This and That and Where to Next

I picked up the computer hoping to check my e-mail. The internet has been flaking out all weekend. I haven’t been able to get e-mail since Friday (it’s Monday) but at times I can get to Facebook (if I wait 10 minutes for it to load). Earlier today I received a phone call from Dakota who apparently had the good timing to catch the only 20 minute interval in 3 days that would support the Vonage line, but I still can’t access my e-mail. Bah humbug! I also can’t get to Cyberbones so I am typing this in word hoping I can upload it later.

I am hiding in my bedroom with a throbbing headache and backache hoping this isn’t the onset of malaria or the stomach bug that Dave has had since last week. I took tylenol and it isn’t working at all, maybe I will try Motrin next. I decided to take a nice hot bath hoping that it would ease some of the muscle pain. I started the tap running, retrieved my cup of tea, and returned to find the water in the tub was a shade or two darker than than the tea in my cup. Ewww! Dave suggested that I look at it as a mineral bath and climb in anyway. After the initial yuck factor I did take my bath and the hot water did help the backache, a little bit anyway. Moments like this I am ready to pack it up and head out of Africa.

Debating the topic of where to next, next as in where to live after Malawi, has become the newest hobby in the Cyberbones household. Real Post Reports is probably the most visited site on our internet. See a show on TV about Istanbul, head to Real Post Reports and check out Turkey. Get an e-mail from a friend new serving in Dubai and loving it, run look up the UAE. There is no single favored post, instead it is more the post of the day. You can pretty much measure how the day is going by where we want to go next. On a good day we are looking at exotic sounding hardship posts. Does anyone want to come visit us on Mauritius? Has anyone even heard of Mauritius? On a bad day we are looking at any place that is closer to home, has fewer mosquito born illnesses, and more access to Starbucks. Starbucks will be a major bidding consideration this next time. Have I ever mentioned there is NO Starbucks in Malawi? I really need a caramel macchiato people!

Yesterday Dave was in the living room folding clothes and absently staring at the computer screen saver, which is just random pictures from our iphoto files. Several pictures in a row of Germany flipped by and Dave muttered “I could go back there.” Wow, not something I thought I would ever hear him say. I stared at him until he finally shrugged and said “What? It was easy to live there.” Of course today he is all “Let’s go to Italy.” Probably because we celebrated Columbus day by watching Under the Tuscan Sun over coffee this morning while the kids were at school.

Alonzo’s only request is that where ever we go it should have a commissary. Apparently he is having Pop-tart withdrawal issues, and I didn’t include any in our consumables. Bad mommy! The other day we watched a show about Korea. When it was over he looked at me and asked very seriously, “Does Seoul have a military base with a commissary. “Yes” I answered. “OK Let’s got to Seoul.” Hmmm....I may need to look that up, wonder how the schools are? I am with him though, a commissary is sounding darn good to me right now, frozen pizzas, Pop-tarts, squishy white bread, and mac and cheese...yummy!

Colin simply wants to go to Tokyo because that is where his best friend from Germany moved to, failing that he wants to go back to Germany or maybe Jakarta. I think he may be tired of new experiences and is looking for the familiar.

Grayson seems to care the least, probably because he thinks he is Indonesian and can’t remember living in the states anyway. As far as he is concerned we move every few years. That’s just what our family does. Poor confused kiddo.

As for me I just want to go someplace easy. Some place without really loud birds that wake you up before 6 am every flipping morning. Why can’t the wildlife understand I’m NOT a morning person? Someplace where I don’t have to go to every store in town to do my weekly grocery shopping and still come home without some stuff because those items are simply out of stock everywhere. Butter anyone? Some place where a Coca Cola shortage would be ludicrous. Yes, we are having a Coke shortage, and yes I realize that sounds trivial but some days I just want an ice cold Coke! Besides if a country can run out of Coke you can imagine what other things we run out of. So yes DC sounds lovely and so does Frankfurt. But then again so do Taipei, Mexico City, Bangkok, and Hong Kong. All that awesome food just waiting to be eaten.

All this speculation is a bit premature. We don’t get our bid list until sometime next July or August, and even after we submit our bids it will be wait, wait, and wait some more to find out where we are going. Still playing the “what if” game seems to be hard to resist. I think it is part of human nature to want to plan for the future and that can be hard to do when you have no idea of what continent you will be living on in 2 years time.

Nice hot mineral-bath spa treatment anyone?

Oh Happy Day!

Yesterday was a great day. No, I didn't win the lottery or find a diamond in the backyard. Our second consumables shipment arrived. YAY! Pace picante, mac and cheese, shampoo, toilet paper, canned tunafish, corn chips. All the things that make life good, OK so not ALL the things, but a lot of them for sure. This is what our kitchen looked like at 2 o'clock.


A smallish mountain if boxes. I convinced Dave to take the boys and go to softball without me. By the time they retuned the boxes were gone and our formerly almost empty pantry was restocked and ready to go for the next year. It looks good.


We ordered our consumables from ELSO rather than spend our limited time in the states this summer shopping and dealing with shipping. For the most part it worked great. We didn't order many things that outdate or go stale easily, like chips or cereal. We had heard from others that they often arrived near to expiration date. I am happy to say that nothing was anywhere near to expiration date.

The only problem we had was a few things that were out of stock and so were CANCELLED from our order. Things like hairspray and children's tear free no tangle shampoo. Things that are hard/impossible to find here and if you do you will pay 10+ dollars for a itty bitty bottle. Sigh! Things that can't be shipped from Amazon because we are a pouch post and they are liquid or in the case of hairspray, flammable. HUGE SIGH! Dave is going back though his in-box to see if he missed an message asking if we wanted to make a substitution, because the first thing we heard of it was when we got an e-mail that said "Your order has been shipped here is a copy of your invoice." For the next year I will have to deal with messy hair and children crying because of "burning-eye" shampoo and tangled hair. Just dandy! At least I can drown my sorrows in bottle of picante sauce.

Household Help

Daniela at Tuk & Tam is hosting the FS Weekly Blog Roundup. The optional talking point (OPT) is "The Best Of... insert country here." I am opting out of the OPT this week. Hey, it IS optional.

I’ve already ranted about the shortfalls of Malawi, although I think it is more a case of false advertising rather than actual shortfalls. Still I have already had my say, and I don't think I need to rehash it again. So far the best of Malawi has been the trip to Zambia last October, and well, Zambia is a different country, so that isn't exactly the best of Malawi.

Instead I am going to focus on house staff. If you are a long time reader you already know that I hired house staff before we arrived, based only on a recommendation from the people who had this house before us, no interview. It was a disaster. One I won't be repeating. While I appreciate that for some people having staff all lined up and ready to work from the day you hit the ground is a necessity, especially if you are a single parent or a tandem with kids, in the future I will be taking some time to settle in before hiring staff.

I have been without house staff since early October. Mostly I have enjoyed having the house to myself. An acquaintance here asked rather incredulously if I enjoyed cleaning toilets all day. Well no, but then again it only takes a few minutes to clean toilets, so it's not that big of a hardship. Plus the kids are old enough to help out around the house, and I think that having chores is a very important part of growing up.

I’m a bit of a homebody. I enjoy the process of making a house a home. I like cooking, dusting, and the satisfaction of a clean, attractive room. Ok, so I don't really enjoy laundry, but at least I have a washing machine to make it easier. I'm not sitting on the banks of a creek scrubbing my clothes like most women in Malawi, and I do love the smell when the dryer is running. Unlike a lot of (fully justified) trailing spouses you won't hear me complaining about not being able to find work at post. I was born in the wrong decade; I actually like being a domestic goddess. Sick isn't it? My mom is probably rolling her eyes right now trying to figure out where she went wrong.

As of this week we once again have house staff in the form of one maid/nanny. She's a hard worker, the house sparkles, she keeps the kids from fighting while I cook dinner, she speaks English, and she even bathes Grayson before she leaves. She’s a real gem. She’s driving me absolutely bonkers!

I am rapidly coming to the conclusion that I would be best off without full time help. I think in my ideal world I would have someone come in once or twice a week to do toilets, mop, vacuum, clean the windows, and do the ironing. That someone would call my by my given name, make eye contact, laugh when I tell a joke, and never never never flinch when I walk into a room. Then the rest of the time I could have my shiny clean house to myself.

So why did we hire a maid? Well there’s no such thing as a babysitter around here. David and I have not been out to dinner once since Dakota left for boot camp last December. In order to have a night out a few times a month we had to hire a full time employee. Talk about your overkill. The kids are all school age, so having a nanny seems a little silly. To justify hiring her we have her do housework in the morning and in the afternoon she mostly watches Grayson play with her daughters. I have to admit this plan beats having to run out and break up 10 fights between the boys while I try to cook dinner each night.

You know not so long ago I was a stay at home mom in the states, trying hard to keep my sanity with two kids in diapers, one half potty trained kiddo, and a preteen with attitude issues. I would have given my eyeteeth to have even a part time helper. A full time, live-in maid was the stuff of movies and dreams. David was working 2 jobs and going to school part time, so I was on my own most of the time. I don't know how we did it, but we did.

This is probably a case of be careful what you wish for. I was really looking forward to having help again. It is only now that I appreciate just exactly how lucky we were in Jakarta. Our pebantu and driver there were totally wonderful and we still keep in touch with both of them. It’s clear I will not have the same kind of relation with our current employee, but I do think we are going to be able to make it work. Now if I could just convince her to call me anything but “Madame.”

Ewww....

The FS Weekly Blog Round up is being hosted by Stephanie of Where in the World Am I? This weeks optional talking point (OPT) is toilets. Yeah. Toilets. You wouldn't think toilets would be such an interesting topic but, Oh man are toilets overseas a big deal.

The kid's all time favorite toilets are the ones in the Tokoyo Narita Airport. We had a 8 hour layover there once and I really thought the kids were going to dehydrate themselves going to the bathroom every 10 minutes. Turns out they were just playing with the toilets and the cool turbo handryers. What's so great about a toilet? Well these had a heated seats, built-in bidets with warm water, I think I remember a blowdryer, and sound effects. There was no little silver flush handle, instead there was a control panel with lots of little buttons, in Japanese. The boys were in toilet heaven. It took care of at least an hour of that layover.

Personally I like the self cleaning toilets in Germany. When you flush the seat suddenly starts rotating through a cleaner. Each person using the toilet gets a freshly cleaned seat. No more worrying if someone "sprinkled while they tinkled." Ingenious. I can think of a few dozen bathrooms along I10 that could use this feature!



I am pretty sure that everyone's least favorite toilets are the "squatters" so named because you must assume a squatting position in order to use it. Lord have mercy if you have bad knees, are pregnant, or for some other reason you can't squat down and get back up with out loosing your balance or having to touch the wall. I have yet to be in a squatter toilet that I would willingly touch any surface.


If you should have to use a squatter my son's advice is just to take off your pants rather than risk having them touch the puddle of....nastiness that's invariably on the floor of squatters. Carefully take off your pants and hang them around your neck, one less thing to worry about.

My advice when traveling in an area that has squatters is to skip that second cup of coffee to reduce the chance of having to use one, and carry toilet paper. Squatters NEVER have toilet paper. Sometimes thay have a hose, most often they have a bucket of water and scoop. The idea is to use the water to wash yourself using your left hand (which also explains the taboo against touching food with your left hand), no idea how you are supposed to get dry. Toilet paper, purell and maybe baby wipes are esential travel equipment in such areas. Never leave home without them.

I have managed so far to avoid having much contact with African public toilets. I plan to keep it that way. That bit about skipping the second cup of coffee? Vital! Also no matter how quick the trip is supposed to be I go right before I leave the house, you never know what might happen. There are a few western style toilets in Lilongwe I will use in a pinch but they do tend to smell, and I try hard not touch anything in the bathrooms, ever. Mom thank you for forcing me to "hover" over public toilets, who knew that would become such valuable skill?

When we went to Zambia the boys had to use the bathroom at the border crossing while we were dealing with paperwork. Dakota took the little ones. He came back and reported that the urinal was a long trench in the ground deeper than he was tall. The younger boys added in details about bugs, flies, and smells that I could have lived without. He reassured me that he held onto his brothers while they went so they wouldn't fall in. GAH! I decided then and there that I could hold it until we reached camp in a few hours, and possibly until we returned to our house in a week, depending on the conditions at the camp. Thankfully the toilets at camp were fine, a bit buggy at night, but otherwise not bad. At least I didn't have to hold it for a week. Small blessings!

I've had occasion to use a composting toilet on a reasonably regular basis as I take gardening classes at the Nature's Gift Permaculture Center. It doesn't smell like I thought it would. That's a good thing! They keep a bucket of wood shavings and a bucket of ash next to the toilet and there are instructions posted in English and Chichewa to put a little bit of the shavings into the toilet after each "deposit" and a little ash it if it starts to smell. It seems to work, and it doesn't use any water, a HUGE consideration in an area where water is such a precious commodity. If I had a cabin waaaayy off in the woods on the side of a mountain somewhere, a composting toilet might be an viable option. Maybe.

Well that's the Cyberbones Toilets of the World tour. Make sure to click over to Where in the World Am I? on Friday to check out the Weekly Roundup. I hope someone had a fancy toilet with a bidet, I always wanted a bidet. Don't know what I would do with it, but it seems cool.

Household Help

This week's Friday Weekly State Department Roundup is being hosted by Ogles and Observations. The theme this week is household help. Be sure to click over on Friday to check out everyone's stories of having help around the house.

I was totally blessed to have possibly the best staff EVER in Jakarta. I had a maid I adored and the kids loved and a driver who was funny, patient with the kids, and got my husbands humor. I still keep in touch with both via FB!

One day I was cooking dinner. Dwi (the maid) was outside with the kids and Haryono (the driver) had gone to the embassy to retrieve David. I was alone in the house with my glass of wine, the dinner prep, and my computer which was streaming a country music station from back home. I was happily chopping away, sauteing, and simmering. At the same time I was also singing along with George on the radio and two stepping my way around the kitchen. That's George Strait y'all, just in case you are wondering Geroge who?

I forgot one thing, the kitchen window was wide open. It faced the driveway so that when Dave and Haryono returned from work the first thing they saw was me dancing and singing around the kitchen. To this day I have no idea how long they were standing there, I just know that when a station break came on, I quit singing and there was a sudden burst of applause from the window. I looked up to see my husband camera in hand, Haryono, Dwi, the kids, several of the neighbor's staff, and a gardener or two, all standing in the window grinning like mad. Totally busted! I blushed furiously and took a bow, what else could I do? Then as soon as everyone had scattered I slammed that glass of wine.

One of things I looked forward to the most about coming to Malawi was having help again. A few years of doing it all in Frankfurt had me looking forward to living the easy life again. It is strange thing to have help, at least if you were brought up in America. Most Americans don't have household help of any kind. A few of my friends had a maid that came in twice a month and did the dusting and such but no one I knew had a full time maid, never mind a living in. That was something you only saw on TV, like Alice on the Brady Bunch.

So far there isn't an Alice for me here in Malawi. In fact I am currently without household help although I do have two gardeners that I am totally convinced are somehow related to Naoma's driver. If it weren't for the kids I would probably be content to keep it that way, but in Malawi if you want to someone to watch your kids once in a while so that you can go out to dinner you need to hire a full time helper. Seems a bit like overkill, but that's the way it is.

I had hired staff, not only a maid but a cook as well, before our arrival here at post. They were the staff from the people that had this house before us. That didn't work out as well as we had hoped. They have both since moved on to new positions and I hope are much happier. I have decided that I will never again hire staff before I arrive at post, not even if it means I may need to do without for a while. It is just too important that I be happy with the people sharing my personal space on a daily basis. It's a tricky business this having staff thing.

What Does it Say About Me?

We are 6 months into a 3 year assignment and I am already compiling a list of where I would like to go next, and by default where I don't want to go. Exactly what does that say about me? It's no secret that I wasn't thrilled about Frankfurt and now we are in Malawi and I am counting the days until R&R this summer. It's not that Malawi is awful, aside from the giant hairy spiders, mostly it is just boring. And expensive. Very expensive. Which means that we have very little money left to get out of here and go do something.

How expensive can it be you ask? Well milk is currently running about around 9 dollars a gallon, butter is around 10 dollars a pound, don't even bother to ask about cheese or meat. A bottle of Johnson's tear free baby shampoo is around 8 dollars, and that's the little bottle. Diesel is around 4.30 a gallon and gasoline (petrol) is just over 5 dollars a gallon. But wait, don't you embassy types get a COLA (cost of living allowance) to help deal with this kind of stuff. Why yes we do, thank you for asking, but sadly the COLA here is considerable less than it was in Frankfurt and yet we spend a whole lot more on daily living expenses than we ever did in Frankfurt. It makes no sense what so ever. I don't get it.

On top of the expense there is really nothing to do here. Nothing at all. This is truly a post that the can be nice if you get along well with the other people at post (we do thank goodness!) and are into socializing with your co-workers at each other's houses. If you are looking to go out to eat once in a while, or have a drink at a club, Malawi isn't the place for you. If you are into hosting frequent dinner parties maybe you can make it work.

The only houses with a pool or tennis court are assigned to the DCM and the Ambassador. Thankfully the DCM allows regular hours for the embassy community to use the pool, and there is a sign up for the tennis courts at the ambassadors. The British High Commission has a club and Americans diplomats are allowed to join for a fee. We spend at least one day every weekend when it isn't raining sitting by the club pool hanging out while the kids play. It is too cold to swim during dry season so I am not sure what we will do then. Other than the British club there are no places to go hang out with the family. No kids sports teams other than the ones associated with the school, no swimming pools, no playgrounds, no gyms, no music lessons, no stables (there used to be one but she closed up shop and left town), no movie theater, no bowling alley, not much of anything really. There are only about 10 restaurants in town and they are pretty pricey. Seriously we ate out at a Thai place in Frankfurt on a regular basis for far less than a basic meal out here. There is a really good Indian place just down the road from us but dinner for just me and Dave will run about $60. We don't eat out much.

Most people try to get out of town on a regular basis for sanity reasons. There are lots of lodges along the lake of varying quality. Some are reasonably nice, some are real dumps, none are really up to to American or European standards no matter what they advertise. Almost all of them charge per person. That very quickly puts them out of our price range with a family of five. Lake Malawi is close enough for a day trip and has some nice snorkeling and diving. But you do risk contracting bilharzia and we are not allowed to drive outside of Lilongwe after dark so that really limits day trips. You have to always be aware of the time and make sure to allow enough time for traffic accidents blocking the road, changing weather conditions and detours so that you arrive back in Lilongwe before dark. The one saving grace is many of the lodges have campgrounds but you need to make sure that you bring all important camping gear with you in your HHE. We didn't, but you can be sure that we will be loading up this summer when we are home in the states.

Do I regret coming here? No, I really don't. This is the perfect time to be in Africa for my family. The kids are still young high school isn't an issue yet, all the embassy high schoolers I know of go to boarding school, and the boys don't mind hanging out with their parents. Malawi doesn't have many of the security issues that plague other African posts. We are still managing to fit in some great trips, just not as often as I would like. We have already gone to Zambia on safari and will most certainly go again. We are going to Victoria Falls and Botswana during spring break, and next year sometime we will head to Cape Town, South Africa. All of these trips set us back a great deal of money and take a good deal of planning so that we don't blow the budget, and are able to continue building our savings. I simply wish there had been a bit more honesty in advertising regarding Malawi.

Foreign Food

This week's Weekly State Department Roundup is being hosted by Lauren at Global Geraghtys. The theme this week is "I've Never Eaten That Before." Be sure to click over on Friday to find out what strange things people have eaten during their travels.

I have always been open to trying new food, unless of course it came out of the ocean. I don't like most seafood, so fish are safe around me, otherwise it is fair game. Growing up we raised a lot of our own meat. In addition to the standard cow and pig a year we also raised ducks, chicken, geese, guineas, turkeys, rabbits, goats and occasionally other birds if my mother found something new in the poultry catalog. Yes, you can mail order live poultry. Dad hunts so we had venison most years. Dad also fancies himself a gourmet so we would eat any weird meat he found for sale: rattlesnake, bear, alligator, crawdads, frog legs, you get the idea.

Lest you think we ate only meat we had a large garden and we grew what ever weird thing was in the Burpee seed catalog. Blue potatoes, kohlrabi, yellow tomatoes, spaghetti squash. If something strange showed up in the catalog it was a safe bet it was going to show up in our garden that spring.

When we moved to our first post in Jakarta I was ready to try new things. I very quickly found out that tropical fruit is an acquired taste. By tropical fruit I mean tropical fruits other than pineapples and mangos. There are bunches of fruits that are available in every market in SE Asia that you will never find in your average grocery in America. There is salak (snake fruit), mangosteen, dragon fruit, jackfruit, guava, jambu air (water apple), longan (dragon's eye fruit), rambutan and so many more. Some of these I liked, usually the ones with mild flavors, most I found repulsive. The flavors, smells and textures were just too weird. The kids quickly grew to like them all.

There was one fruit none of us were brave enough to try. A fruit that smells so bad, it is illegal to take it on trains, planes, or into hotel rooms. A fruit so vile that even Andrew Zimmern of Bizzarre Foods can't stomach it. The man eats bugs and likes it, but he can't eat this fruit. And yet this fruit is considered a delicacy.

The undisputed queen of asian tropical fruit is of course the durian. It looks like a big spiky melon of some sort. It actually grows up in trees. I can only imagine it would be fatal to have one fall on your head. The smell is pungent, overwhelming, nauseating, and totally unforgettable once smelled. Shortly before we left Jakarta we finally decided we couldn't leave without trying durian at least once.



Dave found the taste a cross between diesel and overripe pineapple he managed to swallow his bite. I can't even describe the taste but I won't willingly put that in my mouth again and I spat it out much to the amusement of the gathered drivers, pembantus and gardeners. Alonzo and Dakota refused to taste it. Colin and Grayson claimed to like it but I noticed even they didn't line up for a second bite.I just couldn't swallow the durian. Blech!

David didn't like it much either but he did better than me.

I am sure there will be many other culinary adventures in our futures, some good, some bad. I can tell you one thing I won't be eating though, mouse on a stick! Not. Going. To. Happen.

Thanksgiving Travel?

This weeks FS Weekly Blog Roundup is being hosted by Sara at WIFE-MOMMY-WOMAN. The theme this week is "Thanksgiving to travel or not to travel?" Be sure to click over there on Friday and see what up in the FS blog-o-sphere.

What is your favorite holiday? Christmas? Fourth of July? Mine has always been Thanksgiving. This is largely due to my Aunt Patsy and Uncle Tommy who hosted a huge family get together at their farm every year. Since we are from southern Texas the weather was usually mild enough that the men could hang around outside talking and playing washers (sort of like horse shoes but it doesn't wreck the grass) while the women hung around the kitchen visiting and helping out with the cooking. The kids ran wild and had a blast. The adults took took turns driving the kids around on the mule (no, not an animal but a farm work vehicle) the kids would load up in the bed and someone would jump in the drivers seat and take them out in the fields for a drive. It was so much fun seeing everyone and eating all the great food.

I miss Thanksgiving with the family. We do manage to have a nice Thanksgiving dinner each year overseas. Sometimes by ourselves and sometimes with other families. I already have my turkey in the freezer ready for this year. Now I just need to figure out the rest of the meal.

I wanted to bid on Mexico City last bid cycle. My sole reason was so we could go home for Thanksgiving. Okay, Thanksgiving and/or Christmas, maybe both. It's a short flight from Mexico to South Texas. We could have been home in just a few hours. We are in Africa so obviously that didn't work out. Darn drug wars! Sigh.*

The question was posed: To travel or not to travel for Thanksgiving? I know that in the states Thanksgiving is a huge travel day but overseas the question changes. It becomes Do I send the kids to school or keep them home? You see Thanksgiving is an American holiday and the kids attend International schools. They don't get Thanksgiving Day off, it's just another day. And honestly even if I did want to travel home it would mean taking the kids out school for a week or more since it is more than a day's travel to get home from here and as they get older it gets harder to pull them out of school without them getting all behind.

The first couple of years overseas I sent the kids to school so I could cook in peace, after all unlike at Aunt Patsy's house where all I had to make was the dinner rolls and a dessert, now I have to cook the entire meal from turkey to pumpkin pie all by myself. It didn't seem like much of a celebration to have the kids go to school as usual, then have homework, before the big event. It just turned out to be a big fancy meal, not much more. The last few years I have kept the kids home. It makes the day a little harder on me but it turns it back into a family event. When my kids grow up I really want them to look back on Thanksgiving and have good memories of a very special American holiday.

*Someday we are going to be posted to someplace I can actually get home from for Thanksgiving. Any thoughts on Jamaica or maybe Costa Rica?

Wordless Wednesday -Fashion Statement?

Traditions

This week's FS weekly roundup theme is traditions. Traditions are the glue that holds our family together. The trouble with life in the foreign service it can make traditions hard to maintain since you never know where you will be living in a year or so.

When we lived in the states before David decided to launch our family on this around the world adventure, we had a host of family traditions. This time of year we would go to the pumpkin patch at the Methodist church up the road from our house, I have picture of each boy as a tiny baby propped up in the pumpkin patch looking oh so cute. When the leaves started to change in November we would go hiking at Lost Maples State Park to see the fall leaves. At Thanksgiving we would head to my Uncle Tommy's house for the big family Thanksgiving. A few days after Thanksgiving we would drive to the same tree farm every year to choose and cut our tree for Christmas. There were traditions for each holiday, events that marked the passage of the year.

You can't maintain these kind of traditions when you decide to live your life in a progression of countries across multiple continents. Instead you develop other kinds of traditions. Traditions that are more portable and not tied to a particular place.

It shouldn't surprise anyone who knows me that many of our current traditions revolve around food. Some traditions are annual events, like making tamales for Christmas. I used to make Dave get up very early in mid December and go stand in line at Ruben's Tamales on the south side to get our tamales for Christmas Eve. If you are from South Texas you probably eat Tamales at Christmas time and Ruben's are the best in San Antonio. There is no Ruben's in Lilongwe (or Frankfurt or Jakarta for that matter) so now I make my own. They are pretty good, not as good as Ruben's but a whole lot better than no tamales. Thank goodness for the internet, I can order all the tamale making supplies I need.

Other traditions are weekly. Monday night is soup night. I am sick of this one but when I tried to do away with it due to the fact it is HOT here there was protests so I am still making soup every week. Wednesday is dessert night, and Friday is movie night. Actually Saturday has become movie night because Friday night here in Lilongwe means softball at the school followed by volleyball at the shack. You have to be flexible in this life, but it's the small traditions that mark our week help make a new place seem like home just a little faster. It helps our kids understand that even though where we live may change, somethings stay constant no matter where we live.

Make Your Own Cheese, Seriously!

This week I had to make ricotta gnocchi for Colin's birthday. OK I didn't HAVE to make it but it was his birthday and that's what he wanted to eat, so I was going to work to make it happen. I always let the kids choose what they want to eat on their birthdays. There was one problem though, I couldn't find ricotta cheese at any of the grocery stores. I lucked out and found parmesan cheese but no ricotta to be found.

When you live overseas for a while you get used to making things from scratch and making substitutions. I had heard somewhere, probably the Splendid Table, that ricotta cheese is easy to make so time to look for a recipe. Epicurious to the rescue! A quick search turned up a recipe with great reviews and even better I could get everything I needed to make it locally: milk, cream, and lemons. I already had salt. To see the recipe click here.

It was pretty easy. Mix the cream, milk, and salt and bring to a rolling boil. Add the lemon juice and reduce heat to a simmer. In about 2 minutes the milk should suddenly turn into a disgusting mess of white floating chunks in yellowish liquid. It sort of looks like something my kid threw up up. Don't panic the white stuff is the cheese curds and yellowish stuff is the whey. Curds and whey!

Little Miss Muffet

Sat on a tuffet,

Eating her curds and whey;

Along came a spider,

Who sat down beside her

And frightened Miss Muffet away.

We have plenty of spiders around here and now curds and whey. We are all set for a visit from Little Miss Muffet. I don't think I would like a big bowl of curds and whey though. Ick! Instead I lined a colander with a clean kitchen towel strained out the cheese. I let it set for about 30 minutes so most of the whey dripped away. What was left was some of the best ricotta I have ever tasted. I can't wait to try this in something that showcases the cheese like shells stuffed with ricotta and spinach. Maybe next week... if I can find shells. Probably not.

A few notes:

1. Don't use UHT milk, for you state side folks that is long shelf life milk that doesn't need refrigeration. UHT stands for Ultra High Temperature processing. I have no idea why but it won't work. I found out that you CAN make it from powdered milk. YAY! It probably won't taste as good as fresh milk but if you are in Nouakchott or Ouagadougou, craving lasagna, and have by some miracle managed to get hold of a chunk of mozzarella, you are probably won't care.

2. If you can't find cream just use 3 cups of whole or 2% milk, it will still work, it just won't be as rich and creamy.

3. Save the whey if you are a bread maker. One of the commenters recommended using it to make bread. The whey is supposed to be high in protein so it makes your bread extra nutritious. I tried it and it came out beautifully. (I really DON'T like the local bread so I make my own several twice a week. I wasn't trying to show off, honestly) You can freeze the whey if you don't have time to deal with it the day you are making the cheese.

4. Allrecipes.com has a recipe for cheesecake using ricotta rather than cream cheese. I will be trying that soon. I haven't seen any cream cheese here yet and cheese cake sounds really really good. I have a birthday coming up. Maybe I will ask Dave make that for my birthday cake.

Too Much of a Good Thing?

Have you ever noticed that when you read a novel, especially a historical romance set in 1700 or the 1800's, it always takes place in a rich persons house and there are servants all over the place? There cooks and chambermaids, footmen and doormen. There is a servant for every want or need. It all sounds like such a good idea. If only life were a novel.

Well apparently I was reading those novels when I was hiring staff prior to our arrival here. In a facebook conversation awhile back I said that it is a good idea to consider hiring staff prior to arriving at post, especially if you are heading to a third world or developing country where having help is the norm rather than the exception. I still think it is a good idea. When we arrived in Jakarta, at the very end of transfer season, it took a long time to find a maid. Most of the ones who had experience with Americans and spoke some English had long since been snapped up. So yes it is a good idea to consider hiring household help before arrival.

On the other hand it is probably a good idea not to get too carried away hiring people before you get to post. I got carried away. Big time. Drat those historical romances with all those footmen and handmaids. Now I have to deal with it. Someone, or a couple of someones, will have to go. There are too many people in this house and in the yard all the freaking time and it is driving me nuts. Plus they are costing us money, quite a bit of money actually. So how many people did I hire? Four. Yes, I am nuts, thanks for asking. At the moment I am really thinking that EF'M is on to something with his refusal to hire help.

So how do I fix this? This is one of the poorest countries in Africa. The level of poverty here is shocking. I am thinking if I was given a choice of being a trash picker in Jakarta or living in a village here, I am going with the trash picker's compound, hands down. Yes, it is that bad. So how can I fire someone for my mistakes? They haven't done anything wrong, there are just too many of them. Two of these people live-in so if I fire them I am not only costing them money but a safe place to live. The other two are gardeners. While my yard may look like a tropical paradise, I assure you the other side of those brick walls is a whole other story, a story of red dust, stunted hacked off trees and not much green, so what does a gardener do besides work for an expat with a big yard? This is truly a case of be careful what you wish for, you might get it, and then what?

So has anyone out there had to deal with this situation? Please tell me I am not the only crazy one. What would you do?

Christmas Eve 2009

So what does a Texan do at Christmas time? Eat tamales! What to do if you are far away from Texas at Christmas time? Make your own tamales and invite friends over to help eat them. Which is exactly what we did. We made 12 dozen tamales, a pot of chili con carne, a pot of beans because some people like beans in their chili, bought some Big Red (God bless who ever is charge of the commissary!) and then invited everyone from Dave's office to stop by this afternoon after work. Of course some people are out of town, some people are busy, but some showed up and we ate, talked, laughed, and had a blast. I think this may be a new holiday tradition.

Heavy On My Mind

Today is Monday. I am doing the same thing I do most Mondays, that is I am cleaning house. After a weekend of the boys being penned up in the house by the soggy cold weather the house looks as if a tornado swept through. This week though, I notice I am being a little more ruthless than normal about throwing things out. Generally I am a bit of a pack-rat. So what has changed? Well as Dave announced we are going to Malawi this summer. The catch is the State Department imposes a weight limit on our house hold goods, 7200 pounds to be exact. Everywhere I look I see something else that needs to be thrown away or given away.

I have yet to meet another expat (other than FS) that ships by weight. Everyone else seems to ships by container size. If you think of those pictures of the big ships with all those big containers that look like a box car minus the wheels, those are the containers I am speaking of. In fact I know of at least one woman who was excited about her husbands promotion not due to any monetary increase but because now they were alloted a larger shipping container and she would be able to ship some antique Javanese furniture.

So far today I have thrown away several Burger King kids meal toys, a couple of t-shirts with small holes, a couple of blue kitchen towels that had gone all frayed on the end, a kids book with some torn pages and a ripped batik cicak. Nothing big or heavy but if I can manage to throw away a couple of items every time I clean house it will (hopefully) all add up to quite a lot of weight by the time we pack out in June. Maybe I should start weighing what I throw out each day and keep a running tally to see how much I weight I eliminate from our shipment.

A Handshake At Last

A handshake is the first official notice of your next post assignment you receive when in the foreign service. While it is not a done deal until orders are cut, it is very rare for a handshake to be broken. This morning Dave finally received the e-mail we had been anxiously awaiting. We have a handshake! YIPEE! We know where are heading after Germany. Oh, what? You want to know where? Well here is are a few hints:

This is a picture of one the many cool things we can see at our next post.


The handshake is for the capitol city of the country that is home to the 3rd largest lake in Africa and the 8th largest lake in the world. The country is known as the "warm heart of Africa." This country earned its independence from the UK on 6 July 1964 and one of the official languages is Chichewa.

Can you guess where we are going?

Bagpipes Wanted

This morning we were listening to kids music on the way to drop the kids off at school. I know again with the kids music, but this is the first year I have ever driven the kids to school everyday so it has never been a topic before. One of the songs featured bagpipes. Immediately the cry went up, "I want to learn to play the bagpipes! Mom can I have bagpipes for my birthday?"

To which I replied, "Nope! Bagpipes are expensive."

With out missing a beat Colin came back with, "That's OK Aunt Brenda can buy me some in Scotland where they are cheaper, she's going there this summer. Mom can I e-mail Aunt Brenda tonight?"

So my globally nomadic children have learned two things:

1. Things are usually cheaper in the country in which they are made. (Exception being coo-coo clocks which are just God-awful expensive even here in Germany! More on that later.)
2. Keep track of where family/friends are from, and where they are living or visiting now. You never know when it might come in handy.

Oh, and on a final note, Donnie and Brenda consider yourself warned. Your greedy nephews will sending some begging your way soon.

Field Trip Time

When I was a kid a field trip meant trip to the Buttercrust Factory for a tour at the end of which we each received a pencil, a ruler, and a slice of Buttercrust bread still warm from the ovens. That was the good field trip. The alternative was a trip to one of the missions of San Antonio. Everyone has heard of the Alamo, but there is also Concepcion, San Jose, Espada and San Juan. I am pretty sure I went to every one of those missions on a school field trip at some time or other.

Yesterday my third grader showed up with a permission slip for a field trip. I have to admit I am jealous! None of my field trips were remotely as interesting as this one promises to be. What makes it so cool? For starters it is 3 days long. A sleep over trip. Here is the description from the permission slip:

• Day1: Bus transfer after the regular school day to the Youth Hostel Büdingen. The group will be greeted by the youth hotel team with a welcome drink in an original middle ages goblet. After a warm dinner they will go by foot to the old town of Büdingen and participate in a Night Watchman stroll though the streets and narrow alleys of Büdingen.
• Day2: After breakfast the children will go to the Büdingen castle and enjoy a tour of the proerties of the princely families of zu Ysenburg and Büdingen. Lunch will consist of a lunch pack provided by the Youth Hostel. In the afternoon they will learn how the pages, knaves, and knights lived and worked in the middle ages. A museums education officer will give the children insights into the making of ink, writing on parchment paper with Carolingian script and a traditional middle ages writing utensil and creating a family crest. In addition they will be dazzled by a weapons exhiit. The day will end with a group barbecue in a special barbeque hut.
• Day3: After breakfast and vacating their rooms, the children will say goodbye and will take with them and array of memories and impressions of the Middle Ages. Bus transfer back to school by mid morning.

I am torn between being happy he gets to have this wonderful experience and wanting to grab on and hold him tight, he seems to be growing up too fast!

Visitors Yay!

Today we took a break from research and enjoyed having some guests stop by. Before we decided to pick up and move overseas we lived in a great little neighborhood with lots of wonderful friends. I feel fortunate to have lived there and still keep in contact with many from the old neighborhood. By a weird quirk of fate our neighbor from across the street back then is here in Germany for a couple of months due to his job. He and a friend found time this weekend to drive to Germany and hang out for a while. I really enjoyed seeing him. We rarely get visitors here so this was a special treat. Dave snapped this pictures of our family with Chris and his friend Steve. Thanks guys for stopping by it really made this a special day.

Computer Woes and a Really Long Bid List

My computer died. Dead. Really truly goners. It was working fine. I pushed the button to check my e-mail and also set it to retrieve any new podcasts on itunes (sadly NPR addicted, yep, that's me) satisfied it was doing its thing I went off to cook dinner. Came back a little while later hoping it was done so I could sync my pod and listen to the newest Splendid Table while cooking only to find that the rotten thing was frozen. Tapped a few buttons hoping what ever the problem was it would fix itself, Hey! Stop laughing! It usually works. Instead I got the dreaded grey screen with the blinking question mark. Not good. I left it hoping Dave could fix it. He came home fiddled with it a while and pronounced it dead. Initially he hoped to be able to retrieve some of the data, but even that didn't work. What ever happened it fried itself good. Yesterday we went to the local computer parts store and picked up a new hard drive, so now it is working again, sort of. It looks like my computer but sure doesn't act like my computer. All of my settings, bookmarks, files, downloads, and everything else that made it mine are gone. Dave said it will take a few days to finish loading all the programs but then it will good to go. In fact he says it will be better since the old hard drive was only 60 gig and the new one is 500 gig. That's quite the upgrade so I guess there is a silver lining. Now if only I could remember everyone's e-mail address.

On to other matters. Lots of you have been asking where we are going after Germany. (quick note- my husband is member of the foreign service so we move every few years to a new country) All I have been able to tell my friends is "I don't know yet." We do know when we will be moving but not where. This week we received our bid list so now I have new answer, "We will be going to one of the places on the list."

The bid list is basically a list of maybes. We receive the list, have some time to research the different places, submit out bids - requests to go to a particular place, then wait and wait and wait. Of course there are a whole bunch of other people out there all over the world doing exactly the same thing and chances are good if you want to go to a particular place someone else will too so we actually submit a list of places we would be willing to go to, then hope we get the one we really really want. For example on our last bid list we really wanted to go to The Hague in the Netherlands but we are now living in Frankfurt Germany so obviously that didn't work out. Frankfurt was our 2nd choice so can't really complain, we are living in Europe after all. Some times you get what you want, and sometimes you don't. It is really more complicated than this, there are all kinds of things to consider, and the bigger your family the more complicated it gets. I will skip the details for now. If you want to know more just e-mail (it's working now) and I will get back to you.

With no further ado here is our bid list. It is really long this time. Some of the places have more than one position available but I will skip over that part and only list each place not each position.

THE BID LIST
Abu Dhabi
Abuja
Addis Abada
AIT Taipei
Algiers
Amman
Ashgabat
Asmara
Asuncion
Athens
Bangkok
Bangui
Banjul
Beijing
Beirut
Belgrade
Berlin
Bissau
Brasilia
Brazzaville
Bridgetown
Bucharest
Budapest
Buenos Aires
Bujumbura
Cairo
Canberra
Caracas
Chengdu
Ciudad Juarez
Conakry
Cotonou
Damascus
Dar-Es-Salaam
Dhahran
Doha
Dubai
Frankfurt
Freetown
Georgetown
Guangzhou
Guayaquil
Hanoi
Harare
Ho Chi Minh
Hong Kong
Hyderabad
Istanbul
Jakarta
Jeddah
Jerusalem
Kathmandu
Khartoum
Kuwait
Kyiv
La Paz
Lagos
Libreville
Lilongwe
London
Luanda
Madrid
Manila
Maputo
Mbabane
Mexico City
Moscow
Muscat
Naples
New Delhi
Olso
Ottawa
Paris
Phnom Penh
Prague
Pretoria
Rabat
Rangoon
Reykjavik
Riga
Rio De Janeiro
Riyadh
Rome
San Salvador
Sana'a
Santiago
Sao Paulo
Seoul
Shenyang
Sofia
Tallinn
Tashkent
Tegucigalpa
Tel Aviv
Tokyo
Toronto
Ulaanbaatar
Valletta
Vienna
Vientiane
Vilnius
Warsaw
Yaounde
Yerevan

In case you are wondering when we receive the bid list it only lists the city NOT the country. I have been trying to do research via my ipod touch (not fun) so I haven't had a chance to look up all of the posts yet or I would have listed the countries. Did you know where all of these cities are? Not me! I have my atlas right next to as I do research. It also lists some stuff about the position that is only of interest, or even intelligible, to the employee. If you are FS yourself my husband is an IMS, that's computer geek to the rest of us. (Sorry Babe! LOL!) Thank goodness or my computer may have been gone for good!

So where would you want to go if you had to make this choice? Remember there are as many people staring at this list as there are positions. Someone WILL go to each and every one of these places but only ONE lucky person is going to Paris, the rest of us are going some where else. Oh the possibilities!

4th of July

This is the first year that we haven't made it back to the states for the 4th of July.  I was really worried that the kids would miss their usual round of friends and family, parades and fireworks. I think the sting was mostly removed by the arrival of Aunt Teri on July 2nd. Instead of a parade and fireworks we enjoyed a celebration here on the Siedlung.  There were no fireworks but there was a lot to do!

The Marines opened the festivities with a flag presentation. What is it about a man in uniform? WOW!

Teri and David suited up for a little sibling rivalry Sumo style. Teri pinned David first. Girls rule and boys drool!

There was high flying fun on the trampoline bungee that had even Teri jumping for joy.



There were carnival games to play with prizes to win, and win the boys did!

There was the usual assortment of bouncers to use up some of the seemingly inexhaustible kid energy.

Cody even tried his hand at bull riding! Yee Haw!


There was also lots of food. Hamburgers, hot dogs, BBQ chicken, and lots of cotton candy. We may not have been in America for this all American celebration but I think we celebrated in true American style!