Up, Up and Away....

Our Friday Night

Last night the men folk had "games night", so our friends Carolyn and Ryley asked the kids and me if we wanted to go on a date night to Fashion Island. I have posted about Fashion before and how I try not to go there, but the place does have some positives: a Mexican restaurant and play area for kids.

Our date consisted of all you can eat tacos (they were pretty good) at a Mexican restaurant with $3 margaritas and than an hour of chasing kids in the Fun Island for $6. My whole night didn't cost me more then $25 including taxis.

I call that a successful Friday date night.

The Fun Island is an arcade like area with soft plat, games and rides.  Liam cries every time we have to leave.

Looking down into part of the soft play.

Last time we came here was before summer break.  It that between time, Liam has grown a ton and was able to do a lot more on his own. 

Horrible picture, but I wanted to post it because it is of Amelia and some Thai friends she made while there.  They LOVED counting to 3 in English before they went down the slide. 

The entrance of the soft play area.

One of the arcade games.  Arcade games in Asia are WAY better then the US.

10 Important Life Lessons You Learn From Living Abroad.

The below article was posted on a Facebook friend’s page. I started reading it and shaking my head yes with each lesson. I thought it was worth sharing and posting here so I remember the lessons I have learned once we no longer are living abroad.

How the lessons relate to me:

1. How to get used to almost anything: I still have higher expectations, but have come to realize maybe they are to high. My comfort zone has really been stretched and some things seem funny that I once swore by.

2. How to cook: Just last night I taught my nanny how to make Mexican (one of the things I miss the most). I have posted before that I get something in my head and I obsess on it. Cooking has been one way I can get some home comforts.

3. The importance of sharing a meal: Sharing meals is how we have made our friendships. Being away from our family and friends, you need to find a new community to share special events with. Food is definitely a focus in those.

4. How to ask for help: The whole first year is spent asking for help. I have made some great Thai friends that I could not live without due to their help. They arrange travel plans, they help me make appointments, they even tell me or take me to places to look for things I need.

5. How to question the status quo: "When in Rome" is all I can say. We moved abroad to experience a new culture. That means going beyond our comfort zone.

6. How to have fun anywhere: Long weekends and breaks are already being planned. I am super excited to share some of them with friends and family this year.

7. How to throw stuff away: This can be a very liberating experience. We will have to do it again when we move back to the States. It is surprising how much stuff we have already accumulated in the year we have been in Thailand. The hard part will be decided what stays and comes. Only 8 checked bags allowed.

8. How to talk to strangers: We have met and talked with many new people, with Wade being the best at doing this. In our everyday life it is strangers who see we are Farangs and they want to practice their English skills. On vacation is it other expacts who live around the world. There has been times we share emails or be friends on FB because of the connection.

9. How to handle peer pressure: There has been a lot of self-discovery living abroad. It is why we did it.

10. How to empathize: This has allowed me to appreciate what I do have. I hope I can hold onto that feeling for a long time.

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By Whitney Cox

A lot of people philosophize about the Peter Pan appeal of traveling—about regression to a childlike state of wonder and freedom. We can all see the appeal of traveling back to a time when everything was thrilling and new. But if a vacation is an escape to the magic of childhood, then living abroad is a visit to the pangs of adolescence. Welcome to the purgatory between young recklessness and adult competency! Unlike tourists, you are charged with errands and chores; unlike locals, you have no idea how to accomplish anything on your to-do list.

But once you get past the growing pains, and start learning how to take care of yourself in unfamiliar territory, you get to experience the magic of actually growing up. It’s a world of implicit triumphs and it’ll-be-funny-later humiliations. Unpack your bags and look forward to these life lessons:
1. How to get use to almost anything

There’s a reason that the first few days or weeks in a new country are called the honeymoon period—the country’s bad habits and blemishes have yet to make themselves obvious. They always do though. It can be anything from cultural acceptance of littering to limited dining options, but something will start to drive you crazy.

My first expat breakdown happened in Vietnam over hygiene. I was sick to death of lax standards in restaurants and markets, of dirty glasses and grubs clinging to my lettuce. Of course, there’s nothing I could do about the national pandemic of hair in my food—it was a case of patience or perish.

I knew I had come full circle when an American friend came to visit and a rat ran across the floor of the restaurant where we were eating, causing her to recoil slightly. “Yeah, that happens,” I explained, shoveling noodles into my mouth. “Are you going to finish that?” She pushed her plate to the middle of the table.

Some things (like the rats) you don’t necessarily want to get overly familiar with, but it’s nice to discover how far you can stretch your comfort zone.

2. How to cook

Sure, you might pick up some tips about rolling factory-perfect spring rolls after a year in China, but every expat knows that the real delicacies when you live abroad are the dishes you miss most from home.

Living in New Zealand, which is about as far from Mexico as you can go, is where I learned how to actually make Mexican food. This was an act of necessity: the tortillas in stores were expensive and tasted like plastic, but I really wanted some tacos. As it turns out, tortillas are not at all difficult to make.

I’ve also added from-scratch marshmallows, yogurt, and falafel to my repertoire, simply because these things are no longer cheap or convenient. It’s amazing how well you can manage without access to the packages you’re used to picking up at Safeway. And who knew that most food tastes better when it hasn’t been sitting in plastic for three months?

3. The importance of sharing a meal

Most cultures have traditions surrounding meals, be it huge dinners at 9:30pm or a break for tea and biscuits in the afternoon. These are invariably social occasions, and you will invariably be included in them.

Even in cultures that don’t venerate mealtimes, you’ll find yourself invited for dinner—it’s a universal way to make friends. Meals become an opportunity for socializing and sharing, which is an old recipe for healthier eating habits and interpersonal bonding.

When I started reciprocating meal invites, I found that food is a fun and easy way to introduce your culture to an international crowd. It’s also a great vehicle for sharing your experiences abroad with friends and family back home (they will be significantly more willing to eat your food than watch a half hour slideshow of your photos).

4. How to ask for help

It’s fine to ask for directions or recommendations when you’re on vacation—it’s expected even. But in our normal lives we tend to be pretty self-sufficient. We figure out how to do things like pump gas and eat artichokes by watching other people do it all our lives. Or, failing that, searching for instructional YouTube videos. Either way, we can go at it alone.

Not so much when you live abroad. No matter what, there will be moments when you need to swallow your pride and ask someone for help with a chore you wouldn’t have blinked at back home. Like buying shoes… When I lived in Vietnam, I had trouble finding shoes that would fit my giant, American feet. I looked in all the markets and department stores, but nothing fit.

It is humbling to ask someone how to buy shoes. It is even more humbling to require that person to personally take you to a shoe store and have them explain to the shop owner that you need clown-sized shoes. But once I wrangled a friend into helping me, the process only took about twenty minutes. As it happens, asking for help when you need it is an extremely useful habit.

5. How to question the status quo

All those things you grew up thinking were written in stone? Forget about them. There is almost nothing you’ve learned that is incontestable—everything from table manners to hygiene is culturally relative.

I have been well trained to be polite in the American sense, and if there is one thing I knew never to do, it’s yelling indoors. But to get the attention of a waiter in a Vietnamese restaurant subtle hand signals or eye contact won’t cut it: it is imperative that you shout “Hey you!” as loud as you can. Did this make me feel like a jerk? Absolutely. But after a few weeks, I decided that it makes me feel like less of a jerk than sitting around waiting to be doted on like a princess. It’s all relative.

Yelling at wait staff was never my cup of tea, but I’ve picked up other ideas from living abroad that have taught me to question the givens in my life. Once you’ve had your expectations turned thoroughly upside down, you start to see that there are other, sometimes even better, ways to do things.

6. How to have fun anywhere

Vacations are fun because they’re a break from real life—you don’t have to worry about work or cooking dinner or getting the car fixed. Instead, you get beaches and guilt-free Tuesday nights spent dancing with strangers. Just sit back and let the fun come to you.

Living as an expat is a little different. Sure, the beaches and jungles are still there… but you have to go to work on Wednesday morning and can’t exactly spend your afternoons gallivanting with backpackers. That said, it’s not like you’re not going to spend your tenure in a foreign country sitting on your couch and watching TV.

So you keep your eyes and ears out for activities in the evenings; you look for feasible weekend trips; you try pretty much anything because life abroad is supposed to be an adventure. And when you bring this habit home with you? It turns out that even your dull-as-dishwater hometown can be exciting when you try to see it that way.

7. How to throw stuff away

Packing light becomes a way of life when airport scales stand between you and your next home. It’s unjustifiably inconvenient to cross continents with broken appliances and clothes you don’t wear, but sometimes it’s really hard to let go.

Going through the junk I accumulated over a year in Vietnam just made me want to keep it more: that t-shirt presented to me by a stranger in a bar, that statuette I won on a game show, that hilarious red tinsel monstrosity I used as a Christmas tree… It was all unnecessary and yet totally irreplaceable.

I realized, after finally filling myriad garbage bags and presenting random tchotchokes to my friends under the guise of “something to remember me by,” that the stuff was never as important as the stories. Now I keep a notebook handy whenever I purge my closet, writing down the anecdotes that go with the items I’m about to throw away. It’s fun to flip through and makes me feel okay about getting rid of stuff I don’t use.

8. How to talk to strangers

Not only will you have to start anew with the people you meet abroad, but many of the cultural references you might normally share with strangers no longer have any bearing. Questions like ‘”where did you go to high school?” and cultural references understood by most of your native peers won’t serve as icebreakers.

Language barriers can make this even more difficult, but I found that approaching strangers with a smile and a little humility will get you far. Turns out this also works wonders on people who do speak your language.

Conversation topics usually have to go off-script, with a lot of improvising around the circumstances. But once you get the hang of talking to people you don’t share a background with, you might find that the things you learn from your differences are more interesting than finding out what you have in common.

9. How to handle peer pressure

You might be surprised at how much of yourself is still measured through comparison with your friends and neighbors. Think about where you think you stand politically… You might seem extremely liberal in the US, but you’d probably land somewhere else on the political spectrum in, say, Sweden.

I always thought I was a good environmentalist: always turning off lights when I left a room and recycling old newspapers. I discovered in Vietnam that I am only a good environmentalist when the people around me have similar concerns. After months of tossing once-used plastic water bottles in the gutter (where garbage gets picked up) and churning the AC all night long, I had to concede that I was hardly as earth-friendly as thought I was.

By challenging your own position on anything and everything, you end up with a much stronger sense of what you actually believe as opposed to what you believed because everyone around you believed it, too. Sometimes it’s a painful revelation, but it does give you enough awareness as to suggest positive self-change. Or at least enough awareness to suggest you move back to a country with curbside recycling pick-up.

10. How to empathize

Living abroad puts you on the outside looking in. For most of us, it is a unique experience to be on the margins of society. And for most people living abroad, it’s a temporary situation. Still, it’s not always easy.

Living abroad can be frustrating and embarrassing, and finding hair in your food, going on fruitless outings to try and find tortillas or shoes in your size will make you wish for a time when things were straightforward and familiar. It can’t help but make you appreciate life on the periphery.

With a better understanding of the difficulties circumstance can cause in our lives, it is easier to empathize with those who, for whatever reason, find themselves marginalized. After all, the opportunity to look at life through someone else’s eyes is one of the reasons we travel in the first place.

SOURCE

Back in BKK

We have been back in the humidity for two weeks now. I can safely say, the jet leg has worn off and our "normal" routine is back in full swing. Like going back to the States, it has been easy to fall back into old habits of playing outside with friends, swimming, drinking beer with ice and eating a fair share of Thai food. We also moved houses. Not far, just right next door. We did this so Goma (Nanny) can stay in her room where she was living last year (working some hours for our neighbor).

Airport fun with tattoos.  

Last weekend we had Monday off for Mother's Day/Queens birthday. We laid low and did some house work, shopped and went out for a couple meals. Wade and I also got some kid free time and went for brunch. It was nice how easy it was all compared to a year ago. This time we are able to have fun, instead of just trying to survive.  It has been nice.

First day of Pre-K picture. She looks like a good Catholic school girl.

Wade's and my brunch.  We went to a place recommended by friends, roast.  It was VERY trendy and Western (aka American)

Back to our favorite Thai place, Pink Sheep.   Pictured is Panang Curry (Rask, I think of you when I eat it).

Traveling with kids

I am not going to claim to be an expert of children or travel. But with the international travels we have been doing this past year, I have learned a lot. I thought I would share some of my learning...

1. Kid meals: When flying with kids, call the airlines before you board and order children's meals. It is way easier to get a 4 year old to eat a hot dog over Bibimbap.

2. Kid cups: The beverage service on flights is not the most kid friendly. Bring along sippy cups or water bottles that are spill proof. Keeps everyone cleaner a little longer while you enjoy your glass of wine.

3. Gifts: For each hour of travel I plan for one gift. These aren't fancy; A color book, small toy or activity set. The dollar store is the best place to buy these. The Dollar Tree has a great craft aisle. You might not use them all, but best to be over prepared.

3. Treats: It may not be the best idea to get kids sugar high, but gum and gummy treats help relieve ear pressure. I flew once without them, and learned the hard way.

4. Pack extra clothes: You will get dirty.

5. Frequent flyer miles for everyone: There is no age limit to join the club. Might as well start accumulating them early.

6. Melatonin: I am not suggesting you drug children (consult your doc before), but when you need/want them to sleep, this is the most natural way to do so. Play with amounts before you go. I like the chewy ones from Trader Joe's (Amelia calls them her sleepy vitamins).  ONLY use them for up to 3 days after to aid in the reduction of jet-leg.  If you use it more, it could mess with your natural ability to produce the hormone. For other sleep issues, do under the monitoring of a trained professional.

7. Seat forts: I learned this one from Wade's cousin.  Use the provided blanket to make a fort out of your seat. Reduces sensory stimulation and makes the kids feel cool and that they are "playing".

Hello there.

I had full intention of keeping up with the blog this summer.  But, once we hit US soil, we have not stopped moving.  We have become I-5 gypsies, living out of suitcases.  However, both North and South we have our own space and the kids have rooms to claim as their own.  This has been great considering that other people we know (teachers) are on the constant move around the States and sleeping on couches. 

Being back has been like a dream.  We have loved being with family, friends and the easiness of it all.  It has been refreshing with how simple it was to fall right back into "our" old lives.   It has also made me realized how much stuff there is here and enjoy. I have missed that and will claim that the Northwest is the most beautiful place in the world on a sunny day. 

Shopping: The first time I walked into Target when I got back I left with nothing because I was overwhelmed.  Now, I have spent a small fortune and I am afraid I won't have enough room in my suitcases to bring it all back to BKK. I just keep thinking I need to find stuff to last for another 10 months!!!  I think I have over done it :). 

Food: I came to eat, and man did I.  I seriously have put on some lbs and hope the Thailand heat and food will shed it fast once I am back.  Wade and I came for beef and we totally fulfilled that desire.  I go to bed most nights with an upset stomach because of the richness and quantities of the food here.  I totally understand why we are the world's "largest" nation.

As I look on FB to see friends from BKK arriving back, I am looking forward to our next year there.  I know it will fly by fast and I already have big adventures planned.  Doing what we are doing is like going away to college.  I need to enjoy it while I can and take advantage of what is has to offer for us/me and how it is changing us/me for the better.

Let the last two months be told in pictures.  We leave the States soon and I will post more once we are back in BKK.

Countdown in hours

Preschool graduation done.

Good-bye dinner with friends at our favorite Thai restaurant completed.

Last mango and sticky rice from Soi 166 (Amelia singing her love for it with every bite) devoured.

Thailand, we will see you in 57 days.