Farewell Taipei....Yadda, Yadda, Yadda.....

I won't bore you with the details of my last few weeks in Taiwan. Needless to say, it was a lot of the same stuff I've already written about. Saying good-bye to all of my new friends was hard, but we promised to keep in touch although only Laura and I have managed to do so. As of the last time we spoke, she still didn't have an email account, so we've been doing it the old fahsioned way and putting pen to paper a few times a year.

I also won't go into the details of what happened in between my trips. Or maybe I will if I am feeling particularly sadistic and want to bore you all to tears. Basically, I'd return to Portland, which I kept as a home base since rent was cheap and I had a sweet little studio in Knob Hill right behind Trader Joe's....and it just didn't get better than that.

Sometimes I'd work part-time at an antique shop that was three blocks away from my apartment, and I'd model locally...which is more of a part-time endeavor than I care to talk about. See, Portland has a miniscule market with just a handful of clients like Nike, Adidas and Lucy.com, as well as the local supermarket that sells clothes and thus hires models (Fred Meyer). I'd work up in Seattle a couple of times a month for Nordstrom and the Bon Marche, and that was the extent of that. I barely eeked out enough money to cover my bills and was so understimulated after my first trip abroad that I couldn't wait to get back on the road.

There were other bits here & there that happened while I was at "home", like, my cats were always happy to see me, and the feelings were reciprocated. I always ended up missing those little buggers curling up at my feet at night. I didn't have any friends in town anymore, since the girls I had graduated from college with had all gotten married and were starting to have babies already, and I was "the model" and therefore a pariah. The one exception was Amber who I met while modeling in Portland. Her inner & outer beauty made an instant impact on me and we became fast friends. That and the fact that the day we met, backstage at a fashion show, she told me she could have sworn that my boyfriend at the time (a photographer....yeah, I know, totally cliche) was gay. Gotta love her brutal honesty!

I did end up going through a messy breakup with the afore mentioned boyfriend after I got back from Taiwan. He pulled a disappearing act while I was out shooting a commercial for Panasonic. We were living together, I came home, his stuff was gone, blah blah blah, no warning, more blah, etc. But this ultimately was the best thing that ever happened to me and my career. I was now free as a bird to travel travel travel non-stop. And anyways, did I really need to be with someone who got my car towed & impounded while I was gone because he had parked it in front of a fire hydrant (yeah...no Einstein here). That was awesome. Let me tell you. I just have to go into this a little because it is just too Jerry Springer not to.....So my car was impounded from the day after I left on my trip to a week after I got back....over 2 months! And they were ready to auction if off since no one had come to claim it.....I was, of course, never informed of this one. When I got back I was told that my battery was dead and that's why my car was "at another location". Ha! Thank God, I wrangled the truth outta this dude and his best friend saved both my car and my ex's ass by putting $1000 on his Gold Card to get my car out of jail. Hell, I wasn't gonna pay for it....wasn't my fault! I figured ex could deal with his best friend later.

But I digress...and must say....when you are a traveling model, being single is key. You don't want to have anyone to miss at home or wonder what they are doing when you call at 4am and they aren't home. Plus do I really have to mention that you will be living, working and playing with some of the world's most beautiful boys and girls....so why would you ever want to be young and attached.....? Oh, naughty.....but need I say more? Be ye young, single and rootless......someday you will be old and live to regret not doing so....

I never had a boyfriend the rest of the time I traveled as a model and I loved the freedom that that afforded me. I had my guy friends, and I don't mean friends with benefits unless stealing kisses from a few of them counts as benefits. Nope, we were just a band of brothers, because I was just one of the boys. But, more on that later....since I don't start meeting who'll ultimately become part of "the crew" until I go to Miami.

But on to my next stop....the land of the rising sun.....Osaka, Japan.