I’m pretty sure I got my first migraine when I was about 10 years old. I remember doing math exercises in school one morning and having a hard time focusing on the numbers. This visual disturbance morphed into a sickening headache that left me sitting inside during recess, unable to move without nausea and pain. I suppose it eventually passed and I just got on with my day. I don’t remember even telling anyone about it. Childhood nonchalance, I guess.

The migraines didn’t really come back until I was in college, when stress and hormones did their part to make the headaches a more common if (thankfully) still not very frequent occurrence. These days, hormones, stress and air travel are my most reliable triggers, along with (surprise!) excessive alcohol consumption - though unlike a lot of migraine sufferers, I seem to do fine with red wine, thank goodness. But sometimes there’s no apparent trigger at all. Sometimes you just get a headache that “turns” at some point; it ceases to be a headache and becomes something much, much worse.

If you’re not sure you’ve ever had a migraine, then you haven’t had one. Migraines aren’t just “really bad headaches”, they are agonizing, debilitating, all-encompassing beasts that leave you curled up in a ball, whimpering, thinking you would do anything at all to make the pain stop: cut off a limb, kill someone, throw yourself out the window. A relative of mine used to beat her head against the wall because her migraines were so bad. I tend to compulsively press on various parts of my skull as if I could find the single pressure point that would block all of the pain. Unfortunately there is no such point, and I just wind up with sore spots all over my head the next day.

As far as migraine sufferers go, I’m one of the lucky ones: I don’t get migraines terribly frequently, when I do get them they don’t last for more than a day, and if I can get to a darkened room and go to sleep they mostly pass within a few hours. Some people’s migraines last much longer. My mom has been migraine-free for several years now (thank you, modern medicine), but when I was growing up, her migraines would lay her low for days on end. I remember her ghostlike shuffling when she was in the throes of a migraine; I didn’t understand it then, but I certainly do now because I do that shuffle myself. Some people get multiple migraines in a month - or even a week. I can’t begin to imagine the suffering they experience, and I would pray to any god available that I never have to go through such hell.

I had a migraine yesterday. It was partially my fault: We were out late the night before being somewhat debauched on Halloween, and while I tried to be good and balance glasses of beer with glasses of water, I clearly wasn’t good enough because when I woke up at 7 yesterday morning, it felt like my skull had split open in the night. I drank water and took some painkillers in the hope that this was a hangover headache that would fade with a bit more sleep. Ten hours later I was still awake, still in bed and still in agony, trying not to cry because crying made it worse. At some point, someone had slowly driven a railway spike through my left eye and out the back of my head (this is my typical migraine profile). Any light was blinding, any sound was deafening. The pounding pain came in nauseating waves, over and over and over again. The wave would crash in my brain and I’d think I was going to throw up, then it would abate and I’d think “please let that be the end of it please let that be the end of it” - then it would crash again, then abate (“please let that be the end of it”), then crash again, all day long.

I rolled over and over in bed, eyeshades on, fingers pressing into my skull, wishing fervently that I could just fall asleep, getting up only to shuffle to the bathroom or, once, stupidly, to answer the phone (the person on the other end asked if I was okay, because clearly I didn’t sound okay, and when I mumbled that I had a migraine, she perkily replied, “Oh, yeah, lots of people are sick here today, it’s miserable, isn’t it?” - and it took all my willpower not to say, “Lady, you don’t have a f*$king clue.”). I briefly thought I might be able to sit and do some work, but two horrendous minutes at the computer convinced me otherwise and I blindly stumbled back to bed, thankful that I didn’t have anything too pressing to do or any responsibilities to anyone other than myself.

I kept thinking of the sumatriptan I picked up from the pharmacy a few weeks ago, but having never taken it before I was too scared to try it, particularly while I was alone. Sumatriptan constricts the blood vessels in your head, with strange and sometimes dangerous side effects. Many migraine sufferers get relief from it, but many others find the side effects worse than the migraine itself. My fear of having a heart attack trumped my desperation to get rid of the migraine, so I kept pointlessly popping acetaminophen and worrying about liver failure instead. There’s no easy way out when you suffer from migraines.

In the end, I don’t know whether it was the passage of time or the pills that finally made the migraine start to fade yesterday. All I know is that by 5 o’clock someone had started to withdraw the railway spike, by 7 o’clock I could sit up without feeling like I was going to throw up, and by 8 I was hesitantly enjoying some chicken noodle soup and rice from a local Chinese takeaway. I felt as fragile as a blown-glass Christmas ornament, spaced-out and slow, but I felt like a human being again instead of just a bundle of wildly firing pain synapses and over-dilated blood vessels.

Today, as expected, I’ve got my typical post-migraine symptoms. It feels like there’s a bruise through my head where the railway spike was. I feel a twinge there every now and then and it makes my stomach clench with anxiety - is the migraine coming back? I don’t want to move very fast, and I’m cautious about what I’m eating and drinking. I feel wrung out, not just physically but emotionally, like I’ve survived an ordeal. I’m relieved the ordeal is over, and I’m trying not to think too much about the next one, because another one is bound to come at some point.

But I woke up without a migraine this morning, and it was the best feeling in the world.

That’s not to say I don’t buy actual souvenirs or trinkets when I go away. I’ve got t-shirts from Australia and Alaska, posters from Paris, jewelry from pretty much everywhere I’ve ever been, and I carted chopsticks, ceramics, fake sushi phone decorations and several mameshiba toys back from Japan. I like to trawl local markets just as much as the next traveler hoping to capture something of the essence of a place and bring it back home to put on the mantlepiece.

But as a food obsessive, it’s often the gastronomic riches I discover abroad that have the most lasting impact on my life back home. I’m firmly convinced that most places on earth have something interesting to offer in the food department, whether it’s Spätzle or scamorza or scrapple, and I’ve found culinary inspiration in a variety of places—not all of them “exotic” locales.

Having said that, the cuisines I’ve had the least exposure to are frequently the ones holding the greatest revelations for me. The revelation in Japan was miso; I’d long been a fan of miso soup, but it was a wooden bowl of white miso paste served as a dip for crunchy white cabbage that made me realize I had to get some of that stuff for my own kitchen. Thailand was just revelatory all around, because I’d never really had Thai food until I sat down on a plastic stool on a sidewalk at midnight and ate som tam, the salad that immediately shot up my list of Awesomest Foods of All Time—and since that point, fish sauce and bird’s eye chilies have been a permanent fixture in my kitchen cabinet.

Now, two weeks after getting back from Shanghai, I find that little bits of China have crept into my psyche—and into my kitchen. China took me by surprise in a way that it really shouldn’t have: I knew China was a huge and varied country, and it stood to reason that its food would be as varied as the country itself. And yet I was continually taken aback by spare ribs rubbed with cumin, and fava beans with ham, and cucumber salads with fresh chilies, and flat breads crunchy with sugar crystals, and lamb kebabs, and crepes.

One of my favorite dishes turned out to be nothing all that unusual: soft eggplant with minced pork in a rich, spicy sauce, which is apparently very common in Szechuan restaurants around the world. I couldn’t get enough of it, and I knew straight away it was something I would have to try cooking at home. So after trawling the internets for recipes, I paid a visit to Yum Yum Oriental Market and gathered up a basket full of chili-bean paste, chili-garlic paste, fermented black beans and Szechuan peppercorns and made my way home to try my hand at spicy Szechuan eggplant.

It wasn’t an exact recreation, but it was delicious, and it didn’t taste like any Chinese food I’d ever made before—it tasted like China to me. And though I ate my homemade Szechuan eggplant sitting alone in front of the television last night, I was surrounded in spirit by jovial Shanghainese web geeks drinking Tsingtao and feasting on everything from sticky pork belly to chili-smothered fish to that awesome spicy eggplant.

I didn’t actually buy any trinkets in Shanghai, but the eggplant is my souvenir of China. Like the som tam, like the miso, it’s something that wasn’t a part of my life before, but now it is and will continue to be—because every time I sit and eat it at home, a part of me is sitting in Shanghai too.

She reckoned the bu yao would be handy because, as an obvious foreigner in China, I would be an easy target for people trying to aggressively sell me knock-off Rolexes or fake Chanel bags. And sure enough, whenever Jeremy and I have walked down the pedestrianized shopping superhighway that is Nanjing Road or frequented any other high-tourist-traffic areas in Shanghai, we’ve been repeatedly intercepted by people waving flyers at us and asking if we want “WatchBagShopping?” or “TshirtDVD?”

My primary tactic for dealing with touts is to just ignore them and keep walking (which is pretty easy to do here seeing as I’m usually a good head taller than the person trying to get my attention). A raised hand and shake of the head can often do the trick as well. But for the most persistent hawkers—the ones who descend on you as soon as you stop to look at something or who follow you down the street even after you’ve said “no”—there is only one 100% foolproof tactic, and that is to say a firm and decisive “Bu yao!”

Weirdly, it seems to work like magic every time. Ignore them or shake your head and the hawkers might go away, but they might also stick with you. But say bu yao and they seem to disappear in a puff of smoke. Jeremy said it’s like being in a video game: as you walk down the street, the “bad guys” keep popping up in front of you left and right and you have to knock them down with your bu yaos so you can continue moving forward. When you get to the higher-level hawkers, you may need two well-aimed bu yaos to take them out, and for the boss level it might take three. But eventually it will have the intended effect.

Twice today I saw fellow tourists failing to shake off aggressive salespeople with diffident refusals, and both times I wanted to shout, “Say bu yao! Say bu yao!” I didn’t say it then, but I’m saying it now to the non-Mandarin-speaking world at large: if you learn no other words of Chinese before traveling to Shanghai, learn xie xie, and for god’s sake, learn bu yao. Oh, and learning xiaolongbao (“soup dumplings”) wouldn’t be bad either—but that’s another post for another time.

As much as I like to think of myself as an intrepid traveler (I’m really not) and as much as I was looking forward to seeing the city (I really was), it was all just too much for me at first. The heat, the jet lag, the disorienting dreams. The noise, the traffic, the merciless high-rises stretching into a hazy distance. The “hazy” part of that distance; even in Bangkok, the air wasn’t this brown. And the language barrier, the incomprehensibility of every blessed thing around me.

I hate to admit this, because I do love to travel. I take great pleasure in exploring new terrain, grappling with foreign tongues and eating mysterious foods from dodgy carts on the street. When I’m at home, I yearn to be away, I dream of Patagonia, Russia, Hong Kong. And the very name Shanghai conjures up images of everything I want out of a city: glitz and grit, street dumplings and sky-high cocktail bars, the past and the future piled on top of each other in one messy, exciting jumble of the present.

But as I stood at the hotel room window yesterday morning and stared out at the vast alien landscape that was the actual Shanghai, I honestly just wanted to be back home. I guess it happens to the best of us.

That feeling persisted throughout the morning and reached a peak when we went in search of food on a nearby street lined with tiny shops, where local people were filling bags with fresh vegetables and streaming into small, mysterious eateries for lunch. The menus were resolutely Chinese, and the system for acquiring food was initially impenetrable. And just when I thought that there was no way we could break into the oblivious flow of everyday life around us and simply find something to eat, please, we were gently beckoned into a nook of a noodle shop by a young guy who, through pointing, nodding and thumbs-up signs alone, managed to instruct us in the ways of putting together a bowl of soup:

Take a little basket, fill it with as many ingredients as you want from the refrigerated cabinet (vegetables both familiar and strange, meats both identifiable and not), choose your noodles, hand it all over to the cook, take a seat, and then wait for a steaming bowl of noodle soupy goodness to be delivered to you—all for a grand total of less than £1 a bowl. Spice it up, slurp it down, and feel your sense of discomfort drain away. You’re just another hungry customer. You’re now part of the flow of everyday life. You’re finally really in Shanghai.

And as I stand at the sink washing a mug, I think, “Wait a second… I was just in Shanghai. I was in Shanghai last night, with Jeremy. I can’t be here now. This must be a dream.” But there’s no way it can be a dream. Everything from the mug in my hands to the sunlight streaming through the window feels utterly, solidly real, as real as any waking reality. The thought that it’s all just a dream is frankly ludicrous.

So maybe Shanghai was the dream? But no, that was real, too: the sweltering cab ride, our Chinese hosts, the German beer garden on the banks of the river (surreal, admittedly, but still real). I know I was definitely in Shanghai, and I know I’m now in my parents’ kitchen—and I know that one of those two things can’t be true.

I suddenly recall a discussion we had in the pub earlier in the week about lucid dreaming. How can you tell when you’re dreaming, and how can you take control of your dreams? Look at your hands. Look at yourself in a mirror (you won’t have a reflection). Look at your watch (clocks don’t tell the time in dreams).

I look at my hands; they’re covered in soap suds and still holding the mug. I look at myself in the mirror, and though a strange cold shudder runs through me, it’s definitely my own face I see looking back. I forget about the clock thing and instead look out the window, where I see loads of huge bunnies happily munching their way through the garden and a troupe of children performing some sort of syncopated dance routine on the street.

And then I wake up to the sounds of Shanghai traffic and the hotel elevator and—incongruously—a little bird tweet-tweet-tweeting from the urban jungle outside my window.

So Shanghai won out in the end; that soapy mug in my hands apparently never existed. But I swear that the kitchen and the mug didn’t feel any less real than the hotel room and the bird. And when I mentioned that the bird sounded like a mockingbird and Jeremy joked that maybe we were still in Florida (where we were frequently awakened by a crazed mockingbird in the garden), I experienced a flash of paralyzing doubt—because for all I know, we still are. The only thing that makes this moment my “reality” is that I haven’t woken up yet.

Sweltering cab ride from the airport to the hotel. Quick bag drop. Sweltering cab ride from Pudong to the other side of the river. Shanghainese feast for lunch: glazed pork, braised fish, crab, garlic broccoli, sweet glutinous rice ball soup. Hotel, nap, shower. Walk around the block, memories of Bangkok - the heat, the traffic, the tiny neon-lit shops(?), people sitting on the curb outside or gathered around tables inside, eating. Many people walking multiple small dogs. Confused car journey to dinner destination. Pedestrians wandering through four lanes of traffic. A group line dancing to Chinese music in a park. Two men playing badminton on a street corner. Dinner: Rinderrouladen, Spätzle, Rotkohl and a Hefeweizen at a beer garden overlooking the Huangpu River and the Bund (no, I didn’t expect that either). Cab ride to the hotel, PJs, blog post. And so to bed.

Here’s the thing: I am a translator, not an interpreter. Though the distinction isn’t clear to most people outside of the industry, there is a vast difference between these two occupations—it’s the difference between sitting on your own in front a computer with your documents and dictionaries, pondering grammar and shades of meaning and carefully crafting beautiful written sentences (translator), and sitting in a booth at a conference wearing sticky headphones, listening to a stream of words pour into your ears in one language and simultaneously rattling out a semantically equivalent stream of words into a microphone in another language (interpreter). The former job is supremely suited to quiet, bookish folk such as myself. The latter is a job for an adrenaline junkie.

Schorsch and I had chatted about interpreting on numerous occasions, and though he maintained that it was an exciting and fun thing to do, I always said that I was pretty sure I wasn’t cut out for such a high-stress, fast-moving job (actually, I always said that the idea terrified me). However, I also always admitted that I was kind of intrigued by interpreting, so when Schorsch suddenly found himself without an interpreting partner for a three-day conference that was just two and a half weeks away, he picked up the phone and, as a last resort, called me.

My instinctive first response was “no way.” I’ve had no training as an interpreter, my German listening comprehension isn’t what it once was, and the thought of those headphones and that microphone filled me with utter dread. But as the phone call went on and Schorsch told me that the conference was being hosted by the Bergen-Belsen memorial and that he was utterly confident I was up to the task, I felt myself weakening. I realized that if I had ever wanted to try my hand at interpreting, this was a good opportunity to do so. I also realized that if I said no, it would only be because I was afraid, and I knew I would hate myself if I turned down an interesting professional challenge just because I was scared.

And so it was that I found myself in a conference room in Hanover several days ago, with headphones on my head and a microphone in my hand, feverishly interpreting presentations at the 2nd International Bergen-Belsen Conference.

In the two short weeks between accepting the job and going to the conference, I spent nearly every waking moment reading about conference interpreting, sight-translating documents (that is, reading a document and translating it out loud on the fly—bloody difficult) and attempting to interpret German podcasts and videos online (even more bloody difficult). I also bored everyone around me by droning on and on about how hard it all was and how nervous I was, and I continuously swayed between thinking everything might be okay and thinking everything was going to be a complete disaster.

In the end, it was a bit of both. The first presentation of the first day was basically my nightmare scenario: an extremely abstract and tortuously academic paper delivered at such a breakneck pace that I had a hard time understanding it let alone interpreting it in real time. As I hunched over the microphone and listened to sentences slip by one after the other without being able to articulate a single coherent sentence myself, all I could think was, “I. Am. In. Hell.”

Schorsch—who struggled with that presentation himself after I gave up and thrust the microphone at him in desperation—assured me afterwards that that was really the worst I could expect. And it’s true that while there were many more times during the conference when I felt completely overwhelmed and out of my depth, there were also some times when I sat with the headphones and the microphone, and German words flowed into my ears and English words flowed out of my mouth, and instead of thinking I was in hell, I was thinking, “I’m doing it! I’m doing it!” And that was rather awesome.

The first and last days of the conference were held at a venue in Hanover, but the middle day took place out at the Bergen-Belsen memorial itself, and that was by far the highlight of the event (if visiting a former concentration camp can be called a “highlight”). I again felt a rush of excitement and pride when I walked into the documentation center and saw the permanent exhibition in all of its bilingual glory. The presentations that day went really well, and Schorsch and I got to interpret a tour through the POW section of the exhibition, which I quite enjoyed. At the end of the day, the director of the Lower Saxony Memorials Foundation publicly thanked us for our translations and all of the conference attendees applauded, which embarrassed and delighted me in equal measure. And as we unwound over a few beers back in Hanover that night, Schorsch said, “The next time I get an interpreting job, I’m going to call you again. We make a good team.” And I couldn’t really argue.

This interpreting gig was one of the toughest things I’ve ever done professionally. It caused me a huge amount of stress, I wasn’t entirely pleased with my performance, and there were several points at which it took all my willpower not to tear off the headphones and just run away. I feel immeasurably more comfortable sitting at my cozy, quiet desk with my dictionaries than I do sitting with a microphone grasped in my sweaty paws. But when I take a step back, I have to acknowledge that I think I’ve “leveled up” both professionally and personally: I conquered (or at least managed to live with) my fear, and I got to experience a whole new aspect of the language industry.

And if I do get another call from Schorsch, I’ll dither and panic and wring my hands—and then I’ll probably find myself reaching for the headphones and microphone all over again.

If I’m honest, I have to say that I never, ever imagined I’d live here this long. Frankly, I never imagined I’d live anywhere this long; 10 years sounds like an eternity to the Army brat in me. But time has that funny way of speeding up as you get older, and things you think are temporary have a habit of fossilizing when you’re not looking. You tell yourself you’ll just try out this or that, and before you know it a decade has passed and the roots you assumed you’d never put down suddenly seem quite deeply entrenched indeed. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, it’s just one of those things you figure won’t happen to you—until it does.

Things have happened in the past 10 years which I truly could not have conceived of when we showed up here in October 2000 with no jobs, no money and nothing but the stuff we had managed to fit in a station wagon before driving over from Germany (the essentials, like several stringed instruments and a whole bunch of stuffed animals). I never imagined that Jeremy would become an author three times over and a renowned conference speaker. I never imagined that I would wind up working with a close friend on projects that meant so much to me. I never imagined that we’d make a go of it with the band, I never imagined that I’d become such an enthusiastic cook and food writer. I never imagined that we’d travel to the places we have, I really never imagined that we’d buy a flat, and I never imagined that I’d forget to acknowledge our 10-year Brighton anniversary because I was too busy trying to sort out what carpet to put down in the bedroom.

I’ll admit, I’m ambivalent about staying in one place for such a long time. As a kid I think I longed for roots, but as an adult I’m suspicious of them. I also can’t relate to that feeling of never wanting to live anywhere else (and a lot of people feel that way about Brighton: “I love Brighton so much I could never leave!” Really?). I can imagine myself in so many different places—from Seattle to France to Japan—that the idea of just staying in one place seems odd.

On the flip side, when you stay in one place for a while, you wind up with friends, and routines, and favorite restaurants, with local knowledge and networks of support, and with an understanding of the people and culture around you. And even after living in one town for so long, there are new things to be discovered. Just moving from Hove to Brighton was a pretty big shake-up; sometimes it feels like we’re living somewhere else entirely, but our favorite people and places just happen to be here, too. That’s rather nice.

So, thanks for the past ten years, Brighton&Hove. I have no idea how long my roots will hold me here, but for the time being, I’m happy enough to call you home.

which illuminate
the pathways and gateways of
gardens in japan.

you weren’t pricey,
plastic instead of granite,
little solar cells.

you weren’t too bright,
just enough to cast a glow
on the path out front,

to guide us at night,
coming home in a taxi,
walking down the street.

i knew you’d get nabbed.
at some point all things do here
if they’re not chained down.

you were placed, not chained,
beckoning kids, drunks and jerks
passing in the dark.

you were so fleeting,
a month of brightness, then gone,
stolen for no point.

people really suck.

i love my little garden.