ten minutes to myself

transportation woes (again!) and other stories

It didn't quite go like this:

Dear Family Who We Didn't House on the Special Compound

In order to give our employees and their dependents the best-ever bus service between where we've housed you and the place where you work and your children go to school, we're eliminating the bus services at 3 pm, effective the week of those afternoon parent/teacher conferences. To make this the most convenient for you.

K. Thx. Bai. 

But it's not too far from reality.

It really is the week of parent/teacher conferences, and the the bus at three that I had counted on when I scheduled my interviews at the elementary school and the middle school has been eliminated from the schedule. 

So that the kids and I aren't stranded at the elementary school - which is near nothing unless you happen to live in that part of the Dharma Compound (because then it's near your house!) - for three hours until the next bus appears, Chris is going to pick us up in our rental car. 

We have a rental car, and it's totally a big deal! Sure, it's one of those Toyota Fortuners that I came to loathe during our time in Thailand because ours lacked any sort of feature to make it compatible with my children's car seats and the lap-shoulder belt loved to cut into my neck in the most uncomfortable way, but it's also given us a lot more freedom to do things on the weekend that we didn't think that we missing out on before! We zoom on over the causeway to Bahrain, and have bacon with our breakfast, see movies at the cinema, and shop in stores that stay open all day. We drive to Tamimi on Friday mornings and bring home a trunk full of groceries instead of lugging them home on the bus. Even going into the compound to do whatever - check email, return library books, grab a burger at the eatery that is actually good (but otherwise inaccessible) - is so much easier when we can do it on our own schedule. 

You all know where this is heading, right?  

Yes. Ten months after arriving here in the Kingdom, we bought a car. Well, Chris did. It's a cute little Hyundai with cranberry-red leather seats. We should have actual possession of it sometime next week. 

We aren't exaggerating much when we say that we bought our last car, our Subaru, over the internet. Our experience buying our desert-mobile has been nothing like that. The drive out to the car dealerships has been a bit harrowing, even early on Saturday mornings when the traffic is "light". It seems that the best time of day to buy a car is at eight at night when the traffic is the heaviest. Chris took a GM Acadia out for a test drive one night a few weeks ago and passed a seven-car pile-up. The rule-of-thumb on the road here seems to be "if there's half a metre between your car and the car in front of you, you aren't following close enough." You can understand how things get dicey so fast here.  

After several false-starts and plenty of fretting, a winning model emerged, and Chris drove the rental car to the Hyundai dealership. How would he like to pay for the vehicle? Bank wire transfer. "Sir, can't you pay with your credit card?" 

Yesterday, he returned to Hyundai once again to fill out more paperwork, and one of the employees led him to a place he called "Auto Chapeau" so that Chris could hand-pick out the window-tinting for his new car. First question, "Would you like legal or illegal?" For serious.

If we'd known that buying a car here in KSA was going to be such an amusing experience, we would have done it months ago!

 

armchair realtors

For two people who've been living in rental accommodations for most of the last decade and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future, Chris and I spend a lot of time looking at real estate listings. It used to be something we'd do to keep in touch with the home prices in our neighbourhood of Acadia in southeast Calgary, but now we're looking for a place to unload all of the furniture and artwork that we couldn't bring with us to Saudi Arabia. It's not necessarily logical, but it hurt me to leave those things behind; the Vietnamese lacquer painting of the little boy and a water buffalo, the pink dollhouse bookcase, and oh my goodness, all those books.

The solution that Chris came up with sometime last summer, when I was pretty heartbroken about having to leave things behind and live in furnished accommodation, was something along the lines of, "We'll buy a condo in Edmonton and you can spend the entire summer every year surrounded by our familiar stuff!" and it sounded fantastic. Edmonton's my hometown, it's where my mom still lives, and my head began to fill with images of spending July and August in a condo by the University of Alberta. My kids would ride their scooters along the pathways on campus on their way to STEM-centric girl-empowerment summer camps, and on Saturdays we could saunter down to Old Strathcona to buy veggies at the farmer's market. This scenario kept me going for many, many weeks. I figured that I could manage to live in an isolated apartment in a country where I don't have freedom of movement for ten months if I could pop back into my Canada Life for the other two. 

This bubble burst just after Halloween, if I remember correctly. Canadian Non-Residents technically can own property in Canada, confirmed our non-resident tax advisor, but we'd have to be able to convince the Revenue Canada folks that Edmonton is actually a vacation hot-spot akin to  Ontario cottage country or Whistler or else be potentially subject to tax penalties. So ... scratch that idea.  If we step foot in Edmonton during the school summer holidays, it will once again involve exceeding the recommended occupancy limit of my mom's house. 

Thus, Chris and I have to look elsewhere for our home-away-from-home-away-from-home, and he was interested in hearing what spot outside of Canada's borders I'd be content to spend pretty much every summer and winter holiday. It wasn't hard at all to suggest London. We've spend a lot of time there, I can speak the language, and the public transportation is awesome. I had to stop championing the London vacation home concept when it became clear from my real estate searches that flat prices weren't dropping at the same speed as the kilometres outside of the city centre were increasing. Sigh.

The second-most popular location for Chris's real estate searches is Edmonton. The very same Edmonton mentioned and dismissed a couple of paragraphs ago. His reasoning is that the company he works for here has gone a bit overboard hiring ex-pats and just might decide to send them all home, so we might as well continue checking out what kinds of homes are on the market. (He found a cute one with a mudroom (!) last night).

The MLS listings that Chris peruses the most are for Austin, Texas. He spent a week there last fall, and became quite infatuated with the place. We're now thinking of spending our winter holidays there to see if maybe the kids and I can also fall a little in love with Austin. It's funny - Texas is one of those places I've said that I'm not really interested seeing. I said that about Asia. I said that about the Middle East. It's a good thing that I don't really mind being proven wrong. 

little miss cheerful

It's been brought to my attention by a handful of the very lovely ladies who live in my building that for a newcomer to Saudi Arabia, I seem way too upbeat about living here. I have to admit that I'm not sure how to react to that accusation, so I usually shrug and say, "Well, this isn't the hardest place that I've lived." 

I am guilty of declaring that my abaya is awesome after realizing that I don't have to dress up at all to go out (sidenote: you might have to come here to understand why; I'm not slovenly, I promise). I think that it's cool that my kids can choose any fancy beverage from a restaurant menu to have with their lunch instead of having to hunt for the non-alcoholic offerings. I am quite happy to read a book while in rush hour traffic rather than navigate through it. 

My family is in a minority here because this isn't our first overseas assignment. We are also unique because we've repatriated once and then moved across the ocean again (albeit a different ocean). I know to expect that many of my frustrations about KSA won't go away, but that I'm going to find that many of the things that I love are going to outweigh them. And I know not to idealize life in my home country (thank you very much, repatriation reality-check). That last point is probably the hardest thing to let go of. 

When we first left Canada and moved to Thailand, I know that it took me months - at least nine - before I emerged from my deep funk enough to even realize that I had been in one. Maybe this is why I don't know what to say when my friends and acquaintances tell me that I seem bizarrely happy with life here; I could be fooling everyone right now without the self-awareness to realize it!

how to weekend

When we first arrived in KSA, weekends were my least favourite days of the week. Our family had to choose between these three not-necessarily-appealing options: long bus ride into the compound followed by a long walk in the heat, bus ride to a shopping mall where we spend more time locating shops and restaurants than we spend actually visiting shops, or staying in our small apartment where it is likely that the tv and radio will be on in the same room simultaneously and the three people that I live with will be getting on each other's nerves by doing largely age-appropriate things. This still happens sometimes, but it's getting better. 

We have a bit of a routine now. This past Friday, as usual, we went to one of the large grocery stores. We've been to Danube twice and I am still a bit confused by the layout (it's a large retail space and suffers from sprawl, alas).  I am happy to stop off at the small grocery store on the compound during the week to pick up small items to bring back on the bus, but it's nicer to go on Fridays in a car to bring home large and bulky items like cases of drinking water. Sidenote: Danube has an incredible number of varieties of Cheerios, but none of them happen to be the plain old ones in the yellow box. Weird.

For the second time ever, we went out to dinner. And by "out to dinner", I mean eating someplace that is neither our apartment (obviously) or one of the dining options on the Dharma compound. We went to the Steak House in Al Khobar, and had a lovely time sitting in a real restaurant eating nachos (that looked nothing like the picture in the menu), burgers, and sandwiches. 

Both the grocery store and the restaurant are public spaces, so I wore my abaya while we were out, and it occurred me that it was kind of awesome because I spent the entire weekend wearing yoga pants and a tee instead of having to change when we went out. 

We've headed out to the malls for the past two Saturdays. This past Saturday was good because Chris found what he was looking for, I found what I was looking for (stationary supplies!), we took the kids to the amusement park that is the top level of Rashid Mall, and we managed to order our lunch shawarmas before the food court restaurants closed for mid-day prayers. Same thing last week, except that our shopping mission was to check out the newly-opened Old Navy at the Mall of Dhahran to score some warmer-weather clothes for M. 

It always feels good to feel like you've finally figured something out. 

two monthiversary

Of course it feels like we've lived in sandy Al Khobar longer, but it's only officially two months. Amount that I miss living in Calgary? About zero percent.

Things that I like about living here:

• Mint lemonade and shawarma
• My kindergartener is in class for more than 12 hours/week!
• Unlocked contract-less less expensive mobile phone!
• There's a library. I think that it's a little smaller than the Fish Creek branch that we borrowed from in Calgary, but they have a fantastic selection of magazines and I've made a lot of good finds there!
• I can get on a plane and fly for six hours and land in one of several foreign countries (instead of just the United States - or frankly, I could still be in Canada)
• I get to wear my favourite combination of jeans, hoodies, and sweaters all year long because here, modesty trumps dressing sensibly for the weather :)
• This store that we went into to buy a few small gifts at, and walked out having bought a cute little corner desk. I miss having the lovely carpets and decor items that we bought in Bangkok and Saigon with us here, but I think that I could happily decorate my entire apartment from Desert Designs.

 Things that could use improvement

• Transportation! A couple of my friends here keep small cars parked in the compound (where it's not actually illegal for women in Saudi Arabia to use their foreign driver's licenses) , and I am quite envious because they can pick their kids up from the elementary school and then drive to the middle school and pick up the other kids and then cruise onwards to the big park after school. If I tried to do that, I'd end up arriving at the elementary school thirty minutes early, and then after I'd collected Sadie from kindergarten, I'd have to wait two hours for a bus to come to take us to the middle school to pick up Madeline, and we wouldn't get home in time to do homework, let alone visit a park! Nothing about that is practical.
• Similarly, location. Life here would probbably be more varied for my family if we lived on the compound and our kids could participate in after-school activities and schedule playdates with their friends.
• Our apartment is one bedroom smaller than promised, and the kitchen is a window-less ugly brown rectangle with a poor layout. Also, my stove is not level! Weird.
• The weather is already approaching intolerable levels of hot (for me), and it's only the beginning of April.
• The women's gyms here have exactly zero squat racks, zero kettle bells, and bar at the bench press station is frequently AWOL. 
• The ban on changing rooms in clothing stores keeps me from supporting that particular part of the retail sector.
• Sandstorms aren't fun. Sand somehow gets onto all the surfaces in my apartment, and now I'm kind of panicky that my kids will get stranded at school or on the school buses during one. 
• No chai lattes at Starbucks. This is criminal ...
• My apartment building does not have enough elevators to deal with the school rush-hour that happens twice every weekday, and dealing with the school rush isn't particularly great for my nerves. 
• To be filed under School, Transportation, and Location: My kids have to be up int he morning by 6 am to catch their bus at 6:35. They don't get home until between 3:30 - 3:45 in the afternoon. Madeline has said that she "doesn't have time to have fun anymore" because the hours in-between that and bedtime are taken up completely with homework and dinner. I feel really sad about that. 

Things that have surprised me:

• The weather was quite mild when we arrived in February; it was chilly enough to actually need to wear a sweater and long pants
• Don't really miss eating bacon, ham, or any sort of dish with pork, actually, though sometimes I wish that I had a meat to add to the dinner rotation besides beef and chicken.
• Most of the things that I believed about life in Saudi Arabia - as reported by the western media - have to be taken with a grain of salt. Just a few days ago I read an article from the UK that stated something to the nature of, "of course, women in Saudi Arabia can't leave their homes without their male guardian" and I had to close my browser immediately. There'd be a lot of unemployed taxi drivers here if that was actually true.

What's upcoming for Month Three and beyond? We're supposed to be moving into our permanent housing (which won't be on the compound, ugh). Our sea shipment from Calgary should arrive and clear customs, so there will hopefully be a happy reunion with our bedroom and living room furniture. And figuring out where we'll travel for a long weekend in June - Chris's latest suggestion is a resort outside of Abu Dhabi to check out the sand dunes, and I'm already imagining the photos that I'd be able to take.

how to do it all wrong

Today, we bought a desk. This is a good thing (albeit an impulse purchase) because our air shipment from Calgary is supposed to be delivered on Tuesday, and there's a dearly-missed computer and printer in it. There is nothing in recent memory that I've looked forward to more than the arrival of the air shipment. It's about 6-7 weeks late, which is far too long to be living out of suitcase. I really would like to be reunited with my clothes. And my kids would like their books and toys. And that computer is anticipated by all. 

Moving here, if I'm quite honest, has been an awful experience, at least in terms of actual logistics.

1. Our relocation advisor neglected to request the moving company that they use in Calgary to get in touch with us to schedule the pack-out, until about two weeks before our scheduled December 29th departure. There was no way to make this happen on time - over the Christmas/New Years break, so the flights were rescheduled for me and the kids, Chris went off to KSA alone, and I was left to deal with the moving company alone. 
2. The moving company. When we moved to SE Asia, the company that packed and shipped our household goods was the MI Group, and they were fantastic. This company, not so much. A few days prior to pack-out, I sent our assigned moving coordinator an email just to check that they had silica gel packets ready amongst the packing material because our belongings would be in long-term storage for a long time due to relatively new policy by the Dharma Initiative company the Chris works for. The guy first wrote back that he's never heard of moving companies using them (despite my personal experience with two), and "they actually cause damage". But he'd look into it for me, and check on the storage conditions here in KSA, but he never actually did do that. Also, this company didn't give us some paperwork that would become crucial later in the story.
3. So, Chris landed at the Dammam airport at the end of December, was met by a company representative as expected, and discovered that no actual arrangements for our housing had been made, which is not how the situation was advertised. This was straightened out a day later, but it absolutely shouldn't have happened, and we're thankful that our children didn't have to experience the big hunt for a place to spend the night in the wee hours of the morning right after they would have walked off of a transatlantic flight.
4. A "welcome package" containing pantry basics, dishes, cutlery, and pots and pans was supposed to be delivered ASAP to new arrivals. I think that it actually took about ten days, so Chris ate a lot of take-out with no proper utensils for a good while. 
5. Meanwhile, back in Calgary, I had to reduce the amount of stuff that we shipped by about half, so that meant putting a lot of furniture into storage and donating away an insane amount of books, and clothes. I was shocked to realized that I'd reduced my wardrobe by half, but it's the books that I will miss the most. Though, we put all of our bookcases into storage, so I wouldn't have had anywhere to put them here, anyways. But it's not really missing stuff that I'm still frustrated about - it was the sheer amount of work this was. I was solo-parenting, and didn't really spend any time with my kids for a whole month because I had to organize every single thing that we owned into the toss/donate/keep categories, and it was a giant undertaking. I felt awful. I should have been helping my six year old practice her articulation stuff, her literacy stuff, and such. Instead I let her watch My Little Pony on Netflix because I had to pack my car with goods to take to the hazardous waste depot. 
6. We did arrive in KSA at the beginning of February. About a week past when we thought that our air shipment should have arrived (within fourteen days per company policy), we discover that it and the sea shipment are still hanging out in Calgary, because there were a few forms that we needed to submit that we were not given before departing Calgary. I think that Chris was actually more livid than I was, but I still spent the better part of a day and night filling out the longest one. It honestly took that long. 
7. More form fun: "Please provide receipts and authenticity certificates for artwork valued over $2500, for insurance purposes." We did this. New memo to us. "We no longer insure artwork." Head desk.

But the air shipment is in the kingdom now, and I assume that the sea shipment is floating along somewhere. New desk arrives in the next day or two, and I am really looking forward to our lives here feeling less temporary :)

 

route talk

This is my sixth week living in Saudi Arabia (and it's actually raining here today, in the desert, which amuses me greatly), and one of the things that I've been doing a lot of is riding on buses. Obviously. 

For the most part, I like this aspect of life here. I get to sit and knit or read or chat with the other ladies while someone else deals with the predictably unpredictable traffic. The buses are unfailingly clean. They play music I like over the speaker. Some even have wi-fi (and it's much faster than in our apartment, so a wi-fi bus is the best place to download podcasts).

This is my sixth week here, and two problems with the buses have become apparent.

1 - The buses aren't quite frequent enough. My kids go to school on a private compound, and I had a meeting with Sadie's teacher after school last Tuesday to discuss how she's been doing and what to expect for the rest of her year in kindergarten. To get to her school by the appointment time of 3:15 pm, I had to leave my apartment at 1:50 pm, and then wait around the school office for about 45 minutes, because there no later bus that would work. Then, my kid and I had to wait around her deserted school for about an hour, so that we could catch the 5 pm bus back to our home. We walked in our door at about 5:50 pm. One bus every half-hour would go a long way to make life off-compound a lot smoother. A meeting with a teacher shouldn't be a four-hour undertaking, you know? 

2 - The buses don't follow the route they're supposed to. It's maddening! I've taken it to the compound (which is oddly like the Dharma Initiative from Lost, but that's a story for another day) in the evening, and it's skipped going past the middle school because no one was getting off there, but what if there were people needing to be picked up? This past weekend, the four of us were taking the bus to get lunch at the Mexican restaurant by the golf course, and from prior trips, I knew that the golf course should appear out the left window. Except it didn't. We got off the bus at a completely unfamiliar place which turned out to be on the wrong side of the golf course, and 5 km away from the restaurant. So,  we all got our cardio in that day, and I also got a pretty bad sunburn on my lower neck! Last night, I pulled out the "official" map of the bus route, and discovered that on Saturday, it drove up the completely wrong road! Yes, the golf course should have been on the left after all ...

so, we're still in calgary

Not supposed to be.

We had tickets to fly out on December 29th, but the company who is moving us failed to notify the actual moving company until it was too late to actually schedule our pack-out. So now we're out of here during the first week of February.

Moving prep is really frustrating. I am not sure why this company bothers to offer a household goods shipping allowance when we've had to donate, dispose of, or put into long-term storage over half of our belongings. On Wednesday the local movers are back to pick up our sofa, computer desk, bookshelves, patio furniture, and our kitchen table and chairs. They'll go into storage and we'll get to enjoy two weeks of indoor picnics for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. 

One of my nightmares is that the international mover will finish loading our remaining belongings and then tell us, "Your container is only half-full!" 

I know that that our stuff is only ... well, stuff, but I am kind of attached to it and can't help but think that settling into a new foreign country would be a little smoother when surrounded by the things that have made our home our home for many years now. 

Speaking of our home (and since this is a ranty post), it's not quite as described at Chris's job interview and subsequent offer letter. The three-bedroom house on a secure housing compound with a school, library, movie theatre, and grocery store has been swapped out in favour of a two-bedroom apartment in town.  At this point in the game, the only response is ... of course. 

 

 

 

life in point form

I've come down with a case of list-itis again, undoubtedly brought on by having our passports out for visa approval. It's the final contingency to clear before our one-way flights are booked and our pack-out is scheduled. We won't get much warning; maybe six weeks after our visas are granted if we're lucky, though I feel like we need to prepare for only three or four. 

Hence, the to-do list (in progress):

• figure out our tax issues around non-residency
• sell our house
• sell our car (maybe)
• notify the schools, home security company, my gym, my mobile phone provider
• buy suitcases or boxes for the stuff we'll take on the plane
• close-out our safety deposit boxes at the bank
• find a storage facility for the stuff we're leaving in Canada
• paint the basement 
• take the e-waste and hazardous waste items to their proper disposal facilities
• schedule tuberculosis tests for the kids
• give away a bunch of stuff???
• set up bank account at HSBC

The to-buy list:

• back-to-school clothes for a summery climate (this mainly affects our oldest kid)
• everyday dishes
• back-to-school supplies for the next school
• new mattress for us

The packing lists (details to follow)

• suitcase stuff 
• air shipment stuff
• sea shipment stuff
• store-in-Canada stuff

There's a lot of stuff that we won't know for sure until we're in the company housing. Our new home may be wired for 110V electricity but it might be 220V. We'll take our 110V stuff and our heavy transformers, and I won't dwell on the fact that I gave away an awesome 220V food processor/blender only eighteen short months ago. We might be in a place with temporary furniture, or we may have permanent stuff and then most of our shipment will go into storage until we are able to move into different company housing. 

I'm supporting this overseas move because the big picture is that we'll have a better quality of life than we do here in Calgary, but the short term is looking pretty crazy.

update on that moving thing

I'll admit that over the summer, I got a little bit wrapped up in the small details of our prospective overseas move. We received some less-than-positive information about a housing shortage, and I became rather obsessed with it.

Some of my concerns are still on-going . Like, the housing that we may be assigned to isn't very family friendly - no outdoor space for the kids to ride their scooters, create murals with sidewalk chalk, work on their frisbee skills. Not enough bedrooms. Too far away from the compound for after-school playdates to be do-able. I've learned that others concerns are going to actually work out fine, like how the kids will stay for lunch instead of coming home, which makes more sense considering their one-hour lunch break and the 50-minute round-trip travel-time. 

I went to an orientation session with the company last week, and it was all about the big picture, and it was a good reminder. More family time, because there's no overtime. Chris will get on the bus to come home at 4 pm every workday. Timely and quality healthcare (did I mention that one of my kids is waiting nine months to see a dermatologist here in Calgary?). A school that is rich in resources and extracurricular activities, small classes, and modest dress codes. Life in a small community. Excellent access to travel. My list of destinations is long: Turkey, Egypt, Oman, Jordan, South Africa ... 

As I sat listening to my orientation leader and keeping an eye on the slides, it occured to me what this opportunity has to offer intersects pretty nicely with the things that I came to appreciate about living overseas before. And I strangely miss it. 

dumb reasons indeed

A heavy package from FedEx arrived a few days ago. Sadly, it didn't contain the early birthday presents that my five year-old was hoping for. The contents inside were from the company that Chris has a job offer with; there's probably a dozen forms due back at different times. There are several more boxes that Chris needs to have checked before we're moving for sure, and thankfully, I've been minimally involved with the paperwork. 

Last week, I posted that I only had a dumb reason for not moving overseas with this opportunity. This week, I kind of feel that I only have an dumb reason for actually going: family vacations in cool places. 

Yeah. That's it. The only thing left that seems positive (from my point of view, of course) is traveling to places like Turkey and Jordan and Cape Town with Chris and our kids. I'm not sure what else there is to look forward to?

Initially, we thought that all company housing was in compounds, which sounded good (and maybe more than good - these ones are like small towns with grocery stores, bowling alleys, movie theatres ...). I've lived in a large compound before and it was awesometo have a safe place for the kids to play outside and ride their bikes, live near the school, and it was easy to make new friends in that sort of environment, too. I met other people just by being out and about. It sounds like the community atmosphere that Chris was told about during his interview. We've now learned that compound housing is incredibly scarce and we're more likely to be placed in another town in a furnished apartment, and that just seems a lot more ... isolating (this housing situation would have been isolating in the other places I've lived, too). So, this is something that I have to remove from my "postives about moving" list for the time being while "apartment in another town" goes onto the negative side, and it makes me feel rather blue to see that "awesome family vacations" is all alone. 

There should be more here, shouldn't there?

the Christmas in London tradition

The Origin Story: About three months after we landed in Bangkok back in 2007, we realized that our new country of residence wasn't going to be very Christmas-y at Christmas. For one, it's a Buddhist country. Two, it's hot and very green every single day of year, so it would never "feel" right to us. We discovered that London was a mere 12-hr direct flight from BKK, and our first overseas Christmas tradition was born. 

It really was a tradition - we've spent four of the last six holiday seasons in London. It's a fabulous place at Christmas time - it's cool enough to wear lovely sweaters and warm jackets without being freezing, there are decorations and Christmas fairy lights everywhere, turkey dinners and mince pies are easily procured.

This year we get to participate in the "we're not traveling for Christmas" tradition, and while it will be fantastic for my kids not to wake up in a hotel or worry about if Santa left something under the tree in SE Asia for them to open later, there are a couple of things about our UK Christmases that I'll always be fond of:

The Christmas Grotto: So, Santa is called by the very dignified name of "Father Christmas" and Father Christmas lives in a grotto instead of a fenced-off area of a shopping mall. We somehow managed to visit the Grotto at Harrod's when Madeline was just three years old, and it was a totally magical experience. Father Christmas was the loveliest version of Father Christmas ever - I honestly do think that all of the grandfatherly actors in the UK who very narrowly beat out by Michael Gambon for the role of Albus Dumbledore went to work in the red suit instead. I'm totally not kidding.

Father Christmas chatted with our shy three year-old for more than ten minutes (during which we forgot all about the hour we probably spent waiting in line), leafed through a gigantic book housing the nice/naughty list to look up her name, asked her about her Christmas wishes. We were all charmed, and of course we bought the over-priced souvenir photo. It made visiting Harrod's during Christmas week worthwhile, which is saying a lot. A very big lot. 

Grottos are everywhere. We never returned to Harrod's because they've gone to an appointment-booking system that users access based on what tier their Harrod's loyal card is. Last year we took both of the girls to the Victorian Grotto at the Museum of the Docklands. It was a timed entrance, and the wait in line was still long, but the little reconstructed Dickensian front room where my kids met Father Christmas was charming in it's simplicity and the Man in Red was perfectly grandfatherly and their visit was not rushed at all. I hope that Madeline and Sadie haven't forgotten.

The Holiday Panto: So, pantomimes are musical stage productions that spring up all over during the holiday seasons  - they're very campy and family-friendly at the same time. Most of them seem to be based on familiar stories , like Cinderella or Aladdin or Snow White or even the Gruffalo (first one we saw!). Sadie was two years old the first time we took her - the production was Dick Whittington's Cat and she sure danced in the aisle when Dame Edna Everage lead the closing number of "Born This Way" (the whole thing was quite the spectacle).

We've managed to find a couple of pantos to check out this month that are near Calgary and it's feels kind of nice that we can continue one of our holiday traditions. 

The grottos and pantomimes aside, there were other things that made London an awesome place to go to for some Christmas cheer. Madeline's old enough to take to the West End theatres, so she and I went to see Wicked one year (her dad went to see Paul McCarntey). My kids got to practice their skills on outdoor -skating rinks, which would have been impossible in Saigon's climate.

I have no idea if we'll be sent to live overseas again, but my fingers are crossed and resuming our Christmas in London tradtion will feel like a lovely and familiar reunion.

 

 

another thing i've been reading

I can't remember who sent me this article to read, but it feels completely authentic to me: I am a triangle and other thoughts on repatriation.

hardship assignment

Back in the spring, when I grudgingly posted on Facebook (and admitted to friends not on FB) that our next assignment was going to put us back in Calgary, the general response was "How exciting" and "Welcome back to civilization" and other similar things that made me cringe. 

I'd lived in Calgary for six years before, the same as I had in SE Asia, and I had a preference. It's not the one that people probably would have guessed if they'd been reading either of my blogs back in 2007 when we moved to Thailand. I'm getting a little tired of hearing that I should be thrilled to be back in North America from people who ... well, don't really have the same lived-there-for-many-years basis for comparison. 

I don't like the notion that life here must be so superior. I could easily argue that it isn't.

Sure, Calgary (and Canada or the USA) has some material things that I appreciate, like better quality food (even if our fruit and vegetables are shipped in from far away for part of the year). I like knowing that the milk isn't adulterated with hormones and that the plants outside having been doused in DDT. It's nice having our own car. It's nice being able to purchase children's medication at the drugstore and not have to wonder if it's counterfeit.  It's nice that my kids can take lessons in gymnastics and ice-skating. Internet is way faster. Netflix exists. 

But I miss the slower life that we had overseas. We had more down-time as a family - here, busy-ness is a terribly contagious disease. Our kids' friends in Asia lived nearby instead of commuting to our local school from the deep south, so after-school playdates were possible/easily planned. There were always people to befriend, and seeing how challenging that is here, that was a really lovely thing about living in an international community. It's not hard to find people with similar interests to mine in Calgary, but finding people who can spare five minutes to talk isn't always easy because they're busy, busy, busy.  

It's really an odd feeling to be back in the country that I grew up in, and feel like it's a strange place that I have to get used to living in. One of Chris's co-workers from Saigon emailed him a few days ago to report on how much downtown Saigon has changed in the months since we've been gone, and I'm surprisingly sad that we aren't there to marvel or curse about it. 

Stupid Repatriation Problem: I Miss My People

We've been here for three months, and still, every time I see a notice on a community message board with the headline "New to Calgary?",  I wander on over with great expections.

And then read the paragraph below: "Learn English with Other Immigrant Women!"

So. Yeah. 

Stupid Repatriation Problems: Food is Expensive!

So, we've been reintegrating for almost three months now, and I am still having a crisis everything I step into a grocery store. I guess that loaves of bread and cartons of eggs have probably only increased by about a dollar in price since the last time I bought them in Canada, but my brain has a hard time valuing those products at their current selling prices. 

Joining the backyard chicken movement seems kind of complicated, seeing as we're living in a high-rise condo building, so it looks like I will be circumventing the system by baking our own bread once we have our sea shipment delivered and my stand mixer and baking tools are back. 

we're still here

And it's a good thing that we're still in Saigon, because we don't have any place to live in Calgary yet. I've been trying to get many things sorted out for the summer - a couple weeks of summer camp for the kids, getting Sadie on the wait-list for speech therapy through the health authority - but all of these forms would like to know our address and phone number. Of course they do. The best I can do right now is offer up my mom's address in Edmonton, or Chris's office in downtown Calgary.  I don't think that I will have another good nights' sleep until I know where I'll be sleeping at night at the end of June. 

I've been doing all of our move prep on my own because Chris has spent most of the last six weeks in other cities, but it's actually working out well because I can organize things that way I want to and he gets to investigate things that would be hard to do if he was still in Saigon, like check out cars and take them on test-drives. I don't think that either of us has ever bought a vehicle that hadn't been previously-owned, so it's fun to check out all of the colours and trim levels and such on the manufacturer websites. I'm trying to not get too attached to the idea of something blue because reality is that we're going to be buying a new vehicle in a hurry so we get to pick from whatever is on the dealer lot. I'm so ready for something that isn't silver! 

 

 

the farewell tour

On Wednesday at breakfast, I sat staring at my empty iced chai latte cup and thought, "I'm going to miss this place." I was sitting with my kids at a Starbucks on Orchard Road in Singapore. There is a very good chance that I'll never be there again. 

I can't remember how many months we were into our life in Bangkok when we first visited Singapore, but I do remember that it felt soooo good! The streets were clean. I spoke a common language. There were familiar things - organized traffic, playgrounds, parks, shops, etc. I took a photo of the view from our hotel window and thought that it reminded me of Vancouver. 

Singapore is easily the place that we traveled to for a family-oriented getaway the most during our six years in SE Asia. It's only about a 90-minute flight from BKK and Saigon, and plenty of the discount airlines in this region fly there. I think that we kept going back to stock up on shopping (baking ingredients! vitamins!) and because there are were more quality things to do with children. 

Usual highlights from our trips:

• The wildlife parks: Singapore Zoo, Jurong Bird Park, and the newly-opened River Safari. There is a zoo in Bangkok and there's also one in Ho Chi Minh City, but the ones in Singapore are modern, spacious, educational, and  conversation-minded, and they do not dress the animals up in costumes for exploitive photo ops. 

• Botanical Gardens, because 1) the flowers in SE Asia are lovely and exotic to my eyes and 2) it has a terrific playground area.

• The Forum: This is a small shopping center that has a lot of retailers focused on children. There's a Mothercare (a UK-company that carries a lot of baby apparel and gear that is hard to come by in SE Asia - things that I bought there include packages of onesies (nicer than Old Navy, actually), See Kai Run shoes, and a SwaddleMe)). There's a shop called Vitakids where I've found other things that were a challenge in BKK and Saigon: children's vitamins, supplements, and safer sunscreen/shampoo (they stock TruKid, among others). My kids are fans of the children's bookstore called Bookaburra, and there's an Early Learning Center toy store next door. On the top level, there's a Stride Rite and also a Toys R Us (though it doesn't stock the same quality of merchandise as the stores in Canada, it's a lot better than the TRU in BKK).

• SEA Aquarium on Sentosa: This is quite new, and is marketing itself as the largest aquarium in the world. Madeline was thrilled to see about a half dozen exhibits on jellyfish, and I was happy to have a (flash-free, of course) photo of a clownfish in an anemone. I have a four year-old, so Finding Nemo still heavily influences our aquatic interests. The aquarium is located in Singapore's maritime museum, and I wish that we'd spent more time looking at the exhibits because the did look really cool (and very hands-on).

• Gelatissimo: Madeline's dearest request for our last trip was that we go for gelato because she really wanted more of the green apple gelato that she had the time when we checked out the Singapore Flyer. The Singapore Flyer was out of the way, but luckily, there was a Gelatissimo outlet on Orchard Road that we could walk to. And they did have green apple on the menu on that day!

I picked up a second-hand "things to do with small kids in Singapore" book before our final trip, and there were more than a couple of museums that earned kid-friendly marks, and a science center that sounded like something my girls would be into, though we didn't have the time to check it out. We've been on the Singapore Night Safari, so we saw a lot of animals sleeping, and we've been to Universal Studios on Sentosa, but it wasn't as interesting to our younger kids as a Disney Park is.

We've sometimes had difficulty finding taxis for return trips back from places like the zoo, so on my last trip, the kids and I  got around using the MRT and the SAEx coaches and it was inexpensive (as far as Singapore goes) and easy to figure out. I also saw one of those double-decker sight-seeing buses, and thought that would have been a practical way to navigate between several of the tourist attractions. Wish I'd known about that before ... 

So, yeah, I was a little sad to have my farewell tour of Singapore come to an end earlier this week. I always felt a little bit more like my old self there, like I was slightly less of a foreigner than I was when in Thailand or Vietnam (and maybe even Newfoundland, you know). I will be glad, however, to never again feel the frustration of trying to search out a hotel that had rooms that could accomodate more than two adults and one child simultaneously. Oh, Asia :)

so many words, so little time (and stuff)

I'm thinking that this blog is heading towards closure. I haven't had much content or interest in a long time; my kids are getting older, becoming their own people, and deserve privacy, and life overseas is taking me by surprise less all the time. 

I've got bigger things to devote my time to, like preparing the inventory for our air and sea shipments. I probably should have started that already, to be honest! I've managed to get my annual photobook project finished and uploaded for printing, but that's only one item crossed over the list. We don't exactly know what Chris's start date for his new job is, and we also don't even know what our post-move address is going to be. There's just lots of stuff that I need to be doing away from sitting in front of a computer. 

And if I was to write more? It would probably be all bitter and angry words on topics such as how insanely hot it is here, how there aren't many houses for sale that would work for us, how darn powerless I feel in this whole process because I have, like, zero agency to decide anything in this relocation. 

I do have a good rant about Madeline's school saved up inside me, so I might post that when the school year is over :)

 

if I were the reviewing type

I'd be raging somewhere against the (fellow foreigner) photographer we had a photo session with two weekend ago.

The crimes:

• Actually telling me that I am a "lady of leisure" without actually inquiring into how I spend my time here in Saigon. There is nothing that I despise more than being stereotyped as a typical ex-pat wife, because I'm really not. 
• Frequent high-pressure emails, like he's trying to sell us a brand-new Prius to make an end-of-the-month sales quota.  We don't want to upgrade the trim line!
• Sending us proofs that look lower-resolution than the images on my child's Fisher Price digicam. Seriously, I can't see my childrens' faces in the proofs well enough to see if their eyes are open or if they're smiling. 
• Quoting me a price for an 5x7-ish  print that is equal to what he'd sell an 11x14-ish for. 

Well, I feel better by typing out my itemized list of complaints, really I do. Now, onto bigger (actual) problems. 

the one about the dishes

Today, we loaded ourselves into our trusty Kia minivan and drove to the Minh Long porcelain factory/showroom/outlet in District 9. It was only about one hour away, but with Madeline in the car with us complaining about having to take a drive longer than her school commute of ten minutes, it kind of felt like four or five hours. Our mission at Minh Long was to cross another item off of our Stuff to Buy Before We Move List - new "everyday" dishes. It probably seems excessive to have porcelain for regular use, but here in Saigon, a porcelain soup bowl is about $1.50 while one from Corelle is $10. The math seems self-explanatory, right?

The actual purchasing of our new dishes doesn't make a very exciting story, but there were a couple of crazy things that happened. Chris took the kids to the cafe on-site for ice cream while I lurked around the showrooms free of tiny grabby hands. I joined them in time to see the kids each presented with large colourful sundaes. We amused ourselves for awhile with trying to guess the flavours - Sadie's had a purple scoop that I think was purple yam, and one that was definitely durian. Chris quit sneaking spoonfuls as soon as he realized that that the white scoop was durian and not vanilla or coconut, but we both were rather amused to see that Sadie thought that her "exotic" ice cream was just grand, regardless, and she kept working at it until it was entirely gone. Madeline barely touched her dish.

The other crazy thing was when we were in the parking lot, filling up the back of the minivan with the boxes of tableware. When we took Sadie over to the teapot-fountain to take a quick photo, the excited paparazzi swarmed our little girl, and I really couldn't get a good shot of her because of the crowd.  

Sadie wasn't really amused.

reveal

So, remember how I wrote about ordering hand-sewn quilts for my kids back in October? They were finished in time to be tucked under the tree for Christmas. This one is Madeline's (please excuse the quality of the actual photo - the lighting was lousy):

I love it. She loves it, which is probably more important. The dark turquoise of the applique looks fantastic with the white background, and I can't find any faults in the workmanship. 

I'm less pleased with Sadie's:

The pink fabric was supposed to be pink tie-dye, but sometimes those things are tricky to communicate, so I can mostly forgive that. The thing that really bothers me about Sadie's quilt is the proportions. It's really long, and the center applique is small and leaves lot of "blank" (or yellow) space. I don't really like the large section of plain fabric between the top of the center applique and the top of the quilt, and I don't like how the applique isn't centered in the middle of the bed (see: problem with the length). I think that this was actually my fault though - aren't twin beds normally longer in Asia than they are in Canada?  I'm kind of tempted to relegate this quilt to guest-bedroom duty and start over for Sadie. 

field trips: not always the best idea

Today, Madeline's class went on a field trip to the zoo here in Ho Chi Minh City to study animal habitats. Both Chris and I were wondering about what the outing was intended to achieve; we've been to the Saigon Zoo before and it's more of a lesson in "habitat don't" than "habitat do". This is the developing world, after all ... 

Still, when Madeline's teacher stopped me in the corrider to talk, I was internally freaking out that she'd unleased her belligerent streak again. Instead, he apologetically recounted all of the things that apparently deeply upset her on the excursion, like:

• the elephant was chained up
• the otters had no access to water
• she heard some classmates excitedly talk about how one of the snakes was being given a cute little bunny to eat*

I'm still unclear what the point of going to the Saigon Zoo was, but I do know that I'm pleased that the treatment of animals in captivity is something that matters to my kid. 

 

*I wasn't sure what Madeline thought that snakes ate. I asked her, and she figured that it was animals that were "less cute" than bunnies.

the life counterfeit: now with doughnuts

It's probably not surprising to anyone that there are a lot of fake things in Asia. The fake Apple stores in China got a lot of headline attention in the summer of 2011, so that's a good example (and there was also a fake Ikea, which I would have been more interested in). I've never seen a fake Apple store in either Bangkok or here in Saigon, but that's not to say that my life has been devoid of fake items. We've watched our share of fake DVDs during our nearly five-and-a-half years in Asia, bought Sadie fake Adidas when she needed new sneakers, and I'm currently very enamoured with the fake Cartier tank watch that my husband brought me back from his trip to Beijing. 

So, perhaps it's not very unexpected this week found me schilling these fakes things for the Canadian booth at the international food fair at Madeline's school. 

They're Timbits, but not real ones because they're homemade instead of being purchased at a Tim Horton's.  I've never made doughnuts before, and tested out two different recipes for these. The first was a cake doughnut recipe that I think I found over at Dinner with Julie, but I had trouble getting the size of the doughnut holes under control and the final product was a little too crumbly to be eaten in a school gymnasium. I ended up going with a yeast doughnut, and found this tutorial at Crepes of Wrath really helpful. The actual recipe is Alton Brown's.

The fun part of this exercise was that my Canadian neighbour's mother's neighbour actually owns a bunch of Tim Horton's franchises back in Canada, and donated a bunch of Timbit boxes and other swag to decorate our booth (there's no denying that it's still "bake-sale" chic, though). 

 

sometimes the story is better ...

So, it was my husband's birthday yesterday, and I've been in a Saigon's-a-cool-place-to-be mindset, so I thought that the gifts that I'd found locally here were thoughtful and kind of awesome. Exhibit A: A print of the part of HCMC that his office is in from a funky gallery (Tara & Kys) he likes:

Exhibit B (not pictured) would be a lacquer tea box (similar to this), because Chris likes tea and has a variety of different varieties sitting out on our kitchen countertop. 

I am a little sad to report that neither of those lovely gifts excited him nearly as much as this did:

This is exactly what it looks like: a slice of a tree trunk with the bark removed. It's also a cutting board that is roughly sixteen inches across and three inches high, and it weighs so much that dropping it on one's foot might actually break bones. 

Chris bought it from the guy who drives around on his motorbike selling wooden cutting boards on the street. I guess that he was admiring a pair of the cutting boards, each from a different kind of tree, before finally selecting the one above (Exhibit C?) for the actual purchase. Apparently, he chose wisely, as he was later informed that he picked the one that he "can chop up a snake on and not get poisoned from the wood."  Which leaves me wondering why cutting boards are even made from toxic trees? Or was the snake the important thing to focus on in Chris's warning? Could we have chopped up a chicken on the other cutting board and been totally fine? 

This is just something that I didn't have to think about when I lived in Calgary. I'd just go to Ikea and buy a cutting board in the prettiest colour. Easy peasy, and no one gets sick and no snakes are harmed.

 

my dad was usually right, as it turns out

Case in Point: Watch batteries.

Sometime last fall, I was bragging that inexpensive watch batteries were another of the nice perks about living in SE Asia, and my dad totally laughed at me and explained that I'd probably been putting totally crappy batteries in my wristwatch, no matter that they have "Energizer" or whatever etched onto the top. 

And then last weekend, my watch abruptly stopped at 7:35 on Saturday morning. There wasn't the sad ticking sound that foretells a low battery, either. It just stopped. And I'd just had it changed in Bangkok this past June when I was there for a check-up. 

So, yeah, my dad was probably correct that my cheap watch batteries are probably truly cheap watch batteries. 

how i spent my summer vacation: a study in awesomeness

At the beginning of August, my family loaded itself onto a Qatar Airways 777 and flew across the Atlantic. We spent a lot of our summer vacation in transit - it's a long flight between HCMC and Doha, and an even longer flight from Doha to Washington DC. 

The DC-area is where we experienced the first awesome things about our summer vacation. Starbucks! Iced chai lattes are one of my favourite things in the world, and I have to travel to other countries to find them, so yes, that was a big deal. I had my first iced chai latte of the trip the day that we landed. Another awesome thing: TLC - a channel we don't get here! I totally indulged in garbage tv on our holiday. Whenever we were staying in hotels, I watched a lot of Say Yes to the Dress and Toddlers & Tiaras. I threw in a little HGTV on the side when I was feeling more adventurous. Another awesome thing: I went to an actual Athleta store (yay Tyson's Corner!) and tried on the Nectar dress that I've been admiring for about two years. Turns out it looks absolutely horrible on me, so it's a good thing that I waited and didn't spend a crazy amount of money shipping one to Vietnam. I bought a pair of Dipper shorts instead, and they are pretty terrific. Tyson's Corner also had a store where my children spent their birthday money buying their un-Canadian dolls outfits that cost more than the ones that they were wearing on their very own bodies. But that's what birthday money is for, right?

Part of the attraction of heading back to North America over the summer is the opportunity to fill up on some of things that we miss while we're living overseas, like family and wide open spaces. We stayed with Chris's sister in Maryland for a few days, and it was just lovely to watch my kids play in a fenced backyard, take them to a playground, and even just eat a picnic lunch outside on benches. (The part of this visit where Madeline conspired to play with her five year-old cousin to the near-exclusion of the other three kids was unplanned, though).

Wegmans! We stepped into a Wegmans somewhere in Maryland and Virginia, and it was crazy to be in a regular grocery store again! Gosh, it was spacious and well-stocked in comparison to the types of places that I get to buy groceries here in Saigon. Despite accusing me of going overboard in Target (where I re-stocked our medicine cabinet for the next year), he went a little crazy in the snack-and-drink aisle at Wegmans. The drink where pellets dropped down into the bottle for mixing was kind of neat, but I passed on his super-sized bag of crystallized ginger. 

Part of heading back to an English-speaking county during the summer is about shopping, but the longer that we live overseas, the more content I am to live without a lot of the consumer items that I used to haul back to SE Asia in my suitcase. This trip, we mainly brought home pharmaceuticals, birthday/Christmas gifts for the kids, and a few odd things that I can't locate in Saigon, like duct tape, cork sealer for my Birkenstocks, and sport laundry detergent because my regular clothes were beginning to smell too much like my gym clothes. 

On this vacation, I learned that my kids are generally cooperative enough that I can take them swimming by myself without being way out of my supervisory-and-water-skill league. The first time I took them solo was in Pinehurst, NC when Chris was off golfing. I did get a little nervous when the water they were playing in got deeper than I was comfortable in. This was an awesome development, especially since the alternative would have been hanging out in the hotel room for the entire day instead. This also paid off again when I hung out with my kids at the beach and hotel pool when we were in Hilton Head Island and Chris was off elsewhere in South Carolina watching a professional golf event of some sort. No one drowned, my kids monopolized the water slide at our resort as much as they could, and we came home with new pool noodles and sea shells. 

I also have to mention here that the cleanliness of the public HHI beach was awesome. I certainly wasn't imagining that we'd find an un-ending stretch of sandy shore with no litter or rocks or general ocean sludge. I'm not making this up - it honestly looked like this:

My eleven year-old self (who used to watch Space Camp on a near-daily basis) would have thought that our vacation was totally awesome because we visited the National Air & Space Museum Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center and saw this:

 

Awesome is the only appropriate word.

One aspect of this holiday that I was day-dreaming about before we even left Vietnam was the food. There is a distinct lack of southern BBQ here. However, it wasn't hard to find in the Carolinas. Our first stop after crossing into North Carolina was at some dive in Raleigh where we enjoyed chopped BBQ pork sandwiches and collard greens and stuff. In Charleston, we polished off a helping of boiled peanuts:

And learned exactly why peanuts are a legume instead of a nut. 

The final awesome thing to say about our road-trip holiday is that Madeline and Sadie were good little passengers. They didn't complain much at all about how we strapped them into the back of our rental vehicle for some very long hauls. Madeline usually read or was content to stare out of the window, and Sadie napped or watched Doc McStuffins over and over again on Chris's iPad.  I remembered how I felt about road trips when I was a little kid, and was expecting a lot more tears and tirades. But they didn't happen, so ... Awesome. 

 

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. 

 

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!). 

madeline's schools in bangkok

I've almost entirely abandoned my other blog, but today I managed to finish up a draft that I started many months ago. I thought that I'd cross-post it over here as it's a good fit and I figure that if someone is going to stumble across this blog looking for info on moving to Bangkok with young kids, this post about schools may be useful! Here it is:

Things I Liked about Living in Thailand, Part 2

The schools that Madeline went to!

We arrived in Thailand a few weeks after Madeline turned three years old, and she started preschool about a month later. She was a year too young to start Pre-K at the International School Bangkok, which was the school in our community, but when Chris and I were on our house-hunting trip in May 2007, we toured one nearby preschool, the Early Learning Centre (Country School location out in Nonthaburi). It was the only preschool that we'd looked at, but we have no regrets about not checking out other schools because ELC was pretty darn perfect. 

I can't say enough good things about ELC and the experiences that Madeline had there. The classrooms are bright and cozy, with the walls usually decorated with photographs of the little students hard at work at something. The playground has a shaded place for playing and a green space for running around, and the softest and whitest sand that I've ever seen. Madeline probably brought home a kilogram of it over two years, hitch-hiking in her shoes and, inexplicably, in her hair. The little library in K. Pum's office has a better variety of books than one would probably except for such a small space. Madeline had classes with specialist teachers for art, movement, and music. I hadn't heard of the Reggio Emilia philosophy before Madeline started attending ELC, but after a couple of months of watching her class's study of bears unfold, it looked like a wonderful and inquisitive way for small children to approach learning. 

The school puts on a few events throughout the year, but the one that is the biggest deal is the annual charity art auction. The four classrooms and the art studio would be invaded by the parents of eighty-odd students, all bidding on the large group paintings/collages/sculptures that each class had worked on throughout the year. I was usually outbid on my favourite pieces by the parents of Madeline's classmates - the art auction is very competitive - but each year I managed to come home with a piece that her class made, and they are still hanging up in our home. I'm not talking about finger-paintings, either - under the direction of the art teacher, the small children create some really cool pieces. We have a piece that Madeline's class made when she was three, and it looks like they painting textured paper, tore it up into strips, and then put it back together to look like an underwater scene. From her K2 class when she was four, I have a large picture of flowers that are made from a collage of seeds. 

This school is a great community unto itself. It's where Madeline made her friends, and it's where I met my friends for our time in BKK as well. Her teachers (who were dear and compassionate people) were always out on the playground before class and at dismissal, so it was never hard to ask about what her class had been doing. I helped out with reading and cooking in the classroom, and other parents were welcomed into the class to help out similarly. This place meant a lot to me for my first two years overseas, and I think that I was sadder than Madeline was on her last day of school at ELC. 

Then, Madeline started kindergarten at International School Bangkok (about ten times bigger). Gosh, it was different. It was big, it felt impersonal, and navigating the parking lot was hectic. We were a bit overwhelmed on the first day, but now that kindergarten is over, we miss ISB a lot.

I wouldn't be being honest if I didn't say that we chose this school for Madeline because it was a ten minute walk (on clean, dog-free sidewalks) from our apartment in Nichada Thani. As the school year wore on, it became obvious that it had other things going for it, as well. Their playground equipment was fabulous and first-world-quality (not always the case in Nichada or in BKK in general), the elementary library was well-stocked and the librarian was an awesome individual, the school had a great level of communication with parents and had so many opportunities for parents to volunteer in the classroom (Actually, a lot of these things became more apparent after Madeline started school here in Saigon, where she doesn't have equipment in the school yard, the library only welcomes parents on Tuesdays for two hours, and parents generally aren't encouraged to help out). Madeline only spent one year at ISB, but she has so many good memories of her time there. 

There were a few things that were mildly irritating, like the reminders that the school's worked closely with the US Embassy for security advisory purposes (why not other embassies as well?), and how the extracurricular events seemed to take over the whole community (like the time that my kids and I were trying to walk to the store and their parent volunteers for a race were hassling us over using the public bike lane for our tricyles). This stuff I could live with, though, and if we had the chance to enroll Madeline at ISB again in the future, I'd leave in a heartbeat. 

NB: If anyone wants to read Things I Liked About Living in Thailand, Part 1, here's the link. It's about the compound where we lived!

 

 

the suspect was last seen carrying a basket of colourful eggs

Our little people woke up this morning and discovered that while they were sleeping, someone had trespassed onto our property and into our house! Home invasions are not uncommon in our part of Saigon, and foreigners are a popular target.

Thankfully, our perpetrator didn't take off with the Nintendo DS or my Macbook. Instead, he or she left a few dozen colourful plastic eggs and cheery buckets with lipsmackers and tiny bunny-and-egg-shaped cars for our much-relieved children!

There *are* a few things to do for Easter in Ho Chi Minh City. Like a lot of the other ex-pats here, we headed out for brunch at noon. We chose to go to the (crowded and loud, in all honesty) InterContinental as they had some activities for children, but it seemed like all of the large hotels had an Easter brunch going on today, as did some of the cafes in our neighbourhood. There were even some chocolate bunny sightings - Chris came home with (way too much) chocolate from Boniva Chocolate, and I'd noticed the gold-foil Lindt bunnies at a couple of the grocery shops. 

I have to laugh at myself because back when we were still living in Calgary,  I remember being shocked to learn that Chris's family often seemed to want to have their Christmas plans settled several months in advance. I wasn't inclined to think much about what I'd be doing at the end of December until after Thanksgiving in October! Things have changed a lot for us since we left Canada - Chris and I spent part of our time at the brunch table debating where we should go for Christmas 2011! And this has been an on-going conversation since February, probably :)

not quite ordinary tourists

I never wrote about it at the time, but the four of us made our first trip back to Bangkok as a family back in mid-February. The occasion was something that I'd vowed that I wouldn't be doing ever again: family photos. In truth, they were something of a do-over for the ones that we had taken here in Saigon in December and were kind of meh about (I hope that the photographers took our money and bought themselves some editing software).

I discovered a lot during our weekend in BKK.

Despite a rocky start, I discovered that I truly miss the place; over our three years there I started to understand what life in Thailand is about and become comfortable about my place in it. The frustrations seem minor. The roads seemed so much more orderly than I had remembered, the air quality better, the streets cleaner, and the shops so much more well-stocked, particularly in the toy department. All this in comparison to Ho Chi Minh City. The familiarity was comforting and I felt capable for one of the few times since we came back from our summer holiday in Canada. Feeling capable in BKK was a new experience and it was great know what to do and where to find what we were looking for! It was really a treat to be back at some of our favourite places in the city, and I am looking forward to visiting as a tourist once again. 

I discovered that it's possible for a photo session to go well - ours did this time! It was supposed to happen at the historical Jim Thompson House, which probably was a fabulous (if a bit child-unfriendly; we'd taken Madeline there when she was three) setting. A couple hours before we were due there, the photog called up and said that the Jim Thomspon House was really crowded for her morning sessions there, and would be mind a change of venue? 

We met her at her hotel instead, and she led us across the street and down the road to a  wat. We'd visited a handful of wats in the previous few years, but they were all very busy with local visitors and tourists, all there to see their special Buddha statues. This one was small and modest, and it was very obvious that gentlemen were living and working and learning there. No tourists.  We took pictures between painted wooden buildings, with the kids waving to the monks who would peek at us through the windows. We took pictures in the courtyard, borrowing brooms and carts for props and posing in front of the monks' clothesline, where they'd hung rows of orange, red, and yellow towels out to dry in the sun. I thought that it was a very interesting place and very Thai, and Chris and I were thrilled to have this new experience in Bangkok. 

I can't post and not mention that our photographer was the same one who we booked with before, the one who's camera broke mid-way throught the session, after the photos of little Sadie sleeping and nursing and posing for close-ups of her tiny little feet were taken and subsequently lost forever. I'm in a better place about that these days. We received the photos from this session a few days ago, and there is something healing in them for me. 

shopping soundtrack

For me, grocery shopping since we moved to SE Asia has had a stong auditory component. I was in Metro today, and as soon as I walked in, I could hear the little synthesized song that the forklifts play when they're on. Back in Thailand, I always associated shopping in Tops or the Central food floor with the "Cherry Berry" juice jingle, sung in an operatic fashion. Villa Market's soundtrack was either covers of popular Western music or Christmas carols played out of season. 

I honestly have no memory of the musical background when I was shopping at the Calgary Co-op or at Dominion, back when we still lived in Canada. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that I wander the aisles cluelessly here! 

 

maybe the universe is telling me something

I was looking forward to Wednesday and spending the morning with Madeline (off for spring break) and her chemistry set, but Chris passed along some sad news this evening: the generator that powers our home when the electricity is out still hasn't been repaired, and there is another blackout scheduled Wednesday. 

We noticed that the generator was broken on Monday night, when it failed to hum into action at half past six in the evening and left us sweating in the dark until nearly nine at night. The cost estimate for the repair is apparently ten million Vietnamese dong, and the news that our Vietnamese landlords were not jumping on that estimate to start the repairs does not surprise me. I get the impression that they're "do the minimum" kind of people! When we called to let them know that the generator was broken in the first place, they actually said that it's our house, our problem. That was a rather ironic comment as five hours earlier,  I'd passed along a very thick envelope filled with one hundred dollar bills to pay our rent for the next three months; they seemed happy to be on the home-owner (and generator-owner) side of our relationship then! 

So, at the same time that I am wondering if the generator failure is an omen, we're also on snake alert! This little guy was found hanging around our garden on Sunday; the kids were entertained for at least a couple of hours, but I am wondering if he happened to have invited a few of his friends to come party with him in our yard!

 

 

happy new year to the garbage lady

Our household garbage here in Ho Chi Minh City is currently collected by a small team of people (and a motorcycle cart), led by a lady who normally wears a green coat and one of the traditional Vietnamese conical hats. She was waiting at the end of our street this afternoon as Sadie and I returned from dropping Madeline off at a classmate's birthday party. Today, the lady in the green coat was by to give me my bill for a month's worth of hauling away our household rubbish. My total was 110,000 Vietnamese dong. She also passed along a second bill, also for 110, 000 dong, but her writing on the "subject" line was something that I didn't recognize.  One of the security people compared my pair of bills, frowning a bit, but explained that the second bill was for the "Thirteen-Month Bonus". I knew that families here in Vietnam pay thirteen-month bonuses (basically, an extra month's earnings) to any people that they'd hired to work in their household (people like gardeners, cooks, and drivers, for example) as the Tet holiday approaches, but this was the first I had heard about the garbage collectors being on that list as well. Hmm. I checked with the security guy, who indicated that his garbage collector person also expectes a bonus, so I felt somewhat more reassured that I wasn't being scammed out when I handed over the 220,000 dong to the smiling lady in the green coat (who'd brought along her cute little grandson). It's more the principle of the thing more than the cash, anyways :)

 

 

year of the ... kitten

As the lunar new year approaches, other countries in Asia will usher in the Year of the Rabbit, but Vietnam does things a little different. Felines are more in style, I guess, as the Year of the Cat is upon us. The lunar new year, otherwise known as Tet, has been on my mind a lot this week. Ever since we moved here, I've heard other foreigners recommend that we leave HCMC for the holiday, as "the city shuts down!" - whatever that means, exactly. Lately, I've been hearing more about how all the beach and mountain resorts here are booked up already and stories of families who decided to stay in the city running out of food! I'm not sure if we're going to be able to go anywhere, so I feel that I should start nuturing my hoarding instincts (Side-note: I knew that there were some benefits to buying the shelf-stable milk here!). 

The other thing about Tet is that theft also ramps up in the weeks before the holiday.  A friend explained to me that the locals who have come into Saigon from the country to work are under a lot of pressure to bring expensive gifts back to their families, so muggings have been on the upswing, as well as reports of home-invasions. We don't live in particularly nice neighbourhood, so we've upgraded the lighting in our yard such that it's now bright enough to play baseball at midnight (not that our yard is bigger than a postage stamp) in the hopes that no one is going to come after our laptop computer and iPods at night. I think that the night that I discover someone with a flashlight rummaging through my kids' bedrooms will be the swan song for Saigon for me - could you even imagine how freaky that would be?

On a lighter note, today Sadie and I happily skipped Gymboree - we're never going back, thank you very much. We've found a lovely regular toddler playgroup for Wednesdays that actually encourages them to be individuals. And my little individual seems to have made a New Years resolution to mature some - communicating with actual words, sitting to play quietly with lacing beads, cutting food, looking at books, doing "crafts" - it's so not like her, but it's a lovely change for sure.

 

january's theme: too busy to post

Today, at the first toddler playgroup of the year, I was expecting to exchange "Happy New Year"s with the other parents, so the excited "Oh my gosh, I can't believe how fabulous that Villa Market you had in BKK is!" from one of the moms that I am friendly with caught me off-guard. And it was funny to me - I can remember when I was extremely frustrated with grocery shopping in Bangkok and Villa seemed anything but fabulous, but now, having a Villa Market nearby would seriously make my year. I miss being able to buy edamame and sweet potato fries (and frankly, a whole lot of familiar comfort food) for my kids. Grocery shopping in Saigon means that I am confronted with whole aisles of MSG packages and I've been to three different shops looking for whole wheat flour and haven't found it yet. I am very homesick nostalgic for my former life in Thailand these days ... 

Madeline's class wasn't assigned any homework over the break, and she vehemently refused to have anything to do with practicing math, no matter how many times her dad bugged her about it. "I don't have any homework ! I am on a holiday!" she would tell us, sharply. I usually laughed when they were having a row over homework, because she spent so much of the break from school reading - reading signs, websites,  and subtitles (in Toy Story 3, our latest DVD purchase) - and I guess she never thought about the practice that she was getting! (And I can't begin to express how amazed I am that I have a child who can REA !)

I am also amazed, this evening, at what some of my fellow foreigners in Saigon try to get away with. We have a web-community here, "Nguyen's List", if you will, and today there was a post from someone who  would be delighted to sell a second-hand Maclaren Triumph baby stroller for $230 USD, which is plenty more than what they cost brand-new. I am somewhat tempted to post that I am giving away a second-hand Mac Triumph for free, just to stop someone from being taken advantage of. Sigh.

I'd write more but my husband is newly addicted to Angry Birds and playing it right next to me!

 

completely random tuesdayness

What sort of brain pills is my toddler taking and where can I get some for myself? I'm joking, of course, but I never cease to be amazed at how almost overnight, Sadie seems to have gained thirty IQ points.  Over the last three days, she's started to talk a bit more, and understand an awful lot more. I discovered her new-found brilliance during her midnight-to-half-past-three party that she held on the wee hours of Sunday morning. Hurrah ... and yawn.

How on earth did I ever get my own homework done when I was in first grade? I also had a younger sister, but I don't remember having to fight her off from scribbling in my homework book. Madeline, however, does. Whenever she brings out a worksheet that she needs to complete, Sadie is right there, trying to elbow her way in with a marker in hand. I have no idea how to get Sadie to lay off and leave Madeline to do her work in peace unless I lead her away somewhere else, which isn't often possible as I usually have to stay with Madeline to keep her on task. Ugh. 

I've somehow found myself going on a decorating/organizing binge over the last few days. It started with me hanging up the rest of the pictures and framed photos in the girls' rooms (vain of me, but it makes me happy inside if my kids have nicely decorated bedrooms), but by Sunday, I was re-arranging furniture in our guest bedroom and computer room, displaying knicknacks, and marking the walls where I need holes drilled to hang up more decorations. It's carried over to today; this afternoon I was assembling some IKEA stuff, shuffling the dollhouse from one corner to the other, hauling stuff up to the storage room, and doing more measuring for our artwork. I spent much of our first few months in this house lamenting over how much this house didn't feel like our home and how I missed our apartment in Nichada, but I have to say that hanging up a handful of our family photos in our bedroom really helps me to feel settled here. (But I would go back to a single-storey home in a minute - the stairs here are just inconvenient!)

 

Did I ask your opinion? (and other things I am grumpy about)

Today, I must have had a wardrobe malfuntion and left the house with my "please tell me about my child because you know her better than I do!" sign accidentally taped to the back of my shirt. I say this because Sadie and I had another weird incident at Gymboree early this morning. We arrived only three minutes early (and were the first pair there, naturally). Shortly before the class began, ten minutes late, another little toddler was sitting outside the classroom, chugging back a bottle of milk, and Sadie wandered out the open classroom door to sit beside her. The instructor saw Sadie leave, saw where she was, and then said to me in all seriousness, "You should make sure that she has breakfast before she comes here!" 

Maybe I'm alone in thinking that this was a weird comment, but it came across as some sort of unsolicited parenting advice that is outside the realm of someone who is paid to dance around with a creepy clown doll. Sadie's instuctor is wonderful with the kids, but really, does she have x-ray vision and could see into Sadie's stomach? It's not like Sadie was wrestling the bottle of milk from the other kid. Have I been labeled a negligent parent by the Gymboree folks because of our arriving-in-time-for-class ways? Maybe Sadie just wanted to sit on the bench beside the other little girl today, you know. 

After doing our weekly penance at Gymboree, we headed to Sadie's two-year well-baby check-up. The pediatrician proclaimed her to be a completely normal toddler, but also told me that she'd be talking more if she wasn't still "confused by all of the Thai that she's heard" but to give her more time before worrying. That comment also seemed sort of strange to me, but maybe it isn't. It actually makes me more worried, though, because I imagine us moving on to our next assignment somewhere else, with Sadie still having very simple language skills, and hearing, "Well, it's because of all of the Vietnamese she'd heard!". Gah.

Am I allowed to whine about just one more thing here? It's my gas stovetop. It hates me. It has two burners, and for the last two weeks, they have pretty much refused to ignite. They go "poof" and then when I turn the dial back to the set the flame level, they extinguish completely. My husband, however, has no problem using the stove. It's really too bad that he wasn't around when I wanted to steam some broccoli for dinner tonight ...