Bangkok Trip 3

So here are the last of our photos from our trip to Bangkok. First of all, a couple more photos of Sarah playing in our hotel room. (Let's face it, when you travel with an infant, playing in the hotel does constitute a big portion of how you spend your time.) Look how well she is doing holding herself up when she lays on her tummy these days!
Here you can see her just at the beginning of rolling over--she can roll all the way, 360 degrees now--front to back, back to front, over and over--and she's loving it!
On our last evening, David and I decided to go for some Japanese at a huge mall called Central World that was very close to our hotel. This mall supposedly includes over 100 restaurants and 500 stores!! As we browsed our multitude of restaurant choices, we saw that the mall included a disproportionate amount of Japanese restaurants, particularly sushi bars and shabu restaurants (a kind of Japanese hot pot or fondue where you cook the food yourself in a boiling pot of broth at your table). David said he'd always wanted to eat at a sushi place where they send the sushi around to all the tables on a conveyer belt. I am a huge fan of Shabu, after eating it at an incredibly restaurant in Park City, Utah, called Shabu Shabu. So, we saw this place called Shabu Shi--a combination shabu restaurant and sushi bar, actually an all-you-can-eat buffet for less than $10! So, we had to try it! The food turned out to be kind of mediocre (as is true of most inexpensive all-you-can-eat buffets) but it was still really fun and a cool experience!
The sushi and raw meat and veggies for the shabu coming to our table on the conveyer belt.

Our Shabu pot--the broth was very disappointing compared to the incredible Shabu broth I'd had in Utah.

The fun Asian/Modern decor of the restaurant--which was quite popular, as you can see! The next day we had a morning flight back home. Sarah did great on the plane--she really travels quite well which, I must say, is a huge blessing when travel is as big a part of life as it is for us. We came home pretty tired, but very satisfied with our weekend in Bangkok!

Bangkok Trip 2

On our second day, David, Sarah and I visited Bangkok's famous Bumrungrad Hospital for a couple of medical appointments. We walked in, registered, got appointments, saw doctors--and the whole thing was incredibly convenient, easy, professional and reasonably priced. We are definitely fans of the medical system in Thailand! Adding to all that, the hospital (particularly the new wing) is very impressively decorated:

It has TWO Starbucks, about 8 different restaurants and a bookstore on-site!
In my last post, I mentioned the enjoyable napping our family did on the trip. It was certainly very convenient to stay at a hotel that provides a baby crib, so we didn't have to lug our pack n' play along. Their crip was HUGE, so big that David just couldn't resist getting in there with Sarah himself:
Here is a cute photo of Sarah playing on my lap in the room (these photos are a bit random):
After naptime, it was POOL time!!!
We think Sarah's hat makes her look like a junior member of "The Deadliest Catch" or perhaps someone who would run a lighthouse. :)
The pool was heated, which I think was a key factor in it being Sarah's most positive pool experience to date. She still hasn't discovered the fun of splashing, but she waded happily with her parents in the perfect temperature water for about an hour or so. Very relaxing.
One of the highlights of the trip was a trip we took to an Italian restaurant called Ma Be Ba. I did some internet research before we left to see what restaurants were near our hotel, and this restaurant (whose odd name is derived from the beginning of the three Italian words; Mangaire (food), Bere (drink) and Ballare (dance)) came up frequently as having some of the best, most authentic Italian food available for a reasonable price. Every site also mentioned the decor of the restaurant, several describing it as "kitschy" or "flamboyant." I kind of liked it:

Lots of brick and warm-colored mosaic, a painted ceiling (OK, so the faux sistine chapel thing was a little over the top), sort of Tuscan and a little reminiscent of Antonio Gaudi, with some curvy arches and stuff. In any case, the restaurant was unique, the food and wine all excellent, the "reasonable prices" didn't quite make us choke on our food (though I do think that one meal used about 1/4 of our budget for the whole weekend). A significant part of the cost of the meal was the $25 cheese we ordered. You see, David and I are suckers for a gregarious Italian restauranteur who comes to your table to make small talk and sell you on his delicious specials. He told us about this cheese he had just gotten in from Italy the day before. "There's mozzarella and then there's mozzarella!" he said. David could see in my eyes, I really did want to tast this mozzarella! Our gracious host never mentioned the price of this cheese, but we ordered it thinking, "How much could a cheese cost??" It came out like 3 scoops of beautiful golden ice cream surrounded by slices of fresh tomato topped with olive oil and fresh basil (one of my favorite salads), and I do have to say this mozzarella was heaven in your mouth. The flavor was light and delicate, while the texture was rich and creamy. Yum! But we were still a little shocked when our bill indicated that our appetizer cost as much as our two entrees combined!! Oh well, it was quite an experience and a very memorable meal!!

Bangkok Trip 1

Sorry I am so late posting our photos from last week's trip to Bangkok! We got back on Tuesday, and it been a little bit busy--this has been my first chance to post! Plus we took a lot of pictures, so it took a while for me to pick which ones to put on the blog and then resize them and all that. Whew! Well, enough excuses!
David and I went to Bangkok last weekend to get some immunizations administered to Sarah and for him to take the LSAT exam (not that we are thinking of moving home just yet, but the scores are good for 5 years so it opens up the option of law school sometime in the next few years if we feel that's where God is leading us). Also, it served as a little mini-vacation, which was MUCH needed after a VERY busy June!! The trip overall was pretty great--the weather was humid but only in the 80's (not as hot as we'd expected!) and it only rained in the evenings. Our hotel was very nice and had a great location, so we were able to walk most places we needed to go without getting stuck in the miserable Bangkok traffic or on the increasingly inconvenient-to-use Bangkok sky rail system. We ate some FANTASTIC food, did a little bit of shopping, enjoyed the pool, took some naps in our comfortable and air-conditioned hotel room (both Sarah and her parents!), and just had a generally pretty relaxing time! Here are some photo highlights (I'll do this as a 3 part series over the next few days, so be sure to check back!) PART ONE:

We began our trip by arriving at the airport to discover our flight had been delayed 2 hours. We'd gotten to the airport 2 hours early (I am sort of obsessive about getting to the airport early) so that meant we had 4 hours to kill. Ugh. Not that fun with an infant along for the trip! But Sarah did great--you can see in these photos David did a great job keeping her entertained, we also strolled her around a bunch, and she even napped in her stroller for a while!

We had dinner on the plane that night, and the next morning opted NOT to pay $12 a person for the breakfast buffet at the hotel, so we headed out to Starbucks. However, we did notice that our hotel had extremely reasonably if ironically priced set lunches each day for $5 including a soda or tea!! So we decided to try them out. We were SOOO glad we did! The food was incredible (we'd heard the restaurant at our hotel had won "Best New Restaurant in Bangkok" in 2008), so we decided we'd have lunch at the hotel every day of our trip. On the first day I had a delicious beef tenderloin with a spicy sauce served on pesto spaghetti with garlic toast and a Caesar salad:
The photo doesn't do it justice since I didn't think to take the picture till I was 2/3 done with the meal! David ordered roasted chicken:

Our hotel, the Courtyard Marriott, was located in a very swanky area, right in between the Four Seasons Hotel and the Grand Hyatt. Here you can see the driveway of the Grand Hyatt, which with four story white columns and huge beautiful palm trees, is very Grand indeed:
Part of the Hyatt's hotel complex was a very upscale shopping center, with stores like Burberry and Prada and places where you buy watches by appointment and all that, called the Erawan:

On the property of the hotel's shopping complex there was this shrine, which constantly had people burning incesnse or bestowing flowers on it, but really drew large crowds in the evenings:
I assumed that the ground the hotel was built on was sacred for some historical reason, and so they made sure to include an already existing shrine on the property. The actual story, depicted on the sign below, is MUCH more interesting, though not really all that spiritually inspiring if you ask me:
This is what the sign says:
"At the end of the year in 1955, the union of Thai hotel and tourism company limited, the founder of the Erawan Hotel was told by Rear Admiral Luang Suwichanphaet, who specialized in astrology, that the original moment for laying the foundation stone of the Erawan Hotel was not really right auspicious moment. It must be corrected by building a shrine of the Thao Maha Brahma and a spirit house in the area of the hotel. Then a shrine with the image of the Thao Maha Brahma and a spirit house were built following the advice. The image was a sculpture in plaster covered with gold leaf, which was designed and sculpted by Mr. Chit Phimkowit, a sculptor of the fine arts department. It was brought to enshrine there since the 9th November, 1956. And a worship ceremony of the image has been held there on the 9th November of every year."

A little Google search about this shrine revealed some more interesting info. It is known as the "four-faced Buddha" and worshipped by the Thai buddhists, although it is actually a depiction of the Brahman/Hindu deity Phra Phom. Apparently, this is a VERY famous Shrine, and considered a compulsory stop when tour groups from other places in Asia come to Bangkok. I found several stories on the web of folks who come to Bangkok at least once a year just to worship at this Shrine!! Apparently the place has the reputation of a very effective wishing-well, but the web is also full of warnings about the shrine--if you make a wish there and it comes true, you MUST return and give a thanks offering or bad karma will hit you full force. That certainly explains the crowds. Still, a 50 year old shrine built to bring prosperity to a shopping mall and five-star hotel with confused religious imagery just doesn't seem all that inspiring to me, personally. ;)

Anyway, come back for more of our trip to Bangkok tomorrow!

Mama's New Baby

That's right, there is a new baby in town, and this Mama is very excited! Today I brought home my brand-new eliptical exercise machine! Well, its not brand new in any way, except to me. I am on a listserv for local expats, and the last couple of months they've been full of ads for people selling their furnishings and such because they are moving back to their home countries. Recently I saw an ad for an eliptical machine for 1/3 of the normal price, and I just had to jump on it. I started loving elipticals when I used to go to the gym and I could distract myself from exercising by watching TV or listening to music while really working up a sweat. My favorite kind of exercise is the distracted kind. And since its been difficult to get back to exercising (besides lugging my child and all her stuff around while walking nearly everywhere I go) since having Sarah, and I am hoping my NEW BABY will just do the trick. Here are some photos of the new baby with my original and most precious ever baby:






As you can see, Sarah is a big fan of our new addition as well! She was immediately drawn to it, and enjoyed touching all the new surfaces and observing every detail. :) In the photos with her, you can see my house helper holding Sarah. She is always commenting on Sarah's strength and what an active baby she is. After seeing Sarah's interest in the exercise machine today, she commented that Sarah would definitely love to play sports and exercise in the future, which she said, "Showed the Western aspect of her personality." (i.e. non-Asian because Asian women generally have no use for sports). :)

Father's Day "Card"

As part of celebrating David's first Father's Day, I put together this little photo slideshow of some cute photos and David and Sarah together as a Father's Day "card" from Sarah.

Cultural Learning and Stroller Issues

So, I was inspired by my good friend Erin-Ashley who recently wrote about a local holiday and her not-so-successful attempts to celebrate it with her neighbors (read about it here), to write about some cultural issues I have been facing recently. You may be thinking--"She's lived there for five years! Shouldn't she have this figured out already?!" But, no no, I am far from having this culture figured out. Just when I think I've learned a few things, my eyes are opened to how much more I have to learn. So before I get started telling you the specifics of my current cultural challenge, I want to share with you some important principles to keep in mind (which I have to repeat to myself like a mantra at times to keep my American-justice-loving self from committing some big faux pa!):

• Property does not mean the same thing here as it does in the U.S. People share stuff soooo much more here (this is good!) Beware telling a friend you like something of theirs because they are likely to try to give it to you as a gift (see point #2). The line between "mine" and "yours" is much blurrier here. Also, this is a finders=keepers culture. What that means is, if you leave your cell phone in a cab, it belongs to the cab driver or next passenger or whomever finds it. This is NOT considered stealing here. Upstanding moral folks will keep things they find that someone else lost without trying (or trying very hard) to locate the former owner to return the item. When you think about it, this is not unreasonable when you live in a country of 1.3 billion people!
• Gift giving is VERY important. I am going to go out on a limb and say that gift-giving here is to relationships what mutual respect and quality time are to friendships in the U.S. Important principle--whereas gifts in the states are given to thank a person for something they have already done or to honor an existing relationship, here gifts serve as a gesture to signal someone you are hoping for a closer (and mutually beneficial) relationship in the future. In the states this is VERY counter-cultural--the idea of giving a gift in order to obligate someone to yourself. I admit this is still hard for me to swallow at times. But when you get to know people here and you realize that this is what EVERYONE does, and its done generally with a good heart, it gets a little easier.

So, keep these two things in mind as I explain my current predicament. Since we walk almost everywhere here, having a good, lightweight, sturdy, well-made stroller for your child is a huge blessing! My parents bought us a really nice Maclaren stroller for Christmas, and we use it nearly daily. However, we don't have a good place to store it. We live on the fourth floor, and it would be very difficult for me to haul it and a child up and down four flights of stairs every time I wanted to go out. Our stairwell (where many of our friends keep their strollers) does not have a good little nook at the bottom for keeping strollers since it leads down to the basement parking garage. Some neighbors of ours had the same predicament, so they began parking their stroller at the front gate of the complex, in the room where the security guards sit. The room is long and narrow, with plenty of space toward the back, perfect for stroller storage. This has not seemed to be a problem for them, so we decided to do the same thing.

Everything was going great until a couple of weeks ago. I walk into the room to get our stroller to take Sarah for a walk and I see one of the guards at the back of the room sitting in the stroller eating his lunch. A full grown man (albeit a small one) sitting in a stroller designed for a child. Despite my knowledge of principle #1 above, I was NOT HAPPY. I pretty much ranted about the injustice of it, the who-does-he-think-he-is of it, to David for our whole walk up to lunch, the whole lunch, and the whole walk back. I was determined to speak my mind to the guards when we got back, but David (thankfully) talked me out of it, saying that it would only make the situation worse.

Since then, I don't think they have sat in the stroller again (the guard was clearly embarrassed I caught him doing it), but there have been other problems. Greasy handmarks on the sun-shade with little dried food particles now stuck to it (this, at least, could be an honest mistake made by a guard who'd just finished lunch and needed to move the stroller for some reason). Then yesterday I discovered that someone had taken a pen and had been DOODLING on the sun shade. I admit this is REALLY HARD for me to understand. I am getting angry just thinking about it--why would you think its ok to doodle on something that belongs to someone else just because they are storing that item in your workspace?? You can see I have a long way to go!

So, obviously, one option is I stop storing my stroller there. It very well may come to that. But storing my stroller in the guard room is still the most convenient option for me, so before we go there I am going to try another solution based on principle #2 above--gifts. :) I realized that I have been using my American cultural methods to express my appreciation to the guards for letting us store the stroller in their space--friendliness, saying thank you, smiling, etc. But I had not been doing the proper Asian thing! So yesterday I bought some fruit (this is the most common gift--practically a currency of relationships!) and gave it to the guard on duty when I returned the stroller yesterday. I plan to kill them with kindness. My hope is that, eventually, I will get the reputation of "that really nice foreigner lady" and the guards will WANT to respect my property, etc. This seemed successful yesterday. Normally when I retrieve or return my stroller I get barely a nod or grunt of acknowledgement. Yesterday, after the gift of 1 kg of plums which cost about $0.70, the guard was soooo polite, wanting to take the stroller to store it for me, making very polite conversation and everything. I thought to myself, why hadn't I done of this sooner!!! It was very difficult for me at first--to give a gift to someone who might have been a part of disrespecting my stuff. But the instant change in the guard's demeanor melted my heart as well. He began seeing me as a person, and I began seeing him that way too.

At least on that level, this experiment in cultural relevance was a success. Will it improve my stroller issues--we shall see!!

Weekend Trip

David, Sarah and I traveled to a small town in the mountains of our province this weekend to do some teaching at a retreat. We've had a really busy couple of weeks (hence very few blog posts), so although our trip was not without work responsibilities, it was still really nice to get away and enjoy some fresh mountain air and a beautiful little tourist town! Here are some photo highlights of our trip:
Here Sarah is sleeping in the taxi on our way to the airport with just her little pinky in her mouth, a la Dr. Evil!! :)

One of the main attractions in this city is the "Old Town"--a tourism district which has been beautifully restored with cobble stone streets and canals running throughout. Here are Sarah and I standing in front of the old water wheel at the entrance to the old town.

The old town is full of little alleyways and corridors which really give you the feel of stepping back in time.

In front of a restaurant, we see the wait staff dressed in traditional clothing getting their daily instructions from the manager before the dinner hour begins.

One of the most beautiful parts of the old town is the canals which weave and wind throughout the town. Many stores and restaurants are only accessible by little footbridges that run across the canals.

Here is an example of the lovely quaint architecture of the buildings and restaurants.

One of my favorite aspects of the old town is the use of traditional red lanterns for decoration. They are all lit up at night, and there are candles floating down the canals--so romantic! Too bad David and I have never had the chance to come here just the two of us--we've been separately a couple of times, and this trip we spent the evenings in our hotel room as Sarah slept. :)

Saturday afternoon we stopped for some drinks at the Two Cats coffee house, an adorable little spot at the top of a hill in old town.
While we were there, I never saw the two cats, but I did see these two dogs!

Sarah made a friend with this little girl whose family had recently moved from a big city out to this town in the mountains to open an inn. The tourism business must be good here!

Sarah laid next to me on the bench as David and I enjoyed our quiet little spot at this cafe.

Our table had a great view of all the roofs of the old town as well as the surrounding mountains.

That weekend, Sarah spent a lot of time in her carrier as we walked around. Here she is asleep with the strap (which she loves to chew and suck on) still in her mouth!

On Sunday, David and I got to have lunch with some great friends, Chris and Sarah Morrison, who live in another city. We ate tacos and fajitas at a cafe run by an actual Mexican lady. The food was delicious and authentic--a REAL rarity when you live on the other side of the world from Mexico!!