Midweek Ramble

Friday will mark 1 month since our arrival - three weeks of it spent in Vietnam and one in Bali! It has been strange to be in a new place with few responsibilities. Let me re-phrase: in a new foreign place with a lot of time. Hal has his work and the kids are busy at school - just like in Maine. My work - looking after the house, sewing, volunteering, etc. - stayed in Maine, with the exception of looking after the family.

The first few weeks here were spent adjusting: to the climate, the people, the apartment, the currency, the neighborhood...you get the idea. Then we went to Bali - and I know this may sound strange but that was a vacation. If we were in the states for a school break it would have been to see my parents in Florida.

Now we settle into a real routine. I am finding a few things to do to keep myself out of trouble - a cooking class yesterday, the International Ladies of Vietnam Tea on Thursday mornings (1st one tomorrow) and I just cold-called Mr. Huong, whose name I found in a magazine, for lessons in Vietnamese.

When we went to Bali one of our scuba companions was a former UN employee who ran the refugee resettlement camps for Vietnam and Cambodia during the Vietnam War. He is Indonesian, lives in Java and has a summer home in....New Hampshire! Just over the Maine border. We left him Hal's card so that he could send us some underwater photos he took. I hope he sends them so that we can reach him to invite his family over for lobster in Maine because I would love to hear more of his stories.

We went bowling at the Diamond Plaza Shopping Center on Sunday. The folks on the lane next to ours were from San Diego. The woman we spoke with had left Vietnam when she was five years old and this was her first time back. I wonder if our friend in Bali "resettled" her? As a parent it makes me wonder how you decide when it is time to leave everything you know and love and move to another country? Have conditions in your country declined slowly over time is their a defining moment? I don't suppose you can ever know unless you are forced into that situation.

On a lighter note it is quite tricky re-thinking currency. For example, In Vietnam $1 US dollar equals 17,440 Vietnamese Dong. In Bali we used the Indonesian Rupiah - $1 US dollar = 11,675 rupiah. Next week we will spend some time in Thailand where $1 US dollar = 34.95 Thai Bhat. Cheat sheets converting 25, 50, 75 and 100 are helpful but I should probably learn to do it in my head. Who knows, maybe by the end of April I will have learned to think in Vietnamese!