Going Domestic

farewell, swedish furniture infatuation

Sunburst Coffee Table - not really kid-friendly
Originally uploaded by goingdomestic

Our furniture doesn't come from Ikea these days.

Before moving here, I had no idea how much furniture and home decor items were made in Thailand.  The really cool thing is that it all costs a lot less, not having to cross the ocean to land in the display window of expensive Calgary furniture stores! Needless to say, we're funneling the funds that we, as non-residents of Canada, can't use to contribute into our RRSPs into some new stuff for our home.

These are the latest - Chris really liked the drum table and the sunburst design on the coffee table. I did, too. I don't think that we'd ever see anything like those in Calgary, let alone be able to afford them!  I am a little sad about demoting my much-adored LEKSVIK coffee table with the basket cubbies, though.

part of life here

Okay. I'll admit it. I'm in a posting mood less and less these days. Crafting is pretty much a hobby of the past, my sewing machines sit around and get dusty, and I'm still struggling to bake my favourite treats in a foreign oven that I don't have the instruction manual for and ingredients that sometimes just don't exist in Thai grocery stores. Sometimes it's hard to be cheery and inspired. 

I'm kind of worried about getting into a funk again. It's hard to escape the feeling of goodbyes and endings here in the compound this month. My daughter's preschool is starting their year-end activities. Their art projects are being auctioned off to support a hill tribe school at the end of this week, final progress reports are being issued in a couple more weeks, and the last day of classes is in a month.  It sounds like at least half of her class won't returning to the same school next year.

My friends all have their airline tickets booked and talk about how they've started packing for their trips home at the beginning of June (school gets out earlier here than it does it Canada, I guess). Everyone is excitedly talking about seeing their friends and families again, shopping at familiar places (Cheerios at every grocery store, naturally), and catch the big summer movies when they first open.  I have to admit that it does sound like a nice break.

Two of my friends are leaving Thailand for good in June, and it feels really weird to have invitations for farewell dinners and parties sitting in my inbox.

When we moved here last July, I got to watch as our compound became a less lonely place to live. More families arrived for the first time, or returned, just about every week. I feel like I'll be spending next month seeing the opposite effect, saying goodbye to my friends on a weekly basis. Ugh. Part of life here, I guess.

my stash

Normally, when I hear other people refer to something as their "stash", I assume that they're either referring to their hoard of narcotics or their collection of yarn. If you happen to hear me use the term in conversation, though, I'll be talking about my collection of packaged foods from North America.

I felt like I won the lottery on Friday morning. I was walking past the last aisle before the check-outs in our community grocery store, and out of the corner of my eye I saw a vaguely familiar blue box! It was graham crackers - one of the products that I'd been searching for over the last six months! I didn't think twice about buying the last box! The crazy thing is that I was at the grocery store on Thursday at 1:30 pm, and the graham crackers weren't on the shelves. They managed to sell out by 9:00 am on Friday morning!

Anyway, between my pantry and the freezer compartment of my fridge, I think that I have a decent little stash of comfort foods.  Hopefully it will last until the end of the school year ...

rain and ramblings

I'm really behind on posting here. I can partly blame the storm that went though one week ago. Incredible wind, rain, and lightening - and the storm lasted for hours. Our electricity was out for at least seven hours. No air conditioning in Thailand in April is a rather uncomfortable situation for our foreign selves! The next morning, I went out for a walk around our lake and counted the number of trees that had fallen down. Even more had limbs blown off. One of my friends had part of the ceiling of her apartment collapse, and the big international school was closed because of electrical problems and because many of the tiles on the roof had blown off. Life is usually really uneventful here, so this was quite exciting. Except that part about no air conditioning. Our local grocery store was without electricity for over 24 hours, and I'm still a little leery about buying dairy products and meat there. I'm not sure that their inventory has turned over yet!

I had another weird experience this past Monday. I was out with my friends to celebrate a birthday, and before we went for afternoon tea at one of the hotels on the Chao Phraya, we stepped into a jewelry shop to browse. I'd never been jewelry shopping in Bangkok before, so I was a little intimidated to step into the shop and be greeted by a fleet of salesgirls dressed in identical pink suits. I never counted how many sales associates there were, but it seemed like at least two dozen. At the time, the five of us were the only customers in the shop! As I wandered past display cases full of incredibly large and ostentatious bling, I was trailed by two or three of them. I had never seen customer service like this before in my life, and I was a little weirded out by it. It became a little cool when, after I'd found some style that I actually liked, the salesgirls kept finding similar pieces to show me. Can I say how much I love coloured sapphires? There was a bracelet there that I still think about ...

A couple years before I started blogging, I'd had a completely different experience shopping for fine jewelry in Calgary. I'd wanted to get Chris a really smart-looking titanium wedding band, and the only place to buy them locally was at the Birks store in TD Square. It was convenient; TD Square was where I got off of the train and caught a bus back to our apartment on Spruce Drive, and the store was never busy at all.  Anyway, I stepped into Birks, after work, to purchase this ring for Chris for three consecutive days.  It was a big purchase - the titanium rings they had were all priced at over one thousand dollars.  On each of those days, I lingered over by the display case for a good ten minutes, only to be completely ignored by the sales staff who weren't busy with other customers. The store was pretty much empty, as usual. I'm not really sure why no one asked me if I required help. Maybe it was because I was carrying a backpack, holding leftovers from my lunch and my gym clothes? Maybe I looked too young to be able to afford anything?  On the third day, I thought about speaking up and asking to see the ring that I wanted to give to my husband, but I was also tired of Birks and figured that maybe I just wouldn't shop there anymore.