You are from Seattle...met Dr. Bob and moved to Germany?

Yeah, ~d and Linda both asked about that. Right, some people don't know that story. I get to tell it a lot, and I never know which parts to include. I don't want to leave out any important or interesting details, but I don't want it to be all long and boring either.

I'm not really from Seattle itself, but from its catchment area. You know, every small town has teenagers who can't wait to graduate and move to "the city". Well, Seattle is our "the city". And unless you're actually from Seattle or thereabouts (or, oddly enough, Japan) you probably won't have heard of my hometown.

So anyway, um. Uh, 1993 was a really bad year for me, and I uh, went a little crazy. Lost a couple jobs, wrecked a romantic relationship, did some scary risky stuff, traveled a lot, and basically acted like a person who had nothing to lose. Which I wasn't, so that was really stupid. And part of that was that I just sort of... up and... went to South America. For no particular reason, with not a lot of money and no specific plan, just this weird restlessness. I went with Cindy, a woman I barely knew, and when we landed in Quito with our Lonely Planet Ecuador guide, another tourist (Nigel) noticed he had the same book as us, and asked if we wanted to share a cab into the city. We snagged another tourist (that was before the Ph.Ds (yes, two of them), but he eventually became Dr.Bob) in the airport, and a third (Anders) attached himself to our group as we were leaving the airport.

And the five of us were all there for different reasons, with different destinations, but we kind of separated and recongregated in various constellations over the next month. This is where I can easily bog down in extraneous detail, because some of the story is really cute. But that is the gist of how Dr.Bob and I met. The story comes up often because I am a Foreign Wife, so people are always asking me "So, did you meet your husband in the States, or here?" To which I reply "um, neither!" And then the whole sordid story comes out.

Incidentally, we lost track of Cindy and Anders, but we're still in touch with Nigel. He's visiting us this weekend, in fact.

So that's how we met. How we wound up here is an even longer story, pieces of which will find their way here, over time.