I was born in Kimbrough Army Hospital, Fort Meade, Maryland in 1962. A mere three days later, I was in Warren, Ohio the place I call my hometown. Warren, Ohio is about the midpoint between Chicago, Illinois, and New York City. This is probably the reason you may hear a couple of stories about organized crime in the area.
There was a popular book called “Welcome to the Jungle Inn” and a movie starring Christopher Walken and Val Kilmer, “Kill the Irishman” that maybe mentioned Warren, Ohio, and the Mahoning Valley. Because of its manufacturing history, Warren’s population peaked in 1970 at about 63, 500 and trending downward since the industrial decline of the 80s, it is now at around 39,000. I am proud to say I am from Warren, Ohio, and consider myself a “small-town girl”.
I grew up on a dead-end street in the same house my dad grew up in along with my mom, brother, and Aunt. Life was good on Cottage Court. Living on a dead end, we pretty much roamed the neighborhood from sun-up to sundown. In the summer months, darkness didn’t mean we were in the house. The concrete back of a business was the dead-end of the street. The neighbors would bring out a movie projector and we would watch movies shown on the building’s wall. Our house was a “safe zone” and friends from the neighborhood or from across town knew they were welcome and that my parents would try to help in any way they could. I walked to Laird Avenue, my elementary school where my mom also worked part-time as an aide. After Laird, it was East Junior High and then Warren G. Harding Senior High. Friday nights were football games and weekends were carefree. Between my junior and senior years in high school, I received a scholarship to attend a summer semester in Athens, Ohio at Ohio University. My dad wasn’t keen on dropping my sixteen-year-old self off in coed Biddle Hall for the summer, but he survived and so did I. Imagine this…our high school had a smoking area for students. We also had teen night clubs where we partied on the weekends. After we outgrew the Red Caboose, we were ready for the V.I.P. Lounge. The years were flying, I was off to Kent State and working part-time at the YMCA. Part-time turned into full-time and I never worked a day in my field of study.
Warren seriously had the best restaurants…Alberinis, the 422, the El Rio, the Living Room, Golden Gate, the Sunrise Inn, and the Buena Vista to name a few. Back in the day, they were known far and wide. Only the BV, famous for Uncle Nick’s Greek Fried Chicken, and the Sunrise Inn, best known for the Old World Pizza, are left from the aforementioned. Most everyone pays the BV and Sunrise a visit whenever they are back in Warren. I’ve even been known to have a Sunrise pie delivered to Paris, France. There have even been a few famous people from Warren. Earl Derr Biggers of Charlie Chan fame, Catherine Back of the “Dukes of Hazzard”, Roger Ailes, Paul Warfield NFL Football Hall of Fame, Dave Grohl of the Foo Fighters, and professional golfer Jason Kokrak. Warren has its share of problems but it was a great place to grow up. It will be my home base when my traveling slows down.
In August 2014, I moved to Paris, France. It was the first place I have lived outside of Warren, Ohio. A big change from Warren, Ohio. Paris had a population of just over 11,000,000 in 2014, roughly the same population as the entire state of Ohio. I had been to Paris a half dozen times before I moved there. It’s true when you first arrive all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, you have an overwhelming urge to be a tourist. Running out every morning to see what you can see and collapsing into bed every night exhausted. Until that day you tell yourself, stop, this is my life right now. It’s okay to, God forbid, stay home one day and not see if you can catch a glimpse of the Eiffel Tower. Soon, you fall into a routine, and living in Paris is really not that much different than living in Warren, Ohio…..haha, okay, that’s a lie. Living in Paris is amazing. Once you learn the secret to the arrondissements, Paris is a very walkable city. The arrondissements are numbered 1-20 and start in the center near the Louvre with 1. They then go in a clockwise direction and resemble a snail. Another secret, well it’s not a secret but it does help you navigate, Paris zip codes tell you what arrondissement you are in.
If you look up the address of my favorite café, Café Chappe, it is 8 Rue Tardieu, 75018 Paris. You then know you are in the 18th, also known as Montmartre. I’m not going to spend a lot of time talking about life in Paris because many of you already know Paris is my heart. Life in Paris was magical…from walking the cobblestone streets to wandering aimlessly in the Louvre because you could go on a whim. Attending a Christmas service at Notre Dame to just sitting at a café for hours with a book… indescribable. And just like Adriana said in “Midnight in Paris”, “Actually, Paris is the most beautiful in the rain.”
After a short stint back in Warren, I was off to China for what I thought would be 6 months. Not skilled in the use of chopsticks and certainly not prepared for squatty potties, I landed in a rural village that wasn’t even named on a map in Shandong Province…Xiashan. Xiashan is considered part of the city of Weifang which is a 1.5-hour bus ride away. The rural village was the epitome of “build it and they will come”. While the 4-5000 residents of the village lived in simple homes, it was surrounded by 100’s of high-rise “ghost” apartments, one of which I lived in. Since the newly built school was a boarding school and when school was in session, the population of the community more than doubled because of the student population, I guess they were hoping that the families that traveled (some over 4 hours) to Xiashan would invest in the real estate.
It was this small village that made me fall in love with China. It was about as far from Warren, Ohio, and I don’t mean distance, that I could get. Very few people spoke any English and most people in the village and surrounding villages had never seen a Westerner. Having light hair I definitely stood out like the proverbial sore thumb. Because I was also taking Mandarin lessons, I arrived with a student Visa that was only good for six months. Before that six months ended I knew I wasn’t ready to leave China, but I had to return to the USA to apply for a new Visa. Because of the timing of the semesters, as much as I wanted to return to Xiashan, they had to replace me before I could return. Life in that rural village was simple. I bought my fruits and vegetables in the local street market.
I bought meat hanging from hooks or once even waited while they slaughtered a sheep so I could buy meat. So, I went back to Warren sent my passport off, and waited for a new visa. I was so sure I would get the Visa and go back to China, I asked the school if I could leave my things until I returned which they graciously allowed.
After about two and a half weeks, I had a 10-year multiple-entry visa in my passport. I returned to Xiashan to celebrate Chinese New Year with one of my co-workers and her family before heading nine and a half hours by train to Hunan Province in South Central China and the city of Changning. Changning means eternal peace and is home to about 810,000 residents, a small city by Chinese standards. Life in Changning……my roommate Yulia was from Moscow and we got along famously.
The biggest change here is I went from teaching grades 1 and 2 to teaching grades 5, 6, and 7 with sometimes as many as 85 students in a class. A slight adjustment in lesson plans and I survived. I also survived the rainy season in Hunan. From the time I arrived in February until leaving in mid-June, I think we were lucky if we had 3 straight days without rain. Living in Changning, I would occasionally take a weekend trip to Hong Kong. I also visited Guilin, Yangshuo, Shenzhen, Guangzhou, and Shamian Island. I did love the spicy food in Hunan Province, but at the end of the school term, I was ready to move on to a new part of China and hopefully back to primary students.
Next up – Part Two -Qingdao, Dong’e, Bali and Warsaw
Down the Rabbit Hole 