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Post by Deleted on Jun 14, 2009 14:12:41 GMT
Can you pinpoint a precise moment in your life where you had to make a decision between two different things, and if you had chosen the other one, EVERYTHING would have been completely different?
(marriage excluded)
I myself can't think of a precise moment where I had to choose one or the other thing, but it seems clear that if I had not chosen to move to another continent when I was 20, my life would have been considerably different.
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Post by hwinpp on Jun 15, 2009 10:58:32 GMT
If I hadn't reconsidered staying in the army after 4 years my life would have turned out very differently. I'd signed a contract for 12 years but I was given the chance to leave after 4 years because the cold war ended. Yes, it would have been very different indeed.
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Post by spindrift on Jun 15, 2009 16:45:52 GMT
Years ago I was offered a job as an Air Stewardess with Pan Am airlines. I turned it down. Look what I missed! Training in San Juan, Puero Rico and spending at least a year based in Chicago (that's why I turned it down).
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Post by imec on Jun 15, 2009 16:48:44 GMT
a year based in Chicago (that's why I turned it down). Really? Chicago is one of my favorite cities.
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Post by spindrift on Jun 15, 2009 16:50:49 GMT
There! I KNEW I should have tried it!
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Post by imec on Jun 15, 2009 16:52:55 GMT
The architecture is fantastic, the lake is gorgeous, the people are real. The weather could be better...
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Post by spindrift on Jun 15, 2009 16:54:57 GMT
Just to think that I probably would have been an American by now!
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Post by bixaorellana on Jun 15, 2009 16:57:37 GMT
Yes! You wouldn't talk funny any more!
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Post by spindrift on Jun 15, 2009 16:59:12 GMT
Ha ha! I've only been to the States twice. I must rectify this. Would Hawaii be a good place to start?
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Post by Deleted on Jun 15, 2009 17:02:12 GMT
There is nothing American about Hawaii. I think a couple of years in Kansas would really educate you. Or maybe Rikita can give you some tips about Oklahoma.
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Post by bixaorellana on Jun 15, 2009 17:06:12 GMT
After 1975, many of the Vietnamese who came to the US were relocated in Louisiana and Florida. There they found a warm, semi-tropical climate, waterways, and seafood. Others were placed in subdivisions in the midwest. Not to knock the midwest, but the contrast with their homeland must have made those people think they'd been exiled to purgatory.
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Post by imec on Jun 15, 2009 17:08:05 GMT
Special places in the U.S. for me include: New York, Chicago, New Orleans, Florida Keys, San Diego....
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Post by Deleted on Jun 15, 2009 17:24:57 GMT
After 1975, many of the Vietnamese who came to the US were relocated in Louisiana and Florida. There they found a warm, semi-tropical climate, waterways, and seafood. Others were placed in subdivisions in the midwest. Not to knock the midwest, but the contrast with their homeland must have made those people think they'd been exiled to purgatory. You have skipped over Mississippi for the Vietnamese. I found it very interesting that the signs in the casinos on the Mississippi Gulf Coast (along the lines of "Do not leave elderly people in your parked car while you are gambling.") were in English, Vietnamese and Spanish.
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Post by bixaorellana on Jun 15, 2009 17:36:00 GMT
I did, didn't I? It wasn't deliberate, as I tend to think of the Miss/La gulf coast as one place in some ways. Also, I know I was thinking of the voyage west on the intracoastal waterway from La. to Texas. In western Louisiana, the waterway is lined with businesses whose signs are in Vietnamese, and whose clientele out on the docks are of Vietnamese ancestry. Add to that the watery landscape and the helicopters (from the oil fields) flying overhead, & my ex-husband quipped that he thought he was having a flashback from his time in Vietnam.
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Post by rikita on Jun 18, 2009 16:07:46 GMT
well i sometimes wonder what i'd do right now if i had chosen different things to study - would i have graduated by now, then? or be as lazy as i am?
hm also for my exchange i originally wanted to go to colombia (for the second half, after oklahoma) but they took colombia out of the program because of the problems there... so they gave me the choice between chile and costa rica instead, but said if i insist i can also go to colombia, as i already have a contract, but i'd be on my own there. i went to chile, but sometimes wonder what would have happened had i gone to colombia, and would it have changed the later course of my life... probably not, but you never know...
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Post by bjd on Jun 19, 2009 12:43:32 GMT
When I was 20, I had just come back from 4 months in Europe and couldn't wait to leave Canada again. So I worked for a while and bought a ticket to Australia by ship. But on thinking it over, I realized that the most interesting people I had met were students, so I cashed in my ticket and went to university. I think I made the right choice, especially since it led me to the life I have now.
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Post by spindrift on Jun 19, 2009 22:20:04 GMT
bjd - and what is the life you have now? I'm all ears.
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Post by traveler63 on Jun 20, 2009 23:01:03 GMT
There is one major fork in the road for me. I was 17 and met a young man(no this isn't about marriage). We had a whirlwind romance, he was 7 years older. He had a split window white corvette. He always had money, lived in a really nice house with another guy. It was in Ojai, CA. He would drive all the way to Garden Grove, CA every week for our dates. In 1966 he decided to move to San Francisco and asked me to go with him(not marriage). I was so shy and not really adventuresome so I said no. I think that hurt him, and we didn't correspond. Fast forward to July of 1969; I had met Kirk and we were getting married in August of 1969. The phone rang at my dad and moms house and it was him. He had moved back to Southern California and had raised a big stink at my former employer's office and they gave him the last phone number they had on record for me. He wanted to come and see me and I had to tell him I was getting married in 2 weeks. He was not a happy camper.
I still wonder sometimes what my future would have been. He came back to LA as a very prominent businessman with several high end jewelry stores, mostly in the Northern California area.
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Post by cigalechanta on Jun 21, 2009 5:39:43 GMT
I was offered a job in Aphganistan, years ago, my late husband would not agree to go but I could have saved alot of money if I had taken the job and not be in my sitiuation
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Post by spindrift on Jun 21, 2009 10:03:08 GMT
traveller63 - yes, I'm sure you wonder and I wonder what your future might have been as well.
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Post by Deleted on Jun 21, 2009 10:27:41 GMT
I've pondered over this thread and aside from my marriage the only thing I can think of is my decision to leave the Northeast and move South. I was going to school in Boston and there was a fire in my dormitory room.(my roommate had loaned her key to a friend to use her hotplate which was forbidden ). Unbeknownst to me ,the friend left the hotplate on ,and I awoke to the room in flames in the wee hours of the morning. My roommate was off on some Grateful Dead tour.The university sued all three of us and I consequently had to transfer somewhere else. I really.really wanted to stay in Boston but was put on a waiting list for the school I wanted to transfer to. My backup plan was applying to a school here and I was accepted. The rest is pretty much history. So,that simple twist of fate led me here and my subsequent marriage etc. I do think that I wanted to get as far away from NY as I could at that time so I could justify not going home for long weekends etc. due to the situation with my stepfather.Had I remained in the Northeast I know and feared something not so nice would have "come down".
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Post by bjd on Jun 21, 2009 11:59:51 GMT
Spindrift -- I sometimes think my life is too easy and pleasant. I went to university, met my husband to be who was a French grad student, moved to France and have lived here since. My kids have all turned out well, I get to travel, work occasionally doing something I enjoy. What more could I want?
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Post by Deleted on Jun 21, 2009 16:27:10 GMT
A life of danger and excitement?
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Post by spindrift on Jun 21, 2009 21:06:03 GMT
bjd - I am so happy for you. I really am ;D
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Post by Deleted on Jun 21, 2009 21:19:35 GMT
In my early years in Paris, it seemed as though everybody I knew was jumping on the Air India flights (there were two 747's a day to Bombay in those days -- and we didn't have Indian immigrants back then!) in order to spend at least six months in India and/or Nepal.
I watched them enviously and stayed rooted to the ground, because I was too "reasonable" and also felt that my family could never understand such a desire.
Would my life have changed if I had gone down the Kathmandu road like the others? Probably not -- all of the others came back sooner or later and had completely normal lives. But at least they also had the memories of what they had done.
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Post by spindrift on Jun 21, 2009 21:24:23 GMT
Well...Kathmandu has changed my life in many ways. It's that sort of place if you stay long enough and go often enough.
I never went to India and Nepal in the hippy years (I wasn't ever a hippy)....and it's never too late to go there!
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Post by lagatta on Jun 22, 2009 10:58:58 GMT
I think it was probably too new for you to be actually living in France (despite a background in French culture and language, but overseas is different) to want to head off to somewhere else so remote.
All the French people I've known who took the hippie road back then turned out just like everyone else. The more sensitive remained involved in issues of international justice, but then so did a lot of other people.
I was a hippie of sorts, but more in the sense of being an artist and not liking "straight" conventional people whose mindset was still in the 1950s. Never a big dope smoker, or into anything remotely esoteric.
Kerouac, by your name and some indices, way back when at lonely planet, I thought you were a damn yankee from a Massachussets milltown of Québécois descent. You won't kill me, eh?
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Post by Deleted on Jun 22, 2009 11:57:02 GMT
Not to worry. On the internet, I can be whoever anybody wants me to be.
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Post by tillystar on Jun 22, 2009 13:09:52 GMT
I do wonder how different my life would have been if my then boyfriend hadn't hit me the day I got my a-level results...is it odd to say I am kind of glad he did?
I was only studying part-time in the evenings for interest and had no intention of going to uni but after he hit me I was so mad I called around lots of unis as far away as possible until I found one that would take me at such short notice as it was nearly the start of the next term.
I packed my bags and moved to the other end of the country two weeks later and there I got my degree and met Mr Star.
If that hadn't happened that day I might never have gone to uni, never mind that one, and my life would be completely different...different job, no post-grad degree, different husband, different friends etc etc.
I am glad that man decided to hit me the day he did..any other day (when not on the high of getting my results) I may not have taken such decisive action!
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Post by Deleted on Jun 22, 2009 21:32:16 GMT
It often requires just one shocking moment to change your life forever.
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