Going Domestic

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.

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.

mystery shopper

Grocery shopping here nearly always comes with elements of surprise or mystery. Sometimes the shop will have received a new shipment of imported products, and the shelves will be full of familiar packages and my day will immediately brighten. Othertimes, I'll walk in and immediately feel a pang of regret that I didn't buy that extra box of Cheerios the last time that I was in. I will never *not* buy an extra box of Cheerios on a go forward basis, by the way.

The element of mystery usually comes into play when I get the wacky idea to try cooking or baking something new. Today, it was a recipe for pumpkin loaf. I actually needed to buy a fair amount of the ingredients, but many of them were pantry basics, like brown sugar and chocolate chips (okay, the recipe called for nuts, but why would I make something with nuts when I could use chocolate chips instead?). One thing that I would be buying for the first time in Thailand was evaporated milk. I figured that it wouldn't be hard to find as there seemed to be a plethora of canned milk products available here. Alas, I came home in the freakish heat and humidity empty-handed.

There was something on the shelf that I think *might* have been evaporated milk. The thing that gave me pause was that the Thai characters on the can were identical to those on the can of sweetened condensed milk. I really had no idea what I was considering buying. I might as well admit that. Anyway. Chef Google produced many suggestions to use half-and-half as a substitute for evaporated milk, and hunting the grocery store for half-and-half appeals to me more than reducing whole milk on the stovetop (another frequently suggested substitution). So, maybe I'll still end up baking a pumpkin loaf this upcoming week ...

foolish? poolish?

Thailand must be a truly blessed land. Repair work that would surely injure, kill, or just never work out is accomplished here with minimal fuss and attention to safety. Today, a bunch of ceramic tiles in the swimming pool at our apartment are scheduled for replacement. I had assumed that the maintenance workers were going to drain the pool to accomplish this repair, but it looks like thousands and thousands of litres of water isn't going to stop the repair work. It must be like the time when my friend had the underwater lights in her pool replaced while the electricity was still on and the water was still in ...

The swimming pool repair conundrum is just one of the bizarre things occupying my mind today. The other thing that I am getting obsessed with is having to submit a copy of our truck's registration to the office that issues us the permit to use The Compound's shortcut access to the expressway to get permanent access before our temporary access expires. I thought that a photocopy of our registration sticker would do it, but the folks at the office assured me that I needed a photocopy of some booket. Well, while fetching the toy that my kid left in the car last night, I searched the glove box, and there are no booklets! So, I'm wondering if maybe "registration" was a code word for "proof of insurance" because that's what I found. Even when I think that I know what I'm doing here, it's obvious that I don't ...

Maybe I should just eat more spicy papaya salad and not think so hard :)

sometimes the quest for a good burger goes astray

Yesterday, I ate a mediocre burger as a patriotic act. It was kind of soothing to see the familar Triple O/White Spot logo beaming at us across a busy shopping centre. Chris and I don't often find Canadian things in Bangkok, but there, on one of the upper floors of Central World, was a little franchise from Nat Bailey's White Spot empire. I swear the fries tasted like McCain's. They were my favourite part of our lunch!  It's probably been four and a half years since Chris and I had eaten at a White Spot, but we used to step into the Macleod Trail location after work from time to time.

talking to americans

Sometimes it's a lot of fun living in the cultural mosaic that is Bangkok's foreign community. Last week, I was over at my friend S's house, and her daughter and mine were dancing around to selections from S's iPod. As the final notes of a classic Springsteen track played, S's daughter suddenly said, "Mom, I need to hear the baseball song!" S and her family are from the US, so I assumed that I'd soon be watching the little girls rock out to "Take Me Out to the Ballgame". A little seventh-inning stretch for the playdate, so to speak. My friend wandered over to her iPod and remarked, "Laura, you are going to laugh so hard when you hear that she calls the baseball song!"

She was correct. I burst out laughing as soon as I heard the opening notes of Queen's "We Will Rock You". "S," I said, "that's the HOCKEY song!!! Everyone knows that!"

Funny the difference that a silly border can make, and that I discover this whilst on the other side of the planet.

springtime in the prairie

I've been wondering, lately, what my backyard in Calgary is looking like. How much snow is left? A few inches, or a few centimeters? Any bare patches where brown leaves and yellow grass are poking through?

We moved back home from Newfoundland at the end of March/beginning of April last year (to be honest, the time was such a whirlwind that I can't remember which!), and I swear in less than a week, I found that my tulips had popped out of the ground!

I love the way that spring smells, snow mold and all. I loved the sound of the melting snow on the road as the tires of vehicles rolled through the wet patches, and the sound of the melt-off running into the drains. Raking dead grass from the lawn is therapeutic.

I wish that we could have packed some of that up and brought it here. Every day looks and smells the same, and it's hard to believe that the months are passing at all.

i still heart usps

On Friday, I was delighted to discover another package from the USA sitting outside the door of our apartment. My sister had ordered my birthday gift from etsy, and asked the artisan/seller to send the package directly to me here in Thailand. It wasn't really a package - it was a manilla envelope that contained two silk-screened tees. The total cost of postage from somewhere in the USA? $6.50. For TWO shirts.

Anyone care to guess how much Canada Post would have charged? 

I'm dumbfounded that I envy Americans their postal system! "Envy" and "postal system" are not normally used in the same sentence, no?

for the birds

Where else but in the suburbs of Bangkok can a person find a Mexican restaurant that will decorate a birthday cake with a budgie bird? Que Pasa really does make delicious cakes, and their frosty is light. I'm just glad that Chris decided to pass on one of their homemade pinatas. It would have been a bit too much ...

how i got here, part two

I like to think that I hit the ground running once Madeline and I stepped off the airplane to join Chris in Thailand. He had already been working here for three weeks. The very next day, we were occupied with a bit of unpacking, finding out where to buy the groceries that I wanted, figuring out what to do with an energetic three year-old in very, very hot weather.  We'd moved here in July, a time when the majority of families in our community were on home leave, so the only other people around during the day were the handful of other families who'd also moved in the summer.

A lot of our first month was spent waiting. Waiting for our cable television to be hooked up, waiting for our internet connection to be set up, waiting for our sea container to arrive at the port. It seemed to past fairly quickly, despite that. We experienced our first beach resort holiday, checked out the children's museum in Bangkok, and explored the aquarium at the Siam Paragon shopping center.

By the time September rolled around, Madeline had been in preschool for a few weeks, and I guess I slowed down long enough to be hit by a massive case of homesickness? Depression? Frustration? Probably all three. I frequently felt ill if I spent time outside in the sun. I actually had to boycott the grocery store where I'd doing the majority of my weekly shopping because the prospect of wandering around Tesco Lotus one more time, pushing a cart that was unsatisfyingly half full because I just couldn't find what I was looking for because many things we like aren't available here, put me on the verge of an anxiety attack. It's now March, and I still haven't gone back.  The traffic began to get to me. I forced myself to think happy thoughts of a cool autumn in St. John's, Newfoundland, where I could eat pea soup from Belbin's, find all of Madeline's snacks readily available, and bad traffic meant that it took fifteen minutes to get home instead of ten.

I can't remember exactly, I think I pulled out of it as I started building stronger friendships with some of the other foreigners here. It was October. Chris, Madeline, and I had some really good adventures together, and life in Thailand started to be fine. I don't blink an eye anymore about buying my groceries at what's probably the most expensive place in town, because they usually have at least 75% of what I need. I can settle for that (and good mental health). Shopping for apparel for me is a depressing prospect, but I swear that this is the best place on the planet for affordably decorating one's home.  Massages and pedicures are cheap. Madeline gets to go to a private Reggio preschool. I think that there will always be things that I miss about Canada or frustrate me about our life in Thailand, but I have a feeling that when I run the final numbers in two or three years, we'll have come out a bit ahead.