Suffice it to say that things have changed a bit since we arrived here a year ago (almost exactly a year at this point). We made it through weeks/months of hartals for the anniversary of the election. We made it through the blockade of the city.
The current situation is definitely something new. It might or might not have made the international news. About 3 weeks ago, a "western looking" man was shot outside the grocery store in the diplomatic enclave. This is a bit surprising for several reasons. First, with all of the violence we have seen in the past 2 1/2 years that we've been here, westerners have not really been the target. Occasionally, people are in the wrong place at the wrong time, and they get caught up in events. This was not the case however. Second, the man was shot in the back. There is reason to assume that he was essentially picked at random based upon the way he looked and was merely found to be a convenient target when someone was looking for one.
It's certainly sad to see something like this happen in a country where we (personally) have been shown nothing but friendship. One of the things I will take away from my time here - however long that might be - are the friendly smiles you get from most people you meet. This event was clearly something out of the ordinary. Unfortunately, that fact alone does not make it less likely to occur in the future. A few days after the first shooting, another man - a Japanese man - was shot while riding a rickshaw. The circumstances are similar enough that the two shootings are thought to be related.
In an effort to ensure everyone's safety, our movements within the country have been significantly curtailed. We have very specific places we are allowed to travel and are required to keep very specific hours. Sadly the grocery store is not one of those places; neither are restaurants or shops.
We continue to hope that the situation will improve, but naturally there's no timeline for something like that. So far, we're very happy staying in focusing on school, work, movies, baking, and the things that have always sustained us in the past. Home is still here - and we're happy to be together.
Sunday, October 18, 2015
Wednesday, May 27, 2015
Online Ordering
There are probably a variety of ways to tackle (accept) life overseas. You can choose to fully embrace the local culture by only shopping for and eating things that are locally available. Alternatively, you can import (via Amazon or a variety of other sources) just about anything you could need or want from the US. We have found that we fall somewhere in the middle of this spectrum.
One of the things I have come to appreciate while living here are the locally available fruits and vegetables. You become much more attuned to the growing seasons. Strawberries are available for a matter of weeks each year. Zucchini is available a bit more often, but still has a definite growing season. Mangoes, starfruit, grapes, and lychees are some of my kids' favorites, but also have a very limited season. Who knew I'd become extremely proficient at cleaning and preparing starfruit? I'm still not that great with the mangoes... Lychees are my newest favorite (as they're in season right now). Admittedly though they make my fingers hurt. All that peeling... At least they taste incredibly good once you get them peeled.
Bananas are pretty much always in seasons, but the particular variety you get just depends on the day. Some days we end up with the mini-bananas and some days the standard sized ones. They're all good in my opinion. To my knowledge, all of the apples we get here are imported, but they're available year round. Carrots, cucumbers, onions, and potatoes are also common at all times of the year. Meal planning, to the extent that we try to incorporate the locally available produce, depends on keeping track of what's currently in the store.
School lunches are another ball of wax altogether. The school offers a prepared lunch each day (for a set fee), but we have opted not to take advantage of that. We gave B an option, and he said he prefers to bring his own lunch. There's a new bakery near our house that we have just started using for sandwich bread, but white bread is available at most grocery stores. Wheat bread is much less common, and is generally not available in sandwich sized portions.
When preparing to come here, one of the most common things I heard from other FAO families was that snack foods were generally difficult to come by, and expensive to boot. They didn't lie. That's one of the things we order online and have shipped here. We order pretzel barrels, Cheez-it's, and other snack items from Costco in bulk on fairly regular intervals so we have small finger foods to put in lunches. Sadly things like Veggie-straws (a favorite of the kids) are not carried on their websites. If you're thinking about keeping your Costco membership while overseas, keep two things in mind: 1) A lot of things from their warehouse are not online 2) They do not ship to DPO. All of our Costco items have to come through the pouch (which does limit what we can order).
Lack of local breakfast foods was also mentioned as an issue before we came overseas. Under normal circumstances, our embassy commissary maintains a good selection of cereals at not-exorbitant prices. Unfortunately, with the ordering issues we've had recently (which we hope to be resolved within the next month), we've been short on cereal. I used amazon for a while to try to supplement, but I have discovered that walmart.com has better prices on their cereal. The downside is that you can only order 4 boxes of each type of cereal per order (yes, I like to buy everything in large quantities) and while they claim to ship to DPO, I have had several instances where they put all of my items in boxes much too large to fit in the DPO mailbag and they got returned to Walmart. I got a refund, no questions asked, but I still didn't get my stuff... So, for breakfast foods, I recommend Walmart, and I also recommend just paying the shipping on whatever you want rather than trying to stock up enough to get free shipping ($50 and over per order).
For those who do a lot of baking, I've heard great things about King Arthur Flour. Several times a year, they offer free shipping (or you can purchase a yearly membership and get free shipping all the time). They don't just have flour by the way. They stock a wide variety of baking mixes, storage containers, and accoutrements.
So, share! What are you favorite online spots for food?
One of the things I have come to appreciate while living here are the locally available fruits and vegetables. You become much more attuned to the growing seasons. Strawberries are available for a matter of weeks each year. Zucchini is available a bit more often, but still has a definite growing season. Mangoes, starfruit, grapes, and lychees are some of my kids' favorites, but also have a very limited season. Who knew I'd become extremely proficient at cleaning and preparing starfruit? I'm still not that great with the mangoes... Lychees are my newest favorite (as they're in season right now). Admittedly though they make my fingers hurt. All that peeling... At least they taste incredibly good once you get them peeled.
Bananas are pretty much always in seasons, but the particular variety you get just depends on the day. Some days we end up with the mini-bananas and some days the standard sized ones. They're all good in my opinion. To my knowledge, all of the apples we get here are imported, but they're available year round. Carrots, cucumbers, onions, and potatoes are also common at all times of the year. Meal planning, to the extent that we try to incorporate the locally available produce, depends on keeping track of what's currently in the store.
School lunches are another ball of wax altogether. The school offers a prepared lunch each day (for a set fee), but we have opted not to take advantage of that. We gave B an option, and he said he prefers to bring his own lunch. There's a new bakery near our house that we have just started using for sandwich bread, but white bread is available at most grocery stores. Wheat bread is much less common, and is generally not available in sandwich sized portions.
When preparing to come here, one of the most common things I heard from other FAO families was that snack foods were generally difficult to come by, and expensive to boot. They didn't lie. That's one of the things we order online and have shipped here. We order pretzel barrels, Cheez-it's, and other snack items from Costco in bulk on fairly regular intervals so we have small finger foods to put in lunches. Sadly things like Veggie-straws (a favorite of the kids) are not carried on their websites. If you're thinking about keeping your Costco membership while overseas, keep two things in mind: 1) A lot of things from their warehouse are not online 2) They do not ship to DPO. All of our Costco items have to come through the pouch (which does limit what we can order).
Lack of local breakfast foods was also mentioned as an issue before we came overseas. Under normal circumstances, our embassy commissary maintains a good selection of cereals at not-exorbitant prices. Unfortunately, with the ordering issues we've had recently (which we hope to be resolved within the next month), we've been short on cereal. I used amazon for a while to try to supplement, but I have discovered that walmart.com has better prices on their cereal. The downside is that you can only order 4 boxes of each type of cereal per order (yes, I like to buy everything in large quantities) and while they claim to ship to DPO, I have had several instances where they put all of my items in boxes much too large to fit in the DPO mailbag and they got returned to Walmart. I got a refund, no questions asked, but I still didn't get my stuff... So, for breakfast foods, I recommend Walmart, and I also recommend just paying the shipping on whatever you want rather than trying to stock up enough to get free shipping ($50 and over per order).
For those who do a lot of baking, I've heard great things about King Arthur Flour. Several times a year, they offer free shipping (or you can purchase a yearly membership and get free shipping all the time). They don't just have flour by the way. They stock a wide variety of baking mixes, storage containers, and accoutrements.
So, share! What are you favorite online spots for food?
Wednesday, May 6, 2015
Ahhhh Vacation!
Leave is supposed to be relaxing - and it will be once I finish requesting child meals, making seat assignments, requesting bassinets for the long haul flights, and inputting frequent flier info for five people for every leg of the flight on four different airlines all of whom have their own system to input the info. I just lost two days worth of nap times and two evenings of TV time and I don't even know that I have bassinets. That will require 2 phone calls back to the US and one phone call to someone here who will more than likely say yes when what they really mean is a) I don't understand what you want or b) I can't give you what you want, but I want you to be happy.
<Somebody needs a vacation>
<Somebody needs a vacation>
Wednesday, March 25, 2015
Bednets
Please pardon my crankiness today - our house has been taken over by a virus for the last two weeks and the fifth and final member of the family finally caught it last night. Just want to share a quick thought. For anyone who thinks bednets are beautiful, exotic, or even romantic...
Imagine how much fun they are to clean after your child has vomited on them. That's all, folks! It's a long weekend here, and if today is any indication, it's going to be a very long weekend indeed.
Imagine how much fun they are to clean after your child has vomited on them. That's all, folks! It's a long weekend here, and if today is any indication, it's going to be a very long weekend indeed.
Tuesday, March 3, 2015
Discontented Ramblings
If that title doesn't draw you in, I'm not sure what will...
Things in Dhaka have been what I'll call "less than ideal" for a while now. The on-going blockade of the city and the accompanying hartals have necessitated what amounts to a lockdown inside the diplomatic enclave for quite some time. While I might not have gone to any stores or visited around the city were this not happening, the fact that I CAN'T do those things just makes me a bit stir crazy.
Even within the enclave, we are facing restrictions in which roads we can use at different times of the day due to the likelihood of protests involving cocktails (the equivalent of weak flash-bang grenades) and petrol bombs (similar to molotov cocktails). I'm not usually a social butterfly by any means, but, again, these restrictions just make me antsy.
Additionally, due to unrelated (mostly) issues, our commissary is slowly but surely running out of food. Were the local grocery store easy to get to, this wouldn't be a huge problem. However, it's on one of those roads that we can't be on most of the day. They have not had dry cat food since we got here, and I've been unsuccessful so far in cracking the code on how big of a bag I can buy that will actually get shipped here. So far, both bags I've attempted to order have been rejected and shipped back. Awesome.
Our car continues to give us issues. Sometimes I wish I'd studied auto mechanics before coming overseas - I definitely wouldn't lack for customers. So far, we've flushed the radiator, replaced the water and oil pumps, replaced the head gasket, replaced the brakes, flushed the radiator again (since they mixed antifreezes at some point creating a fine mess), and had some electrical work done since stepping on the brakes would make the headlights turn on. All of this from a car that was in "good mechanical condition" according to the previous owner.
In local news, an arrest warrant has been issued for the leader of the opposition party (BNP) and there's no real way to know what will happen if they actually take her into custody. Also, a few days ago, an American citizen was hacked to death with meat cleavers downtown. He was Bangladeshi-born and well-known as an atheist blogger which some apparently felt was justification for murdering him in front of his wife.
And now my lack of cat food seems a petty concern.
Things in Dhaka have been what I'll call "less than ideal" for a while now. The on-going blockade of the city and the accompanying hartals have necessitated what amounts to a lockdown inside the diplomatic enclave for quite some time. While I might not have gone to any stores or visited around the city were this not happening, the fact that I CAN'T do those things just makes me a bit stir crazy.
Even within the enclave, we are facing restrictions in which roads we can use at different times of the day due to the likelihood of protests involving cocktails (the equivalent of weak flash-bang grenades) and petrol bombs (similar to molotov cocktails). I'm not usually a social butterfly by any means, but, again, these restrictions just make me antsy.
Additionally, due to unrelated (mostly) issues, our commissary is slowly but surely running out of food. Were the local grocery store easy to get to, this wouldn't be a huge problem. However, it's on one of those roads that we can't be on most of the day. They have not had dry cat food since we got here, and I've been unsuccessful so far in cracking the code on how big of a bag I can buy that will actually get shipped here. So far, both bags I've attempted to order have been rejected and shipped back. Awesome.
Our car continues to give us issues. Sometimes I wish I'd studied auto mechanics before coming overseas - I definitely wouldn't lack for customers. So far, we've flushed the radiator, replaced the water and oil pumps, replaced the head gasket, replaced the brakes, flushed the radiator again (since they mixed antifreezes at some point creating a fine mess), and had some electrical work done since stepping on the brakes would make the headlights turn on. All of this from a car that was in "good mechanical condition" according to the previous owner.
In local news, an arrest warrant has been issued for the leader of the opposition party (BNP) and there's no real way to know what will happen if they actually take her into custody. Also, a few days ago, an American citizen was hacked to death with meat cleavers downtown. He was Bangladeshi-born and well-known as an atheist blogger which some apparently felt was justification for murdering him in front of his wife.
And now my lack of cat food seems a petty concern.
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