The tribal wives of here.

The most excellent blogger Very Bored, who's doing her thing over in Catalunya, tagged me for a meme. You have to produce a list of rules for living the life of the 'tribal wives' of wherever you are. I think it started as a tv show or something. So she did something hilarious about life in rural Catalonia. But contrary to her possible expectations, I'm not going to talk about the rules of life for the tribal wives of Turkey because there's is a lot more fun to be poked at us ex-pats. We have our own habits, our own idiosyncrasies. And any one coming to stay from somewhere else, some place where they actually belonged, would have stuff to get used to. So here are the rules. Welcome to our tribe.

Week end charter : Marianne's Cuba not so libre

I’m not even a real ex-pat, having only lived abroad for a few months. But since I left Paris, France for Holguin, Cuba right after I’d finished business school, I guess I can call mysef that. I could write 100 posts about my stay in Cuba. Had the internet been easier to access back then, I so would have blogged about it. But it’s been ten years, now. When Sandrine suggested this week’s theme, I realized how bored I am talking about Cuba. 

You know the feeling, I’m sure: we’ve all done something extraordinary, at least once, in our life. You rode an elephant, hunted a bear, killed a snake with your bare hands, met Alexander Skarsgard on a plane* and each time you meet someone new, there will come a moment when you will tell the story. And, except if it’s very recent, you’ll realize you’ll be telling it the exact same way as the time before. People don’t want to hear how the elephant was in fact very small, the bear blind and the snake already dying : they want to hear something exciting.