ten minutes to myself

summertime in saigon

I'm pretty certain that my husband thought that our summer here in Saigon was going to suck big-time. No matter how cheerfully I assured him that the only holiday I was taking with kids was a holiday in which he came with us and that we'd be happier at home with our own beds, books, toys, etc., he didn't quite believe me and predicted massive boredom. Right until the last day of classes for Madeline, Chris kept asking if he could send the kids and me to places like Singapore, London, or Hong Kong for a week, just to break the monotomy. He presented me with a listing of children's summer activities in Bangkok, even. He even offered to send me and the girls to the US a week ahead of his arrival, and I turned that down. A week in a nice hotel by the Smithsonian wasn't even a little tempting - my kids grow tired of museums (and walking to museums) quite quickly. 

I've traveled alone with my kids three or four times now, and while it might look like a vacation on the surface, going alone is really a lot more work for me. The "vacation" part doesn't really happen the way that it does when the four of us travel to together. So this year, I'm waiting.

We're staying in Saigon except for the two weeks that Chris has booked off. It's been fine, actually. Life here isn't really any more boring than it normally is, and it's a little nicer, in some ways. I can take the kids out for lunch at the local cafe, and their playground area isn't crowded. I don't lose sight of Sadie in amid the packs of children that are there during the school year, and it's a lot less likely that a group of eight year olds have commandeered the swingset. The grocery store hasn't yet run out of anything that I wanted to buy, so my kids are happy because I can always find strawberries and the their favourite breakfast cereal. 

Since the kids have been off for summer holidays, I've been planning special cooking projects a couple of times a week Rice Krispie squares are a consistent success, though last week's attempt to make sunflower seed butter has been put on hiatus until I troubleshoot what we were doing wrong with the food processor. 

The children from next-door have been around as well, so all the kids have been running between our houses a lot. 

Madeline starts two weeks of art camp the week after next. There aren't a lot of choices for summer camps here, but she did have the option of chosing dance or sports instead. Sadie was too young for any of the summer programs except for the one at the Montessori school, but it was ridiculously expensive (nearly $300 for five half-days/week).  

I know that summer would be a lot more fun if we were living in somewhere like St. John's again - there'd be more summer camps, playgrounds, parks, a library to visit, and probaby more friends at home to play with, but staying here in Saigon for most of the summer hasn't been a bad experience at all.

Yet. 

 

canadian fusion

Anyone who knew me in Canada probably knows that my favourite way to enjoy the Calgary Stampede is from a distance. This distance - between Calgary and Saigon - is pretty effective. The Stampede might seem harmless on the surface: carnival rides, free concerts, and a rodeo. Indeed, the pancake breakfasts are pretty awesome.  I just never understood why the entire city seemed to need to abandon all sense of reason for the ten-odd days of the Stampede and become a quasi-frat-house of drunk fake cowboys/girls. Specifically, at noon in the middle of the work-week.

So, imagine my delight when my husband announces how much he's looking forward to this year's Canada Day celebration, organized by the Canadian Chamber of Commerce:

Um, yee-haw?

So, Canada Day in HCMC is interesting. There's obviously a time-zone difference, but did you know that Canada Day actually happens on June 23 here, instead of July 1? We totally live in the future! 

Kids were invited to play that most Canadian of athletic pursuits, Miniature Golf:

I'm aware that ice hockey and curling were probably impractical, given it's like 35 degrees celcius outdoors, but I was sort of wondering if lacross was ever considered. Or even basketball. 

But some of elements of this patriotic bash were successful. Many, many litres of Clamato juice were flown in for the caesar bar (though I prefered to mix beer into my Clamato juice). The music playing at a polite volume over the speakers in the beer tent was a good mix of Bachman Turner Overdrive, KD Lang, and Blue Rodeo. The steaks were imported from Alberta (and they actually did taste like I remembered). 

The organizers obviously knew what the best airline is to fly back to Canada:

(Everyone gets the irony there, right?)

And they had the right attractions to groom the country bar-stars of the future, even if they are currently too little to do more than pose for a photo on a mechanical bull:

seven hundred and some odd number of days later ...

It's been two years since we moved to Ho Chi Minh City, and today I spent this anniversary doing the exact same thing that I was probably doing two years ago: staring at the foil packages of laundry detergent at the grocery store, trying to figure out what kind I needed by the tiny little pictures on the front (hand-washing only? are the little blue sparkles supposed to mean bleach?) because everything is labeled in a language I can't read. Our landlord dropped off a new top-loading washing machine this morning, and I needed to figure out which little pictogram denoted "low-suds". Apparently, I need the detergent in the blue package now, instead of the orange package. 

It's been two years and I kind of miss my life in Bangkok more than I miss my life in Canada, as nice it was with access to pesticide-free food, 911 service, and my family three hours north on Highway 2. I'm not sure that I've become any fonder of Saigon. I still get really frustrated with Madeline's school. I count the smallest things as major victories, like actually managing buy a gift here for my husband that he actually wanted (in case anyone is curious, a pasta roller from a shockingly nice kitchenware shop in District 3). I still get all angry inside when I see motorcycles speeding down the sidewalk when all the kids have left school for the afternoon. How much would a little patience and courtesy cost, Vietnam? I am so not going to miss that. 

It's been almost five years since we left Canada and I think that my children are going to be in for a shock when we move back and they realize what it means to live in a culture of commercialism. We don't have toy stores where with more than a shelf of Barbies, Lego, and Crayola supplies. We don't see toy advertising anywhere. While this is so very nice in many ways, it also means that it's really hard to figure out what to do about gifts for Madeline's birthday next week. She's asked for books, and maybe to order a new outfit for her Un-Patriotic American Girl doll, but no toys, because she really doesn't know what's out there. Neither do I. She'll probably be receiving a lot of new books to mark her eighth year on this small world. 

Two years isn't a long time at all, and it's really weird to think that in a few months it's going to be time to starting looking for the next place we'll relocate to.  I've basically told Chris that I'll move anywhere except for the Democratic Republic of the Congo (not enough info about the schools, that's all). Bonus points if our next house or apartment comes with a dishwasher, of course. I have to focus on what's important :)

 

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.