Eight Places

My friend Abby tagged me for the "8 places in the United States where I’d love to live" meme, and as it's a slow day at work and I need to wait for some additional material before embarking upon my next serious blog post, I figured "Why not?".

I'm afraid I'm going to break the rules, though. I'm going to expand my choices outside the boundaries of the US (due to my multi-national background) and I'm not going to tag another eight bloggers, as most of the people I'd tag have already been tagged by others. What can I say? Rules just aren't for me. If you're reading this and haven't been tagged and want to play along, feel free to say I tagged you!

1. Tucson, AZ - USA: My current location, so this is an easy one. I love my job, I love my friends here, and I (mostly) love the climate. Plus, desert. Need I say more?

2. Albuquerque, NM - USA: I've always loved the predominantly Adobe-style housing found in the northeastern part of this city. It's also within easy reach of Santa Fe, without the high price of living that goes along with being there.

3. Paris, France: I have so many good memories of the time I spent here, seven months as a student on industrial experience placement between my third and fourth years of college. Wine for lunch being a routine part of the work day (no-one got anything done in the afternoons!), buying fresh bread on the way home in the Métro, spending weekends getting lost in the incredible modern architecture of La Défense, watching movies in a cinema on the Champs-Elysées dubbed into French with English subtitles (for the tourists), shopping at the Saint-Denis Flea Market, riding on the back of my boss's motocross bike as he circled the Arc de Triomphe for the fifth time because he knew how scared I was, and yes ... some other wonderful moments I won't be sharing here ;-)

4. Battle, England: Where I lived during my teenage years. Yes, it is named after a battle - the 1066 one. Walking home, I used to cross over the small stone tablet set into the ground that marks the spot where King Harold died from an arrow in the eye. My mother worked for a while at the girls' boarding school that now inhabits the Abbey founded by William the Conqueror to commemorate his conquest. You can't imagine how it feels to be sitting around in ruins that have existed for 900 years, in the dark, waiting for your parent to get off work and drive you home. If I ever believed in ghosts, it would have been then.

   And yet, the countryside is amazing there. The woods and fields, open for all to wander through, paid a large part in the development of my tomboy identity. I spent more time halfway up a tree than I did doing my homework. I think I was preparing myself for a solitary, woodsman-type existence. I'm glad my life turned out quite differently, though.

5. Tavistock, England: My last two years of high school were spent at a boarding school in this town in the county of Devon. I was still a solitary child, and drawn to the countryside. There's an old, abandoned railway line that passed through, crossing high stone bridges and delineating meadows. There were rules against walking along it, but they meant nothing to me. I would pack a lunch and spend a whole day up there, eating the wild strawberries and spying on the back gardens of those who lived nearby. I'm quite sure that the owner of the scrapyard adjacent to the railway would not have been happy to know that I was slipping down into it, avoiding the high fences, and methodically removing license plates and other trophies from the vehicles there, and taking them back to display in my dorm. The dangers of wandering around amidst tottering columns of twisted metal never occurred to me then.

6. Aviemore, Scotland: Snow, amazing landscapes, snow, a sports complex with a world-class ice-rink, snow, memories of a vacation when I was ten with my mother and my best friend sharing an RV, snow ... did I mention the snow?

7. Lhasa, Tibet: For a long time, I owned and bred Tibetan Mastiffs, and did quite a bit of research into the Tibetan Culture. I think life here would be too hard for the long-term, but it would be fascinating to experience for a while. I even have an English-Tibetan dictionary at home, but I never quite got all the way to the end of learning the alphabet, nevermind anything else.

8. Small Spaceship, In Orbit Around Somewhere: I went through a period just before puberty where I would spend hours upon hours upon hours designing spaceship interiors. Once again, I think it was a reflection of my desire to live an isolated life away from people I didn't understand, and who didn't understand me. Self-sufficiency has been an underlying theme in the way I've lived for a long time.

   Besides, wouldn't it be fun to go where no man has gone before, to search out new... yeah, all that!