The weather has finally cooled and feels good. For the last 3 weeks, Paris was under a brutal heat wave. In a few days, I'm going backpacking solo in the Alps for 2 weeks. Mina is back from Algeria.
Mina had been gone for 1 month to stay with her mom in her seaside house. Now that she is back, she is suddenly inviting me to go with her and meet her mom in Algeria next month. Algeria is one of those countries the US government warns you to stay out of. After meeting her mom and the rest of her family, we would spend some time sight seeing and then backpacking in the Atlas mountains and some in the Sahara desert.
Mina had been gone for 4 weeks, and that's a long time. In the mean time, I have been seeing a lot of Ritzko. Ritzko grew up in Japan and went to college (Harvard) in the US. After grad school, she was a reporter for the Wall Street Journal (pre Murdoch) for several years. Later, she moved to Paris and does something completely different.
I spent a year in the desert practically alone and never felt lonely. Here, I feel horribly, lose_my_mind and need morphine for comfort lonely after Mina was gone for only a few days. Not wanting to sleep my life away on morphine, I tried to keep myself busy with Ritzko.
I still don't know what it means for a woman, especially an Arabic woman, to invite me to visit her mother. In the US, in my experience, it has meant the woman is claiming you. Her mom is a moderately religious Muslim as well. I have no idea if my guess is right, but I have the impression they take boy-girl relationships more seriously in that culture. I will take it as a compliment and go.
Other than that, is she trying to send me a message? Or am I over-thinking this? The reason I think she might be trying to send me a message is because of something that happened with Sara, a grad student from Pakistan. Sara was in the same lab with me several years ago. She was nice to me from the day she met me. Soon, she started giving me presents. They were only things like boxes of tea or a book every now and then. I didn't think anything of it.
One day, Sara spotted me having coffee with another girl I knew. The girl was not my girlfriend, but the next day, Sara went apeshit at the lab. She asked me how my "girlfriend" was. I told her that wasnt my girl friend but she wasn't satisfied. She glared at me the whole time she was there that day. She looked like she had gone crazy. Then she ripped up my project poster and quit.
Mina had been gone for 1 month to stay with her mom in her seaside house. Now that she is back, she is suddenly inviting me to go with her and meet her mom in Algeria next month. Algeria is one of those countries the US government warns you to stay out of. After meeting her mom and the rest of her family, we would spend some time sight seeing and then backpacking in the Atlas mountains and some in the Sahara desert.
Mina had been gone for 4 weeks, and that's a long time. In the mean time, I have been seeing a lot of Ritzko. Ritzko grew up in Japan and went to college (Harvard) in the US. After grad school, she was a reporter for the Wall Street Journal (pre Murdoch) for several years. Later, she moved to Paris and does something completely different.
I spent a year in the desert practically alone and never felt lonely. Here, I feel horribly, lose_my_mind and need morphine for comfort lonely after Mina was gone for only a few days. Not wanting to sleep my life away on morphine, I tried to keep myself busy with Ritzko.
I still don't know what it means for a woman, especially an Arabic woman, to invite me to visit her mother. In the US, in my experience, it has meant the woman is claiming you. Her mom is a moderately religious Muslim as well. I have no idea if my guess is right, but I have the impression they take boy-girl relationships more seriously in that culture. I will take it as a compliment and go.
Other than that, is she trying to send me a message? Or am I over-thinking this? The reason I think she might be trying to send me a message is because of something that happened with Sara, a grad student from Pakistan. Sara was in the same lab with me several years ago. She was nice to me from the day she met me. Soon, she started giving me presents. They were only things like boxes of tea or a book every now and then. I didn't think anything of it.
One day, Sara spotted me having coffee with another girl I knew. The girl was not my girlfriend, but the next day, Sara went apeshit at the lab. She asked me how my "girlfriend" was. I told her that wasnt my girl friend but she wasn't satisfied. She glared at me the whole time she was there that day. She looked like she had gone crazy. Then she ripped up my project poster and quit.
