Passport "Issues"

 So, you know those things up there?  Passports?  Yeah, so, it turns out you can't live without them in another country.  

I know you knew that already, but in case you were wondering, like, at all, it's 100% true.  We can confirm it from personal experience.

You see, about three weeks ago, the lovely Bobbie was taking Matthew down to the clinic in T-land to get a certificate that he was better and could go back to school (if your kid's been sick, you have to have a doctor's permission for him to return).  Anyway, to make a long story short, unfortunately, the passports were accidentally left behind inside the public transportation, and our many advertisements offering a reward for their return went unanswered.

So, we needed new passports for Matthew and Bobbie, which means going to the embassy and getting them.  Unfortunately for us, the nearest embassy to T-land without crossing a border is here:

Yep.  Moscow.  Our wonderful capital city, only 4,700 km away.  So, it was time for a trip.  But first, a cute picture of Matthew wearing the colors of his favorite team (or, in honor of the fact that it's an English team, perhaps I should say "colours of his favourite team"), Liverpool:

Now, I must admit that I was loathe to leave the work at a very busy time for me to come here to get some new passports made, but there are some advantages.  First of all, we can't get decent beef in T-land, so Bobbie bought some steaks and made them up with a squash salad thing that was super yummy.

We also got to visit our friends and coworkers here while we waited for the documents to be ready, and they gave us their old roller blades that their kids had outgrown.  Steven and Matthew love them!

We also took the boys over to IKEA one day, where they got to play in the ball pit (always a popular destination):

 

Look at the wonders of the western world: shopping with carts!

 

And, since we had to be here anyway, of course I got to do a language check on our friends who have lived here and studied Russian for a couple of years.  You might remember their daughter from pictures a year or two ago when I was here checking them then.  The boys had such a great time playing with another kid who speaks English (though I don't think her baby sister provides quite the same level of energy as Matthew and Steven when they play together!).

 

Here the boys are playing train with friends while waiting for one of them to complete his Russian interview (which I've been listening to for the past two days to write up some recommendations to help them improve in the future).

Anyway, thanks for stopping by.  Passports have arrived, so now we go back home this weekend.  Going to be a busy few weeks when we get back catching up, not to mention we have someone coming in for a visit to help us work on some things.

Bobbie's Busy Baking

Well, you've been hearing a lot from Jesse lately with his Thailand trip.  So, what have I been up to in between language study sessions?  

Baking!  Lots and lots of baking.  Our neighbor upstairs who we are good friends with wants to open a business where she sells my baking goods.  It's just started and we still have a long ways to go (we don't even know if it will work out or not) but she is promoting my goods to her friends and family.  

So, I've been busy baking all different kinds of cakes, cupcakes, and cookies.  I'm fairly new to this and still have a lot to learn but since no one here does anything like this, the cakes are becoming popular.  Here are just a few examples of what I've been baking (other than cookies):

Our friend's son's birthday was a few weeks ago and he loves transformers:

We just celebrated Woman's Day which is a very big holiday here.  Our neighbor sold this to a store:

 Our friend, Shawna, was just in town for a visit and had a birthday:

For anyone who watches cooking programs, you know the first thing you want to do is try to cook what you saw on the program.  My new favorite cooking program is "Cupcake Wars", and so, well .... lots of cupcakes in our kitchen these days!

Starting from the pink one working clockwise:  lemon with raspberry frosting, lemon meringue, chocolate with chocolate cookie-dough filling (topped with chocolate ganache and a chocolate cookie), chocolate with chocolate cookie-dough filling (topped with a white chocolate and chocolate chip frosting), German chocolate with German chocolate icing filling (topped with chocolate ganache).

So, yeah, overkill, I guess.  Well, that's it for this post. We have lots of other things to talk to you all about, but we'll get to that in our next post. Until then, thanks for stopping by!

Thailand - Part II

 So, this is going to be mostly pictures, because I'm too busy to have time to write much, but I thought I should at least post something so you can see what it's like here.  And what it's like is ... just beautiful!

These are the hotel grounds where we're staying - the landscaping and color are amazing.

 Only in SE Asia would you get a sign like this - NO DURIAN.  (Durian is a popular local fruit, which is forbidden in a lot of places because it smells horrible).

 On the subject of funny signs, though, I prefer this one.  His special powers include the ability to kill bad guys with a pure concentration of smell - he's known only as:

 Anyway, these are some shots from some of the walks around the city.  They have a lot of really ancient architecture in Chiang Mai, including the old city walls and some of these old monument things (I guess; maybe I should have read the guide book closer).

The street food, as you saw in the last post, is amazing, and all pretty cheap.

The Sunday market even has stalls where for about $1, the ladies will give you a 15-minute foot massage.

These were weird; sort of a banana cake roll.  You can see the finished product there in the back, like a banana rolled up in a sweet pancake and covered in chocolate sauce.  I didn't try one, but they looked tasty.

A guy selling some handcarved wooden dishes.  They were a little pricey, though.

Quite a number of Buddhist temples around the city.  They decorate them very lavishly, and the effect is really pretty.

I did meet some folks some of you might recognize here in town.  It was great to catch up with them, and enjoy a burrito at a Mexican place together.

This is the "Night Bazaar," sort of a nighttime tourist market where all the vendors come out and try to sell you fake Rolexes and Thai silk scarves and the like.  I bought myself an "authentic" Liverpool jersey to wear when I support the Reds for about 1/10 the price of the real ones.

The temples are decorated really exquisitely.  Some of the detail in these things is quite amazing.

And of course, there are smaller versions too, as seen here.

Unfortunately for me, it's about time to wrap up my Thai adventure and head home, but I wanted to give you some more pictures to enjoy while I'm on my travels.  It will take me 4 days to get home, but I'm starting to really miss my family, so I'm anxious to make the trip, even with the accompanying temperature drop.

It has been a very profitable time here, though, with lots of good meetings with new and old friends and coworkers.  We found out lots of news that relates to our work and how we can improve things, so now we just have to implement those things in T-land!

Thanks to all of you who were thinking of my wife and children back home while I was traveling; from all reports they're doing well (and hopefully looking forward to me getting home as well?).  Please continue to do so as I travel, and look for more news in a week or so on here.

Thailand - Part I

So, as you remember if you read this last week, I (Jesse) am now in Thailand.  There is a conference here starting on Monday that I'm supposed to go to, so I made the arduous journey.  Totally worth it, though - this place is amazing!

But more on that in a bit.  First, this is where I left from. More precisely, this is the KFC in Novosibirsk along the way, but it's still an illustration of the cold and misery that I left behind in Siberia.  Although, can you ever be miserable if you have KFC and free internet?  I spent a whole afternoon here just killing time before my flight.

Leaving the -40 weather behind, I then flew to Bangkok.  My first order of business was to get through Thai immigration, which had one of the longest lines I've ever seen (it goes back beyond this picture for about another 40 meters).

With that (finally) accomplished, it was off to the train station!  Bangkok has a really nifty airport rail link, and then you ride the subway a few stops down to get out right at the train station.  I was impressed, but also roasting.  It was definitely time to take off a few layers of coats.

Just to prove that I'm not lying; that really is the Bangkok train station up there (I know, you thought I was being sneaky, didn't you?):

After buying my ticket, I went outside to get something to eat.  There were a lot of stands like this:

and this (where I bought enough watermelon and mango to choke!  I miss fresh fruits as we don't see them in Siberia much):

Finally I found this lady making food for another older Thai lady, with no foreigners around.  I thought to myself, "Now there's the place to get real Thai food!" and waited.  I couldn't really talk to her, but I knew enough to ask for "pad thai" which she understood.  It was really yummy, and only about $0.90 American.

Edit: I got the video to load!  Here is a video of the lady preparing my evening meal for me, so you can see how a real pad thai is made.  I managed to turn it off before you got to see me pantomiming "I will eat here" for you, much to your disappointment I'm sure :-)

 

It looked like this when all was said and done - delicious:

Anyway, after I ate I went to get on the train to Chiang Mai, my ultimate destination.  The train accommodations were super nice; there was even a curtain for each compartment to have its own little private spot!

It was an overnight train, but I woke up the next morning to some beautiful views of Thai countryside:

Once in Chiang Mai I took a tuk-tuk from the train station to downtown.  If you look out the window you can see another one of them in the picture; sort of like a three-wheeler with a roof bolted on.  Pretty nice, and cheap as dirt.

I wandered around the market some, and eventually found another good place to eat.  (Bobbie wanted pictures of the food I was eating, so sorry if there are more of those than you want to see.) The lady recommended a half-and-half split of these two dishes, so I have no idea what the names are (she just pointed at them).  The left is some sort of nutty-flavored bean sprout salad - decent.  The right is a very spicy pork curry - amazing!

I found another girl outside selling strawberries in a cup for about 50 cents, so I treated myself.  At this rate, I'm in real danger of overdosing on fruit before I head home!

For the final leg of my trip, I went to the airport to watch the sunset and catch the shuttle out to the hotel where the conference is being held.  If I get a chance I'll post a video of the lady making the pad thai later, and the next installment should feature more from the conference itself.  Edit: Done; see above.

 

Thanks for stopping by and reading, and please remember to lift up Bobbie and the boys while I'm away!

Video Post

Well, I (Jesse) am leaving in a couple of days for Thailand, so the next post will hopefully have something different going on, but this update we didn't have much.  I decided to post a couple of videos for the grandparents of the boys doing random stuff.  The first one is of them dancing to a Veggie Tales movie someone sent us:

Bobbie's been doing "English school," as he calls it, with Steven when he gets home every day, and he's getting pretty good at reading.  Again, this is mostly for the grandparents, so they can see how he's doing:

I'll leave you with a picture of Matthew wearing his great grandmother's apron.  Bobbie's family sent it with some other family stuff in a package last month, and the boys love to cook, so occasionally one of them gets to wear it as he helps Mommy make dinner (even if it does look like a dress):

And that'll do it, I guess.  Sorry about the short post; not a lot going on other than the usual language and culture study these days.  Hopefully, the next post will have either a picture of me enjoying some delicious pad thai or my wife bitterly bemoaning the fact that she has to stay in Siberia where it's -40 ... On second thought, hopefully it will just be the pad thai.

The Wandering Boys

So, normally on the blog we talk about what we're up to, and we occasionally mix in some pictures of the boys or something, but I thought today we'd show you what they've been up to lately.  Mostly because that's all we seem to have pictures of this month, since the lovely Bobbie and I have pretty much been doing straight language study and not much else.

Anyway, it's been a while since we posted, so here's a shot of our New Year's Eve.  We kept it pretty simple, stayed in and just watched the fireworks (the boys loved that; they would NOT go to sleep!).  We did get together with our neighbors from across the hall, who came over to say goodbye to the old year with us.  Not much of a party, and they didn't stay long, but we hung out and chatted for a bit before they left to ring in the new year in their own apartment.

Earlier that night we let the boys light off a sparkler.  Well, I should say "boy," because Matthew was having nothing to do with letting something burn in his hand.  He's too bright to think that's anything but a bad idea!

For Christmas we got a sushi kit, and Steven is a budding chef.  Thus, it was only natural that he would want to help out whenever we make sushi.  Here he's laying out the raw fishy bits for the roll.  The odd thing is that the boys don't really like sushi, but they love making it.  So do we, actually, as it's one of the only 'ethnic' foods that we can get the ingredients for here.

Matthew showing off the muscles that he gets every time he takes a bite of broccoli.  We've managed to teach the boys that eating green food makes them "strong," and they think it takes an instant effect and have to show us their bulging muscles every time they take a bite of vegetable.

On the other side of the healthy/non-healthy spectrum, we had a taffy pull.  It was mostly a test, to see if we could do it with some of our friends sometime, but the boys loved it.  Matthew gave up after a few pulls, so we had to help him out some, but Steven did really well.  We let them choose which color and flavor they would put into their taffy, which was a big hit.  Steven's was red and vanilla; Matthew went for blue and mint.

Grandpa and Grandma in the States sent us some money for Steven's birthday a few months back, and we saved it until a really cold day.  On Saturday we took the boys out to the indoor pay-per-play playground, which has an area like a McDonald's playplace that kids can play in.  They had a fun half-hour running around (during which we forgot to take out the camera), and then we went out for pizza.

Seriously, Daddy, it was fun, but please put the camera away now.  I've had enough pizza and now I'm tired:

In other big news, the other set of grandparents sent a hammock, all the way from Bolivia!  It's like a slice of home, right in our living room.  The boys LOVE it, of course, and so do I.  I like to pull out the e-reader I got for Christmas and just lay in it, reading.  Could anything be better than unlimited books and a hammock?  If only I had unlimited time ...

The hammock has actually been quite a novelty for the folks here.  Our upstairs neighbors came down for a visit the other day and couldn't get enough of it!

It was quite tricky to figure out a way to hang a hammock in concrete walls, but I had a handyman here putting in a new lock in our metal door, and I asked him what he thought.  He disagreed with my idea of a brace drilled through the wall, which I admit was overly complicated, and came up with a solution I never would have thought of (but which is totally brilliant).

He thought for a minute, said, "We need a metal plate that we can drill in," and left.  He came back with two of these, which are spare parts for a car (it goes somewhere underneath where the leaf springs and suspension hook into the axle, I think).  It already had two holes, we drilled two more, and voila!  A hammock hook hung with 4 anchored bolts, size 20cm by 10mm.  Holds me and the boys, swinging.  Pure genius.

And that's about it for the Wandering Boys.  Next time, a post about ... I don't know.  Whatever happens between now and when I leave for Thailand in a couple of weeks, I guess.

Shaken Up!

 Most of you probably don't know, but, on December 27th  around 11:00pm as the boys slept and we were getting ready for bed, we had a pretty serious earthquake here (6.6 on the Richter scale).

Is started with a loud rumbling outside (sounded like a semi truck right outside our window) and then, all of the sudden the apartment started shaking, and then rocking back and forth.  We ran into the boys room, grabbed them in their blankets, threw on our coats, and ran down 8 floors to outside where we joined other people who had the same idea.  

The rumbling had stopped by the time we got outside but we didn't want to go back in since we weren't sure it was over.  After about 40 minutes outside, Jesse and I decided it was OK to go back in (the fact that is was -30 and we didn't have our regular clothes on and the boys only had the blankets around them helped in making that decision).  

There have been several strong aftershocks ranging from 4-5 on the Richter scale. Once we went back inside, we got our things and spent the first night at our office since it's in a 4-story brick building versus our apartment building which is 9 stories and made of concrete.  As you can imagine the buildings here are not built for such things, since an earthquake that strong has never happened here before.

We are all OK, if a little shaken up (hehehe).  Several teams have been going around to check buildings for damage.  I read somewhere that they found 31 buildings with enough damage to evacuate.  I'm not sure how true that is so I can't confirm or deny it.  Our building is fine and there are only 2 minor cracks in our apartment (not serious).
 

But, we survived and we didn't lose anything.  The aftershocks have stopped for the most part and life is back on track.  Thank you for those who knew about this already and thought for us.