A Foreign Fourth

July 4^th as an expat is always interesting. And by interesting, I mean "dull". I always want to do something, but I usually end up just making a flag fruit pizza and singing the Star Spangled Banner by myself. It’s just about as boring as it sounds. This year as July 4^th was approaching, I kept wishing that there were some picnic or barbeque I could go to.  Then, the day before, I decided to take the bull by its redcoat tails and organize my own bash. I texted two American coworkers, and they were both excited too (I had saved them from their own fate of lonely high notes), so it was set! One girl brought her “native” boyfriend, who was at first apprehensive about being around “all of those Americans”. I guess we’re a scary bunch, or she had exaggerated the size of the party to him. There were three Americans and two “natives”, including my incredibly supportive husband who was just as excited as I was about the party. He even hooked up his laptop to the TV so we could watch youtube videos of fireworks. On the menu were “grilled” burgers,

baked beans (with bacon bits!!!), chips, homemade lemonade, and, of course, a flag fruit pizza.

I had brought over some little flags a few years ago, and we did get a little flag waving in during the fireworks finale.

Everyone had fun, and no one was singing off key alone. This land was made for you and MEEEEEEEEE!

Driving

I think it’s time to write about driving. Driving sounds like no big deal, but it has been a major hurdle for me. When I moved to this country 4 years ago, some friends suggested I buy a car, and I basically laughed in their faces. “No way am I driving here!” I said. I scoffed. I was a scoffer. Why, you may ask? Drivers here are crazy. Traffic is crazy. Lane lines are usually non-existent, and when present, are taken as polite suggestions. Traffic lights are also suggestions, unless there is a police officer standing at the intersection. I just heard yesterday from a local – only the stopped police write tickets. The ones driving around are also breaking the rules, so you don’t have to worry about them. Wow. Laws are there, they just aren’t enforced. It’s perfectly normal to park a car on a main road. Just stop in the right lane and get out. As a courtesy, you might put on your blinkers to let people know that you are at a complete stop on a major road full of moving traffic.

And the pedestrians. Oh, the pedestrians. First of all, they are everywhere. They can jump in front of you on any road at any time. One classic from earlier this year was a man eating pudding while crossing the road. Nope, he couldn’t wait that extra 30 seconds. He was standing between two lanes of moving traffic just eating his pudding, waiting for a space to clear. And that’s pretty normal.

I describe all of this to support my position of not driving here, ever. I haven’t even mentioned the motorbikes, recycle carts, horse-drawn wagons, tractors, trucks, busses (we saw a bus literally rip the side off of a car one day AND JUST KEEP GOING!), and the dream team - taxis, shared taxis, and shared minibus taxis. These wonderful fellows’ normal mode of operation is to cut in front of everyone available, slam on their brakes, then speed ahead until they see another passenger, at which time they repeat their dance all over again. I did not want to drive.

Then we bought a car. Then we said “It would be a good idea for Marie to learn to drive.” Did I mention we bought a manual transmission? Did I mention I never got around to learning manual transmission? My first lessons were on the nearby college campus, which is built on a mountain top and whose entrance road is a big, steep hill with speed bumps. There are also wild dogs living on that campus. Oh, and the campus busses. Thankfully, it was pretty empty on weekends, so I got some good practice in. That was in January. I’ve driven about twice a month in the city since then, and I’ve been traumatized about twice a month since January. I’m happy to say, though, that after a debacle on Sunday when I couldn’t even get the car out of our neighborhood without stalling out (our neighborhood is really hilly, ok?) we made a new game plan. For three days this week my husband has been driving us to his work, then I switch over and drive to my work alone. It’s a 20 minute trip, all flat, lots of traffic, starting, stopping, etc. It’s perfect practice for me until I can get my confidence back up. I only had one mishap on Monday morning when I tried to start in 2nd gear. Other than that, I think I’m improving ever so slightly. And I’m even starting to enjoy it. I can do things here that I always wanted to do in the States, but knew would never fly, like inventing new lanes of traffic for myself, honking my horn at annoying people, and cutting people off in traffic. Confession – I also stop in the right lane on a major road when I’m waiting for my husband after work. No one even gets upset because it’s the normal mode of operation! Hey, I might get into this.

 Do any of you have driving stories? Did anyone else have trouble learning manual transmission?

Home Improvement

This post is not about the tv show, but I just want to say – they don’t make television like they used to. Home Improvement, Full House, Family Matters. I never thought I would say this, but I miss the 90s.

Ok, the real subject of this post are the home improvements that have been going on around our house for the past year:

• The Great Leak of ‘11

• Tore out our old wood floor that had gotten water under it during the Great Leak of ’11
• Added windows to our balcony to make them more functional year-round

• Fixed a leaky shower

• Got an air conditioning unit installed (yay!)

As I mentioned in an earlier post, getting repair people to come out to your house here is nearly impossible. For example, the Great Leak of ’11 started about 4 days before our wedding. My parents, my brother and I were staying in the new house the week before the wedding. Everything was already getting pretty stressful, then a phone call came from my soon-to-be husband one night after everyone had checked in – the neighbors had called him to say we were leaking on them and could I go downstairs and check it out. I was sleeping in the living room, so I had to wake everyone up just to find some clothes, and went downstairs. Yep. We were leaking. We called the guy who had done our bathroom remodel every day for the next three days, but somehow he just couldn’t squeeze us into his schedule. To me, this was an emergency. We could not take showers. We could not do laundry. I was getting married. He finally got around to coming while we were on our honeymoon. My in-laws (they aren’t reading this, but a big shout-out to them) came and took care of it while we were gone. My mother-in-law told me after the fact she actually broke out in cold sores after seeing a three foot high pile of rubble in what used to be our bathroom, and all of the new flooring torn out. When we got back the house looked exactly the same as when we left, and the leak was fixed. Turned out it wasn’t the bathroom guy’s fault after all. Faulty furnace pipes.

Our wood floor didn’t take too nicely to all of that water, though, so we finally decided we should replace it after my MIL and also my best friend who was visiting fell through the floor a little. Having guests falling through the floor is something to be avoided, if you can. So, in March sometime we had the floor replaced in the living room, which meant clearing out all of the furniture, paying a guy to come tear up the floor, re-plastering the bottom of the walls ourselves, painting the room, then getting the new floor put in. We decided not to do the floor ourselves since it didn’t cost that much more to just have someone else who knew what they were doing do it. It took a total of about 4 days.  My father-in-law saved us by coming each day to let the workers in and supervise them. He also came when the windows were installed on the balcony, and before we even moved into the house he came to supervise the bathroom , new windows, and new furnace projects. He’s a life saver!

                            Here's me enjoying the new floor before we moved in all the furniture!

I repaired the leaky shower myself finally after the shower guys flaked out on us five times or so. I felt like quite the handy woman with my silicone gun and fixity powers.

Our most recent project is the A/C unit that came last night. The guys were an hour late, and we started panicking and calling them every 10 minutes. Turns out the delivery guy’s phone ‘ran out of battery’ and that’s why we couldn’t contact him. My guess is he was eating dinner, which is fine, but I just wish people would tell the truth. Two installation guys came, and they decided that the best way to install it would be to lower it with a rope from our upstairs neighbor’s house. Wait, WHAT? Is this normal? Why do I ask if things are normal anymore? So, I was assigned the lovely task of going upstairs and asking our neighbors who we’ve never met if we can lower our air conditioning from their balcony with a rope. At least we got to meet our neighbors! They said sure, not problem, and we gave them some cherries as a thank you. They didn’t actually lower the a/c. They tied a rope and one guy pulled it up out of our house and positioned it from their balcony. We were a little disappointed at the end when he told us that we were all set – and we would just have to get an electrician to hook everything up now. Um, what? I thought that was your job. Anyway, we’ll try to get an electrician tonight and hopefully sit in a blissfully climate-controlled room tonight. You just never know what will happen here. I’m trying to roll with the punches.

 Success!

Has anyone in other places had unreliable home improvement people? I am starting to realize why the DIY movement is so big in the US. If want something done right…DIY!

Pictures to come!

Stitches

Why did I call this blog Marie in Stitches? Well, I think my life is pretty funny sometimes, but also, always the lover of double meanings, I do actually sew. I won’t show all of my projects here, because many of my projects remind me of Vanessa’s sewing project for Theo. (Cosby Show, anyone?) In case you missed that episode (you should really watch all of the episodes of the Cosby Show) Vanessa offers to duplicate a designer shirt for Theo for a fraction of the cost, and the final product is awesome, in that it would take incredible skill to make a shirt look that bad on purpose. It was so horrible that it was almost cool in its horribleness. But it didn’t look like the original. Anyway, some of my projects are like that, but some actually turn out, like this shirt that I made recently. It was my first try at a men’s button-down, and I have to say I was pretty pleased with the result. The owner, (Mr. In Stitches) has even worn it in public without incident or anyone asking if the shirt was homemade. That is the definition of success in my book!

I also made this puppy dog hooded towel a couple of months ago. (Sorry for the sidewaysiness.)

The owner has also been using it regularly, although not in public, and seems quite happy with it. However, I will not be showing a picture of the matching hand puppet that I made. That was a “Vanessa”. I still gave it to the intended recipient, and, as I thought, he didn’t notice that the puppet had a perpetual smirk or that I used dark thread on white terrycloth and could not for the life of me remove the stitching (For those who care - don’t make a wrong stitch on terry cloth.)

 So, there you have it. I am Marie. These are my stitches.

Flowers, Flowers Everywhere!

I haven’t written lately because I’ve been so busy having various adventures! Here is one:

We went to a flower festival a couple of weeks ago about 1.5 hours from where we live. I heard about it from a Scottish coworker, and since I got the flower loving gene from my mom, I immediately wanted to go. Unfortunately, the week before the festival we had to rip out our living room floor (or more accurately, pay someone to rip it out) in anticipation for our shiny, new, non-squeaky floor that visitors and kin would not fall through. But that is another story, or two, so back to the flower festival. As written in a previous post, workers and repairmen are not the most reliable crowd here. In fact, their unreliability is quite reliable. We had offered to take our Scottish friend to the festival with us, but then had to cancel and reinstate those plans about 47 times during that week. The final word on Friday night was that the new floor was going in on Monday, so the flower festival was a go! At that point our living room floor was bare cement and all of the things that had been in the living room were then not in the living room and had found homes in our other two rooms or kitchen. So, the house was a bit difficult to live in, and a day out at the flower festival was looking better all the time. So off we went to pick up our friend.

It was a pleasant journey, until we reached the part of the highway that they had decided to turn into an unimproved dirt road, which was the last 30 kilometers of our journey. There was a water-sprayer truck, which seemed to help a bit with the dust, but also created a bit of mud. When we got back into the city, the guy at the carwash was amazed – “Where did you go with this car?” It looked like we had driven to Siberia and back, driving directly through any lakes or rivers in our way. Actually, I felt pretty cool driving around like that for a few hours. Oh yes, we are cool enough to have a car THIS muddy.

Anyway, when we entered the little town holding the festival, it was instant charm. They had posted signs for a free parking lot, which turned out to be someone’s olive grove. We just chose a tree and parked under it. Then, we followed the sound of the banging of drums to the main part of the festival. Inexplicably, there was a group of about 10 middle-aged women dancing quite rambunctiously around the drummer. This spontaneous drumming and dancing lasted the whole day. It looked like a little mini-wedding wherever they popped up. We all just had to shrug our shoulders and say “Whatever”, because there was no real rhyme or reason to it.

And we come to the festival itself. There were a hundred or so stands of flower sellers laid out on two main streets in the city. They had also set up the normal market, so there was quite a large area to walk around. The flowers were, of course, beautiful, and even better, really cheap. We got 3 rose plants between the three of us for about 4 dollars each, and many plants were just one or two dollars. We had lunch in a nice little hidden garden café that our friend knew about (he goes every year), which was a nice reprieve from the drum and dance routine. We came home with 6 plants total, some of which I don’t know the names. One was a kind of daisy, one is called the “Prayer Plant”, one succulent I found online and identified as a blue echeveria (?), and two roses, as I said. We gave the orange rose to my MIL and kept the pink one. All plants seem happy so far and are playing well with the other plants.

All in all, the festival was quite cute and worth the drive.

Wild Grapes

In honor of Easter I have been reading part of John Stott's "Through the Bible" daily devotional book. Today I hit a devotional about John 15 - The Vine and the Branches. A few years back God used these verses to cause some growth in my spiritual life and hammer out some "trust issues" I had been having with Him. So, it was really nice to be reminded of this teaching. It felt like returning to and old friend's house.

Then, in the middle of the devotional there were some suggested readings the normal verses about the fruit of the Spirit, and then Isaiah 5. So, I looked at Isaiah 5. God found some good soil, planted a vineyard, made it all nice, but then the vines gave wild grapes instead of grapes. I don't know what wild grapes are, but apparently not the result He was going for, because he proceeds to trample the vineyard, undo everything He had done, and let it get overgrown with weeds and thorns. I just keep thinking - what are wild grapes? So, I looked it up.

Most commentators that I read about commented that wild grapes are beautiful, but sour and even poisonous. Also, they are what you would expect in the wild if nothing was done to cultivate a vineyard. So, rather than just even being unfruitful, which perhaps would have warranted more care (just my speculation), God's vineyard had actually produced bad fruit as if He had done nothing at all. So, in my life, wild grapes would be the natural sin from my sin nature. Is there good fruit in my life? Do I live as if God has done anything at all for me? Sometimes I wonder, but then I go back to the vine and the branches. Christ is the true vine. If I am living in Him, I will produce fruit. The branch can't say "Well, I feel like producing fruit today." It just does.

One more part of the devotional that struck me was about pruning. I thought of my mom and grandma. They always get so much grief over their overpruning practices ("Don't kill the thing!"), but in the springtime, my mom's garden is really something to see. There is color everywhere. Stott mentions also that spiritual growth is rarely disconnected with some kind of suffering. This is a great thought. Happy Easter everyone! He is Risen!

Obvious Tax

It's tax time! Having just finished my taxes, I've got taxes on the mind. I'll just print out my forms and mail them off tomorrow - I won't even need the automatic foreign resident 2 month extension this year! Sometimes I feel silly filling taxes here. While I'm filling out the forms I feel like I'm doing a fake out with the IRS - here's how much money I made on line 347 OOPS! I made it all outside of the US on line 758. Gotcha! It seems like a lot of form filling, adding lines 5-61 and multiplying by .4749283 to write the number "0" at the bottom, but it is pretty amazing, when you think about it, that they made a handful of two page forms to accomodate the various life situations of over 300 million people. It's also amazing, that with five thousand here and three thousand there, they collect enough to run a country (I know, there's a huge deficit, but it's still amazing). I wouldn't be saying it's amazing if my number wasn't zero, but when you think about it, it is big job.

Then I was thinking, what if I and others around me could collect a little here and there as a tax. I like saying "If I had a nickel for every time...", but since nickels are out of style, I'll up it to a quarter. The first tax I would collect is the Obvious Tax. When people tell me something obvious about myself, I will collect a quarter. If they are married, have children, or were born after 2002, they get a deduction, 5 cents for each that applies. Examples of "Obvious" qualifying statements include, but are not limited to - "You are tall." and "You look tired, (teacher)." These two will be enough, actually. I could finance my own Department of Transportation with that tax.

The second tax I would collect is the Spam Tax. This would be harder to enforce, but if I only enforce it with spam text messages, I should be able to collect enough from my bank and telephone company alone to finance my Ministry of the Interior Design. Who ever heard of a bank spamming its customers? Do banks in the US do this?

PS - As a disclaimer, just because I don't pay taxes in the US doesn't mean I don't pay taxes. I'm actually really thankful that the US doesn't double-tax citizens who live in foreign countries. That was a great, merciful idea, whoever thought of it.