.farshid sedghi’s personal blog.

Once again, I am on the move. The time is approaching fast and in a couple of weeks I will be leaving Haifa and the Baha’i World Centre to start a new chapter by getting married and moving to Seattle, USA.

Getting up and leaving a place that you have lived in is usually hard. You give up being (at least) geographically close to the friends you have made, some of the habits you have developed for that place that you enjoy, the restaurants you have come to like and dislike, the food that is local and won’t taste the same outside and so many other small details of life that you won’t even know you will be missing until you leave the place, some of these small things being things that might even annoy you from time to time.

Having moved and lived in six countries, I feel somewhat experienced in handling most of these things and the feelings that follow them. But this time around I feel completely unexperienced and unprotected to deal with them. The reason for this being, I am leaving the Baha’i Holy places and Shrines, my spiritual home on this planet and that is not an easy thing to do.

The excitement of getting married and having that to look forward to helps a lot. The fact that everything is completely new, new people, new friends, new culture, customs, you get the idea… so I try not to think about leaving too much and try to make the best of the remaining two-three weeks that I have left. In the meanwhile I am trying to also learn about things that I will need to attend to once in my new country by finding different sites, e.g. for finding flats, best cell plans and so on. If you are from the Seattle area and have good websites to share that make life easier, please let me know.

Although I am not big on these sort of tests, since I was very fascinated with military planes back in the days of childhood (and still am to some degree) I gave it a try…and the result were:

What military aircraft are you?

F/A-22 Raptor

You are an F/A-22. You are technologically inclined, and though you’ve never been tested in combat, your very name is feared. You like noise, but prefer not to pollute any more than you have to. And you can move with the best.

I don’t know what to think…”although you have never been tested in combat…”, that doesn’t sound too impressive.

Once again, the time has come to post a few link for future reference :

UPDATE: Good advice for phone plans and comparisons including links Compare cell phone plans about.com - Packed with articles about anything you might need/want to buy as a consumer and other stuff Cool uses of Google Maps Google Ranking Patent Revealed? Answers.com/X where x can be any term you want to find out about and it will give you an answer. wayback machine - gives snap shots of websites over the years Urban Legends Reference - You see pictures and read things on the net and some are just unbelievable. These guys dig deeper to find whats really true and what is being spread around the net for fun.

I must admit, I have enjoyed the process of creating gift registries for our wedding and it has been a learning process as well. Actually, everything that has to do with wedding has been a learning process and I would have never imagined there are so many details, rules and etiquette to consider.

But back to the registry experience. Ideally, I would have just preferred if everyone gave us checks, regardless of size, and we would have figured out what we want once we can go to the store and shop based on where we end up living etc. But, you can’t do that as it’s not nice to ask for money in Persian culture (as well as many others I am guessing, except for Italian where I hear it does pay off to get married). So what if you left it to the guests judgment to choose whatever they want? Well, for one I know how much I don’t like buying gifts myself, since I never seem to know what to buy so I would not want to do that to our guests. Another reason not to leave it to guests’ own choice is because, generally speaking, the standard wedding gift given by Persians is crystal vase. Why Persians as a population believe that is all a newly wed couple need I have no idea though. So, in order to avoid being forced into changing career and opening a crystal vase selling store after the wedding it is wise to have a gift registry.

So we started, on Macy’s, Crate & Barrell and Amazon (well no hardcore electronic store seemed to have wedding registry functionality on their website so I chose Amazon and the ones that had something in lines with registry were only gift certificates which goes back to asking for money = big no no). So I have been like a kid in a candy store trying to pick stuff that I like and know we will need (need is a relative term here). At the same time it gave me a chance to be able to dive into all sorts of specs and compare products to the left and right which I love (and probably why I was called a gadget freak by friends). So now that the dust has settled, I feel proud to have been able to have found the best of the best electronics (with my Finance’s approval on color and design choices of course). The only thing that remains is for the guests to actually look at the items and buy them, instead of saying to themselves: Do they really think I am going to pay $600 for flat LCD screen or $450 for a home theater system? and then bring a crystal vase instead.

Time will tell which choice they will make…