It’s finally happening. I have run for and missed my last FSI shuttle bus. I’ve said farewell to David, my favorite apartment building concierge, for the last time. I’ve watched all of my worldly possessions get packed away and sent off to various places (with more than a little moral support from our friend Diplodocus). And, via the most circuitous route I’ve ever taken for such a journey, I’ve come home to Seattle. Next week: Korea.

It’s funny how just seeing a certain thing or being in a certain place can make a person feel so good inside - so relaxed and happy. A friend of mine asked me why I ever left the Pacific Northwest if that was how I felt about it. Sometimes I wonder the same thing myself, but I always come back to the idea that there is something bigger out there that I am supposed to do, some greater purpose I’m supposed to serve. I feel like the potential to help others is so much greater in this job than in most of the things I could be doing if I had stayed in Seattle. That doesn’t mean I might not eventually return to Seattle to work for some NGO that provides humanitarian aid or something, but for now I think this is where I should be.

On my wandering journey the other day from DC to Seattle, I ate lunch with a pilot in Chicago. We had a long conversation about all sorts of things about the Foreign Service and living a life of constant travelling. He asked me if it was hard not to be able to go home at night to a place you’re really comfortable in where there are people who really know you. I told him I couldn’t deny that it was hard, but I said I might find it more difficult to be a pilot, having responsibility for hundreds of lives at a time and never really knowing where you’re going to end up the next week. When I had to leave to catch my next flight, he said to me, “Thank you for your service.” It almost brought tears to my eyes.

NPR has just launched a new series of reports that focus on life in the Foreign Service, with each individual report focusing on a different aspect of life as an American diplomat. I’ve just listened to the first of them (focusing on security issues), and I think I can safely say it’s a pretty accurate depiction of some of the realities people face in this career. I’m looking forward to hearing what they have to say in the next few reports.

Update: The text version on the web is not as good, but the audio version of the second report is worth listening to (click the “listen” button on the website).  Oddly appropriate for the day all of my belongings get packed up and moved.

Today I have:

1) Successfully completed the ConGen course at FSI. My days of training at the Foreign Service Institute are now officially over.

2) Received (at long last) my travel orders to Seoul. They have been reviewed by someone who should know and found, miraculously, not to be in need of revision.

3) Arranged for someone to come to my home in Seattle while I am there for a week to collect/pack the remainder of my stuff that I left there with my mom. (Hooray! I’ll have a bike to ride around the army base in Seoul!)

4) Finished the formal introductory letter to the Ambassador, my ultimate boss in Korea.

5) Sorted some more items into the “goes to Goodwill” pile.

6) Come across what is quite possibly the best ever “pro-choice” slogan (a great big “in your face” to the hard-core Christian Right, and multi-purpose to boot if you think about the recent stem cell debate). Irony is divine.

– Lake Baikal. If it were empty, it would apparently take every river in the world put together a year to fill it up again. And it’s said that you could pick up Mount Everest, turn it over, and bury it completely in the silt at the bottom of the lake. I think it’s going on the “I should go there sometime” list.

– Apparently the people who are going to (inshallah) collect and move all of my worldly possessions next week are the same people who do that each time someone moves in or out of the White House. I’m told I probably won’t have to worry about things getting broken, at least.

– Relatedly, it would appear that I own a grand total of about 5000 pounds worth of stuff. The guy from the moving company who came to survey my possessions suggested I buy some nice big pieces of furniture sometime soon. What, Ikea furniture isn’t the best there is?

– I’ve been told that Zambia is “the real Africa.” Makes me wonder two things: is it a place that needs to be put on the list? And where’s “the fake Africa?”

– I’ve finally managed to convince myself that if I bought a pair of pants three years ago and I still haven’t managed to hem them so they can be worn, chances are I don’t need them.

– The good news: when I get to Seoul, at least I won’t have to cross the river to get from home to work. There’s all sorts of unhappiness related to water on the Korean peninsula right now.

– Oh yeah, for those of you who might be wondering: still no travel orders.

I’ve been trying to keep up with my Korean language skills, if only just a little bit. To this end, I’ve been going a few hours a week to Korean class (yes, I know some of you will be shocked at this, but I actually am doing this willingly). Today in class, I was asked what we actually do in the consular training course I’m taking at the moment. Beyond even my lack of vocabulary and my lack of ready access in my head to the vocabulary I had learned, I was at a loss for what to say. I looked at the instructor and I said, “We do a lot of acting.”

For those of you wondering why this might be, I’ll do a quick run-through of some of the duties of a consular officer overseas. When dealing with American citizens, the consular officer is something like a cross between a social worker, a loan officer, a notary public, a mediator, a go-to person for lost people or passports, a public records clerk, and a lawyer who tells you all about the law but does not give legal advice. When dealing with citizens of other countries, the consular officer is the face of the U.S. to other countries as well as being the oft-mentioned “first line of defense” who screens people wishing to come to the U.S. and hopefully has supernatural powers or a golden lasso of truth to determine whether the person is lying about their reasons for traveling to the States. I’m sure my colleagues could flesh out this very basic description, but we’ll leave it at that for the time being.

So why the acting? All of this consular work involves dealing with other people, sometimes during some of the most difficult times of their lives. In learning how to do the work, it’s helpful to have some mock interactions. Generally, some of us take on the roles of consular officers while others of us play visa applicants, Americans with newborns, Americans in prison, or family members receiving a call from a consular officer abroad with the news of a loved one’s death. Today was a particularly rough day with the roleplays, and I actually brought the person playing “consular officer” to my “tortured 19-year-old prisoner” close to tears.

Honestly, it never crossed my mind that the one acting class I took as a kid would ever come in handy in the Foreign Service.

Today I walked outside after spending about 20 minutes in a severely air-conditioned environment, and my glasses immediately fogged up as if I had just leaned my head over a pot of boiling water.  This on a day that actually feels quite a bit less oppressive than the past few days by virtue of the fact that it’s been drizzling off and on all day.  I wonder if this is what a hundred percent humidity is supposed to be like…

The latest news on the getting-ready-to-go front: it’s looking like I may have to stay at a more expensive hotel for my consultations in San Francisco in order to pay less.  Strange, but I’m starting to get accustomed to things like this.  Also, because the government is paying so little for my flights from DC to San Francisco to Seoul (less than 600 dollars total - how can that be?), any adjustments for personal reasons would be astronomically expensive so I’m going to have to make my own separate reservations to fly home to Seattle for a week.  Fingers crossed that I get my travel orders in time and don’t have to cancel that too!

Warning: venting follows.

You would think that an organization such as the State Department whose staff is constantly required to flit to and fro around the globe would have the travel thing down to a fine art. Unfortunately, this is very much not the case. Travel orders (the piece of paper that is the key to accomplishing absolutely everything else) are apparently among the most difficult commodities to come by in the Foreign Service. Among the list of things travel orders are essential to doing: purchasing plane tickets, packing one’s possessions for the move, applying for a visa to the country one is moving to, proving to the mobile phone company (or the landlord or any number of other entities) that the government really is sending you to a foreign country. Really, nothing gets done without that piece of paper.

Ostensibly, one should be in possession of travel orders at least 45 days before planning to get on a plane. At least that’s what the regulations say. In actual practice, I am sitting here with less than 20 days left before I am on a plane and I am without travel orders and without a way to get them anytime soon. As it turns out, the computer system is currently down for a scheduled upgrade until the 19th (exactly one week before people are supposed to come and pack away all of my stuff).

As maddening as this is, there are stop-gap measures for some of the things that need travel orders to get accomplished. For example, I have been able to make travel reservations, just not to buy the tickets. I’ve arranged the date for the people to come and pack out my stuff, but they’ll be unable to go through with it unless they see my travel orders at least five days in advance of the date in question. And today, I talked the person who is supposed to be generating my travel orders into filling out a different form for me so that I could apply for my visa to Korea (another thing I was supposed to have done 45 days before departure).

I’m still stressed about it, though, and I’ll probably be in the travel orders office on the 19th or 20th (whenever their computers come back on-line), hovering and annoying them until I get that piece of paper. If I do not receive my travel orders on or before the 20th, all of the arrangements I have made could very well be thrown completely off and my departure may have to be delayed. Not an exciting prospect at all.

I (sort of) have a cat named Luna. (Origin of the name: matches her eyes - bright orbs of gold against an all-black background; plus it was the only word I could think of that referred to the same thing in all of the languages I knew at the time). I got her in Bulgaria, originally thinking of it as a highly practical method of trying to rid my very small Bulgarian apartment of its many, many uninvited guests of the crawly variety. Of course, I fell in love with her. About six months before leaving Bulgaria for good, I brought her back to the U.S. with me on a visit home, leaving her with my mother (mostly for purposes of good veterinary care). The plan was that she would live with my mom until the following summer, when I would take her to DC with me when I started grad school. What I didn’t plan on was (1) my mom falling in love with her too, (2) her becoming so quickly accustomed to the freedom of wandering outside whenever she pleased, and (3) the restrictions and added expense regarding pets in DC apartment buildings. Suffice it to say that now, three years later, she is still living in Seattle with my mom.

When I found out I was being sent to Korea, I was excited because I thought it would be a good opportunity to be able to bring Luna with me and still be in a place with reliable veterinary care and good availability of pet food. But my mom fought hard with arguments about Luna being accustomed to being outside (not really a possibility with the military base accommodations in Seoul), the difficulty of taking a pet across international borders, and even the idea that Luna has become such great pals with the golden retriever and my mom’s cat. After a couple of months, I basically conceded and began to come to terms with the idea that Luna probably would not get to come with me.

With this in mind, you can imagine my surprise when I was on the phone with my mom the other day and she said, “Do you want to take your cat to Korea?” Me: “Um, yeah, I would have, but haven’t we talked about this already and you weren’t going to let me take her?” Mom: “Well, I think she would make a great Korean cat.” Me: “Uh, how so?” Mom: “I just think she would do well over there.” Me: “But if I was going to take her, I would have had to start making arrangements well before now.” Mom: “Well, it’s just that if she were in Korea, she wouldn’t be leaving dead mice in my car.” Ah. What a good cat. She still does exactly what she was meant to do. If (heaven forbid) I have uninvited guests again in my place in Seoul, I will probably get back into negotiations with my mom.