Feast for Eyes

This time I'm writing about a much more exciting topic than Beijing: leaving Beijing!  It is (job) bidding season for D-What, meaning the list of positions available for her next assignment is out and the process of lobbying for jobs has begun.

Initially, we were on a solid course with a focus on some intriguing posts a bit closer to home in WHA (Western Hemisphere Affairs): Bridgetown, Barbados; and Paramaribo, Suriname.  However, D-what didn't get the promotion she was expecting and has been told that – thanks to the State Department's brilliant cone system in which you must select a career track (options being: Consular, Economics, Political, Management, and Public Diplomacy) before you even join the Foreign Service – she most likely will not get promoted unless/until she does some PD (Public Diplomacy) work overseas, as that is the cone she chose way back in '98.

In light of her non-promotion, her/our bidding strategy has changed drastically, as the WHA posts mentioned above would be non-PD positions.  So now, presumably to family and friends' dismay, we are forced to look into postings at even more remote locations: Jakarta, Indonesia; Addis Ababa, Ethiopia; Pretoria, South Africa; among others.  The objective now is to get D-What into a PD job as quickly as possible, by having no language training or very short language training in an easy-to-learn language – and maybe even get out of the EAP (East Asia & Pacific) region to further diversify her experience.

I'm not particularly excited about any of the current options for our next assignment – but then again, I was excited about coming to Beijing and we all know how that turned out.

P.S. – the title of this entry was seen on a young Chinese woman's t-shirt in Beijing.  I think I know the intended meaning, but here in China you never really know.