traveling without moving

only 2 years after moving from Brussels to Quito, we were told we might only have 2 months to pack our bags & move to Rome. i remember looking into Rome's Lycée Chateaubriand & finding out it is one of the best French international schools in the world. the daughter of an Ecuadorian diplomat in my class had attended that school while her father was stationed as the Ecuadorian ambassador to Rome, and she had great things to say about her experience there. it was also much larger & formal than the Lycée La Condamine, Quito's French International school where classrooms were seperate cabins & 3 lamas ran around freely within the school's gates. we also had large cages with monkeys & parrots from the Amazon. i remember having to build a seperation within the cages to keep the monkeys away from the birds. those tiny monkeys got pretty aggressive & chased dangerously after the poor birds. anyhew, prepared for Rome, we were then told the move was cancelled & we might be sent to Vienna instead, which i wasn't too excited about. i imagined Vienna populated with conservative types listening to Mozart & waltzing around the city. when i was told Vienna was actually pretty vibrant, all i could think to myself was how living in a "Sound of Music" sing along was sooo not going to work for me. several months later, rumor was that we were off to Tehran. not quite like Rome but edgier than Vienna!!! phew!!! another diplomat in Quito who had just been transferred from Iran reassured us that Tehran was actually very safe & lots of fun. with so many restrictions, he said there was a steep contrast with what happened throughout the city behind closed doors. he went as far as saying that he had attended parties often much wilder in Tehran than in many cities of what is considered the free world. MUSIC TO MY EARS!!! i was ready for Tehran. then that fell through as well & my folks had only 2 months to pack their bags & move to Caracas. i'm really glad they did because i loved it there. besides, i was very happy to stay in South America, my favorite place on earth, after California. years later, i was living on my own in Los Angeles. my folks were still in Caracas & my stepdad was 2 years away from retiring from his 30-plus years as a diplomat. they decided to send him to Luanda, the capital of Angola, a former portuguese colony in Africa. the British amabassador in Caracas had lived there for a few years. his wife had very fond memories of Luanda. she described it as the quieter, smaller, more provincial African cousin of Rio de Janeiro with more infrastructure problems due to post colonial wars, conflicts & corruption. she said Angolans were very warm & fun, and the embassy district was beautiful, making up for all that Luanda was lacking to someone with "European standards." by then, my brother Eric was in Anapolis; i was at USC, and my youngest brother Jonathan was about to graduate from high school & was planning on going to college in the USA as well. my mother decided she didn't want to move to Africa & be so far from her 3 sons. my stepdad ended up retiring early & my folks got a place in Miami, a short flight away from LA, Anapolis & wherever Jonathan would go. he decided on Miami as well...
i wonder what it would have been like to visit my folks in Luanda over the holidays. how great it must be to meet these crazy kids: