Dinner party

Tonight we are having friends over for dinner – our first dinner party and our first guests of any kind except for the folks downstairs. Although the apartment is still a little bare in terms of accoutrements, I think we should be able to do OK for a dinner. We found the Thai grocery in town and outfitted ourselves with some basics: smoked crushed chili, Szechuan pepper, real soy sauce (the stuff they sell at the grocery store is thick and flavorless), mian (noodles), fen (noodles), We bought a rice steamer. We bought some chopsticks and small bowls.

Here’s the menu:

• Chips and that chili sauce (app)
• Rice
• Steamed squash
• Wok-fried kale and garlic
• Broc, carrot and tofu
• chili eggplant and green beans
• chowmein/ spicy noodles
• green tea pound cake
• vanilla/choc/lingonberry ice cream
• orange slices

UPDATE: It went well. We definitely need to buy a wok because it is really hard to stir-fry without the high sides. If you don’t stir enough either things burn or you turn the temperature down and it is too greasy. Folks were game to try everything and seemed to enjoy it all. The green tea pound cake was good. I overbaked it slightly (still getting used to my new oven) but the ice cream made up for the slight dryiness. In addition to the dishes I listed, we also did szechuan potatoes. We baked them to save time (and oil= and then just briefly tossed them in the pan with hot oil and the chilis, etc. We don’t have a dishwasher here (sigh) but we did the dishes as a team and had them all taken care of in about 30 minutes.

Now off to bed. A busy day tomorrow: 8 am skype with one of my brothers, school open house at 10. Växjö culture festival (Kulturnätten) at noon. Chinese New Year Party from 2 – 6:30. The festival goes til midnight but we probably won’t make it past dinner.

 

Schooling across borders

We had connections to the Waldorf School here in town through some of my colleagues. Those connections allowed us to get the kids provisionally enrolled from the U.S. so that is what we did. I was a bit worried about the fit of the school. I thought it would probably be fine for Mei-mei whose fabulous preschool in Montpelier has an approach that I think could best be classified as non-doctrinal Waldossori. I was worried about Jie-jie, however, since she would be demoted to preschool AND in a Waldorf classroom of kids aged 3-7, without books, pencils, paper, etc. I told myself that it would work out OK in the short term, allowing Jie-jie to learn Swedish.

The first week seemed to confirm some of my fears about Jie-jie. She said that she was a bit bored and even suggested that maybe instead of being in her preschool class she could be an assistant teacher in the nursery room next door. The teacher scheduled a meeting with us and I considered suggesting that she might be moved out of the preschool into class 1/2 (ages almost 7 to approaching 9). However, in meeting the teacher, it became apparent that she was doing some independent work with Jie-jie and the other 6 year old. Instead of suggesting the move, I told the teacher that Jie-jie can read and write her letters and numbers. She said she would get her some colored pencils to use during “big kid time.” I decided that, since Jie-jie seemed to be settling in and the teacher seemed to be attentive, we could keep on with the status quo.

Then, strangely, this Monday the teacher suggested out of the blue that I might want to think about looking at Class 1/2. This morning she announced that this afternoon she would like to take me up to meet the teacher. So, this afternoon we went up to check it out. It seemed much more Jie-jie’s speed and, in fact, in terms of material it would be review but it would be in Swedish. When I asked Jie-jie’s teacher about the move she said that, although everything is fine with Jie-jie in the preschool, she thought that a full 6 months in there would be boring for her. So, on Monday Jie-jie will start in class 1/2. We will spend the next few days acclimating her to the idea and, hopefully, convincing her that the move was her choice.

 

Immigration Administrivia

Sorry. Sorry.  Lots going on here. I’ll get you up to speed.

1. The day after my last wild post a senior colleague called the tax office and they said they could process our person nummers without the card but they would need some additional forms from the Migration Office. When he called the Migration Office to get the forms, they told him that our cards had shipped out the previous afternoon – the very afternoon after the morning they told me it would be 2 more weeks! I called Jason at home and he watched for the mail. When it arrived he contacted me and we met at the tax office to have the cards photocopied and the copies mailed to the tax office in Malmö. The next morning my colleague called the tax office. Our case manager had not yet received the copies but she said she would look for them. Shortly thereafter she called and said she had them and would call with our numbers by the end of the day. Not too many minutes later she called and told us what the numbers were. That was good news since the kids’ school had told us that it was the absolute last day we could turn it the enrollment paperwork.

So, today we wanted to go and open a bank account. We arrived at the bank with our residency cards, passports, my paychecks, etc. However, the person helping us said that our new personnummers were not in the system and they weren’t on our IDs so we needed a letter from the tax office. We walked over to the tax office, got them to print documents stating our personnummers and then walked back to Nordea to open an account. It took a bit in part because there was a clitch when she started opening 2 accounts (one for each of us) when we wanted a joint account. That doesn’t seem to the default here in Sweden but since Jason isn’t earning any money here it seems silly to hold 2 accounts. Our account is now open. The money we deposited (my wages) will post in a few days, and our cards will arrive within the week. That is progress! Next on the agenda is getting full set up at work and getting ID cards (although, do I really need one?).

The big question, of course, is would all of this come about without the stress and labor if we had just waited patiently? Maybe, but seeing as we encountered at least one snafu (the document that was not where it should have been), I am not confident that it would have worked out. Furthermore, as stated previously, being here but not being in the system makes things take longer and makes life more expensive. If I did it again, I would push the way we did.

 

Immigrating to Sweden: Lessons and Frustrations

There is a substantial blemish marring the moderate, efficient, perfectly rational and just-the-right-amount landscape of things here in Sweden. I think I keep leaving it out in hopes that it will go away but, alas, today is the day in which I have had enough. I am going on record.

In October I learned that I was being offered my research position at Linnaeus University. I waited some time for a formal offer of employment (the contract) to arrive. When it did I applied immediately for a work permit for myself and residency permits for the family. There was an online application form and a substantial processing fee. I completed the application at the end of October and was told that I should receive a decision within “several weeks.” Once we had the decision we would all go to the migration office upon our arrival in Växjö in order to get fingerprinted, etc, for our residency cards.

A few weeks later I received word from the University that there was a form they had not given me (the contract was not the correct form for the migration office). About a week later I received the correct form in the mail. However, there was no way for me to submit the form online. I contacted the migration office over email and asked where I could send the form. After a substantial delay they got back to me with an address to send the form. I sent it immediately.

LESSON ONE. IN SWEDEN THINGS TAKE A LONG TIME AND YOU DON’T ALWAYS GET WHAT YOU NEED TO NAVIGATE THE SYSTEM.

More time passed and still no decision. I tried to be patient and trust that the paper pushers were doing what they needed to do. December arrived. We left for China. I tried calling the migration office a couple of times and was always put off by the person answering the phone (I have learned that the first person you talk to in the Swedish bureaucracy is charged with the task of breaking your spirit so you go away) who told me that it takes up to 6 months (not the several weeks I heard in the beginning) so I needed to be patient.

Then we arrived in Sweden. I have already explained that I felt nervous about showing up without the right to work. But it ended up being much worse than feeling nervous. You see, legal residents of Sweden have something called a personnummer. It’s like a social security number except that you need it for everything. The kids need it to register for school and dance class. You need it to open a bank account (and get a Swedish bank card and make cash transfers) and if you don’t have a Swedish bank account and bank card you have to pay hefty fees for everything from buying train tickets to paying for any services like the aforementioned dance classes. In Sweden folks basically do not use cash and checks are unheard of. Everything is done through EFT. You also need a personnummer to get set up at your new job – email, getting your research computer, getting a mailbox, accessing your research funds, etc. So, from day one we felt marginalized by the need to ask the school, for example, to enroll the kids only provisionally and to ask colleagues, for example, to print documents since I didn’t have printer access. We were limited in what we could do and paying extra fees because we were not in the system.

I spent my first two days on the phone with the migration office. As I became more persistent about getting a decision on my case, I was given the names of other people I could call. I finally got the name of the person managing my case. She, like all the case managers, only accepted calls from 9 to 11 a.m. However, she did not have voice mail or even call holding so, in the most bizarre of scenarios, I spent an entire 75 minutes making hundreds and hundreds of 7-second phone calls to the same number where I would hear a Swedish recording that said “The number is busy. Try again later” and then get hung up on. After 75 minutes of that I decided to call the service desk (the people who are supposed to break you) and be on hold for 18 minutes so I could give her an earful about how I couldn’t get through to my case officer. At 10:54 I made one last desperate attempt to get my case officer and, amazingly, I actually got through. When she answered I think the first thing I said was, “I can’t believe you actually answered.”

LESSON TWO. STAY ON THE PHONE UNTIL YOU GET THE NAME OF A PERSON WHO CAN ACTUALLY ANSWER YOUR QUESTION.

LESSON THREE. ENDURE UNTIL ALL HOPE SEEMS LOST. IF YOU OUTLAST EVERYONE ELSE YOU MAY GET WHAT YOU NEED.

Once I got through to my case manager, I explained the situation, that I had arrived in Sweden with my family and we needed to get processed so I could get everyone settled and get to work myself. After a little cajoling she looked into the system and saw that the form we sent in later was never added to my file. She moved the letter into my file, attached a priority label to the case and sent it off to the department that makes final decisions. That afternoon I was notified that all of our permits were granted.

LESSON FOUR. DO NOT TRUST THE SYSTEM. IT DOESN’T WORK AS WELL OR AS EFFICIENTLY AS THEY KEEP TELLING YOU.

Proof of our immigration decision in hand, the next day all four of us headed to the migration office to get fingerprinted and photographed for our residency cards. We waited about 60 minutes for our chance. After we finished getting documented we were told that it would take 1- 2 weeks for our cards to arrive.

“1-2 weeks?” I said, “Can you give us our personnummers now?”

“We don’t give your personnummer. For that you need to go to the tax office. If you take the copy of your decision, they should be able to issue your number.”

So, we walked across the street to the tax office and took another number. While we were waiting to be called the employee working crowd control, the one who is there to break you so you go home, approached us to see what we were there for. We said that we were there to get our personnummers. She said that the tax office would not process our applications until we had our residency cards. Once we applied it would take 2 to 3 weeks for our numbers to be issued. Both Jason and I blew our tops at that news. We said that we could not be without our numbers for an additional 5 weeks and that the migration office said they could process us without the card. The employee told us that we were wasting our time to wait but we waited anyway.

Once we were called, the tax office clerk dutifully copied all our passports and birth certificates and the copies of our decision from the migration office. She said they would send them to Malmö where the decision would be made on our case. I returned the next day to inquire about the decision. I was told to return the next week.

Fast forward a few days. No residency cards but a letter arrives from the tax office saying they will not issue our numbers without the cards. I give up and hope that the cards arrive soon. Fast forward a few days to today. Still no cards. I call the migration office. I wait in the queue for 20 minutes only to be told that there was a problem in the factory that makes the cards. They had technical difficulties, had to stop production, and now the cards are coming late. It will still be 2 to 3 weeks before I receive my card. I explain my problems and she tells me that the tax office should be able to give us our numbers. I go back to the tax office. This time I bring all my documents in addition to a print out of their own website which states clearly that they should be able to give us our numbers with the information we provided earlier. After waiting 45 minutes I get to a real person who tells me that I will need to call Malmö and that it is regrettable that the migration office cannot send out the cards but there is nothing they can do.

So, there you have it. I am sure that at some point in the next couple of months we will have all of this worked out and I will have cooled off to the point that I am saying things like, “It is terrible but you just need to be patient and persistent” but right now I am pissed. I think it was Rogers Brubaker (1992?) who said something along the lines of the more you get with citizenship the harder it is to acquire. Well, when it comes to Sweden, this seems to be true for legal residence and entry into the tax system. I used to be quite excited about the idea of sampling a bit of all that the “Great Society” has to offer but right now I am struggling to believe that the offerings are worth the trouble. Between all of the break downs in this system and our transportation snafu on day one, I am beginning to wonder if the orderliness and comprehensiveness of the Swedish system is really just a farce.

Also, for the record, how perfectly Weberian that these 2 offices manage to do a complicated dance that allows them to deny culpability while they make it exceedingly tough (and additionally expensive) to live and work here even though they have invited you to work and given you permission to come. We are fortunate that we are not wholly dependent on my wages (which, by the way, are not easy to access without a bank account). I am sure many other newcomers are not so fortunate.

 

Tiger mother in Sweden?

Our friends were going to come down from Stockholm this weekend but, alas, a large share of their family had the flu so we were on our own for the weekend. At first I was feeling a bit low about it because, although everything seems to be going pretty well, it is a bit lonely when you move to a new place and you know only a very few people. I had been looking forward to the company.

All in all, however, we ended up having a very nice weekend. First there was the aforementioned trip to IKEA. On Saturday we hung around at home for a bit in the morning – cleaning, laundry, etc. After lunch we walked into town for children’s day at the symphony. A nice snow began to fall while we were walking. It was really lovely. The weather up to this point has been primarily foggy with the temperature hovering just above and just below freezing. We’ve had rain and snow but no accumulation. I’ve grumbled several times about the weather because if it is going to be fairly chilly outside and the days are going to be really short there might as well be some snow on the ground to brighten things up and to give you a reason to be outside.

But, anyway, we really enjoyed walking around downtown during the snowstorm. We stopped for groceries including some of our favorite things to make for dinner. We also stopped for afternoon fika (coffee, but in our case tea and hot chocolate) at a local cafe. That place was a nice find because, while I have found many things here to be a little too standardized and mass-produced, Kafe Deluxe was funky and offers a localvore (food of Småland) menu. Once of the kids’ schoolmates was there with her father. As we sat there I felt myself relaxing and feeling more at home. Kafe Deluxe definitely has the potential to be my Friday office.

Today we took the kids to their first dance classes here in Sweden. Mei-mei’s children’s 4-5 year-old class was very basic. It mostly consisted of running around to Swedish pop music. Toward the end of the lesson the children were given a pom-pom and asked to march in time to more of the aforementioned music. Most kids couldn’t find the beat. I am going to try Mei-mei in a class for 5 year olds that are not novices later this week. Jie-jie’s ballet 1 (age 6 -8) was quite nice. Only 5 kids and a good teacher so that class is a keeper.

One of the intercultural issues we are frequently confronted with here (so far) has to do with child rearing. This is the root of my problems with Mei-mei´s dance class. There seems to be quite a lot of emphasis put on NOT pushing children, not over programming them and allowing “kids to be kids” but to me that lack of pushing very frequently looks like a failure to engage the learning that kids are always doing, a lack of recognition of what kids CAN do and the absence of support for them in discovering those abilities. Coming from the U.S. system where parents feel the pressure to supplement school with “enrichment” activities and schools where 5 year olds are being pushed to start reading, it feels very strange to land in a place where my 6 year old who can read in large part because we spent so much time on it last year at the behest of the school is now in a classroom without books, paper and pencils. I have been wondering if I should move Jie-jie into the 7 and 8 year old class but decided to keep her where she is after meeting with her teacher this past week. I explained that Jie-jie can read and she likes to read and write for fun. The teacher said that she will get her some school supplies and make time for her to use them. We’ll see. I keep telling myself that we can keep up math and reading at home while she learns Swedish at school.

 

IKEA: where it all began

You can find the little town of Älmhult about 45 minutes by train from Växjö. In that town in the year 1953 Ingvar Kamprad opened the first IKEA store. We went there today, mostly because we needed dish towels and a couple extra fitted sheets but also, of course, because we wanted to visit the place where IKEA’s global empire began.

Some of IKEA’s offices are still on the campus. There is also an IKEA hotel. The store was pretty ordinary and there seemed to be no indicators or testimonials to the fact that the store was the first of an empire that spans 38 countries. No bother. I could just sense the power and energy emanating from the home of flatpack and particle board.

 

In defense of Finn Hudson

Let me start by saying that I cannot believe I am writing this post. Up to this point I have maintained a strict segregation between my status as a gleek and my academic-ish blogging.

But, yes, I watch Glee. While I would normally push past that so we could stay on point while I offered poignant theoretical and sociological insights into the human condition, I do believe coming out of the closet on this one requires a bit of discussion. I don’t generally watch television. In fact, the only show that I watch is Glee. It’s fun and poignant and bitingly real and garishly surreal. The writing and storyline are uneven to be sure but the music is generally loads of fun and some of the characters are quite compelling. I was in China during season 1 and started watching bootlegs of the show while there. It was just the dose of real/unreal Americana to balance out my life. Since my return from China I have maintained my glee habit, generally enjoying the way that the writers construct a litany of characters who are exactly what you would expect them to be and then some. Now that I am in Sweden, I have the Glee Season 3 Pass on itunes.

So that is enough of that. Let’s get to the point.

This week on Glee, Finn Hudson, a high school senior who realized that the one thing he had going for him was his relationship with fellow senior Rachel Berry, asked her to marry him. It was a bit of shock to the viewer (and to Rachel as well). I do not follow the show on twitter or read up about it in blogs, etc. However, I imagine that the proposal has probably created a bit of a stir with people asking what Finn (and the writers) were thinking. I suspect that people would say that they are too young, that people don’t really stay with their high school sweethearts anymore, that Finn needs to find some direction in life and that direction can’t be following your high school girlfriend around while she pursues her own dreams of Broadway stardom. I imagine all these conversations out there in the ether (or maybe I am just channeling my own memory of my dad telling me that it was a mistake to consider my high school sweetheart in my college plans. I didn’t by the way).

Of course these aren’t real people we are talking about but, all the same, I think it is time to consider the reality of the unreality here.

How unrealistic would it be for someone to go all Lloyd Dobler on their apparent soul-mate? Let’s consider a few only mildly vetted stats…

Probability of U.S. military personnel dying in Iraq in a given year (2003 – 2006) 1 in 255

Probability of high school athlete (in major sport) becoming a professional athlete 1 in 24,550

Probability of Rachel realizing her Broadway dreams (this one was much tougher to pinpoint since most actors never make a living in the job, most people who dream of performing never manage any kind of break into the business, and the world of acting does not end with Broadway and Hollywood but instead includes loads of folks who work in smaller markets and theaters) the odds I turned up (all exceedingly problematic) ranked the odds of making it big anywhere from 1 in 100,000 (for everyone who has the dream) to 1 in 23 for those who get representation, union membership and live in New York or LA. Broadway is all the more elusive.

Probability of Rachel and Finn staying married 1 in 2 (you could adjust this more by taking background factors into account but it is never going to be much worse than 1 in 2.5)

So, Finn has placed a pretty good bet when you consider the situation.

It also seems to me that it is a bit of an American thing to want to prioritize future dreams and relationships over a well-lived present. This forward-looking tendency doesn’t always serve us well (for example in the case of American students who simultaneously have very high educational expectations and lower educational performance than students in many other countries). We need dreamers, to be sure, and Rachel Berry is just such a dreamer. But we also need people to be stable and true and grounded in the present. It seems to me that, in Finn Hudson, the writers of Glee have created just that type of person.

 

Day 1 in Växjö, Sweden

Our flight left Bangkok at midnight on Friday. The kids did remarkably well. Only while we were waiting to board did Mei-mei give in to sleep. I carried her on board. It turned out that we were upgraded to “premium economy” which meant that we were on an older plane, upstairs in what used to be business class before business class got really nice. It worked well with the kids and both of them got a full 8 hours of sleep. The flight was about 12 hours so it was just after 6 am when we landed.

I must admit that Copenhagen came as a bit of a shock to the system after 3 weeks in Southeast Asia. Walking into the quiet of the silent crowd, the cold and sleek Scandinavian aesthetic of the airport felt sterile and bare after the technicolor of Thailand and the ornateness of China. The airport seemed of such diminutive size after Bankgkok and Hong Kong, Guangzhou, and even Singapore which is actually slightly more to Western scale than the other places. The people did NOT seem diminutive, however, and being surrounded by so many tall Europeans, my first thought fell along the lines of something like, “What empty and silent planet have I landed on and who are all these hairy de-pigmented giants?”

We still did not have our residency permits for Sweden and I was a bit nervous about passport control even though I knew perfectly well that I could enter the country without a visa and be there for 90 days without trouble. All the same, I was worried that the officer might ask what we were doing in Denmark and I didn’t want to lie. No worries. The controller didn’t even scan our passports. Just looked at the photos, gave us each a smile and stamped us in.

After we collected our bags we headed into the basement for the regional train to Växjö. The fact that we were able to cross the border, get our bags and take the amazing brief walk (about 4 minutes) to the train station without any confusion and within the short time between our landing and the first train departure thereafter confirmed my impressions of the small-ness of it all but also spoke to the efficiency of things.

The train was right there and set to leave in 2 minutes so we hopped on and decided to buy tickets on board. We took our seats as the train departed and waited for the conductor to come through. Moments after leaving the airport we were in Central Copenhagen and not so long after we were already in Sweden, stopping at the Malmö station.

But then we began to run in to a bit of trouble. In June they changed the procedures and stopped selling tickets on the train. The conductor told us we could get off at the next station and buy tickets for the next train (which wasn’t for another 90 minutes) or we could pay the fine. Jason, who had not slept well on the plane and had no interest in waiting for the next train, seemed to shock the conductor a bit when he asked her what the fine was, how much the regular fare was and calculated that the difference between the two was a small enough sum that he would rather pay the fine. So, she wrote us a couple of tickets (violations, not train tickets, mind you) that we would need to pay at the train station within the next 30 days. We settled in for what remained of our 90 minute train ride.

Then, the last stop before Växjö it was announced that the train would not be continuing on after all and that we would disembark and take buses to our final destination. In a confusing scenario that felt positively un-Swedish to us, we were left standing outside of the Alvesta train station with 30 other people waiting for a bus to Växjö that never arrived. After about an hour we called a cab and paid a relatively steep fare to get to our apartment. Given all the additional fees and fares, we spent quite a bit of money getting from Växjö to Copnehagen. One thing we have already learned about the iron cage of rationality and the gilded cage of bureaucracy in Sweden, however, is that you can’t take the rules lying down. Jason went down to the train station a couple of days later and they agreed to reimburse us for the cab fare. They sent our tickets off to some office somewhere for a decision regarding whether or not they will be forgiven on account of the failures of the train. We expect that we will pay very little or nothing at all in the end.

I was having some misgivings after the train fiasco. Where had I dragged my family? But then we arrived at our apartment. Our apartment is a furnished 3 bedroom on the second floor of an owner-occupied house in Väster (which means West). The owners are the friends of a friend. They have 4 daughters, the youngest are 11 and 13 and they had put special effort into the kids’ bedroom including their own old kid furniture, wall hangings, toys, games and puzzles. The kids were instantly at home. The kitchen is small but it is brand new and bright. The 3rd bedroom was already set up as an office for 2 people. Our bedroom opens on to a west-facing balcony. The combination living and formal dining room included a sofa, a pull-out love seat, an extendable table, wall storage that makes me want to shop for knick knacks to fill it with, and even a small television. Nearly perfect.

We spent the rest of the day walking around to get the lay of the land. Our neighbors/landlords took us in their car for a first big grocery shopping trip. That evening we walking into the centrum to find a pizza place that Jason had been talking about since we visited Växjö last February. The falafelrulle (falafel wrap) was quite nice.

Within hours of our arrival we had achieved a level of domestic comfort that we never achieved in China. Next on the agenda was navigating encounters with the institutions necessary to our lives here: school, the university and, most importantly, the immigration office…

 

food and society

A few food observations from Sweden (I know I need to write some real blog posts but this will have to suffice for now):
1. Falafel is the new pizza. I have never seen so much falafel. Even the Swedish equivalent of McDonald’s has a falafel burger.
2. Pizza shops are the new chinese restaurant. Just as any Thai/Korean/Vietnamese/etc restaurant outside of major urban centers in the U.S. seems to get stuck serving egg foo yung and fried rice, almost every ethnic restaurant in town is a pizza shop (e.g. ali baba’s pizza, Istanbul pizza, Pizza Roma) offering kebab, falafel and/or whatever couple of home country items they can squeeze on the menu.
3. Yesterday we decided to try the Chinese restaurant, Hong Kong Cafe, in the centrum. We could not figure out what we might order from the menu because the choices were so limited. We were speaking to the staff exclusively in Chinese (definitely still better than our Swedish). We told them that we had lived in China. They liked us and we even managed to get them to bring us some Chrysanthemum tea from their private stash. Then it came time to order. So, in Chinese, we said they we saw that they had broccoli on the menu and we were vegetarian so we were wondering if they could do some steamed broccoli sauteed with garlic. Then, the server replied, also in Chinese, “We don’t have any fresh vegetables. We only have frozen.” “Ok.” we responded, a bit taken aback by this unexpected response since, at least in Guangzhou, the fresh vegetables are the key to the cooking, “Do you have any tofu?” This question was mostly for me because I would just about give my left arm for 8 oz. of tofu. The response, still in Chinese: “No. This is not China and it is not Chinatown in the United States. This is Sweden. You need to read the menu and pick something.”

The thing was, she wasn’t trying to be mean or hostile, she was just explaining that there wasn’t anything particularly Chinese about the Hong Kong Cafe. I still have not quite gotten over the strangeness of having someone tell you in Chinese that you were in Sweden now and you needed to conform to the existing menu. Perfect. Score one for Max Weber.

 

Walking Blues, Bangkok

We arrived in Bangkok this afternoon – just a short 2-day trip so Jason can attend to some work business. I really loved Bangkok last time but we were staying in a little hotel in the old city. The room was tiny but we had breakfast on the river and could walk to the palace, etc. This time we are staying in high end digs (Sheraton Grande Sukhumvit) in the business/commercial district. The hotel is really quite luxurious – the kind of hotel where you need to dress-up to leave the room. There is a roof-top laguna pool (a long, winding pool with lots of greenery creating private nooks and crannies). There is a night market right outside, a large shopping mall right next door as well stations for the sky train and the subway. The city awaits but tonight we were tired so we just walked about a bit and then crashed in the room. Tomorrow we’ll get out in it by finding some interesting temples, museums, green spaces, etc.

At this point, however, we’ve been on the road more than 2 weeks and it all seems a blur. I can barely remember Hong Kong and it seemed like we were in Guangzhou for all of 10 minutes. Singapore is fresh but the time there flew as well. Sometimes I feel that this trip, which is really the journey of a lifetime by ordinary standards, is wasted on folks like us – jaded travelers who sometimes don’t even remember to take pictures. We all seem to be ready for home. Jie-jie is missing her school friends and teacher, she is talking about the toys she left behind and how she wants to see the dogs. Mei-mei has begun singing and reciting all the songs and rhymes she learned at her preschool and talking about her schoolmates and teachers. Jason has begun hankering for some home cooking. The other night I had a dream about my 16-year-old dog, Rodman, and how he is in Vermont sadly wondering where I’ve gone to this time.

Is there something about our brains that makes us seek the familiar after 10-14 days, some kind of physiological response prompted by neural pathways requiring experience to reinforce them? Of all the places we’ve visited only this last one, Bangkok, seems unfamiliar and alien yet our thoughts turn toward routine and the familiar. I’ve always said that 13 days is the perfect length to explore a new place and that, if I stay any longer, I begin to feel that I should get a job and an apartment. Maybe it isn’t that it takes that long to know a place well enough to move beyond feeling like a tourist. Maybe, instead, it is at that point when I have a need to no longer be a tourist – even if I’ve divided the days between several locations of varying familiarity (I haven’t been anywhere new on this trip). I wonder how we will all respond to a homecoming in Sweden, landing in an apartment we have never seen in a city we visited for only 2 days. We will start our life there for real on Monday as the kids begin school and I head off to work. All those bits of home we are hankering for are months and months away – so far off, perhaps, that by the time we get there we will need to rebuild the attachments.