ten minutes to myself

if the jolie-pitt clan can do it, so can we ...

Five years ago, we were living in Calgary again (briefly), in-between our relocations in Newfoundland and Bangkok, and amid trying to coordinate having vinyl siding put on our garage and making trips out to the dumpster in our driveway, I had this thought: "Hey, we're going to be living close to Cambodia! I want to see Angkor Wat!"

And a few months later, we were living in Thailand. And it was hot. More than I really realized. And Madeline was just three years old. And there looked like there were a lot of places for her to fall off of those really old Cambodian temples. 

(evidence of the potential for falling to one's death:)

And then Sadie arrived. And it was still hot, and hot weather and tiny infants don't go together. 

And then we moved to Saigon, on the other side of Cambodia. Still hot, everywhere. Madeline's nearly eight and pretty agile. Sadie is three-and-half, regularly trips over her own (kinda big) feet, and she's pretty fearless. It's still hot, but we don't know if we're going to be living here in twelve months time, so this time, we just decided to go. 

 Our trip worked out better than both Chris and I were expecting, actually. We booked a guide and a vehicle for the mornings, and toured Angkor Wat, Angkor Thom, and a few temples beyond, and after lunch we'd usually take the kids to the pool at the hotel. We stayed at the Hotel de la Paix in Siem Reap, and it worked out really well because it had a cafe serving ice cream, a swimming pool that was half-shaded, and no rule that the maximum occupancy of a room was two adults and only one child (we regularly struggle to find two-adults-two-kids per room hotels in Asia, for some reason). 

No children fell off of any temples, despite there being lots of opportunity to do so. Sadie enjoyed finding sticks to carry around and climbing on all the ledges that she could find. Madeline grumbled softly about her displeasure over being dragged out sightseeing, but refrained from asking when we were going back to the hotel every ten minutes (Aside: I'm going to have a great photobook full of photos of her frowning on our holidays, though). And I got to cross something off of the list of things to do in SE that I started five years ago :)

my "glamorous" ex-pat life: laundry editition

Yesterday afternoon, I decided that if I wanted to have any shorts left to wear in my closet (it's frighteningly hot here right now - too hot for jeans!), I needed to do my laundry. So, I grabbed my laundry basket, and headed up the stairs. 

This is my laundry room:

It has a washing machine, a dryer, and that box in the top right corner is a wee little hot water heater that I had installed so that I could wash Sadie's cloth diapers somewhat hygenically.

You may have noticed that my laundry room is actually outside:

I mentioned that I had to climb some stairs with my basket of dirty shorts and stuff to reach my laundry room. That's because my laundry room is also on the roof, albeit a bit covered:

On the bright side, it's so very very hot up there that my clothes will line dry in a couple of hours.

could have been worse

When I was a child in the 1980's, one of the things making the world a scary place was the television series Little House on the Prairie.  For all of it's touted wholesomeness, I don't remember much about plotlines featuring the Ingalls sisters frolicking in the countryside or down by creek. I don't even remember a single reason why Laura Ingalls and Nellie Oleson went at each other's throats over and over again. No, I remember the scary tragic things, like Mary and Adam's baby perishing in a fire at the School for the Blind and the really bizarre episode arc about rapist in a mime costume lurking in the woods. And the one that creeps me out the most: the episode where Caroline very nearly almost amputates her own leg when her husband is out of town and there is no one around to take care of her.

Whenever Chris is traveling for business (which he does often),  I think of tv-series Caroline Ingalls and her infected leg wound, pondering her shiny knife. Because I so do not want to have to deal with any sort of medical emergency while I've been abandoned in a geographical location that does not currently have much more to offer by way of emergency medical services than Walnut Grove did in the 1800's.

So, as I was sprawled on the floor of the bottom level of my house on Wednesday night last week (the very same day that Chris flew out to Hanoi for meeting), having missed the last step on the stairs on my way down to see who on earth had rang our doorbell at 6 pm at night, I thought of poor, home-alone Caroline Ingalls.  And I hoped that the only price I'd have to pay for my carelessness was a sprained ankle. I could deal with sprained ankles, right?

I came home from the medical clinic the next day with an x-ray to forever comemmorate my small ankle fracture and a cast that stops just shy of my left knee. The nurse-practitioner called it a "walking cast" but I am not really sure how it would differ from a non-walking cast because there is nothing special about it as far as I can see. It's slippery on the polished stone floors in this house. It's really inconvenient here, too, because my kids' schools have stairs instead of elevators (or ramps, to be honest), and there is no such thing as handicapped parking near the entrance. I haven't been leaving my home much; I'm walking like Frankenstein's monster, and frankly this city is just too dirty to walk around in without a shoe on both of my feet and the ability to thoroughly wash both my feet. (And now I am very aware of how everyone stares at me as I lurch around).

I'm not used to being forced to slow down, but this first full week with the cast has gone by faster than I expected. It turns out that orders from a doctor to keep my foot elevated is a good incentive to crack open my new book on Adobe Lightroom and start editing all of our photos from last year. There's just a few more months to process, and I have another week in the cast. I think it will be enough time, on both counts.

training for this for half my life

I ventured into downtown Saigon today, on a mission to find a couple of nice birthday gifts to send back to Thailand. There is a decently-stocked (by Vietnam standards - it's no Toys R Us) toy store in this shopping plaza that's called "The Tax Centre". It's full of high-end cosmetics, wristwatches, and Renault automobiles on the ground floor, but it's more like loose stalls on the upper levels. 

As I circled the second and third floors on the way to the escalators to the top floor, my eyes focused only on my destination and not on anyone who might be staring at me in curiosity, it occured to me that I don't even notice anymore that I may be the only one who looks different in that place, the only foreigner. It makes me invisible, in an ironic way.

When I was a teenager and full of angst and largely repressed rage, I never thought about the future any deeper than twelve months out. I never thought that learning to navigate whatever crap I was given to deal with alone would ever be something that would serve me well, or be something that I might feel a few tinges of pride over, give or take twenty years. My status as an outcast and loner was very much forced upon me, and man, it sucked when I was fifteen.

But now, I think that I can cope with being different it now because I coped with it then. Not only that, I'm doing better this time around. I can walk around an overcrowded shopping plaza full of people that I can't even communicate with in a culture that I don't understand the unspoken rules of, and I don't care that I am different at all. 

 

The Real Housewives of Ho Chi Minh City - I'll never be mistaken for one of you

Usually, when I step outside my house here, I hope that I look pretty close to poor. I don't expend a lot of energy perfecting this look, but I do it with purpose nonetheless. Also, when I write "poor",  I mean poor-for-a-foreigner-in-Vietnam, of course. 

I thought about this today after reading another discussion on Nguyen's List about how another foreigner living here in HCMC had their iPhone or camera or something stolen from out of their hands earlier this week. There was the usual out-pouring of sympathy and words of advice from my fellow ex-pats in response, but then I saw the reply that made me smile. Some guy wrote back that the best way to keep from being a target for personal theft here is to look as unremarkable and as poor as possible. Don't wear diamonds and blingy gold chains out in public, drive a beater instead of a gleaming new Vespa, leave the designer hand-bags at home, and carry a cheap-ass mobile phone. 

This has been my plan for about a year now. I don't bother dressing up beyond a pair of shorts and a t-shirt (occasionally, with a small hole or two in it), I leave the jewelry that I care about in our personal safe, load my pockets as inconspicuously as possible with the items that I'd put in a bag, if I was brave enough to carry one. I never look like I just left the salon. I leave my iPod in my van, hidden from view. Basically, I want to look like the least wealthy foreign lady walking across the parking lot to Metro. And I pretty much succeed every time.  

I no longer care what the locals think of me, walking from my daughter's school to my car with no make-up on and wet hair, as long as it's not, "Hey - easy victim!"

 

 

i like showtunes, that's all

I've known that it happens, sometimes, since before I even moved to Vietnam, but it was only two weeks ago that I had actual evidence that the government here has snooped in our mail. The cellophane was off of the DVD that I'd ordered from Amazon, and stuffed inelegantly in-between the plastic case and the cardboard sleeve. The sticker along the top seam of the case was sliced. Inside the case, the plastic hinge mechanism that held four of the six discs was broken.

The government here in Vietnam has the right to inspect all incoming goods/media/whatever for "cultural sensitivity". I haven't seen a definitive list anywhere of what sort of characteristics make something culturally offensive, and I'm more than a little confused on that matter. We know people who have been fined for attempting to import the very same photo-essay books that are available to purchase here at tourist sites. And the Vietnam episodes of No Reservations that were a huge part of making me feel okay about moving here aren't shown on local television (that I've seen). I'm not sure what was culturally sensitive about delicious-looking street food! 

Still, this social control amuses me, and I am usually smiling about my new, somewhat abused, and obviously suspicious-looking DVDs. I hope that the government employees enjoyed their complimentary screening of Glee: The Complete Second Season; the number that the character Kurt sang  from Sunset Boulevard was awesome :)

october starts spooky

A poltergeist.

That's what raced into my mind last night around half past ten as I stood halfway between our tv cabinet and the door of our den, momentarily paralysed as our electricity tripped on and off five or six times in quick succession. The lights in the kitchen flashed, and I could hear the motor in the a/c unit clicking and the generator outside reseting. It all happened in less than ten seconds, and I felt like I was caught in the middle of a suspense film!

Then I remembered, of course, that I live in a place with unreliably electricity and that we'd lost power at least a half-dozen times earlier in the day. Nothing like spastic like the display a minute ago, but probably nothing worthy of an X-File. Freaky, though.

The kids slept through all of the excitement, and Chris and I managed to get the a/c working again about thirty minutes later. 

 

almost (im)famous

So, my daughter Madeline gets particularly excited when we encounter other people wearing the same names that we do. When we were living in Bangkok, it was she who had a name-twin (who still is the only other Madeline she's gone to school with). Here in Saigon, there seems to be a plethora of Lauras, though, so it is I who get tangled in the occasional identity crisis. 

This week, I was emailing with another woman about registering for a beginner/intermediate photography class, and at one point, I received a reply that basically said, "Hey, are you Laura X?"

Well, no, I wasn't - the pair of surnames that I answer to were clearly highlighted in each of our previous emails, too. But this is not the only time that I've had someone ask me if I was Laura X. The funny thing is that Laura X is my neighbour, and we have many things in common - we are citizens of the same country, have kids the same age and born in the same places, and she even used to have the same home address. And my last name is even similar to hers. 

Last week, a few of the parents that I know at Madeline's school came over to me one afternoon when I was waiting for dismissal and asked me to tell them all about Tasers, which I thought was one of the more bizarre questions that I've ever been asked. I wasn't sure what it was about me that marked me as someone who could give an impromptu lecture on electroshock weapons, you know? 

It turns out that I was being mistaken for another local Laura, one who has a surname close to the one that am known by at the school, and she was heavily involved with a thread on a web forum here about bag-snatching thieves who are starting to wield Tasers. 

I'm feeling sort of extra-popular here in Saigon, what with my name-doppelgangers ... 

 

Reason #8 Why My Home will Never be on a Design Blog

Unless it's the anti-Apartment Therapy, that is. 

Consider, this bathtub faucet:

This is in the bathroom that is in-between the bedrooms that my kids occupy, here in our rental home in Ho Chi Minh City. The shape of it is kind of unusual, to my grew-up-in-Canada sensibilities, and I am not sure why the hardware and the bathtub are not flush with the wall, instead of installed 6-8 inches out (gotta love the aesthetics of the exposed pipes). But the really aggravating thing about this faucet is this:

If you can't tell from the photo, what you are looking at is the actual faucet, rotated completely behind the bathtub. How completely un-brilliant is that? So, if I am filling up the tub and either me or one of the kids knocks the faucet, a river of water flows in between the edge of the bathtub and the wall, and right onto the floor. Drives me crazy. I am not sure what sort of practical purpose this serves, and our family sure goes through a lot of towels on bath night because it this feature ...

friday: things making me happy this week

First, an unhappy: Saigon has been bloody hot this week. Stepping outside has started to feel rather like opening a 180C oven and I am sad to report that the air-conditioning in our kitchen/dining room doesn't appear to iniate any appreciable sort of climate change! Ugh. Today when I was outdoors, waiting for Madeline to be dismissed from her classroom afterschool, I was daydreaming of Antarctica ...

Two good things happened this week - the Metro Cash n' Carry in my area finally did away with their 130 cm height rule for admitting children! Sometimes I lament that life in Saigon is against the families with small children (or families without nannies)  with the lack of activities and shops that ban kids, so even if I don't take Madeline out to Metro to pick up a few things regularly, I will be happier here knowing that this obstacle has vanished! The other good thing: I found edamame at Metro - one of the snacks that we'd been missing ever since moving here. I am amazed at the quantity of soy beans my kids have ingested over the last 48 hours. 

Also, I found a blog with a list of "places of interest" for children here in Saigon (yes, those activities that I said were sorely lacking in my previous paragraph - ha!).