Full-blown Crisis Mode

Existential crisis, that is. One might expect this from a recent college grad: someone undertaking a gap year abroad, before they start their career, find a significant other to settle down with and have kids. This is not what is expected of a 35+ year old woman who has graduated from college twice, who can count trips abroad on hands AND toes, who has had a career, found a significant other (uhhh, twice), settled down and had kids. We have just completed 100 days abroad and I thought that I would have been neck-deep in projects by now. I would be volunteering in an orphanage, I would be amazing my family with culinary Thai-American fusion delights, I would be on my way to fluency in Thai, driving a scooter carefree down the roadways, writing children’s travel books, maintaining a successful travel blog and spending my spare time becoming a svelte, tan Muay Thai fighting mom warrior. Alas, this has just not been the case.

Ben finished his TEFL (teaching English as a Foreign Language) certification and began working part-time as an English teacher to young teens. This has really challenged him and generally keeps him out of trouble most weekends. His obsession with CrossFit resurfaced briefly until a new, minor injury sidelined him. He is taking some private Thai lessons and has a scooter to zip around town. The kids have found their groove going to daycare twice a week and have made some expat friends that meet around town for playdates. However, we had an epic fail trying to enroll them into extracurricular activities. It turns out that American kids (or maybe just my American kids) are not as disciplined as Thai kids, and they spent the majority of a karate class making faces at themselves in the mirror. Needless to say, the teacher very politely refused to let them return so we spend our afternoons playing soccer in the yard instead.

I’ve found that even abroad, I’m only really good at cleaning the house. I compared my idleness to all of Ben’s activity and started stressing out. I also found myself wondering why we came here. What did I want to get out of this trip? Was it meeting my expectations? And most importantly, how will things be different in Oregon when we return home? I looked back on my original bucket list to see how we were faring and I was pretty pleased to see that we had ticked off many of the items.

• Make paper out of elephant poop
• Take a Thai cooking class
• Ride a motorcycle across Laos (Ben)
• Lose the baby weight
• Scuba dive (Kara)
• Raise a lantern during Loi Krathong –the Lantern Festival
• Fight Muay Thai
• Volunteering TBD
• Take a junk cruise in Halong Bay, Vietnam
• Eat lots of new fruit
• Explore the Gardens by the Bay in Singapore
• Teach the kids how to swim
• See the sunrise over Angkor Wat
• Master the art of using chopsticks
• Teach English (Ben)
•  Jump off the cliffs at Chiang Mai’s Grand Canyon (Kara)

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I started to have a change of heart about this crisis-thing. Moving abroad with two little kids and setting up a new life takes time and the fact that we got on a plane with one-way tickets is an achievement all on it’s own. It doesn’t necessarily have be defined by rushing through the typical backpacking checklists of 1) see the temple, 2) ride the elephants, 3) try Muay Thai once, 4) ride a tuk-tuk, etc. Furthermore, I should be proud of the things that I have accomplished this week. I rented a car and taught myself how to drive on the left-hand side of the road–in traffic–where lanes are just guidelines and speed limits don’t matter. I completed a doula training course and I can either use these new skills to help my friends in labor or start a brand new business. And I weighed myself at the little gym in our building and I have semi-intentionally lost 10 pounds since we arrived 3 months ago. Ben may be more decisive and outgoing in his planning, but I was accomplishing things too.

I’m still hoping to discover some hidden talent for like, reiki, drum circling, essential oil application, or shamanism. 😉 Instead of fretting over getting weird diseases, I really want to rekindle my passion for studying diseases. I dream of learning a useful language or writing something and getting paid for it, starting an Etsy shop, or even doubling down and getting all those plastic surgeries I’ve joked about having over the years. Ultimately, I decided that the goal of this gap year should be to do what makes us happiest. If that means that we move to Nepal for a month so that Ben can hike to Everest base camp, then that’s what we do. If it means that I get Thai massages twice a week and grow out bushy eyebrows from not plucking, then that’s what I do. If Falcon wants to eat peanut butter for every meal, and Blue wants to play in the sand on a beach for hours then we will try to accommodate them (within reason). Hopefully, in the process we will learn more about ourselves, discover new passions and skills to achieve them, at the very least, get all this stuff out of our systems so that we can return home refreshed and more well-rounded.

Another One Bites the Crust

Today marks a new milestone in our move across the world. For better or for worse, we have run out of Life cereal. To most people this is an inconsequential detail, I will even go so far as to say that it may be irrelevant. But for those of you who know our 4-year old son Falcon, the sunrise today ushered in a new era -one of immense power struggles, deprivation, and passionate fury. Our child loves bread, with every fiber of his petite and wispy being. He loves cereal, oatmeal, pancakes, toast, croissants, macaroni and sugar snap peas, but only the peas, not the pod. Running out of our last creature comfort from home is devastating for him and we are not above bribing him to try new foods at this point. Thankfully, he is showing a very slight interest in sticky rice which we are rewarding with heaping spoonfuls of peanut butter or ice cream or both.

The rest of us have been fairing only slightly better with this transition. Finding SIM cards for our smart phones…no problem, establishing residency in a foreign country…got it, opening a bank account…piece of cake. Did someone say cake? Finding food to satisfy an insanely ravenous bottomless-pit of a stomach, one picky child, a modestly discerning palate and one toddler who shouldn’t even be mentioned because she would eat dirt and be happy about it….tough. We have found a grocery store that sells corn flakes, peanut butter and macaroni and cheese so we won’t starve, but we may complain a lot. Nearly everyone who heard that we were moving to Thailand said, “Ohhh, the food! The food is amazing. Tell me all about it. I love Thai food. Send me pictures.” And while we certainly have had some good food, I have not experienced the culinary orgasm that I was expecting. We buy fruit at the markets and have indulged heavily in persimmons, avocados, pineapple and bananas. We also make our daily trip(s) to the food vendors for fried rice, mangoes and sticky rice, pad thai, omelettes and meat skewers. I make green and red curry at home and every once in awhile we go to restaurants for mystery meat noodle soup. So far, all of it has just been mediocre. I am really looking forward to going on a food tour and really trying some new things and having some explanation of what it is that we are eating.

Purchasing meat at the grocery store is intimidating me into vegetarianism.

Speaking of mystery meat, it’s everywhere…on skewers, in soup, by itself, on pizza (see below), in pad thai, freaking everywhere. It’s somewhere on the nugget-bologna-hot dog spectrum and it’s called misleading things, like “sausage,” which implies that it is meaty, fatty and/or peppery. But don’t be fooled, it’s none of those things. Now that I’ve written all this, I’m starting to doubt that it’s even meat. Maybe it’s tofu with the essence of meat. I need to investigate this further.

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Although there is a lot of gastronomic uncertainty here, I have to admit that it is a little thrilling to order something new. I have found that Ben and Blue have totally different techniques than I do when it comes to the unknown. I’m an ease-into-it kind of girl. Have something familiar with a side of unfamiliar. I’ll try chips, but the seaweed flavor. I’ll have the pad thai but instead of chicken, I’ll have the teeny, tiny shrimps and wonton noodles. Usually, this technique works pretty well for me. Ben and Blue are the jump-in-with-both-feet kind. He’s like, “I’ll have the barbequed, purple blob.” Come to find out, it’s a whole, barely cooked squid on a stick. Not breaded or seasoned calamari as we know it, but straight up, out of the ocean, squid on a stick. Eat it like a rubber seafood lollipop. I suppose that there is some merit to their way of things, but frankly, I let the voyeur in me just sit back and enjoy the show.

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If the dearly beloved Anthony Bourdain was still around, I would challenge him to live solely on the food of another ethnic group. Here is Ben’s attempt at “sandwiches.”