I am Sixty Years young.Before I launch this birthday blog let me answer once and for all the question you all are asking; Nope. No I am not changing the name of the blog. It will remain My Fab Fifties Life.
So Happy Birthday to me. I am Sixty hear me roar. Sixty years young. I feel strong and invincible. I may have been more fit at fifty physically, but emotionally I have never felt better. Bring it on sixty. You don’t scare me. I am sixty, hear me roar.
It’s funny how sixty used to seem so old. I remember my Mom turning sixty…we had a big party because, well, it was monumental…she was old! I think about my grandmother when I was a small child. My memory of her was she was OLD. But the reality is, she probably wasn’t even sixty yet.
No party for me. It’s just another year. A monumental year I am sharing with lots of people…of course all of my high school friends making the leap too as well as Magic Johnson, Emma Thompson, Marie Osmond. Also joining the club Allison Janney, John McEnroe, Fabio and Danny Bonaduce. Yep, we all are getting older – if we are lucky.
And luck has an awful lot to do with it. Those dear to us who drew the short straw and found cancer visit them and take them too soon. Or a plethora of other causes that take so many before they reach this remarkable year. Sixty years young.
Living every day fully, that’s my mantra. We never know do we? Nor do we want to…I don’t anyway. I want to go out with a bang no matter what year and so I will get out of bed on Tuesday (my actual birthday) and I will rejoice that I can. I will roar. I will celebrate. I will be fabulous.
Because seventy is knocking…the decades fly by. My children are adults, my marriage has endured nearly four decades, and I am here. I am sixty hear me roar.
This book was written six years ago. My husband said he was sure I had read it, but I started it anyway after finding a paperback in a hotel in Yangon.
I had not read it, but I am sure glad I did. It’s a remarkable story and I enjoyed it very much.
The Lowland is a sad but fascinating story of an Indian family that takes the reader over four decades and three generations from The Lowland of Calcutta to Rhode Island.
Lahiri is a beautiful storyteller with a instinctive ability to portray both the intimate and far-reaching implications of decisions made, customs and beliefs held dear, and family ties.
Bengali brothers Sabhash and his brother Udayan are so close in age growing up they are nearly inseperable despite their very different personalities. Sabhash the eldest is more conventional with a scientific mind. He wants to be a scientist and heads to America for his college studies. Udayan, always the braver of the two, is distracted, dissatisfied and a rebel.
Udayan’s ideologies find him involved in the Indian Naxalite insurgency and he is executed in front of his parents and wife.
Subhash returns to India to find his parents beyond consoling. Subhash takes Udayan’s wife and the unborn daughter she carries and returns to the USA to raise the child as his own.
The scope of this story is fascinating as it explores family and tradition, parental expectation and truth, martyrdom and secrets and the immigrant experience in the United States. It’s also educational and eye-popping if you are unfamiliar with the brutality and suppression of peasants in India.
Diani Beach Kenya – It’s been a year since the deadly Nairobi hotel terrorism attack that took 21 lives. Kenya has had its share of terrorism over the past decade, mostly attributed to Al Shabab, an African Islamic group associated with Al Qaeda.
Diani Beach at sunrise
During this same year 40000 people died in the United States from gun-related violence.
I share this comparison not to advocate against guns but to make a point; media accounts of violence around the world create a fear of faraway places, even while violence at home is often just as severe.
It’s a dilemma to decide how to travel safely around the globe. And though we take our personal safety seriously, we do not believe we are in any more danger in Kenya, with its history of terrorist hits, than in the USA, with its history of domestic and international terrorism as well as rampant gun violence.
Sheldrick Falls
And so we came to Kenya – specifically Diani Beach Kenya.
Diani Beach Kenya is both a dilemma and a delight. This beautiful coastal town on the Indian Ocean has seen its own share of violence including murder and bombings.
Diani Beach from The Edge Restaurant
The larger image of Kenya as a violent place over the past decade has been disastrous for the tourism industry, especially in Diani. Like other places we have visited (Eastern Europe, Africa, Asia and Central America), war, coups, violent crimes and terrorism – and the media accounts of these- can devastate tourism overnight, and the damage takes decades to recover.
Think about it.
Abandoned Hotel Diani Beach
But what of places like Paris, Las Vegas, London or Boston? All places that have had terrorism attacks over the past few years but visitors still flock there. Why do we feel safer from terrorism in a “western” culture?
Entrance to abandoned amusement park
Diani Beach Kenya, touted as the most beautiful beach in Africa, deserves a chance to rebuild its tourism program. Within the 17 mile stretch of white sandy beach sit several abandoned hotels, bars and even an amusement park – places unable to hold on when the tourists stopped coming.
Abandoned hotel pool, Diani Beach
Today, and particularly during the holiday season when we were visiting, tourism is on an uptick. Europeans from Germany, Scandinavia and Britain were abundant on the beach, in restaurants and bars and in the shopping areas.
Abandoned beach bar “40 Thieves”
Convincing Americans to travel here will take more time, and hopefully there will be no more attacks. Meanwhile we feel safe and happy to have enjoyed this beautiful, affordable and incredibly friendly place.
We want the best for the Kenyan people and our new friends in Diani Beach. Hardworking people who for the most part want jobs to support their families and have a good life. Tourism is the vehicle for that and they want it to thrive once again.
Dinner at the beautiful Sands at Nomad
So here are some recommendations from our three weeks in Diani, for you to consider when planning your Kenyan adventure.
Where to stay – Frangipani Cottages – very affordable, beautiful pool and 700 meters to the beach.
We loved our three weeks at Frangipani Cottages
Our favorite bars and restaurants – Tiki Bar, Havana Bar, The Edge, Nomad Bar and Restaurant, Kokkos, Java House, Oasis Bar, Salty Squid, Piri Piri.
There are MANY other activities in and around Diani that we did not do such as multi-day safari, Colobus Monkey Reserve, slave caves and fishing. Learn more here.
Next stop for us the island of Mauritius out in the Indian Ocean! Don’t miss our ANNUAL WORLD TRAVEL AWARDS 2019 blog coming on January 17th.
Thanks for your support this past year. Please share our blog. Happy New Year!
From time to time I have moments that catch my breath when I think of a few near death experiences I have had in my life. The four moments that occasionally remind me of how lucky I am to still be kicking around. Three of these occurred in a car and one on a horse – inches and seconds from disaster.
In her memoir I Am, I Am, I Am, O’Farrell looks back on her own life where she can count 17 separate incidents of stepping too close to her own death. Several instances the reader can easily relate to, while others seem unfathomable to most of us.
But the part of the book that caught me somewhat off guard was the story of O’Farrell’s adult life struggle to keep her own daughter alive. A day to day process that involves constant monitoring of every item her daughter eats, breaths, touches…as O’Farrell and her family deal with a child with severe immune-system disorder.
This is the first time I have read O’Farrell’s work although she has numerous memoirs and novels. I enjoyed this story dispite it’s sometimes gut-wrenching detail.
Shout out to my husband Arne for his first book review. Enjoy.
This is a fascinating read that takes on the subject of how the modern world came to be dominated by the West. Diamond makes the case that this is not due to any inherent superiority of Western culture or peoples, but was enabled by a combination of random environmental factors present in Eurasia and not in other parts of the world.
These simple factors included easily domesticated plants and animals, and the geography that allowed for easier communication of new ideas and technologies. These elements allowed for more dense populations, the formation of states, and the development of superior technologies like written language and boats capable of crossing oceans.
Another far less intentional key that Diamond explains in great detail is the evolution of epidemic infectious diseases in the West. This came as a result of the close quarters resulting from those more dense populations. Epidemic disease created an huge unplanned advantage when the Old World began to meet and clash with the New World. As brutal and well-armed as the armies of the Old World were, those diseases killed off far more of the enemy than any weapon.
There are a lot of details and a fair amount of repetitive arguments in this book; it’s a long and fairly dry read. Can you open your mind to the concept that the modern dominance of the West wasn’t achieved through higher intelligence and moral superiority? If you can, you will find interesting this book’s premise that the West’s legacy of a better food supply and inherited tolerance to devastating diseases brought us to where we are today. Diamond’s work may forever change your thinking about how the modern world came to be.
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️Four stars for Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond. Read last week’s review of Burmese Days.
This book kept popping up at shops around Myanmar while I was visiting there last month. I had read Orwell in high school (1984 and Animal Farm) but never any more. But I picked up this paperback and decided to check it out.
First of all it was clearly a pirated book. Although the cover looked like a Penguin Classic Book, the inside was printed poorly on cheap paper and within the first few chapters it began to fall apart. Oh well, I just kept trying to hold the book together.
Written in 1934 the book is a fictional tale of the waning days of the British Colonial period in Burma (now Myanmar). This is a time when Burma was ruled by Britian from Delhi as part of British India.
Orwell himself spent time in Burma, so the book (his first) is based on his first hand experience there.
The book uses serious racist language that today is completely frowned upon, and reflects the true superior British societal approach to the people of Burma. The debasing effect the empire had on the native people of the time is frankly, disgusting.
But I’m glad I read it. Even though Britian eventually revoked it’s colonial rights through out the region as well as in other regions, the deep scar Britian left is still today part of life in Myanmar and in other countries like India. Colonialism was and is a blight on people of the world and Burmese Days spells it out in a sad and honest tale of the people who were there.
⭐️⭐️⭐️Three stars for Burmese Days. Read last week’s review of Remarkable Creatures.
Oh I enjoyed this book so much. When I saw this book by Tracy Chevalier, author of The Girl With The Pearl Earring, I knew I would love it – I loved The Girl With The Pearl Earring.
So I was kind of surprised I had never heard of this book. But I am glad to have found it. It’s just the kind of story I love; history, science and strong-willed women from an era of female suppression.
Set in England in the early 1800’s a time where females had no rights, and without a husband, basically no life. Here Chevalier takes real people from the past and combines them with intriguing fictional characters to create a wonderful voyage of discovery in Remarkable Creatures.
The name of this book refers both to our two herions and the discoveries they make.
Mary Anning a real person from Lyme England is one of the early discoverers of fossils. Despite her lack of education or status, her work will lead to the scientific advances on dinosaurs and extinction. Mary will not however, get credit for most of her work since she is “just a female”.
Chevalier creates fictional Elizabeth Philpot, a spinster with a broad mind and interest in fossils. Newly arrived to Lyme she befriends Mary Anning and they begin an unlikely relationship. Part envy, part loyalty, and part mutual appreciation the two women will use each others strengths to trail blaze the science, navigate the prickly issue of female rights, and help each other through love and loss.
A fascinating book with just enough science as well as a beautiful love story and test of true friendship.
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