Touch down

The change from the dark rain bearing clouds and cold winds from take off and the very warm calm air of Bali as we touched down was separated by only seven and a half hours flying south. It seemed as if we were landing at some remote location as the airport has a single runway that stretches out into the bay from where we approach it. It looks like no city I ever flew into and without any disrespect to the Indonesians. It looked like a village of makeshift homes surrounded the airport. When it comes to flying I don't mind up and down and straight lines but I feel slightly uncomfortable when I can see the ground outside my window and we turn sharply. Since I could see the airport's one single runway stretching away from us through my window I realized that we had to turn 90 degrees to line up and that angle of turn is what unnerved me a little.
Once we had disembarked into the airport terminal, we found a clean and modern facility and thankfully an air conditioned environment and surprisingly all of it under red tiled roofs which makes it blend in with the homely buildings of the nearby houses. As it disappeared behind us from our cars rear window it looked like we left behind a shopping mall except for the dreadfully looking out of place watch tower standing over it like some sentinel left behind from the war with the Dutch.

On the ground the view is much better from the air and the houses look quite neat and tidy and the neighborhood is very pristine but the roads leading from the airport to our villa were quite narrow. Our driver didn't speak Japanese but he had a good command of English. He told me that although the roads here in the afternoon in this part of the city were quite light by nightfall they were packed bumper to bumper and traffic just stops. For a major city and a world renowned tourist destination I must admit that the traffic here was very light. Even at three am in Tokyo the traffic is heavier than I saw here. The car took us to a wonderful private villa in Seminyak, which is in the west of the city and only twenty-five minutes from the airport. The villa comes complete with swimming pool, private garden and a cook-maid who more or less dictated to us what time meals were and when she would arrive and depart.
I don't mind at all! I'm here to do a job and of course to relax in my free time and to send our boss, Hana, a post card saying that the event is longer than originally scheduled and so we all need three weeks here! (Laughs)

Natsumi, one of my co-workers on this assignment, asked if the girl who kissed me and said goodbye to me at the airport was my sister.
I looked at her and explained that she is my life partner.
I must admit that the naughty streak in me does like to see shock value register on some people's faces when you admit that you're gay. Oh it's easy to read in a book or here in my blog but when you are actually sat next to someone and they look in your eyes and admit their orientation it does sometimes hit you like a generous gulp from a double vodka on the rocks with a dash of lime!
She simply answered "Oh you chose to be lesbian!"
I just nodded a little "um" because with her head concentrating on her laptop screen, I feel that she wasn't really receptive to my opinion of that remark and to be honest it probably wasn't worth my time trying to educate her.

My being a lesbian isn't a choice really in the same thought that you being, dare I say it, 'straight' is a choice for you - it's simply who you are and to whom you are attracted. It's not a question of what shall I have for dinner and with which gender shall I have sex with tonight?
It's not just sex - let's stay away from sex for the moment.
It's about finding someone in your life that you can relate with and someone with whom you can fall in love.
You, my dear reader, can look at someone and think 'wow, I would love to know that person more and perhaps some kind of relationship could develop over time!' I'll guess that for most of you that person in your dream would be of the opposite gender. Well for me and tens of thousands like me, we much prefer our own gender even though I have been in love with both men and girls in my life.
Does that make me bisexual you may ask?
Well no! As with most things in life there isn't any clear cut black and white, 'either-or' distinction.
For my analogy let's take skin color. There are people with skin as black as the darkest ebony and there are some with a pale white almost bleached and unhealthy looking skin and most everyone's skin tones ranges across the many hues between these two extremes, it's all dependent upon the levels of melanin in your skin.
The same is true for sexuality.
You have at one end of your spectrum, heterosexuals who feel threatened by homosexuals and like to campaign to abolish such aberrations of nature and at the other extreme you have homosexuals who are forever on marches demanding this, that and everything in between for some outmoded notion of gay-rights. Between those two extremes you have normal straights and normal gays and curios normals and uncertain gays and bi would be at center point. I don't believe many are on those extreme end points but I know we all lie somewhere along this measuring stick. I won't play on the side roads of fetishes today because they lie outside of this little explanation.
If anyone of any orientation's idea of a relationship solely centers on sex then I would say that they are very sad and shallow people. I hope that clears up a little mist from some people's eyes!