Our second weekend in Rangoon, we attended a cooking class sponsored by the embassy’s Community Liaison Office (CLO) at a local organic farm. We were excited for a chance to learn how to cook Nangyithoke, a Burmese chicken thick noodle salad which originated in Mandalay.
The CLO warned us to bring insect repellant — and for good reason, as it turned out; the farm hosts its cooking classes in a beautiful outdoor kitchen.
In early August, our first weekend in Rangoon struck the perfect balance of downtime at the pool, making new friends, and exploring a few sights outside the embassy grounds. Thanks to the embassy’s hard-working Community Liaison Office (CLO), V and I were able to enjoy a guided shopping trip before we’d even figured out how to order a taxi on our own.
We moved to Burma (also known as Myanmar) two weeks ago, at the start of my fifth diplomatic assignment. It quickly became clear that we had traded summer in the United States for the height of Burma’s rainy season.
In late July, after leaving Virginia and driving almost 2,800 miles by myself, I arrived in California. I think my friends and family used to be in disbelief when in 2022 I first started driving across the country alone to see them, but now my wild stunts have become almost expected.
My original plan had been to drive directly to the home of my nana in the San Francisco Bay Area. But when I’d looked at my route, I’d realized I would drive right by my mom’s in the Sierra Nevada Foothills on the way there. It made sense to stop at my mom’s to avoid arriving at my nana’s—about three hours farther away—at night. I got to my mom’s right around dinnertime, just as I’d planned.
After our grueling three-day packout ended late last month, I spent the following day preparing to drive across the United States by myself. Ideally I would have left first thing in the morning. But as the final day of our packout had stretched into the evening, I realized some tasks — like going to the bank and post office, returning newly purchased aerosols the movers wouldn’t pack, and making one last run to my private storage unit — would have to wait until the following morning. This would delay my departure until later in the day.
V spent the day cleaning the rental house where we had lived since early 2022, while I repacked all my suitcases at our temporary apartment. Once I finished, I loaded the car and ran a few last-minute errands before stopping by the house one final time to say goodbye. It was only a temporary goodbye to him, but a fond farewell to the only home we’ve known since we left Ciudad Juárez three and a half years ago.
This post is the second half of a story from 2023 that I began to write last week. If you haven’t read the first half, I recommend you do so first so this post will make sense.
I want to take a break from the intensity of Burmese study-related posts and tell a story I’ve been meaning to share since 2023. It’s an emotional story, sad, and long, but I think important, so I will tell it in two parts. This is the first part.
It’s fair to say I am the type of person who relies more on science than I do faith to explain what I experience in life. Most people who know me would probably describe me with words like serious, rational, skeptical, judicious, and methodical.
However, I have also long believed there are things we don’t understand about the human experience. In my opinion, sometimes things happen that we cannot simply explain (or explain away) with facts. Some things we simply feel, and intuitively believe to be true, even if we cannot prove it. This is a story about something like that. It’s a story about a message from beyond.
We’ve now completed 75 percent of our Burmese training, and times they are a‑changin’. Half of our classmates have tested out with their scores and moved on, leaving only the two of us—as it was in the beginning. The seasons have shifted from summer to fall, then winter, and now spring. With about three months left before we depart for Post, the sense that we’re coming full circle grows ever stronger.
Calendar year 2025 has continued to present a strange mix of hardship and beauty. Over the past two weeks of Burmese class, the cherry blossoms around Washington, DC’s Tidal Basin reached peak bloom—just as a devastating earthquake struck Burma, killing thousands.
As I prepared for my second Burmese language progress evaluation last month, I also was getting ready for a special Christmas at home in Virginia. The reasons it was special were twofold. One, my dad (and later my stepdaughters) were planning to visit from out of state; and two, it would be the last Christmas V and I would be in the United States, potentially for years.
In 2024, when I wasn’t making the most of my time outdoors, I managed to publish 35 posts, conclude my fourth tour handling international parental child abductions in the Office of Children’s Issues, and begin long-term training for my next assignment at the U.S. Embassy in Rangoon, Burma.
I also wrote a series of posts chronicling Foreign Service-related topics, including the centennial anniversary of the Foreign Service, the machinations of retirement and sixth tour bidding planning, and my best tips for success during FSI language study.
As I mentioned in the first post of my Trail Quest blog series, in 2020 I inadvertently started a bid to visit all of Virginia’s 43 (and counting) state parks with a pandemic isolation-era visit to Mason Neck State Park (MN). The site of friends’ kids’ birthday parties and impromptu weekend gatherings over the years, Mason Neck as our first state park was familiar, and probably – as the state park nearest our home – also the only Virginia state park we’d ever been to.
At that time, I was only peripherally aware of the state park system in Virginia. I didn’t realize how many parks existed, where they were, or how nice they were. We hiked outdoors in lots of places, but in retrospect they were northern Virginia’s abundant local parks or bigger-visit national parks. Occasionally I would see a sign for a state park off interstate 95 while we were on the way to somewhere else. But in 2023, I discovered Trail Quest.
One of the best things about serving a domestic Foreign Service tour is proximity and access to all the wonderful aspects of life in the United States. In contrast to many overseas assignments challenged by air pollution, security restrictions, or lack of infrastructure, northern Virginia boasts a nearly endless array of activities with no such hindrances.
One of my favorite things lately about living in Virginia has been enjoying its beautiful nature.
Last summer and again this summer, my husband V and I revisited Water Country USA in Williamsburg, VA, for the first time in several years. Water Country USA, a waterslide park owned by SeaWorld, is located about 150 miles south of Washington, DC. The drive takes us almost two and a half hours each way, depending on traffic, making it an easy day trip by our standards.
We first visited the park in 2010, the year I finally bought my VW. At the time, my stepdaughters—now in their 20s and living on their own—were still in elementary school.
While Water Country USA holds fond memories for me, I wasn’t prepared for how much the cost of family fun in America has skyrocketed nearly 15 years later. I’m still baffled by how people manage to afford it.
A few weeks ago, we said goodbye to our trusty 2015 Toyota 4Runner. We’d purchased the red truck as a second vehicle four years earlier – almost to the day – during summer 2020. It had been the height of the COVID pandemic and mere days before we were due to head out to my third tour in Ciudad Juárez. We’d barely had enough time to complete Virginia’s mandatory safety inspection sticker before we’d loaded up both of our vehicles and started our PCS road trip to the border.
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