Women of Questionable Morals

There's a line in some particularly bad Leon Uris book that is something to the effect of:

"Kitty, you've become a woman of renown."
"No, Ari, more of a curiousity."

(Please don't ask why I can quote that off the top of my head...invariably the only answer is that no one will ever love me.)

One day while wandering through Tokyo, I declared myself a woman of curiosity. Here I am traveling the world, a woman without borders refusing to be contained by conventional stardards and expectations.

Sarah prompty mocked me. Something to the effect of "you're a woman with too much time on your hands you crackpot." (Point taken...)After this exchange, I revised my original statement to declare myself a woman of leisure. Here I am, no job, no one to tell me when to get up or what to do. I am, indeed, a definitive woman of leisure.

Except that I feel like women of leisure travel with money...they don't sleep on hostel floors using their towels as blankets.

Once aboard our lady the Yangjing, (China's definitive sea cruiser,) we declared ourselves sea women. We were, undoubtedly, meant for a life at sea, the cool wind flowing through our hair, the smell of salt and fresh air, out in search of uncharted waters. Carey Grant at our sides as we tearfully wave goodbye to land, though sure deep in our hearts that our fate was tied to the sea.

And then we encountered what life is actually like at sea. First off, Carey Grant is not there. They also like to snack on a little something called Chinese porridge: this is lentals soaked in water. A life at sea also involves screaming children, bizzare human interactions and late-night karaoke. After a particularly terrifying night time view, we decided that perhaps we were not woman of the sea. We were woman of land. Land women.

As time went on, we began to adopt the phrase for anything we took a particular fancy to. In the last 10 days, we've been women of...
-the hike (though the great wall proved otherwise)
-the walk (still in the bag)
-the mountain (I decided on this one after I used my Swiss Army knife to open a particular difficult bottle of mineral water. Sarah still claims that this does not count as a mountain-woman activity)
-the bike
-maps (ahh lonely planet...and yet how you mock us)
-public transport (we're actually amazing. We are the original women of p.t...)
-many tounges (although really only one tounge...kind of deflates the argument)
-meditation (well..one day perhaps...)
-positivity (err...well...one day perhaps...)
-regimented exercise (if food poisioning doesn't head our way again)
-concerns (we have a number of those...)

One day while struggling yet again with the crappy and incomplete information provided by our friendly neighborhood Lonely Planet, we decided to write them a strongly worded letter listing all of their shortcomings in great detail. As we continued to compose this letter and a number of other memos we felt the world desperately needed, it hit us.

Really, when it comes down to it, at are very core, the most distilled and central part of our souls...

We are woman of the strongly worded letter.

Take it away, Ms. Ivory...