expat life – Under 6 Overseas

344 Days Abroad

Published on July 26, 2019January 29, 2020 by karaLeave a comment

We have been abroad for 11 months and during that time we have travelled to 13 countries (14 if you count an afternoon killing time and dodging vendors at the border in Myanmar for a visa run.) We have been on more flights that I care to count and probably triple that in hotel rooms. We have dipped our toes in the Andaman Sea, the Gulf of Thailand, the South China Sea, the Java Sea and the Mediterranean. We have hired Ubers, GoJeks and Grabs, and ridden bicycles with kids in ergos, kids in seats, kids in tag-a-longs, and kids holding on for dear life. We have been in a horse-drawn cart and several bicycle rickshaws. We have chartered a helicopter, a flight and several boats. We’ve ridden in tuk-tuks, in songthaews and on the back of scooter-taxis. We’ve been on underground boats and open-ocean ferries, taken light-rail or subways, a diesel train through the countryside and a kiddie train around the mall. We’ve travelled by water buffalo, double-decker bus, gondola and longtail boat. We have rented cars and driven on both the right and the left-sides of the road and we have walked hundreds of miles.

The vast majority of the 344 days we’ve been away from home were spent just living a regular life, you know, grocery shopping, going to work or school or running errands, exercising and playing at parks. But strings of normal days have been punctuated with special events–the bucket list items–where we found ourselves awestruck, or dumbstruck, or starstruck, or physically struck (by cars, which actually happened twice.) We climbed the ancient Mesoamerican pyramids of Teotihuacan and stared into the blank eyes of the mummies of Guanajuato while in Mexico. We have kissed the Blarney Stone in Ireland, visited Stonehenge in England and participated in the Highland Games in Scotland. We searched for the Loch Ness monster, saw the Mona Lisa and stood in the front row of a Mumford and Sons concert. We bungee jumped. We hand fed elephants in Thailand and were blessed by a monk for safe travels. We visited the Angkor Wat temples and donated blood at a local hospital in Cambodia. We watched the light and sound show featuring over 42 buildings in Hong Kong from a sky bar patio. We released a lantern at the Loy Krathong festival and took a cable car over waterfalls and jungles before crossing the Golden Bridge in Vietnam. In Indonesia, we swam with sea turtles and snorkeled over a sunken statue. We saw both the Himalayan mountains of Annapurna and Everest. We witnessed the washing of a body with holy water from a Hindu temple and the cremation of the remains on the river bank in Nepal. Of course, Ben trekked to Everest base camp where he stared with his bare eyes at the tallest mountain in the world in all of its glorious wonder. We stood in Catherine de Medici’s bedroom and saw the collapsed roof of the Notre Dame Cathedral. On a brief layover in the United Arab Emirates, the kids and I visited the Burj Khalifa-the tallest building in the world. We have swung over the rice terraces in Bali, visited the Hanoi Hilton and broke into an abandoned women’s prison in Chiang Mai. We have seen the Liberty Bell, the White House and the Discovery space shuttle. And thanks to that monk’s blessing, we have managed to do with only one visit to ER and one minor bout of food poisoning.

Visiting the elephant sanctuary in Thailand

We have also grown a lot as individuals on our journey. The kids have been forced to travel for nearly a year without a stroller, making them confident road crossers and traffic minders. They have learned how to step off of escalators without help and how to buckle their own seatbelts. They have learned to drink out of water bottles in a moving car, to hold their own umbrellas upright, to get by with only a handful of toys and to go to bed by themselves without constant cuddling. We are impressed by both kids’ resilience with which they accept that they have no home, can’t speak regularly to their old friends, have to constantly leave new friends and have no control over their environment. And they have become more resourceful and patient than I could imagine. We have also travelled for 11 months without losing Falcon’s beloved Monkey Man which I consider a straight up miracle. We have kept our special, plastic, color-changing Chewbacca spoon that Falcon uses daily for his cereal, as well as more important items such as our wallets, ID cards, and cell phones.

Personally, I have gone a year without really wearing any make-up. I haven’t curled or blow dried my hair once. I occasionally pluck rogue eyebrows (although I don’t think that they ever really recovered from the over-plucking look of the 90’s.) My clothes are tattered from months of wear and line drying, and they have weathered the loss of 15 pounds in Nepal and gain of 10ish pounds in France. Grey hairs and sunspots have popped up like left and right, despite lasering the crap out of them in Thailand. Overall, one could say that I have succumbed to a low maintenance, somewhat cavewoman-like appearance. And to compound any stress that I have about returning home, I have agreed to attend my 20-year high school reunion on the way back. In fact, I will fly straight from Mexico into the heart of that madness, stretched out clothes, frazzled hair and all.

We have missed celebrating holidays like Christmas, Thanksgiving and Easter. Mother’s and Father’s days fell on different days in Europe than America so we felt a little disconnected from those holidays as well. Several of our friends have moved away from our hometown and my sister welcomed a new baby in our absence. I never thought that I would say this but we miss having a routine. We struggle not being productive, having time to ourselves and exercising. Although we have thankfully avoided some of this bizarre American presidency, we have been completely out of the loop of American politics, including the ability of vote. And…we have spent our entire savings and then some. We have cycled through a bazillion pairs of sunglasses, umbrellas, chapsticks and jars of peanut butter. We left with about 220 pounds of stuff for our move to Thailand and we will be returning with 120 pounds of bare essentials.

Overall, it’s hard to put into words all that we have seen and done without sounding vain or crazy. This year abroad may not have had resulted in a spiritual awakening or significantly altered the course of our lives but we will be returning mentally renewed and more confident. Our goal was to learn things and to have fun, and I think that we achieved that. We have checked off a lot of the items on our initial bucket list. But over the course of the past year, our bucket list has probably doubled in size, as there are many places that we would like to revisit when the kids get older and new places that we have heard about but didn’t have time to visit. For now though, we look forward to settling down a bit, planning our next adventures and binge watching some good ole American reality TV.

Our Year of Adventure

Published on February 10, 2019March 11, 2019 by karaLeave a comment

Our plan to travel the world was conceived many years ago, but was set into motion in September 2017. It had been 4 years since Ben and I had gotten married, 3 years since we had become parents, 1 year since I had been laid off, and to be honest, our lives had become a little stagnant. In order to spice things up, I ended up drafting a list of options from which Ben could choose: 1) move to another town where I could find a meaningful job, 2) try for a third baby or 3) travel full-time with our children. Each option had implications for our careers, for our relationships with our friends and family, and for our finances. After careful consideration, we decided to follow our dreams and started planning for the trip of a lifetime.

From the get-go, I think most people doubted that this trip would come to fruition. We had jobs, a house, a small savings, cars, loans, friends and family, and commitments just like everyone else. It’s hard for anyone to imagine leaving it all behind. But honestly, the hardest part of this journey so far was merely just making the decision to go. The rest of the pieces fell into place after. Fast forward to now, nearly 6 months into said trip, and I still feel like our plans are met with incredulity. It’s probably just me, but I feel ridiculous when I call home and tell my mom things like, “Ben wants to hike to Everest so we are going to Nepal.” I know her brain is flashing red and she’s racing through questions like, “Who really goes to Everest? How does one afford that? Don’t you need oxygen and gear to withstand a polar vortex? Where do you find a sherpa? Where will the kids be?” I imagine her silently rolling her eyes when I tell her that we are considering a side-business selling cardstock (purchased in Vietnam, carted across the world for 6 months and then sold on Etsy), and how far-fetched is sounds to say out loud that we plan to live with a family we’ve never met–in France–for free–for a month. But all of it is true.

When we planned this trip, I anticipated having a grand adventure, full of family time, visiting new sites and ticking off a few boxes from our bucket list. However sappy it sounds, what we’ve found is that everything is possible. That is not to say that we haven’t had some misfires. Anyone remember THIS post? But overall, we are proud about what we’ve accomplished so far and are excited about what we have lined up for 2019. Here’s a peek into where we’ve been and where we are going.

I am acutely aware of how absurd it all sounds that we tote our toddlers around the world, but once we settled in Thailand, it just became the norm. We have been inspired by families we have met that piece together jobs that allow them to travel or live wherever they want, that don’t let having one or two or three or four kids keep them from going where their hearts desire and that support each other in following their dreams. We are so glad that we made the decision to live and travel abroad, and we feel incredibly lucky to be living this life.

I also want to shout out some families that we have met in person and/or communicate with on Instagram that are truly #livingthedream. 🙂 All have quit their normal 9-5 jobs and are traveling the world with their kids. If you have a minute, check them out.

The Blonde Dilemma

Published on December 28, 2018January 29, 2020 by karaLeave a comment

We come from a homogenous part of Southern Oregon. Our town consists of a whopping 20,000 residents, mostly affluent and retired. In fact in 2011, the Census Bureau confirmed what is plainly seen, that our town is also 91% white. I love our small-town life, but as our children grow older, I worry about their cultural naiveté (to put it politely). For us, a big part of the appeal of traveling is to teach our children and to remind ourselves that the world is a big place. People are a variety of colors, their experiences are diverse, their beliefs, their standards of living, their behaviors, and their languages are all different. In planning for this trip, we had hoped that we would come back with greater respect and acceptance of others, to have more compassion and to learn more about what is socially acceptable in other countries and why.

It’s has been fascinating to watch my family navigate the grey area between cultures. We are not tourists but we are definitely not locals either. We decide when to speak English and when to speak Thai, when to wai (bow with palms pressed together to show respect) like the locals do and when to shake hands like Westerners, when to haggle over the price of a taxi and when to just let it go and pay the foreigner price, when to dress conservatively and when to just wear what is comfortable in the heat. Ben leans more towards integration. He weaves his scooter through the traffic, he takes the time to learn the Thai numbers although they are rarely used and he eats things like fried chicken neck for dinner. I definitely fall into the Western category. I am content using a few Thai phrases, I wear shorts and tank tops most days, and will go out of my way for cheese.

While I am mostly comfortable in navigating this farang (Thai word for foreigner) limbo, the one place that I struggle is when people engage my children-which they do constantly. People genuinely seem to love children in Thailand but I had no idea of the insane level of attention that our light-haired kids would attract. I personally think that my offspring are model-material, but to be fair (pun intended), they are probably just average white kids. In the beginning, it was nice to receive such a warm welcome. We encouraged our kids to say hello when people stopped to look at them. We didn’t want to be rude so we let strangers take pictures. We passively watched as good-intentioned folks lightly pinched the kids’ cheeks, touched their arms and rubbed their hair. At first, we all went along with it, but things changed over the course of a couple of weeks. Once, we were standing outside of a mall playing in a fountain when a horde of Chinese tourists came up. Worked up into a frenzy, they engulfed Falcon like busy bees surrounding a blooming flower until we intervened. Similarly, I walked Blue down the aisle of an airplane to the bathroom on a flight to Vietnam and zombie arms shot out of the seats to touch her over and over as she passed. Although not as gratuitous, the ogling is a daily occurrence. About half of the time, people ask if it is ok with us if they take pictures of the kids. The other half hover around snapping away, sometimes blocking Falcon’s escape or trying to get Blue’s attention by touching her. I want to raise polite and socially confident children, but the constant, unwanted attention is starting to yield the opposite reaction to what we had hoped.

: Taking pictures of Falcon and Blue while they play

We appreciate that blonde hair and white skin is considered lucky and beautiful in many Asian cultures. We should accept that this is part of the culture that we chose to live in. But, we also have a duty to protect our children. We say no when people ask to take pictures of the kids, but they often just move to a different location and take pictures anyway. We position our bodies to shield them from people showing too much interest. Instead of becoming more tolerant and accepting of other people, my kids are becoming increasingly shy and scared because they don’t understand the significance of their features. They just know that they don’t want to do anything to create additional attention. They don’t want to be independent, they don’t want to speak Thai, and they don’t go out of their way to make friends. The irony is not lost on me. We left our racially uniform town to experience multiculturalism, only to find that our children are now in the fishbowl.🤦‍♀️

So, I think the take away message here is this: As a parent, it is my duty to make my children feel safe first and foremost. My job is to demonstrate kindness to others and hope that even if my kids don’t engage, they are still witnessing the behavior I hope they will one day enact. But furthermore, I have the opportunity to teach my kids and other adults about respect. Respecting physical boundaries should be universal and someone’s personal luck or curiosity or trophy photo doesn’t trump another person’s feelings or safety.

Have other families experienced this? How do you handle the attention? I would love to hear your comments and feedback.

**I am aware that the title picture with Blue on the beach may be disturbing to see. She was in no way being harmed and had been fine with photographs until this very moment. Ben was standing just out of camera shot and stepped in immediately when she started crying.