Another day of lazing around at home, which works for me because I had a late-onset hangover... Like 16 hours after I stopped consuming alcohol, and now I have a fat headache. I didn't know I could feel headaches in my nose.

Anyway, shout out to my Uber Drivers. The woman I talked to 2 days ago and I had talked about how weird it is in America to live so far from your family. This echoes a couple of different conversations I've had with my Uber drivers about living away from family.

When I was in Dallas, my Uber driver was from somewhere in Africa, and he worked for a long time to get his son through school as an electrical engineer. More recently, my Uber driver in Seattle was from Ethiopia, and he lives with some of kids.

Since it was a while ago, I can't recall the exact conversation. His youngest kid was still in high school and the oldest one was in college. He was also in college studying nursing, so we talked about the college experience here. I recalled the hostel keeper from Ethiopia that I had met in NZ. I'll have to talk about him some other time, but about how he lives with his sisters after fleeing the Ethiopian Civil Wars. But even though they fled to Australia and then NZ, they stayed together anyway.

With all of these people, we agreed that family is really important to us... And something we observe that's bizarre is that in the US, everyone is ready to leave home at 18, whereas in other places, it's pretty standard to be close to your family members and interact with them more frequently.

That's something I kind of wish was valued more in US culture I guess, especially since I see that it isn't.