Outbound...

I've always liked an adventure. When I was a kid I would always be running around the countryside with my buddies, fighting bad-guys, saving damsels, being a ninja or a cowboy or a knight of some sort. There was always something in the venturing into the unknown that appealed to me. As we leave childhood it seems necessary to leave a lot of that spirit behind, but I never wanted to. I liked the idea of being an explorer until i found out that everything had already been explored. I liked the idea of being a spaceman until I found that I had to be a genius to do it. So I ended up as a traveler. And that has been just right.

In the last few days I left America again. This time it will be for a long time. Two years. On Tuesday I exited San Francisco in the morning after one last batch of Tartine pain au chocolates and coffees with some of my SF family there. It has been over a year since I have written in this blog but I wanted to start it up again to provide a window into what is likely to be one of my most interesting and challenging adventures yet: living in the middle east.

I accepted a Chef de Cuisine job opening a California Cuisine restaurant in the new Fairmont Hotel that has been built on the banks of the Nile River in Cairo. It will certainly be a test to that which I have come to perceive as reality, and I will be excited to use this blog as a way to share some of the stranger and more interesting parts of the adventure.

Since the last blog entries, those of the many months in South and Central America, I have never really stopped roaming. Following the opportunities and options, I sold wine in Montana for a summer and then lived in Portland, Oregon while attempting to secure a job in Bhutan to which I had been connected by a culinary brother. Due to the recession, that job ended up not being a possibility and just as I was about to fully embrace my Portland future, Egypt popped out of nowhere and punched me in the face. It was a long interview process and after many hours answering questions over the phone, I was offered the job in early January.

Since then I have lived in near-complete limbo, traveling between Portland, San Francisco, Montana and Peru many times. I, at one point, had three jobs in Portland, but nothing seemed the right fit. I was originally scheduled to start work in Cairo in February, but things kept getting pushed back due to slow construction and delays due to the recession. In late April I left Portland with the aim to travel before beginning work. I was back in Peru and then about to be on the way to India when my grandmother died and I ended up back in Montana for a few weeks at the beginning of June. I was further delayed when I arrived back in San Francisco and have just finished two weeks of waiting there.

With my recent flight I feel very good about being back in the flow! Ayn Rand, who I think was a good writer despite not really agreeing with her philosophies, says that humans need 'motion and purpose' in order to be content, and in this I do agree. For a while there was neither, then there was purpose without motion...now there are both and I can feel the reason that she wrote that. I am only vaguely sure of where this combination of effects will take me, but the trail that has led me this far has been incredible in its ups and downs and twists and turns...that much more increasing my faith in whatever process it is that leads us where we go.

I think that this will be an interesting time with a large learning curve and surely a good amount of struggle. But I have always enjoyed that. One of the first words I have learned in Arabic is also one of my favorite phrases in Spanish; 'inshallah' and 'si dios quiere', respectively. They both translate to 'if God wills it' or 'God willing'. They refer to different Gods in different parts of the world and I am not even a particularly religious person...but I think this pretty much sums up the way I am looking at this pathway that leads into the blurry future. Sea lo que sea...vamos a ver...we don't know what will happen but we'll soon find out! It will definitely be a trip. And it will probably be pretty damn funny! I'll try to post the interesting stuff here. Salaam alaykum.