Will this be your farewell fling with Switzerland before moving on? You are everywhere! Tomorrow we fly to Kuching on the island of Borneo for three days of idleness at a beach resort, then back to KL for three more days before winging our way back to St. Pierre via Paris courtesy of Air Asia. I had my very first Thai massage yesterday as well. I was sufficiently warned that it would be a painful experience, but I was determined to see what it was like.
It was excruciatingly sensuous torture as a young Malaysian girl clad in black stroked, kneaded, crushed, stretched and twisted every muscle in my body. I can still feel the aftereffects, especially in my back where she not only used her hands, but her elbows and knees to exert pressure on those muscle fibers. At times our two bodies were entwined in strange configurations as she seemed to have a unending source of techniques and new positions to inflict such sweet suffering.
Before leaving for KL, we spent two days in Paris at the annual Paris book fair. I attended a fascinating question and answer session with the British writer Ian McEwan, whom I really love. It is about a Nobel Prize laureate who spends the rest of his life coasting through his decades-old fame but remaining void of new ideas and imagination.
McEwan was such a treat to listen to, and I found him not only extremely intelligent and witty, but very human and down to earth. I found his book in English at a bookstore in KL yesterday, and I am now in the middle of his tale of failed marriages and unfulfilled expectations. Thought you might appreciate this take on the OBL killing by one of my favorite journalists in the Middle East.
I was thrilled to get your mail before you left and then again from Tokyo. However, things on the home front, the rapidity of change, has set my mind into a tizz. Can you believe three years have passed, and now we have to be packed and out of our home by June 30th.
