Wordless Wednesday: KL Street Sign
Tag Archives: travel
Wordless Wednesday: Happy 240th, America!
Twenty, Five, and Four
Apparently, late May is a big time for anniversaries in my life, although until about two weeks ago, I hadn’t realized it. (I meant to write this blog last weekend so that it was much more timely, but after finally getting back on the blogging wagon, I had several even older posts that needed written, and am just now getting almost caught up. Well, unless you count that one about our awesome trip to Perth in February that I still haven’t managed to get put together. Chinese New Year, quokkas, nearly dying on an island bike ride. How has it not found a spot on the blog yet? Eeek!)
While May doesn’t contain a wedding anniversary or birthday (for me, at least, although I am guessing there are *many* wedding anniversaries that do fall in the spring-to-summer month), it does have several other significant dates that have recently popped up in my Facebook feed, reminding me that it seems to be a month of transition for our family of two. (What would I do without Facebook reminders? Those memory photos that it puts up? Sometimes I am not even sure where they come from. There is a great possibility that Facebook has hacked my life, now having a far more comprehensive idea of who I am than I do some days. Also, thank you to Facebook for reminding me to wish a happy birthday to people who are absolutely certain that the only reason I know it is their birthday is because my electronics reminded me. Sincerity might take a bit of a hit there.)
But back to anniversaries.
Twenty years ago, in late May, I graduated from high school. It I hard to think about where the last two decades have gone, but pretty easy to look in my passport and see where I have gone over those ensuing years. When I walked across that stage twenty years ago in my hideous yellow graduation gown I knew I was headed to college a few short months. I knew I would be rooming with my best friend and I was certain I was going to major in Spanish and I knew I wanted to study abroad while in college. Even at that early point, I knew I wanted to “go,” but little did I know just how much “going” there would be! (Yes, I know we voted to go boys in blue/girls in yellow because the contrast of the school colors would look nice, but why didn’t we push for blue, ladies? Did the boys really care if they looked washed-out and half dead in all of their graduation photos? Probably not! Keep this in mind future graduates of CHS. Two colors do look awesome marching down the aisle, but think long and hard about who must don the “gold.” Kelsey, I’m looking at you!)
While things didn’t quite turn out the way I just “knew” they would, life’s twists and turns did lead to two other, more recent anniversaries that come up in the same final week of May.
Five years ago it was that exact week that we finished packing up or selling everything we owned as we got ready for a career change for Thad, an unknown professional future for me and a new home/adventure for us both. With bigger items like the cars and lawn mower sold, the house rented out and everything but two suitcases each packed into a storage unit in Hagerstown, Maryland, to the nation’s capital we went. A new apartment, new friends and more new acronyms that I ever thought possible awaited us on the other side of the country. (I’m an EFM in the FS who worked as CLO and then PCSed to KL, another EAP post, with my ELO husband who is headed to INR for his next job. That’s barely the tip of the foreign service acronym iceberg. Madness reigns.)
Initial training, an assignment to Chengdu and months of language training later, it was again that final week of May that saw us making another huge change- our move to western China to take up a first posting with the Foreign Service. We’d spent a decent amount of time in Chengdu when we were Peace Corps volunteers (that’s another anniversary, coming up the end of June- 10 years since we left on that epic outing), so it was less overwhelming than many first tours, but the excitement to finally be on our way was palpable.
It’s crazy to think that Caldwell High School’s class of 1996 will be reunion-ing it up this summer, but even more so to ponder how different life has turned out from what my seventeen-year-old self had imagined. Somewhere in my boxes and boxes of stuff (probably storage boxes) I’ve got a senior year yearbook filled with notes of excitement and relief that high school was coming to an end, but little did I know just how far my wanderings would take me. Just a year after that, I’d have my first passport, headed to the Dominican Republic and Haiti (Cuba got nixed at the last minute), opening doors to the promise of adventures far beyond the edges of Idaho.
So, happy anniversary 17 year old self, 33 year old self and 34 year old self. Blow out the candles and keep skipping down the sidewalk, looking for endings and new beginnings.
Singapore, Orson Scott Card, and the Kardashians
Two weeks ago, I had to go to Singapore for some meetings. It turned out to be four meetings over the course of two days, which left me a bit of time here and there to do my thing. With morning and afternoon meetings each day, I was left with weird slots of my day to fill. Time was not sufficient for midday trips to my favorite merlion or to visit the Gardens by the Bay and with a big move headed my way next month, shopping on Orchard Street sounded like a bad idea. (Both in terms of space taken up and credit card balance!)
So, what does a girl do with herself and a bit of free time in the middle of a work day? It’s a pretty easy equation (at least in my world):
Coffee shop + Book = Hours whiled away
Over the course of two days, I found myself at four different cafes, enjoying a wide range of beverages (everything from hot chocolate in the morning to Snapple after lunch). I curled up in a huge over-stuffed love seat, relaxed in a wicker basket-like seat and wiggled until I found a comfortable spot on a metal chair with great people-watching. Knowing that I would probably have these odd bits of downtime between meetings, I planned ahead and brought along an Orson Scott Card book that weighed in at nearly 600 pages, enough to keep me entertained for a few hours. (Sadly, I finished that book as soon as I got to the airport and had to make due with a People magazine until I made it back home to Kuala Lumpur. At least now I am updated on the ever-so-current Kardashian drama, what’s happening on The Bachelor, a show I’ve never seen, and what Princess Kate wore on her last visit with the commoners.)
Overall, I can’t complain about my two-day mini-vacation. (Half a vacation? Between meetings, it really was relaxing and a nice getaway!) Looking towards Washington DC in the fall, I am going to miss year-round open air restaurants and patios. Informal apartment hunting is underway and I am thinking I am going to have to add a walkable coffee shop to the list of “must haves.” Maybe a bit of cold weather will add just a bit of cozy to that hot chocolate and new release on a Saturday morning.
Wordless Wednesday:Obama Vegetarian Spring Rolls
Photo credit: Thad Ross
Goodbye to an Old Pal
This poor blog has been sorely neglected over the last handful of weeks. As I look back, I don’t have a great excuse, other than a bit of laziness, but I think I am going to blame it on my recent laptop conversion. Late last year, my trusty pink Vaio laptop began to fail. I would be working away on a project and suddenly I would hear a small popping sound and then everything would go black. Nothing. No power. No charge. Everything not saved, gone. (This was right as I was working on my graduate thesis, so I quickly became an obsessive saver, as little is more painful than having pages upon pages of ideas disappear. Yes, they were still rattling around in my head, but sometimes it is nearly impossible to recreate that perfect sentence that you cobble together, reconstruct and then rework one more time.)
With my faithful laptop looking at an imminent demise, back in late February I finally broke down and bought a new one. I was really hoping to make the current machine last until summer when I would be home in the US to do some in-person shopping, but once it started to blink out three or four times a day, I knew the end was near. A DNR had been issued.
Not wanting to buy local, but also not wanting to buy online without seeing the product, it was time to do a little KL recon. (I am a stickler for a good keyboard. I want something with a bit of a click to it. I adore the sound of typing and want just the right background noise as I write away for this blog and other projects.) Looking at computers in Kuala Lumpur means a trip to Low Yat, possibly my least favorite shopping area in town. It very much reminds me of the computer city buildings in Chengdu- large edifices crammed full of legitimate brand name stores, flanked by less than reputable kiosks and shops selling anything with a battery or electrical connection. The whole place makes me both claustrophobic (something I am not) and uneasy. Am I going to get ripped off? Pickpocketed? Shived? All seem like possibilities.
One quiet Sunday afternoon, Thad and I made the trip to Low Yat where the main test of the day was keyboard clickiness. Once I determined that Hewlett-Packard machines, as whole, had the best sound, it was time to go home and narrow down my options. In the stores (“stores”?) I did see a few other brands of a 360-degree style that I really liked and the internet quickly told me that HP not only has this style, but it was highly ranked among its peers. I love the laptop/tablet combo idea.
Horrified by the price of laptops in general (I really thought they had gone down more than they had over the last five years), I finally settled on the HP Spectre, realized it was pretty much a set price at all stores, so made my purchase. Knowing that it had to be shipped to Kuala Lumpur through the diplomatic pouch, the fact that the Spectre had a built in battery was a huge selling point, as that fits within the regulations of pouch mail. Before buying, I even checked with the embassy mail room staff, who assured me that shipping with an installed lithium battery should be no problem.
Apparently, it was a problem.
As I excitedly watched the shipping progress from Best Buy to the pouch facility, I was horrified one morning to see that the box had been rejected by the pouch and returned to the warehouse. Best Buy refunded my credit card, but what I really wanted was my new computer. Ol’ Trusty was on life support and the prognosis wasn’t good.
Back to the internet I went, reordering the exact same item, but this time shipping it to my brother in Idaho, who then had to rebox it and ship it again (there’s an extra $30) with a customs label indicating that the battery had been removed. Ugh. (The second round of shipping did mean that when it finally came, treats from home and drawings from the niece and nephew were bonus gifts.) Two weeks estimated shipping time on the original purchase ended up being over six weeks, with the new laptop arriving just days after I left KL for a three-week stint at Consulate Ho Chi Minh City.
Now, I’m in the painful process of converting from the dying, cracked, pink laptop to the shiny, new, black and bronze beauty. But, the changeover is fraught. All of my life is on that other machine. It knows my links. It knows my passwords. It has Word. It has everything.
Plus, I feel a strange loyalty to it. (I tend to be loyal to a fault. I remember as a kid feeling guilty when I switched from regularly listening to my parents’ favorite oldies radio station to the current pop station. Strange loyalties, I tell you.)
Last night, I finally downloaded Word onto this new machine, so the replacement process is nearly complete. I am not sure what will become of the old machine as we face packing out in just a few short weeks, but I’m hoping by July to be fully dependent on this fancy new table/laptop, as it is much small and much lighter, a huge benefit as a summer of travel is headed our way. It is time to say goodbye to my old pal, my trusty buddy who has traveled all over Asia and back to American multiple times. It served me well, adding years of postings to my blog, sticking out a graduate degree in literature and giving me hours of wasted time on internet pic-dump sites.
The transition means it is time to get back to regular blogging; no more excuses. Blogs and Wordless Wednesdays are headed your way. Be prepared.
Wordless Wednesday: Market Ducklings
(Photo credit: Thad Ross)
Wordless Wednesday: Always Happier with a Book
(Photo credit:Thad Ross)
Goodbye Ho Chi Minh City
As my three weeks of TDY (temporary duty, meaning I am still working for State, but at a different post/different country) come to a close in Ho Chi Minh City, I’ve discovered something about myself as a solo-traveler. Yes, I want to see all of the main sights and yes, I will pay to go to the top of a tall building to look out over the city. Yes, I will wander around the museum and try to make sense of awkwardly worded plaques and yes, I will get a little lost in my wanderings as long as I have a card for the hotel to hop in a cab in case I get really lost. I enjoy all of these things and have spent several afternoons and weekends doing all of it in and around HCMC, but one of my favorite pastimes here, on my own, has been finding a great spot to pull out my book and waste away an hour or two reading/people watching. (Is it really wasting? ? Probably not.)
When Thad and I travel together, we are on the move constantly, exploring new places and enjoying the trip together. With your favorite travel-buddy along, there is always something to chat about- whether it is what you saw earlier in the day or what is in the plans for tomorrow’s seeing. Solo though, those conversations all stay in my head (well, mostly- I have been known to talk to myself occasionally, but it is usually while I am on the move, sorting out directions or plans). Instead, I used my downtime from touring to relax in the shade with a book and a cool drink, sometimes on a park bench and others at a café. (On the same theme, I also sent out spades of postcards as I enjoyed my strawberry smoothies, and sunshine, so for those in the loop, be on the lookout in about a month! I’m guessing that with the local post, that timeline isn’t too much of stretch.)
It was not a bad way to spend a few weeks.
Of course, I still prefer to travel as a couple. We’ve got almost eighteen years of co-traveling under our belts, so we’re pretty good at the divide and conquer aspects of adventure, but when that isn’t in the cards, I apparently do quite well just me, a book and a view.
A Little Foreign Service Where’s Waldo
I think it is has come up before, but a major advantage to working for the US State Department in foreign postings is that we get to enjoy both US federal holidays as well as local holidays. (Of course, there is a number of days cutoff, otherwise some embassies/consulates would be on vacation all of the time!) My TDY to Ho Chi Minh City happened to fall at just the perfect time, as Kuala Lumpur had no holidays over that three week period, but Vietnam had one long weekend, right in the middle of my stay, so while my dear friends/colleagues in KL were fingerprinting and interviewing and collecting DNA and the million other things that happen in our section each day, I went on vacation to Hoi An.
The other bit of luck that came my way over the weekend was that Thad’s friends were in town from Idaho and he had taken time off work to hang out with them, so the whole crew flew up to Da Nang, where we are able to meet up and travel together for a few days.
Our outdated guidebook (Lonely Planet 2008, but we figured somethings never change!) pointed us towards Hue for a day, a suggestion we gladly took. About two and a half hours outside of Da Nang, the Hue boasts the ruins/reconstruction of a citadel that were the perfect place to kick off our long weekend. We wandered for hours, following a few unspoken rules:
1) If an area is crowded by a tour group, quickly retreat
2) If there are stairs, take them and see where they lead
3) If there is an awesome, cool doorway, wander in to see what it offers.
4) If there is shade, explore the area more thoroughly
5) If there is no shade, walk briskly; Don’t stop moving to read the plaques- just get to the shade!
(Rule three meant that I was the only one out of the group who did not walk in on random old Vietnamese dude eating noodles in his underwear. Rules four and five were necessary as Saturday turned out to be 100 degrees, which my handy-dandy weather app told me carried a heat index of 117. As a whole, we are a pretty pasty group and were sweating in pretty much every place we could sweat. [I swear my eyes were sweating!] Avoiding direct sunlight was crucial.)
Lunch was another small adventure. Our driver dropped us off at a little shop that had only one offering. Noodles. There were no noodle options. No menu. I held up four fingers and soon four steaming bowls of noodles arrived at the table. They had a bit of spice to them, but were not anything I wouldn’t order again. The others as the table added a bit more spice to theirs, Josh and I shoveled our fatty meat pieces into Thad’s bowl and as a whole, we made quick work of those bowls. (There were also some other random foods wrapped in banana leaves deposited on the table. Justin took full advantage of the chance to try a bit of each. That is a level of eating bravery I will never reach. One was never identified as either animal or plant-based…who knows…)
Saturday was long and hot, so we all opted for a quieter, cooler Sunday.
Hoi An sits on a river and we instantly knew the day must include a boat in some form or fashion. It turned out to be surprisingly easy to hire a boat for two hours, getting a private tour of the river and a few surrounding villages. (Tour might not be the right word, as our boat driver spoke nothing but Vietnamese and I was the most fluent one in the boat, with an ever-expanding vocabulary that includes such phrases as “left hand,” “right hand,” “good morning” and “thank you.” None of those were going to do us much good unless we needed to make a quick veer to the right or left.) Nevertheless, we made ourselves at home on our boat (I do believe I was the only one who kept my shoes on!) and enjoyed floating up and around, watching fisherman, working boats and other tourists doing their thing.
How does one follow up something as strenuous as a boat ride? With nothing less than wandering the streets of Hoi An’s old town, checking out the shops and making multiple café stops for Vietnamese iced coffee, smoothies, lime juices and snacks, followed by massages and dinner. Being a tourist is rough!
But, as with all great things, the long weekend quickly came to an end and as a crew, we had to part ways. I headed back to HCMC to finish up my last week of work in the city and Thad, Josh and Justin headed back to Kuala Lumpur in preparation for another week’s travel in the region (Brunei, Borneo and Singapore were on the list). Being able to hop from place to place is a fantastic perk of the Foreign Service lifestyle and one that I am going to miss when we are in Washington DC next year. (It is possible, but much more difficult and expensive from the States. No Air Asia service…)
When you are on vacation in Da Nang from your TDY in Ho Chi Minh City from your posting in Kuala Lumpur from your home in Idaho…
It is a bit of Where’s Waldo for adults.
(Photo credit: Thad Ross)
In Search of the End of the Sidewalk 