exodus from oriental jesusland

good lawd, indeed!

after a 6-week exodus from oriental jesusland (koko), daddy came back to seoul last friday and promptly fell ill. traveling is hard! 

but thanks to in-home convalescence care by a much-improved intern, i'm on the mend. in fact, he's making some sort of honey pear juice concoction as i type. lucky never made me honey pear juice!

most importantly, traveling always reminds me of jesus. and to that end, i think a look back at prior jesusland tributes is apopro:

teasing jesus: the summer 2008 tour (05/08)

jesusland redux (12/07)

jesus: i'm coming home. (08/2007)

it's indulgent, but a holiday overview feels necessary. 

this time around i used frequent flier miles to fly seoul to new york with a stopover in paris. it seemed like a good time to take advantage of 10 quid ryan air flights and spend a coupla weeks in northern europe... despite it being the coldest and darkest months of the year. did you know it gets dark after lunch in stockholm these days? kinda puts a damper on sightseeing. other quick stays in paris, london, berlin and amsterdam were nice (yup, still like asia better), but the old continent's highlight was a few days in essen/cologne with judy-on-meds, jonstoph. 

since i seem to treat relationships like most people approach unpaid internships, it's always nice to see sexy, high-functioning homo couples who've made the transition to domestic stability... and who wouldn't like to see the half-filipina lady of the house's kitchen chalk board to-do list accented with flower sketches? elsewhere in europe... despite the bad rap, parisians are lovely, londoners (with the exception of my wonderful couchsurfing host) make me glad i'm american, and berlin is my new favorite white city.

onward to american jesusland (aka Jesusland) where i had 8 more chances to experience heinous u.s. airlines during the worst season to navigate the airspaces between chicago, seattle, portland and new york. my favorite 24-hour slog involved seattle's epic snow storm, which cancelled chi to sea. after spending the whole day in dallas on standby, a late final flight pulled into sea-tac at 1 am. i talked about lahore with a sikh cabbie, got stuck in the snow for an hour and missed the 2:10 am (last) ferry to mama's house. spending the next 3 hours outside the terminal was cold, but the last 30 minutes included learning the obvious: of course a late 40s, iraq vet, aspiring truck driver and full-time practical lesbian would like mesh crosstrainers!

pear juice dude, mom and momspouse got to know each other during my 24-hour seattle delay. afterwards, seattle was lovely. new york was a bit stressful, turks and caicos was thank jesus warm. then back to koko the long way. the end.