Maybe I had been in Asia too long, but somehow walking that last remaining portion of my trip home seemed like the right thing to do. I picked up a pint of Ben amp; Jerry’s Toffee Heath Bar Crunch ice cream en route, a treat impossible to find on the other side of the planet. Sometimes there is no place like the USA! I could not have planned it any better. When I got home my housemates anticipated having Thanksgiving dinner in another hour, they had no idea that I was returning from Asia, I wanted to surprise them all. By American standards we ate a normal Thanksgiving dinner, but compared to where I had been only a couple weeks before we enjoyed a royal feast.

I worked as a consultant in Silicon Valley for the last few years, doing easy jobs and receiving great wages. Before I knew it, I had begun work at another software consulting job. I spent a few hours a day programming UNIX computers, writing software to control large-scale telephone switches for fiber optic long distance telephone networks, then continue with the research for my trip. At four in the afternoon I headed home for a strenuous mountain bike ride and to study spoken Chinese in the evenings. I had picked up a little Chinese and Tibetan on my last trip but I knew I needed a much greater proficiency of both languages. On the trip I had planned I anticipated that I would go for weeks without speaking English. I knew that I must be conversational in Chinese. Every day during my standard San Francisco Bay Area commute I listened to Chinese language tapes, practicing to myself in Chinese “Hello, are you Comrade Chen?” “No, I’m not Comrade Chen.” In the evenings I conversed with an American-born Chinese housemate, each of us jokingly addressing the other as “comrade”.

I love maps. In my living room an enormous map of the world covers an entire wall. I sit and daydream for hours, checking out different places on this map.