Weekly Update: 11.26.10

Parakou!!  This week was our PSW, which stands for something official and means that all the 1st year TEFL volunteers got together for a week to talk/vent about teaching.  Parakou is in the middle of the country (the farthest north I've been yet), and traveling away from the south was really interesting/awesome.

 - Observations about Parakou/Being North of Oueme Plateau:  People are SO much nicer!  Or maybe just less agressive.  I could walk up to a zem and tell him where I wanted to go, and 9 times out of 10 he'd give me the right price the first time -- no arguing!  People didn't walk up to demand money as much, and there was ignam pilee, which is a delicious, delicious food that you should try.  Also, it was waaaay drier up there, so my hair actually dried in one day instead of the regular 3.  Very cool. 

 - Seeing the other TEFLers:  We had so much fun!  It was really good to see people, vent, tell stories, drink bad Beninese beer, and eat lots of food.  Especially helpful: knowing that bizarre, hilarious, and occasionally awful things happen to everyone.  Also nice to know that all of our schools are really resource-less, not just mine (actually, mine's pretty nice in comparison).  We visited a Parakou school, and were all marveling at the doors and nice chalkboards in the buildings... until my friend Katie said something like, "Whoa... they have walls..."  Lots of good stories about student mutinies, lessons gone hilariously wrong, and discipline tactics yet to work. I feel better... -ish.

 - Food stuff:  Because PC was paying the hotel to cater, I ate more protein this week than I normally eat in 2 weeks at post -- every lunch and dinner involved meat!  Lunch was always eggs!  And I got to eat wagashi, the cheese made by the nomadic Fulani people.  It's not exactly cheddar, but for a dairy-starved girl from Ohio, it was delicious.

 - New friend:  The first day of PSW, we checked in and all headed to a hilarious beer festival in Parakou (like Oktoberfest, but waaaay more Beninese).  While we were sitting there, I met a girl from Japan who's also a volunteer through their PC-like program.  We started talking, eventually exchanged numbers, and two days later she invited me and two friends over for sushi at her house in Parakou.  Sushi was delicious, she was fantastic to talk to, and it was really interesting to see how similar PC and the Japanese volunteer program are.  She got here 4 months ago (like us) and will be here for 2 years (like us) -- good contact.  I think she's going to be in Porto Novo soon, and I hope she calls me... I'd love to return the dinner.

 - Figured out Christmas Break plans:  I'm going giraffe watching in Niger with Bevin, Dione, Matt, and some other people (I don't know the entire group yet).  Yay!  That'll be all the way through Benin, plus a whole new country, plus freaking giraffes.  SO cool.  Gotta start saving/planning/filing for the visa.  : )

I know more happened, but I can't think of it right now... I'll maybe update more later, after I get back to post tomorrow.

Camp GLOW: In Case You Want to Send Me a Christmas Gift…

Every year, PC Benin puts on a series of camps for girls called Camp GLOW (Girls Leading Our World). I’ve seen pictures and videos from last year, and it’s supposed to be amazing – for a week, 50 girls get together to learn about leadership, taking control of their own education and career, saving money to reach goals, and all sorts of sessions that hopefully help them kick past the cultural barriers that Benin puts in their way. There’s fun stuff, too, like arts & crafts, history/culture field trips, songs, and soccer matches (girls rarely get to play soccer here), but the point of it is empowerment, pure and simple.


To do the camp, we need money – Peace Corps volunteers supply the food, the transportation, all of the speakers and field trips, and all of that amounts to about $6,000 USD. We get donations from Beninese businesspeople (part of PC’s policy is that all projects must have some input from local people so that we’re not just giving the people things all the time), but most of the money comes from donations.

So here’s my pitch: I’m doing this camp, and I’m pretty sure it’s going to be incredible. If you happen to have an extra $5 laying around and wouldn’t mind sending it our way, click on the following link – you can donate online (let me know if you do, though, so I can thank you!). I promise that we’ll use it as carefully as we can, and that I’ll write a really awesome blog post on the awesome things that happen. With pictures.


https://www.peacecorps.gov/index.cfm?shell=donate.contribute.projDetail&projdesc=680-197


K, that’s it – begging over. : )

Conversation on Polygamy

At my weekly English department meeting (AP), we got talking about a lot of random things. First it was kids, and that led to how many kids each of us wanted, and then somehow we jumped to multiple wives. One of the professors has two wives already, and he said that it was good for a man to have two wives, especially if he wanted a lot of children.


This is a professor I usually like talking to, and so I felt comfortable arguing a little: I said that it was fine for a man to have two wives as long as women were allowed to have two husbands. He thought this was hilarious. “A woman with two men! That’s not good, God doesn’t like that. God wants men to have multiple wives, that’s why there are more women than men in Benin.” It’s like 52% women to 48% men… I (laughing at the logic) told him this was a ridiculous point, and he should start thinking of better reasons.


Anyway, so we argued for a while (without getting too mad), and while neither of us changed our position much, it was really interesting. I kind of assumed that because professors are educated and generally more worldly than other people in village, they’d be more equality-minded… false. In their arguments, there was an underlying assumption that women are to be owned and controlled, and that a man must always be in charge. “Here, we say that the man is the head of the family, and that without him, the body cannot be.” “In America, we say the woman is the neck, and she can turn the head any way she wants.”


It was frustrating to find out that several of my fellow English professors are unapologetically sexist (even those that talk about girls’ empowerment in the classroom like it’s really important), but in another way it was kind of nice. Seeing girls shoved back every day had kind of drowned out the shock factor for me – in one of my classes I have 33 boys to 13 girls, and I wasn’t surprised at all when I saw that count. It was a good feeling after this conversation to know that I still get fired up about equality, and that I’m still, after all, a feminist. It’s good to know what I’m up against, and what I’m fighting for here… a girls’ club seems more important and needed than ever.

Tabaski: Because Kids Haven’t Missed Enough School

Last week they announced that this past Wednesday would be Tabaski, the Muslim holiday celebrating that one time when Abraham almost sacrificed his son but then didn’t. Instead of slaughtering his firstborn, God said it’d be totally cool if he just killed a sheep, so he did. Thus, the celebration is alternatively called “The Festival of Mutton,” and the entire point of the day is to roast sheep and eat the meat.

I visited my host family that morning and watched them dismantle several dead sheep (sidenote: sheep have truly huge testicles. Terrifyingly huge). I was meeting some other PCVs (Kara and Scott) for festivities, so I left them to roast the sheep and promised to come back before I returned to village. Spent most of the day drinking (beer, wine, gin) and eating (fish, akassa, and because the people we were hanging out with weren’t actually Muslim, pork). It was a good day, not anything all that special in terms of Beninese fetes, but fun to hang out with Scott and Kara – they’ve both been in country for over a year, so they’re good at hanging out with the Beninese. Plus, they’re hilarious and really welcoming, so that was a definite positive, too.

After getting tipsy and eating pork, I returned to my actually Muslim host family (who participate in neither of those activities). I hung out with them for a bit, and right before I grabbed a zem to go to the taxi place, my maman handed me a giant bag of freshly cooked mutton to take home with me – every time I see them, they give me food. They may be in on the village mama’s secret plan to fatten me up. If you have to roll me off the plane in two years, I claim absolutely no responsibility.

Conversation with a Beninese Man

(I’m thinking of making this a recurring feature.) Setting: Seats in front of my concession. Beninese Man in Question: A primary school teacher.


BM: You should cook me something for dinner. You should prepare Beninese food and invite me over.
LG: I’m sorry, I can’t have men in my house. My husband doesn’t like that.
BM: Oh, then I would like to take you out to a restaurant. We can go on a walk afterward.
LG: Umm, no, sorry. I’m married, and that’s not appropriate.
BM/LG: (Establish that I’m actually married, my husband is in America, and that no, I don’t want a Beninese one, too.)
BM: Hmm, okay, I can’t have you. Then I want you to call people you know in America and send a woman to me here.
LG: (Thinking he’s joking.) Hah, okay, I’ll work on that. It’s expensive to get here, though, are you going to pay her ticket?
BM: Yes, I will pay her ticket. I will save my money. And don’t worry, it’s not because I want her to take me to America. She can live here in Benin with me.
LG: (Realizing he’s serious.) There are not many women who want to give up America, family and all of their friends to live here.
BM: But she can have my children, and we can visit America during the holidays. She must be white, and I would like her to have brown hair and either blue or green eyes, not too fat and not too skinny. But definitely white.
LG: I don’t think this is going to work. Sorry. I’ll think about it, but I don’t think it’s going to happen.
BM: So when should I come back? When will you have sent her to me? Two weeks? I’ll check back in two weeks. Remember, she must be white.
LG: …

Weekly Digest: 11.19.10

- Tabaski. A yearly Muslim holiday, Tabaski constitutes a Beninese national holiday, which means – surprise! – no school. Luckily it was on a Tuesday, so I didn’t have classes anyway. More on Tabaski to follow, since the explanation I started writing is way too long for a bullet point.

- Tabaski, Part 2. On actual Tabaski at about 4pm, the Beninese government announced that the Tabaski national holiday would continue an extra day, so there would be no school Wednesday. This one actually did mess up my plans a lot (Wed. I teach 6eme, and both of my classes are behind). I asked why Tabaski was going to continue, and my host maman explained: “Well, you know, we worked so hard today having the party that tomorrow we need the day off to relax.” Ohhh… right.

- Problem with Woman at School. I think I wrote about this last week – a woman professor at school was refusing to call me Madame, instead calling me Mademoiselle as loudly and emphatically as she could. I’d ask her to call me Madame, and she’d refuse… you expect that from men here, but the fact that it was coming from a woman (a professor!) was really getting to me. At the end of last week, I said something to the effect of, “Madame, I respect your marriage. Why don’t you respect mine?” Then I pulled out a picture of me with my husband. Today, she walked up, called me Mademoiselle, and then immediately checked herself. “Good morning, Madame.” Success.

- Other Problems at School. I told the other English department teachers that I was going to Parakou, and they all demanded that I bring them presents… really unprofessional, I think. Not sure how to handle it. I only got to teach my 6eme classes once this week, and now they’re really behind. My 5eme class on Thursday was going really well until the entire class sort of mutinied and refused to do one of my activities. In return, I’m making them do the assignment as homework, plus do another huge (21-sentence-long) homework assignment. Screw you, little assholes, I have the power here.

- Free Food! Today (Friday, 11.19.10), after a hella long trip to the bank – 1.5 hours just to withdraw money! – Elyse and I treated ourselves to “fried” chicken for lunch. We were just about to pay when an attractive older man walked up to our table, told us he had already paid for our meal, and gave Elyse his phone number. “Call me sometime, if you get the chance.” He didn’t ask us to marry him, demand our numbers, or try to get money from us. By far the most tempting Beninese man offer we’ve gotten to date… plus, free food!

- Elyse Visits. After our adventures in Cotonou today, we headed back to my village in a taxi. On the way we ate FanMilk (cheapo ice cream substitute), chatted lots, got an actually good price on the taxi without arguing, and saw a rainbow. Good day, excellent company… : )

- Onward and Northward. Tomorrow we head to Elyse’s post for the night, and after that, to Parakou (in the middle of the country) for a week of training with the other first-year TEFL volunteers. Yay Americans! I expect lots of fun stories, some debauchery, and lots of good food.

Bugs

How To Not Fall Asleep While Teaching

Teaching gets boring sometimes. Not that I’m an old pro or anything, but when you have to go over the conjugations of “to be” 18 times in an hour, your mind starts to wander. To combat boredom, I’ve come up with a number of ways to keep myself entertained.


First, I write my own exercises. This allows me to, a), correct all of the mistakes in the official teaching document we have, and b), put in funnier names. I’ve used celebrities, Disney characters, entertaining Beninese names (Fati being my current favorite), and, of course, friends’ names. See below.

Next, I do my best to call on kids with funny names. This is maybe unfair, but really, when a child’s name is Aude (“odd”), Parfait, or Abiodoun… how can you resist? Related: when grading 5,000 quizzes and homeworks this weekend, I made it a point to look for entertaining sentences that kids had accidentally written. My favorite (4):

Third, I make my own visual aids. Kids find my drawings hilarious, and even when my art skills confuse them terribly (it took me 5 minutes to explain that my picture of “boy” was not, in fact, a newborn baby. It had pants, okay?), it’s fun to draw vocabulary words. Plus, it’s doubly fun to make them copy my awful drawings into their copybooks… Muahahahah.

Finally, and most importantly, I talk to myself. Kids who speak no English and very little French can’t decipher swear words spoken in whisper, so I can say pretty much anything I want when I’m writing on the board. I can also start singing for absolutely no reason (example: Fresh Prince of Bel-Air theme song), and they shut up and all pay rapt attention to me. Does Will Smith have anything to do with simple present tense? Probably not. Does he keep me from falling asleep while teaching it? Yes ma’am.

Friends, Fajitas, and Fantastic Conversations

Any day with fajitas is a good day. Any day with great conversation and company is also a good day. Thus, Saturday (11.13) was absolutely fantastic. (See that word math I did there?)


I didn’t really know the girls in my region all that well – I’d seen them around during stage, but because most of them are health and environment volunteers, I didn’t get to hang out much with them. A week or so ago, though, Becky texted me to schedule a let’s-cook-something-delicious dinner, and eventually we ended up inviting three other girls (Victoria, Emily, Katie) to join – party!


Spent Saturday morning cleaning, then headed into Porto Novo and met up with the girls for ingredients shopping. You take a taxi back to my village, and since there were 5 of us, we just hired a whole car for ourselves. The guy driving us tried to jack up the price, but Victoria flirt-discutered it down to the normal price, and then we had a singalong party all the way back, which we think made it worth his while. “Waving Flag” and Shakira’s Africa song figured prominently into the selection, and the driver thought we were crazy, and life was good.


Came back to my house, then headed out to the buvette (bar) down the road, where we downed a couple of beers, christened ourselves the Southern Belles, and launched into an incredible, unexpected conversation. Sometimes, when you have the vocabulary of a three year old in French, you forget what it’s like to talk about real things. These girls are smart and funny and opinionated, and we had a great discussion: cultural sensitivity vs. women’s rights/health issues (FGM), foreign aid and what’s wrong with just giving people money, African and American takes on volunteer work… everything about what we’re doing here and how we fit in. My mind was spinning happily, and it wasn’t just from the beer.


Came back to the house and made vegetarian fajitas (meat’s expensive and we were lazy) with pico and beans and fresh tortillas. Soooo good. Swoon. Conversation continued, then we watched an episode of House, set out the Thermarest, and went to sleep.


All in all, an incredible day – cheers for big thoughts, great dinners, and fantastic company.

Weekend Update: 11/12/10

I was about to start this post by saying that nothing really happened this week, but then I realized that it did.  Things just surprise me less now, I guess.  Highlights of this past week:

• I taught my first full week!  It was exhausting.  I gave and graded two quizzes -- my 6eme M1 class did amazingly, and my 5eme class pretty much all failed... 37/41 got 10 out of 20 or lower.  Awesome.  That was particularly frustrating because it was review from last year, I used activities we'd done in class, and it was fairly obvious that no one had studied.  I was genuinely pissed, so I made Thursday's lesson a lecture on study skills, I brought out evil Madame M (my teaching alter ego), and I gave them a really long make-up assignment.  Monday, I'm assigning a new seating chart... let's see how they like my class if they can't chat with their friends all the time. 
• Pauline, my neighbor, was in a motorcycle accident.  At midnight last Tuesday, after I was very asleep, she showed up pounding on my door, face and leg covered in blood, and announced that she was sleeping in my house that night.  I didn't really have a choice (she'd left her keys out in Porto Novo), so I patched her up with my med kit, gave her a snack and a pillow, and tried to go back to sleep (she's fine now).
• A little down this week.  Spent most of it inside my house because of some raging digestive issues (I'm doing tests in the med unit today), and I think that made me feel more isolated than usual.  Am hoping that once I'm fully into work, that'll get better.  Plus, after next week is PSW -- a whole week with the other TEFL volunteers in Parakou.  Yaaaay!
• Awesome moment in parents' meeting.  The director introduced me in front of a meeting of all of the school's parents, and I greeted them in Gun.  They looooved it -- everyone started cheering and grinning and clapping, and one guy even made a little speech about how much it meant to them that I was trying to learn local language.  Felt good, and made me (sort of) want to study. : )
• Fellow teacher trouble.  So I was doing well with the other teachers -- I finally convinced most of them that I'm married, awkward inquiries as to whether they can visit me stopped, and I'm starting to have professor friends... actually, one of them (Gabriel, also my Gun tutor; his awesome wife Florence is going to help me with French) found my blog the other day -- uh oh.  Anyway, so there was this one female teacher who absolutely refused to call me Madame -- she'd call me mademoiselle, I'd ask her to call me madame, and she'd say loudly, "MADEMOISELLE."  One of the other profs said it was because she wanted me to marry her brother.  I told her I was already married.  She said I should take a Beninese husband, too, Mademoiselle.  Yesterday I got really pissed and whipped out a picture, and I think she might stop now... which is good, because it's really, really frustrating.  You kind of expect it from the men here, but to have that whole thing coming from a fellow professional woman... Frustrating.
• Observed the head of the English department teach classes.  He's really, really good -- I'm not actually sure I can help him with much more than pronunciation.  I can help with that, though.  During class, one of his kids stood up and, responding to a question, said, "Yes, this bish is beautiful."  I think he meant beach, but I had to fake cough to keep from laughing at him.
• Am having people over to my house tomorrow!  Some of the girls in the south are visiting to slumber party and make fajitas.  I don't know where to get most of the stuff for fajitas... but whatever.  Details.

K, that's all I've got for now -- love yall!

This Week: APCD Visit

Not much happened this week, except my boss from Peace Corps (the APCD) visited. My boss Taibatou is kind of fantastically glamorous, a Beninese woman in charge, and I love it. My other boss, Cyprien, who oversaw my training, was also there… he’s been an English teacher for years, knows everything about education ever, and is incredibly nice when I call him freaking out about my house/school/living-with-the-director situation.

Anyway. So she visited today and observed my 6eme M1 class, which I had seen exactly two times before. We had a couple of rough patches chatting-wise, and it took (not exaggerating) about 20 minutes to explain the sentence “Create a dialogue with a partner” using my entire Franglais and FreMiming vocabulary. But we got there, that’s the important part.


I also decided that I did not want to be bored during this lesson, so I taught my kids a song. A classic, one that fit the topic (Introductions/Greetings) perfectly. I taught them the following:


A: Yo! My name is--
B: --What?!
A: My name is--
B: --Who?!
A: My name’s--
B: Chicka chicka!
A: (enter student’s name)


Please picture me plus my class of 47 students chanting this in front of my bosses. Then add the Beninese English accent (“May name ees watt! my name ees ho!) and my students’ fantastic names (Sunday, Abiodoun, Pelagie, Aude, etc.). I don’t love teaching just yet, but if I get to teach a hilarious rap every day, I can definitely get there.

List: Weird Things I Cook For Myself

I blame this on several factors: lack of ingredients, lack of tools, and just plain laziness.


- Spaghetti with a lump of peanut butter on it
- Rice with powdered milk and cinnamon
- Rice with sweetened condensed milk. There’s a pattern here somewhere…
- Boiled onions, topped with a little sugar. (Try it.)
- Broth. Just broth.
- Dry spaghetti. Not technically cooking, but current favorite snack.
- Mayonnaise sandwich. Ew, I can’t believe I ate that… but it was so good.
- …and that’s enough for now. I’ll let you know if I made anything else that’s spectacularly strange.

Notes on Hygiene, Part 3: I Am A Genius, and Primping

I am a genius. After I wrote the last post, I created what is maybe the most important invention of my life: the Hot Water Bucket Bath (HWBB). I imagine that other people (like, most of the PCV population) has been doing this since before I was born, but I intend to take any and all credit for my groundbreaking creation.

The HWBB is a careful concoction of boiling water (a medium-sized pot) plus faucet water to taste (or feel, whatever). Normally a running shower is preferable to a bucket bath because it’s less work – no carrying the water-filled bucket from faucet to shower, no trying to douse yourself bit-by-bit using a small bowl or cup. Bucket baths take more time and thus increase exposure time to mosquitoes.


However. With the introduction of the HWBB to my life, I’m a convert. I can’t say enough about the joys of pouring a perfectly warm bowl of water over your hair, slowly waking up to the sweet feeling of soap-scented steam curling around your feet. It’s a PCV’s version of a hot bubble bath, and it’s pure bliss.


Enough on that (euphoric, heaven-sent) subject, we have more important things to talk about: primping. Primping, or “spending time making minor adjustments to (one’s hair, makeup, or clothes),”* is difficult here, both because supplies need to be rationed and because it’s difficult to motivate yourself when no one in village really cares. My observations:


Shaving – I can’t stand underarm hair (just the prickly feeling of it, ew), so that’s shaved every day. Legs… well, I made a solemn promise to myself and the world that I would shave my legs at least once a week, so I shave once a week. Usually Tuesdays. If I’m going to Cotonou or somewhere else I’m likely to see Americans, I always before (it’s a patriotic thing, really), but otherwise, it’s once a week. No more, no less.

Eyebrows– This is a good time burner and feel-good-ifier, so my brows are pretty well maintained so far... Since I don’t look in the mirror every day any more, it’s often difficult to tell when they’re getting unruly, but hey, I try.

Deodorant – Every day, religiously. Sometimes more than once. I will not compromise on this topic.


Other scent-related issues – I should have brought more perfume samples, although I’ve found a reasonable substitute: bug spray. I spritz a little DEET on the back of your neck and you can’t really smell anything else.


Makeup – Hah. In the States, I love makeup, and I like looking pretty. Here, it’s so humid and hot that it takes about 30 minutes for most of it to melt off (except for waterproof mascara, which God makes with his own hands as a gift to cosmetically-minded women in sweltering countries). Makeup follows a similar rule to leg-shaving: If I need to feel pretty, I’ll dust on a little powder and mascara, and if I’m seeing fellow PCVs I’ll spend a whole 15 minutes applying creams and liners to my face. On a regular day in village, though, forget it.


There you have it, my personal, no-detail-withheld account of a PCV’s hygiene in Benin. Ta-da! (Please still be my friend?)

*According to whatever dictionary comes with this computer.

Notes on Hygiene, Part 2: Showering

Showering – I shower every day. That said, showering here is different: I have running water (I’m spoiled), but it’s cold only, and at 6am when it’s still dark outside, a blast of ice water to the naked flesh is not something you really want to withstand for very long. I’ve developed the dunk-scrub-splash-dash method in response.


Step 1 (Dunk): Take deep breath, turn on faucet. Edge toward water, put one arm in. Lean head in. Remember that this is not the Hokey Pokey, step under running water. Count to 10 (okay, 5), jump back out of cold water. Turn off faucet.


Step 2 (Scrub): Soap up, concentrating effort on Potential Odor Zones (POZs). I’m going to let you figure out what those are.


Step 3 (Splash): Turn on faucet, stare at it apprehensively until you get the guts to step in (minimum 15 seconds, maximum 2 minutes). Realize that you cannot actually rinse off if you keep leaning away from the cold water. Splash furiously at POZs. Consider self clean, turn off faucet.

Step 4 (Dash): Grab pagne, towel self off as you sprint inside away from swarming mosquitos. Congratulate self on expended effort.

You’ll notice that there’s no mention of shampoo there. I now wash my hair every 3 days. This was difficult to get used to at first (and kinda gross), but a couple of factors have made it easier: First, shampoo adds at least a minute to cold-water shower time. Second, I have a lot of hair, and since I keep it in a bun most of the time, it doesn’t seem worth it to keep it all sparkly clean. Third, it takes my hair a day and a half to dry (thank you, humidity), so washing it more than every 2 days seems like a waste. (Does hair mold?)

Fourth and most importantly, every Beninese woman or child who plays with my hair tries to make it into a helmet. By this I mean she combs it, then uses her hands to plaster it as flat as she can onto my scalp. If it’s clean, strands escape, and she’ll spend 20 minutes explaining to me that I need to buy pomade and/or glue. When my hair has a healthy oil slick going on, it sticks in place, and nothing makes a Beninese woman happier than a completely immobile hair style.


That’s about all I can say on showering without scaring the small children (an army of whom, I’m sure, are reading my blog). Oh, except cold-water showers in the middle of the day are awesome, especially after biking home from school. Stay tuned for further updates.

Notes on Hygiene, Part 1: Introduction

I’ve thought long and hard about writing this post, and I’ve decided that you will probably still love me afterward. Thus, hygiene.

*MOST IMPORTANT NOTE: I STILL SHOWER EVERY DAY. AND WEAR DEODORANT.*

So Beninese hygiene is different than American hygiene: We tend to think they’re dirty because there’s lots of body odor and significantly less deodorant. They tend to think we’re dirty because we shower only once a day and don’t sweep our houses as well as they do. That last part really does factor in as personal hygiene.


While I try to stay as America-clean as I can, it’s tough to be as scrubbed and primped as is normal when you have hot, indoor showers and unlimited access to mirrors. As much as I’d like to lie and say I’m a powder-fresh princess over here, some things have slid a little, and since I’m dedicated to being as disgustingly honest as I can be on this blog… here we go.

List: Top 15 Countries To Visit

In no particular order… make your list, let’s compare!

1. Thailand
2. India
3. Indonesia
4. New Zealand
5. Iran*
6. Turkey
7. Israel
8. Argentina
9. Brazil
10. Kenya
11. Madagascar
12. Morocco
13. Egypt
14. Holland
15. Switzerland


*Potentially impossible.