Saturday, October 27, 2012

Serious Saturday: Cabbages, kings and buffalo wings...


The Walrus and the Carpenter, woodcut, John Tenniel. Source: victoriaweb.org


"The time has come," the Walrus said,
"To talk of many things:

Of shoes--and ships--and sealing-wax--

Of cabbages--and kings--

And why the sea is boiling hot--
And whether pigs have wings."
~Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass

I know nothing of pigs, cabbages, or wings(unless they're buffalo), but I feel like now is a good time to talk a bit about what exactly this blog is for. 

So first of all, this blog is for you. That is, if you are a person who travels across multiple cultures, multiple classes, multiple languages, multiple ideologies and multiple locations on a regular basis, sometimes before you even have your morning coffee. (Or tea. Or wattlescino. You get the idea...) 

This blog is for multicultural, multilingual, traveling, rambling, crosscultural, lifestyle fusion people and their families. It's for third culture kids, global nomads, interculture vultures, immigrants, refugees and virulent trolls. (Okay, so maybe not that last one...)

And it goes without saying...it's also for their friends, neighbors, and anyone else who is curious about or embarking on a cross-cultural journey in life. 

Some of us do this naturally. We're born into one or more cultures and are raised in another, and slipping from one mode to another is as natural as blinking. Some of us are doing this for professional or practical reasons--we work in or have suddenly been exposed to people from other cultures, or we're traveling and suddenly discovered that there can be a steep learning curve in the space between the guidebook and that first international friendship. Some of us do it for love--the one thing that knows no color, class, or international boundaries. 

And some of us do it because it is fun. 

There's a growing group of people who live both between and across cultures and nations and languages and beliefs, and I am one. Sometimes it can seem as though managing all the different parts of our lives can be so fragmented and unrelatable that we may as well be talking to a walrus about vegetables and monarch, for all the sense it initially makes. It makes sense to us but describing the experience--and even better, finding others who are living the experience--is largely left up to luck, chance, and if you're a professional nomad, drunken office mixers.  This blog is (hopefully) to highlight some of the people and places and things that make the global nomad lifestyle--all of its fusion culture and linguistic crossbreeds and of course, the food--amazing.

So when we get to the part about pigs having wings, please pass me the buffalo sauce. And subscribe/follow for more global culture minded shenanigans, every week. Thanks!

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