post, but it is a disclaimer of sorts if this ends up being a narcissistic glimpse into the relatively unstable Krambling mind. (As if blogs are really anything but narcissistic glimpses into the writer's mind, but nevermind.)

NG1 (narcissistic glimpse number one): Another day, another email from a friend saying they can't make it over for the wedding, or to Wichita for the soiree there. I suppose everyone goes through this, but it still sucks. I've never been one of those girls who has planned her wedding since age 4, but I have had The Dream, where everybody I've ever adored from everywhere I've lived gathers together in a huge clump of one-degree-of-separation-ness and scatters, like marbles or jacks, some sticking together and others repeling each other and me thrilled that this blending of the social groups is working. August 1 will be a glorious day with wonderful friends, but there will be some huge holes. In Scotland, they have a wonderful tradition that those who can't make it send cards to be read aloud on the night, then a toast is made to them all. I like that idea. Though it'd be yet another chance to ruin my eye makeup.

NG2: I've been acclimating to the Highlands in two ways that scare me. 1) I think 15 degrees Celsuis/59 degrees Fahrenheit is 'hot'. 2) Whilst in Edinburgh and Glasgow last week, I kept thinking how crowded the streets were, how many people were about, how people were invading my personal space. (And these aren't big cities - 600K in Glasgow, 400K in the Burgh.) It must be the Highland air morphing my brain into mush.

NG3: This is why I LOVE ITALY.

NG4: I failed my driving test today. I haven't failed a test in a very long time. It was due to 'roadworks' as they call it in the UK, where I gave the workers 'too much space' (i.e. I was too far over in the right lane). I am very, very annoyed. "Bad luck," said the Weegie* examiner whose accent I likely insulted by asking him to repeat himself with each command. Failing sucks, too. But it's made better by again glimpsing the above photo.

NG5: The New Baby is nearly gestated. I've been quiet about this one, as it's a tough subject and a tough book to write, though I'm feeling good about it. Hoping to have it ready by the end of June. Fingers crossed.

The top photo is of Turkish lamps and the mountains above Lago Lugano. I'm still on a bit of a high from the trip there. Some connections are tough to break.

*Glaswegian. Some have very difficult accents to comprehend,

When it's played the way it's supposed to be played,

"...basketball happens in the air; flying, floating, elevated above the floor, levitating the way oppressed peoples of this earth imagine themselves in their dreams." ~ John Edgar Wideman

It's a dilemma. Every March I ask myself why again I moved abroad. I remember my first March, in 2002, in Prague, going to school before 7am to check ESPN on a dial-up modem to check the scores. KU was a #1 seed that year, and lost to Kentucky in the Final Four - I spent thousands of Czech crowns on the phone to my parents in despair. Technology had improved in 2003, when I stole the keys to my Lisbon school to listen to the championship game in the wee hours of the morning (which was sadly lost to Syracuse) while spending nearly a hundred Euros on the phone to my parents in despair. In 2004 we made it as far as the Elite Eight, losing to Georgia Tech; I listened to it at a friend's flat, deep into the night. There's little lonelier than a 3-am loss. I'd moved to Slovenia by 2005, and had internet at my flat, but didn't bother with the first round match (we NEVER lose in the first round) which we lost to Bucknell. (Where? Who? Exactly.) Side note: I did win 3000 tolars in the Slovenian-based US Marine-sponsored bracket challenge, which was presented to "Mr Pedroja" because they "figured a girl'd never get that many right". A first-round loss again in 2006. (I think my living in Slovenia was a bad thing for the Jayhawks.) Things started looking better again in 2007, when I was living in Switzerland, had internet at home and got to WATCH (!!!) the games live thanks to CBS...and the Hawks rid themselves of the first-round curse and made it to the Elite Eight before losing to UCLA. And then, last year, which my loyal readers (Mom) will remember resulted in a national championship. What was that again? Oh, yes, a NATIONAL CHAMPIONSHIP.

Few people understand the passion for this game. Some football fans kinda get it - Barcelona, Benfica, the occasional AC Milan/Inter fan might get it - but most think 'basket' is just a primitive version of the game they see in their local leagues where washed-up NBA players go to die. College basketball is so much more than this. It's the yearning these kids exude, the evocative sense of potential that envelops each of these talented young people. It's the Big Decision, to go to college or go pro, to stay beyond their sophomore year. It's the pomp and circumstance, the bands, the cheerleaders, the zealous fans with their heads bursting with irrelevant statistics, the mascots, the storied fieldhouses where the magic happens. It's the speed, the creativity, the knowledge that if you blink you might miss one of the best shots in the history of the game. It's the grin on the face of a young man who just slammed in a beautiful dunk. It's the breathless pause when a hand curls mid-air, pushing the ball from beyond the 3-point line, and the soft whirr of the net when it goes in. It's the good-natured rivalries, the ability to admit you were outplayed on the day but you are thrilled that you got to see a good game of basketball. And in this tournament, it's knowing that anything can happen, that anyone can be the hero.

The Sweet Sixteen is on Friday night. Tipoff is 1:30am Scotland time. I don't think I could have done this living abroad thing without the internet.

To get a taste of it...here's a rockin' ad from this year's Madness.

If there is a special Hell for writers it would be in the forced contemplation of their own works. - John Dos Passos

And I suppose revising could be included in the 'forced contemplation'. I am sick, sick, sick of the book I just finished. At the same time, I love it. I suppose it's like a rerun of The Office or Friends that I've seen a dozen times but will still sit through because something inside won't let me turn it off. But it's gone now, off somewhere in Manhattan's Upper East Side. Now we wait, and I continue the next book, which has been simmering long enough that it's boiling over. This is a good thing.

We spent the last two weekends in Edinburgh attending a birthday party, the Scotland-New Zealand rugby match (better score than last year) and laughing to the point of exhaustion with old friends. It was great to get away, even better to get to a real city again, and made me miss having friends so very much. I wonder if some sort of shared past is essential to friendships past the age of 28 or so. It's been difficult meeting people here, understandably as so many people my age are transient, but also because Inverness is lacking in the cultural scene and places where I tend to meet like-minded souls. I am lucky to have two fabulous sofas to crash on in Edinburgh to get my future fixes.

The past couple of weekends have also reminded me that I do live in a foreign country. I often lose sight of this because of our shared language - it's far easier to feel an outsider in a place where nothing makes sense until you learn the language. British culture shares more similarities to American culture than most other European nations, but Scottish culture is distinct. Walking along the Royal Mile on Sunday, my friend Joseph and I passed shops peddling tartan everything and blaring electronic bagpipe music, and pubs with placards claiming the 'best haggis and clapshot', and clothing shops offering (cheaply made) kilts for £100 - all cliches, and for good reason. So I tried to think of more obscure parts of Scottish culture.

• Techno music. Even if I pop to the post office for ten minutes, I'll hear at least a few cars blaring speedy techno. The drivers don't move to the beat; they just stare straight ahead.
• Irn Bru. Everybody drinks this stuff. The security guard at the consulate, the woman in Prada on the train, the teenagers with pierced cheeks. It's neon orange, and the flavor resembles Hubba Bubba bubble gum.
• Chips and Cheese. Basically a styrofoam sandwich case of thick french fries topped with shredded, semi-melted orange cheese. I mistakenly thought this treat was limited to late-night drunken munchies, but have seen numerous folk walking down the street in daylight shamelessly tucking in to this concoction in Lerwick, Glasgow, Edinburgh, Aberdeen and Inverness (which means it's pretty ubiquitous).
• Scantily clad lassies. It doesn't matter how cold/windy/rainy it is, the girls will wear as little as they possibly can. This rule, while somewhat relaxed during the daytime, is in full force once the sun goes down. The boobs are out, the legs are out, the toes are squeezed into stiletto sandals and the makeup is thick. (Weight, height and other seemingly relevant body issues are dismissed.)
• Pay-as-you-use hair straighteners in public bathrooms. Perhaps this phenomenon has hit America, but it's still weird.
• Chat. If you happen to catch the eye of the right person at the right time, they'll talk your ear off. Recent conversations have included a ten-minute diatribe on the merits of Highland winds from a traffic warden in Inverness, a six-minute discussion of her Christmas plans from a woman at an Edinburgh post office and fifteen minutes of why Glasgow is the best place to live in the world from a lovely chap at the Apple store. I love this trait, and love that people do it wherever you are in Scotland.

It's the end of an era. My new passport took three days. I took the info to Edinburgh last Thursday and received it today. Obviously, the election of the Great Obama has already made the State Department more efficient. (That's a joke, Kevin.) It's the tackiest passport I've ever seen; muted color drawings of Mt. Rushmore, the Liberty Bell, a farmer ploughing his fields with cattle, cowboys, a steam train, a totem pole, and a satellite in outer space, among other things. Every two pages has a quote about freedom, the founding of America, etc. And a few pages at the beginning with some words of wisdom. My favorite: #6, page 6: "Avoid violating foreign laws." Um, thanks for that.
I still have to travel with the old one for another 18 months, as it's got my UK visa inside. They were nice and didn't mess up the pages, only the front and back covers. I love my old passport - there's one blank page left even after getting extra pages put in. Stamps clutter every page. It's tangible proof of so many memories, and of the days when borders existed in the EU. Perhaps more poignantly, of the person I've become since making Europe a part of my story.

The earth laughs in flowers. - Emerson

It's a stop-gap week. Life is full of these. Like when you're waiting for someone. Or a call back. Or it's the night before a test or a speech or a course and you're ready but can't get to sleep. The night before you leave on vacation. The aching moments before telling someone you don't want them in your life anymore. These all share this same painful but ephemeral concept of time, of loitering around til the action begins.

I am nervous about going home. I haven't been in the US for longer than ten days at a time in over six years, and a month seems a long stretch to fill. The sheer choice within the aisles of the Wichita Sam's Club will have me salivating, and the opportunity for 24-hour drive-thru Taco Bell and Krispy Kreme, and my parents' plush gym, and everyone being nice all the time - sigh. And there is something eerily wonderful about the consistency of my hometown.

Then I get back and the world changes. This glimpse of island life has me thrilled to be back on the mainland. I miss trees. I miss the thick woods of northern Scotland. I miss supermarkets that don't run out of food on Friday afternoons. I miss having friends. I miss the cinema. I miss Italian restaurants. Inverness looms as this holy grail of peacefulness and beauty and ease of existence. Only a few weeks left to pack up life, again, and move on. Inverness will be my ninth city in twelve years.

The above photo is of wildflowers growing along a wall in Obidos, Portugal. I haven't altered it in any way. This photo makes me happy, and as the earth isn't laughing in Shetland today, I figured I'd put it out there to help.
FYI: I will be flying 8,514 miles (return); the resulting emissions are 1.92 tonnes of CO2; the cost to offset (Climate Care) is £14.40.