Hanukkah and Christmas Decor

The first night of Hanukkah fell on the Sunday after Thanksgiving this year, and the girls really wanted to get Christmas set up, so there wasn't much time to rest on our Thanksgiving laurels.  The show must go on!

We got out all the red and green boxes, and the girls worked on setting up the Christmas tree.

We found some local powered lights, and Elena was in charge of making sure they actually worked.

Both the girls helped put ornaments on the tree and nothing broke!  Hopefully we're as lucky getting everything off the tree too.

This will be Jeff and my 15th Christmas since we founded our own branch of the Goerss family.

We didn't get the village set up right away, so there was space to do the Hanukkah candles.  We learned the hard way though that Viv needs something under her menorah to catch the wax.

Even though we weren't finished doing all the decorations, the tree was done, which was enough for Pixie.  We found her enjoying the tree the next morning.

Elena was especially delighted to see her and proceeded to catch her up on the events of the past year.  The best holiday present so far though has been Elena's first Covid vaccine shot.  They had a clinic at the embassy after school, and there was definitely a festive atmosphere in the air.  She said it didn't hurt, and her only side effects were a slightly sore upper arm the next day.  She can't wait for her second shot.

We continued with our Hanukkah celebrations throughout the week, including a meal of fried food, although it was a little different this year.  We didn't have latkes, but we had fried chicken, fried rice, stir fried vegetables, and Noby revealed that she can make spring rolls from scratch, so she fried some of those up for us too.

I finally got around to setting up the village, and Jeff gave me a new building as an early Christmas present.  It's a gin distillery! The water wheel moves and everything.  It's a big hit, and it fits in really well.

We have part of the village on the dresser,

part on the card table,

and a few rebels on one of the side tables.

As you can see, it didn't take long for the toys to show up, and the annual sagas to begin.

This one though, I think is the story with the most potential ;-)

We celebrated being fully set up by watching a Christmas movie (photo courtesy of Vivian).

The Marine Ball is usually in November, but with all the things going on this year, it got delayed until December.  At first we weren't going to go, but a bunch of our friends were going, and we figured it would be fun to get dressed up.  Jeff got a suit made, and he had a shirt to match my dress, so we felt very fancy and had a good time.

We stayed overnight in the hotel which had a view of the Pavilion shopping center and a peek at one of the towers.  We had a lot of fun people watching.

The girls continued Hanukkah without us, and they were very proud that they could sing the songs all on their own.  We were home the next night for the final night of Hanukkah, and we all sat down together to enjoy the lights.

The girls have a few more days of school, and then they have three weeks off for the holidays.  It's been a great start to the holiday season, and we'll try to do some fun things to keep them busy and festive while they're off of school.

Double Thanksgiving

We have so much to be thankful for this year, that we really had to celebrate Thanksgiving twice.  Despite a few bumps in the road, we've had a smooth transition to our new life in KL, and it's a good life.  The girls are happy in school, we finally have all of our stuff, and we have made so many new friends.  The only way to show them how thankful we were for all of them was to have two celebrations.  

Our first celebration was the regular Thanksgiving meal on Thursday.  We invited our social sponsor family and some of Jeff's friends from work.  It was big enough to feel festive, but not so big that we didn't have a seat for everyone.

Even though Noby has worked for many American families, she's never worked for anyone who actually cooked Thanksgiving dinner, so she was super excited for a new cooking challenge.  She insisted on cutting the spine out of the turkey herself, but since I'm taller and have more leverage, I cracked the breast to flatten it.  Teamwork!

She also did a great job cubing the bread for the stuffing.

The girls picked off some while it was still fresh.  We left it out to dry, and they would dig through to find ones at the bottom that were still soft.  I didn't stop them, because it was natural bread tilling.

We also added a special Asian touch.  Jeff loves spicy morning glory, or kangkong as it's called here, so of course, we had to have some of that too.

The girls were excited to be hosting company, so they got all dressed up.

The turkey was smaller than what I've cooked before, so I'm afraid I left it in a bit too long, but we had the special turkey gravy to put on it, and everyone said it was delicious.

Plus, there was no shortage of food.

We had to have a little break before dessert.

It was a great Thanksgiving dinner, and everyone had fun, but it was missing one of my favorite parts of Thanksgiving, the morning brunch parade.  Because we're on the other side of the world from New York, the timing is all off.  A lot of people wait and do their Thanksgiving meal on Saturday, especially since school isn't off on Thursday.  In order to get in all my favorite parts of my favorite holiday, we decided to host Parade Day on Saturday.  Jeff recorded the parade, so that we could show it on a loop and serve all day brunch, which is our favorite meal to host.  Having an all day open house also allowed us to invite lots more people, which is great because so many people have helped make KL feel like home for us.

An essential brunch dish for us is sausage balls, and since this is a Muslim country where pork can be difficult to find, we had to figure out the best place to get our base sausage.  Luckily, KL is a highly international city, and there's enough of a market for pork to support specialty stores, like one very appropriately called Sausage KL.  They have a restaurant that serves breakfast, so Jeff and I decided to go check it out.

The breakfast was delicious, and while we ate, we looked over their menu of different sausage types.

We ended up buying the Lincolnshire and Spicy Italian as our main meats, but I couldn't resist getting 500g of the Cranberry & Thyme one for fun.  ALL the sausage balls we made got eaten, so for the next round, we're going to try more flavors and buy more meat.

The other thing we wanted to do was have a Bloody Mary and mimosa self service area.  We had hunted high and low for tomato juice and Bloody Mary mix, and we got lucky enough to find some the week before Thanksgiving.  I had also purchased a few different kinds of fruit juice to make the mimosas more interesting.  The problem was, we didn't really have the appropriate serving equipment to keep that many different kinds of liquid cold in style.  There just happens to be an IKEA close by though, and without much effort, I convinced one of my friends to go with me to see what we could find.  We got super lucky.  I bought a large and small ice bucket, several glass carafes, and a bunch more champagne glasses.  They were about $1 each and came in boxes of 6, so we may never use all 12, but we have them if we need them.

On the day, we set all the choices for glasses up in one area.

We were very pleased with the drink mixing station's final set up.

We put out some food to start, but left plenty of space for more.

We cued up the parade and watched a bit before the first guests arrived.  We had said open house from 10-5, and we had people from 10:30 on.  It was so much fun.  Some people brought food or drinks, and some people just brought themselves, but everyone found something they enjoyed to eat or drink, and the parade was a big hit.  For some people it was their first time seeing it, and for others it was a welcome taste of home.  Noby helped us make sure we didn't run out of clean dishes, and Jeff and I were able to host and really enjoy everyone's company.  By the end we were exhausted, but I'm so glad we did it.

We didn't have anything planned for Sunday, but it was a lovely day, and Elena really wanted to go to the pool, so Jeff went with her.  They took our new floating chairs down and just drifted around the pool chatting for a couple hours, another thing to be thankful for.

This has been a difficult year in many ways, and I love that Thanksgiving gives us a chance to stop, reflect, and share with people who we are thankful for.

HHE (Finally!) and Brunch

We have had a lot of bumps on the road to getting our HHE from the U.S. to Malaysia, so, not surprisingly, there were a few dramatic flairs left for the final delivery day.  We packed out on June 7th, and our UAB (air freight) showed up quickly and easily.  A couple months later, we still hadn't heard anything about our HHE (sea freight), so we reached out through the people at the embassy here.  Essentially, the response we got from the shipping company was, oh, you wanted us to ship that?  Our stuff had just been sitting in DC for months, not going anywhere.  Once we finally got it on a boat, it was supposed to arrive on November 1, but then, for some reason, they switched which boat it was on, and the new boat, had twice as many stops and kept getting delayed.  

Finally though, the ship made it to KL, and the embassy did a great job getting it through customs quickly.  They scheduled a delivery day for us and said the stuff should arrive between 10 and 10:30, so Jeff took the day off, we put the girls on the bus, and then waited for our boxes.  And waited.  And waited.  First, it was going to be delayed until 11.  Then 1.  Then it was definitely going to come by 2.  The truck had had a problem, you see.  They sent us a picture of a truck, which presumably had something wrong with it.  They finally decided to give up on the big, broken truck and load our belongings onto two smaller trucks instead.  By 3:30, the first boxes were coming through the door.

Almost as soon as they started bringing in boxes though, water started pouring from the light fixture under the air conditioning unit.  I ran to get a bucket, Jeff turned off the light and the AC, and we pushed the furniture off to one side.

Noby called the main office to see if someone could come and figure out why water was still streaming from our ceiling, and the moving crew just kept bringing in boxes, walking undeterred around the bucket.  Of course, by that point the girls were home.  I advised Vivian to go to a friend's house, which she did, but Elena wanted to stay and watch, so I put her in charge of checking off the boxes as they came in.

The AC maintenance guys actually came really quickly, but then the movers had to carry boxes around a bucket AND a ladder.

The philosophy seemed to be get all the boxes off the truck, then unpack them, so they started unpacking right around the time the AC guy showed up with a water vacuum for our ceiling.

And to finish the move with a bang, one of the first things they unpacked, they broke.  The man unwrapping my grandmother's sugar bowl threw the paper on the ground without checking for a top first.  Bye bye top.

That was the point at which I decided I needed to leave for a little bit, so I decided to take Elena (protesting all the way) over to her friend's house for the remainder of the unpacking.  They kindly kept her there for dinner, which allowed chaos to reign in the dining room a bit longer.

When she finally came home, she was thrilled to discover a cooler full of stuffed animals in her room and promptly jumped in.

By 7pm, everything was unpacked, if not yet put away, and we felt pretty proud of ourselves for getting it all into the apartment in such a short window.

In the morning, we found a makeshift table for the girls to eat their breakfast at, and then we put them on the bus and got down to work.

Noby was a HUGE help.  She got the kitchen in order, and even managed to fit all of our holiday stuff into one corner of what is supposed to be a maid's bedroom.

By the time the girls got home from school, it looked like a proper home that someone could live in.  They were thrilled to be reunited with all their books and toys, and so, to celebrate, we had some friends over for delivery dinner and a bingo game.

The next day, someone came to hang the pictures, which was a relief, because I kept waiting for one of us to bump into one and knock it over.

It's so nice to have color on all the white walls now, and we were so thrilled to have everything set up, since we had already offered to host Thanksgiving the following week.

While it may not seem like the most logical way to celebrate, we went out for Sunday brunch once the house was organized.  We had actually been trying to meet up with new friends who had been introduced to us by mutual friends, and this was the best time for it.  Plus, they wanted to go to a place on our list, Fuego at Troika Sky Dining.  The way the Troika Sky Dining is set up is that there are several restaurants that share one level.  They're all quite fancy, and they have great views.  On Sundays, the restaurants rotate through serving brunch, and this Sunday was Fuego's turn.

It's best known for its steak, which was on the menu, but many of the other dishes sounded excellent too.

We definitely want to come back for dinner one night, because while the decor looked good during the day, I'm sure it's magical at night with all the lights on.

We even spotted a grand piano with a music stand next to it, so there's a good chance there's live music too.

There were six of us all together, and the waiter brought two of each dish and placed them at either end of the table.  He also made it clear that we could ask for more of anything, but we tried to pace ourselves.  The guacamole with halibut was my surprise favorite of the starters.

The tomato soup wasn't terribly photogenic, but it tasted good.

Jeff's favorite starter was the bread that came with the shrimp dish.  It's the only thing we got seconds of, and even though I teased him, other people ate more of it too.

The clear winner though, was the steak.  It was phenomenal.

There was very good roasted chicken as well, but we were so into the steak that Jeff didn't get a picture of the chicken.  Dessert was lovely as well, and a great way to finish off the feast.

It was not cheap, but Jeff and I figured that it was a well deserved celebration of finally receiving our HHE and getting our house put together.