Money, Transportation, and Household Help

Our move to Thailand is going to involve a HUGE lifestyle change.  For starters, we're going to be living in a four bedroom, five bathroom single family home in a gated expat community.  One of the great things about this is that the international school is right there, and Vivi could probably walk or bike to school on wide, even roads.  Some of the crazy stuff is that the house also has "maid's quarters" which we will probably use for live-in help, and most people drive around the community in gas powered golf carts.

While you're visualizing me speeding down a palm tree lined road in a golf cart, add this thought.  In Thailand they drive on the left hand side of the road, so we have purchased a Honda CRV with the steering wheel on the right.  Golf carts, however, have the steering wheel on the left.  I don't want to even think about how often I'm going to try to get into the wrong side of either vehicle.

You may be wondering how one can purchase vehicles on the other side of the world.  The short answer is awesome people.  In an embassy community, you may not be the new kid this month, but you probably were just a few months ago, so everyone is very willing to help out relative strangers.  For example, to get ready for moving overseas, Jeff and I took some classes where we met another couple who was moving to Thailand.  They moved out in April, so compared to us they are now highly knowledgeable veterans.  They live in downtown Bangkok, so they haven't needed a car so far, but they get a parking space with their apartment.  Our Honda CRV, purchased from another embassy employee we have never met, is now sitting in that spot.  Oh, and how did we pay for it? That gets trickier.

Before this week, I had never tried to transfer a large sum of cash from my bank account to another person's bank account.  I know that criminals and business people have very efficient systems for this, but for the lay person it is a highly convoluted process.  As soon as you go over the $2,000 line, you get into all kinds of interesting regulations about how much money you can move and how often you can move it.  The truly frightening part though is that even though there are tons of restrictions on moving my own money out of my own checking account, it is relatively easy to get a large cash advance on my credit card and transfer that money to someone else.  Paying bills is hard, but getting into debt is easy.  Oh America, what will you think of next?

I haven't tried to pay for a golf cart yet, but I have another embassy friend (who I met through Facebook) scouting that one out for me, and if I find one I like, then she'll store it at her house until I get there.  I have to admit that I fought the idea of a golf cart pretty hard, because it seems so counter intuitive to have an open vehicle in a country where it's always hot, usually humid, and occasionally monsoon season.  But apparently there are certain places that you can only get to with a golf cart.  Plus the mall has a special golf cart parking section (yes, I'm giggling as I write that, but I'm going to live it!).

Even more important than transportation though, is the idea that a new person is going to become a part of our family's daily lives for the next three years.  It sounds like everyone in the area we're moving to has at least part time household help, and some people have a full staff.  If you're living in a house with five toilets, having someone to help clean makes sense to me, but household help services can also include shopping, laundry, cooking, and child care.

A friend put us in touch with a family that is currently in Virginia, but used to live in Thailand and had such a great housekeeper that they brought her back here with them.  It's time for her to go back to Thailand now, so we're going to meet with her today and hopefully she will end up being our household goddess of everything.

It's nerve wracking, and I'm not sleeping much, but I feel like we're making a lot of progress.  Hopefully by the time we leave the U.S. we'll have two vehicles and a housekeeper, and I will be experienced at wiring money around the world.

And so it begins . . .

I've been thinking a lot about doing a blog to record our time in Thailand, and today I decided to just start, since that's the advice I give to my students who aren't sure what to write.  If I'm going to tell them to just write and see where it takes you, then I figure I should practice what I preach.

I also need to give credit to Leah, who gave me a picture of us with our first literary magazine group today, and then said, you should do a blog while you're in Thailand.  Yes, Leah, I should!

Well, we're not there yet, but we're definitely getting ready to say good bye to our life here in Virginia.  The movers are coming next week to pack up everything besides what I can fit in five suitcases.  I've decided not to go for the full eight suitcases that we are technically entitled to bring on the plane, because I was visualizing me and Jeff managing eight suitcases and the two girls, and I started screaming inside my head.  So, five suitcases, one of which will probably be full of diapers.

I have to go through everything in our house and decide if we want it to go to Thailand in air freight (UAB, unaccompanied air baggage, takes two to three weeks), sea freight (HHE, house hold effects, takes two to three months), or storage (a humidity controlled warehouse somewhere in Virginia, won't see it again for three years).  There's also the fourth category that is not in the government handbook, trash.  I have used so many of those giant black trash bags, that I had to go to the store and buy a new box today.  When is the last time you went through everything under all the sinks in your house? I guarantee at least fifty percent of it is trash.  We have been in this house for eight years, and I swear I try to keep it organized, but man we have a lot of junk.

To add to the fun of deciding how to pack things, the government gives us size and weight restrictions.  We get 700lbs for our UAB, and anything we want to ship has to fit inside a 3'x2'x2' box.  That means no crib, no television set, and almost no high chair until I discovered a handle, pulled, and the whole thing collapsed down to half the size.  Luckily, HHE and storage is far less of a challenge.  The embassy provides us with furnished housing, to include lamps, which is great, until you start looking at the details.  For example, what size bed are they going to provide for us? Jeff and I have upgraded ourselves to a king size, but the government only provides a queen size in our assigned housing, so the bed goes in HHE, not storage, and Jeff is going to need to watch his elbows for two to three months.

A rep from the moving company came on Tuesday and did a quick survey of all our stuff.  He said we should be good to go on weight, which was a relief.  Now I'm mostly working on stacking things in UAB and HHE piles around the house, which makes for a bit of an unintentional obstacle course. Tomorrow is Vivi's last day of Kindergarten, so I've signed her up for a martial arts camp for next week to make sure she's out of the house when all the packing is going on.  She's so excited about the move, but we'll see how she does with everything in our house being packed up and taken away.  My goal is to keep her busy, which will hopefully also keep her happy.