Hotel Quarantine

We have survived our first week of quarantine! There are definitely positives and negatives.  We are lucky to have three large, connected rooms, and the food we get is abundant and usually good.  We have views over the city, and the girls have not driven us completely crazy, but after a week of not leaving these rooms, we're all a bit frayed at the edges.  Still, we are keeping busy, and things are going as well as they can.  We spend most of our time in the main room.

When we need a little space from one another, we can retreat to one of the two regular rooms.

Each room has a bathroom with two sinks, a shower, and a tub, so there's plenty of space for each of us to do our thing.

Elena has even appropriated part of her closet as her own private "office".

Vivian made the fantastic contribution of creating a family quarantine schedule for us, and it gives us a sense of structure throughout our days here.

I did the first couple lessons, but then everyone else wanted to get involved and teach about their area of interest or expertise.  We've done some classes casting to the television, and some at the table with each of us on our own devices.

Elena even got out her chessboard to demonstrate en passant, a chess move none of us had heard of before.

Reading and writing are also important daily activities.  I helped both girls find books, and we brainstormed writing ideas.  Of course, Jeff has left us all in the dust.  He's finished two books already and is working on his third.

For field trips, we put on an episode of Rick Steves and travel to somewhere in Europe with him.  We also have fun special activities, like D&D which we've managed to keep up on the other side of the planet, and new episodes of Loki, which we watch and then dissect with our favorite YouTubers.  There's more screen time than we would like for everyone, but I have been able to get the girls to take a break and do things like water painting.

Technology is helping us stay connected and entertained, but the main driver of our daily schedule is still the basic need for food.  Jeff keeps grumbling about Pavlov and bells, but when the doorbell rings a little after 8, 12, and 6, we know it's time for our food adventure.  We go to our main door, and sitting on the chairs outside are two bags of food.

In theory, an alarm is supposed to sound every time we open our door.  Sometimes it rings and sometimes it doesn't.  This seems to be the theme of our time in Malaysia so far, a bit hit or miss.  

Breakfast has been pretty consistent though.  There are always eggs, turkey sausage, hash browns, and what we have determined is a beef version of bacon.  Malaysia is a diverse country, but it's predominantly Muslim, so no pork at the hotel.

We've gotten this version of scrambled eggs, regular scrambled eggs, plain omelet, mushroom omelet, and one time, sunny side up eggs.  We also always get juice with breakfast.  The first couple days we got orange juice, but on the third day, we got mango juice.  Elena was VERY pleased.

We've also gotten apple juice and a light green juice.  We don't know what fruit it came from, but it was yummy.  We don't get any kind of explanation with our meals, so part of the fun is guessing what everything is.  Jeff signed up for the "local" food, so his is a real adventure.

Our "western" selection tends to be a bit more identifiable, and there are some consistent staples.  We get the same vegetables in different configurations.

Yesterday, the veggies showed up tempura style, which was a first.

Sometimes the breaded stuff is chicken, sometimes it's fish.  We also get a lot of straight up chicken breast, and often we have potatoes.  Obviously this calls for ketchup, but all you get is what's in the tray, and so far no ketchup has been provided.  There are, however, lots of delivery services like Rappi in Colombia, so I've been trying one called Happy Fresh that will pick up food from grocery stores.  I have to work within some pretty interesting restrictions though.  This is the list of restrictions for ordering delivery.

The print came out quite small, so here are the highlights.  Things have to be delivered to the hotel before 5 pm, but they don't get delivered to our room until the 6-8 dinner window.  This rules out perishables and means that if you order from the approved delivery restaurants (all of which are unhealthy), your food will arrive lukewarm at best.  We are also not allowed to have anything delivered in glass or cans.  Condiments are also listed under "non-permitted" items, but when I called the front desk to check, I was told that condiments in PLASTIC containers are okay.  Hooray for loopholes! I managed to find Heinz ketchup in a plastic bottle (harder than it sounds, most condiments do come in glass bottles here), and ultra pasteurized milk that could hang out in the lobby waiting to be delivered.  I also got some sparkling water in small plastic bottles.  We did a couple orders, and I got overconfident.  I tried to get better instant coffee (all we have is a water boiling kettle and Nescafe), but it came in one of those tins with a plastic lid, and it didn't make it up :-( We did get some better tea though, so that's something.

In our "living area" there is a half bath with a space that I suppose is meant to be a desk/work area.  We have transformed this into what I call the pseudo kitchen.

We use the desk area for snacks and a tea station.

Then I wash our dishes in the sink and use the vanity area for drying.

We have mini fridges in both the bedrooms, but no microwave, so we end up throwing away a lot of food because we can't eat it, can't reheat it, and we know that more will be coming soon.  It's wasteful, but there doesn't seem to be another solution.  We get at least two garbage bags with dinner each night, and we put them outside our door as they become full.  There's no housekeeping, so we do our best to keep the place clean.  

The toughest part is not being able to go outside.  We are all getting bored and a bit stir crazy, but it is nice to have meals together as a family,

and even though we can't go outside, we have fun looking out our windows at the city around us.

We are definitely ready to get out of here and explore our new home.

Flying to Asia Once Again

It has been many years since we last made the trip from the U.S. to Asia, and the girls are older now, so we were cautiously optimistic about how they would do.  Of course, that was balanced with all the extra stress that comes from traveling in pandemic times.  I had a special folder with all kinds of paperwork showing that we did not have covid, that we did have permission to enter Malaysia, and that we had booked and paid for our quarantine stay.  I had to present these, and then pay for four of our bags, since our ticket was booked through American Airlines while we were flying on Qatar Airways, and for some reason, that only includes one bag per person, even though we are entitled when moving to two bags per person, and regular Qatar Airways passengers get two a piece.  Since this wasn't our first time dealing with this crazy system, we had come prepared and arrived three hours ahead of time, instead of the typical two hours, with all of our bags in tow.

The Mom and Dad taxi service had managed to get us and all of the bags to the airport, with some logistical support from Jeff the Tetris master.  Before we left for the airport, we had thanked them for all of their incredible support with a lunch at Carlyle.  Elena LOVES going to eat at restaurants, and she has been asking throughout this whole pandemic time about when we're going to go to restaurants again.  With things finally getting back to normal in the States, we figured now was the time.  She was SO excited when we told her.

And she stayed excited throughout the whole meal.

It's good that we had such a large lunch, because after all the hoops we had to jump through to check our bags, we had no time to grab some food at the airport.  The flight was less than half full, and it had three rows of three.  We started the girls off with me in our assigned row of three, but when we saw that no one else was coming, Vivian moved over to Jeff's row of three that he had all to himself.  It worked out well, because we each had a kid to take care of, and we all had some space to spread out.

After 45 minutes on hold and talking to someone who didn't understand how co-chaired flights worked, I had managed to get kid's meals for the girls.  They found things to eat, and all the food was pretty good.  It was especially nice that they gave the adults actual silverware.  Elena found Raya and the Last Dragon as a movie option, and after watching it and eating her dinner, she conked out across two of our three seats.  Viv had a harder time falling asleep, but managed to get in a couple hours.  Jeff and I both dozed as we could.  

The flight was over thirteen hours, but it passed relatively quickly and painlessly with a sandwich break and breakfast in addition to dinner.  Elena woke up for breakfast and watched Raya for a second time.  Viv was a bit grouchy, since she hadn't gotten enough sleep.  We were all relieved to get off the airplane though, and it turned out that Doha has a really easy airport for international transfers.  We just got off the plane and into the main terminal to wait for our next flight.  We didn't have to go through any extra hoopla, which was nice.

When we were looking at the terminal map, we saw a big teddy bear picture at the center of it.  We were wondering what that was, and as we walked by the main area, we found it.  It was indeed a very large and very strange teddy bear.  We have no idea what it is supposed to mean, but we took a picture, because that's what we do.

A more enjoyable discovery was a snack shop selling pomegranate seeds.  This is one of my favorite snacks, but it's almost impossible to find good, fresh ones in the U.S..  It was a great treat for surviving the first part of our journey.

We had a leisurely two and a half hour layover, and then we boarded our next flight to KL.  The kid's meal dinner on this flight was just so cute that I had to take a picture.  They have purple and orange lighting on the plane, so it came out oddly lit, but you can see why it made us smile.

Our second flight had maybe 50 people on it, so Vivian got her own row, and Elena split her time between me and Jeff in three seater rows.  She was so excited to get a window seat, because usually Vivian claims that honor.  When we got on the plane it was night, but as we were getting ready to land in KL, the sun rose, and Elena was glued to her window.

She tried her hand at airplane window photography.

She was so enamored of the clouds, that she tried sketching them on the blank pages of her mandala coloring book.  As we got closer to landing, we were all excited, trying to catch glimpses of our new home out of the windows.  We saw the coast on one side and low mountains on the other.

Once again, Elena was all about the clouds.

Finally, we landed.  When we got off the plane, there was an expediter from the U.S. embassy waiting to meet us.  He was a very friendly, young Malaysian man.  We were glad he was there, because getting out of the airport was like an obstacle course.  We took a train, and then worked our way through various stations.  He had a paper bag full of paperwork.  Between the two of us, we ended up having most of the documents we needed.  First, I showed our passports, negative covid tests, and boarding passes.  Then, we got another covid test.  This one was not as easy.  They had longer sticks, and they put one in our throat and one up our nose.  As before, Elena was completely unphased, and Vivian was certain her tester had wounded the inside of her nose.  After that, we spent about twenty minutes sorting out paying the "operational cost" of about $700 per person for passing through the airport (don't get me started).  Next, he took us to the immigration waiting area which absolutely reeked of cigarettes.  We sat there and waited again while all our paperwork was processed.  Finally, our passports were stamped, and we exited that part to find all eight of our bags waiting for us by the carousels.  The last indignity was that all of our bags were sprayed with some kind of "disinfecting" liquid, so everything was a bit wet as we loaded into the waiting van from the hotel.

Even though we were all tired, we enjoyed looking out the window for our drive from the airport to the city.  There are lots of trees and lots of construction projects along the broad highway.  Once we got into the city proper, it reminded us of a smaller version of Bangkok.  The driver took us to the hotel's side entrance.  We were met by a hotel employee in full PPE, who checked us in and rolled a trolley with all of our bags up to our rooms.  We have connecting rooms with a living area in the middle.  The furniture looks like what was left over and rejected from the rest of the hotel, and there is nothing on the walls, but the rooms are large, the ceilings are high, and the big windows give us a peek at our new home.  We are so excited to have made it to the other side of the planet.

A Taste of Summer Vacation

Our goal for the summer was to get to KL as quickly as possible, since we knew that it would take a while to get through quarantine and get settled in.  That meant that we were leaving on the first flight we could after school was done, which didn't leave any time for a real summer vacation.  School was limping through the last couple weeks online, and our house was all packed up, so we rented the Airbnb we had last summer (affectionately known in our family as "the pool house") to have a taste of summer fun.  It has a pool, an air hockey table, and a big yard.  Our plan was to invite some friends over as well for extra fun.

As soon as we checked in, the girls got into the spirit of things with pool time and air hockey.

Our first guests were our D&D group, and we had a great, in person session.  Hopefully our next in person session will be when they all come to visit us in Malaysia.

On Tuesday, we had some of our best family friends over for Vivian's pre-birthday pool party.  We'll be out of quarantine by the time her real birthday comes around, but she wanted to do something with friends in the U.S. as well.

It was fun for the whole family, since we each have a buddy.

Of course, we were having so much fun, that I forgot to serve cupcakes.  It was fine though, because the kids came back to play some more the next day, and we did cupcakes then.

It's great to spend time with friends, but it's tough to say goodbye.

We had another set of friends come over the next day to cheer us up, so all was well again.  They got to use the pool for their baby's first swim, and the girls took their older one to run around in the grass.  A good time was had by all.

Friday was the last day of school, and the day we had to move out of the Airbnb.  It was also the first celebration of the new federal holiday, Juneteenth, so Jeff had a surprise day off.  It was great to have his help, but because the decision was made at the last minute on Thursday, which suddenly became his last day of work, he had a bit of a stressful last day making sure everything got done.  He managed it, but it set the tone for our last few crazy days in the U.S..

Saturday was car selling day, so Jeff and I drove our two cars to CarMax.  If we could have kept the Hyundai, we would have, but they drive on the other side of the road in Malaysia and don't allow hybrid imports, so we thanked it for its service and sold it so that someone else could enjoy it.  We managed to pay off the remaining balance and clear a profit of $1.87, which we considered a great success.  The sale of my car was all profit, but we're debating whether or not we want to turn that into a new car or skip the car and just use it for vacation money.  Everything is going to be close in KL, and I am not a fan of city driving.

We were hoping that selling the cars would be less involved than buying them, but when we thought we were almost done, they said it would be at least an hour before we could sign the final paperwork, and they would call us when it was our turn.  By that point, Mom had already shown up to pick us up, so we decided to take her out to lunch while we waited.  There was a Red Lobster across the street, and since that seemed like something we wouldn't be finding in Malaysia, I went all out on a lobster feast.

It turned into three different meals (I got a bunch of green beans too), so I felt it was money well spent.  

While we're excited about our new lifestyle in Malaysia, we know that things won't be as easy and convenient as they are in the States, especially since KL is in the middle of a lock down, so one of the priorities was getting everyone's hair cut.  Vivian just had a full hair makeover, so she was set, which meant Elena was up first.  She was excited for the hair washing part, and she was not disappointed.

She had also gotten it into her head that she wanted little buns.  She had full faith in the stylist's ability to do this, and while it wasn't something the stylist had ever done before, she was so charmed with Elena that she was willing to give it a try.  She did it while Elena's hair was still wet, and they came out pretty well.  They just required a few bobby pins and some maintenance throughout the day.  Elena was pleased as could be.

Sunday was also Father's Day.  Jeff had planned ahead and ordered books for both our dads, but on the day, I felt like I should do something.  Dad decided he wanted BLTs for lunch, so I went with him to the farmer's market and bought fresh tomatoes.  Then I cooked the bacon and prepped sandwiches.  The girls got Nutella instead of BLTs.  It wasn't much, but he seemed to enjoy it, which is the point of Father's Day.

Jeff's Father's Day present was a new watch for tracking his walks.  We had left it at the house for safekeeping, so the girls and I went there to present it to him.  Vivian, being the ham that she is, went for full speechifying on the wonderousness of Daddy.

Jeff definitely earned his daddy cred that day, because our other Father's Day activity was our covid tests for travel.  Even though we knew it would probably only take 24 hours for the test to come back, no one would guarantee less than 48 hours, so, since we were flying on Tuesday, we had to do the test on Sunday.  I had found a drive through CVS that would do it.  It was a bit bizarre, because they handed us each a brown paper lunch bag with the test kit in it, and then we were supposed to swab ourselves in the car and put our finished test in a drop box.  I had read up on it before we went, so we came prepared.  Vivian was in the front seat with Jeff, and I was in the back seat with Elena.  We each swabbed one of the girls, and then did ourselves.  It actually wasn't too bad, and we got the negative results back in less than 24 hours, so that gave us peace of mind for our trip.

The last few days before we left were a bit of a hectic scramble, so even though it was hassle to move into the pool house and move back out of it, I'm so glad we made the time to enjoy summer with our friends.

On the Move Again

 This past year seems to have just flown by, and it's time to move again.  Our next post will be Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.  This will be our fourth move in seven years, and while just the thought of that is exhausting, it also means that we've got our system pretty much down.  It's telling that Elena just went, oh right, we're doing suitcase, fast pile, slow pile again.  The pile she doesn't need to worry about is the, we really don't need this pile.  Jeff and I have slowly been whittling away at it all, making piles for donation and trash, clearing the piles out of the house, and then starting over again.  We're quite pleased with our progress though, and I feel like this will be our lightest move yet.  There's also been the bittersweet task of deciding which toys come with us, and which can now go to storage.  Our apartment will be smaller than the one we had in Bogota, and we won't have a dedicated "play area", so some of the bigger items are going to go to storage.  The girls begged us not to donate some of their favorite things, so to storage it goes.

Last week Able Movers came to pack up our UAB (unaccompanied air baggage, aka air freight) and HHE (house hold effects, aka sea freight), and I have to say, the name was no joke.  They said they could do it in a day, and Jeff and I were scoffing a bit.  We have never been packed out in a day, but sure enough, they showed up at 8 and were done by 4:30.  It was amazing.

We're hoping we can take some of the credit though.  We did get rid of a LOT of stuff, and we tried to organize things as best we could.  I set up a system for the bedrooms where everything on the beds was UAB, including bedding.  Then, we made a pile of UAB stuff in the kitchen.

Because there are four of us, we get 700 pounds of UAB, the "fast" stuff, so I try to pack things that will make our new home feel homey, as well as as much non-breakable kitchen stuff as possible.  They give us a welcome kit, but it's rarely enough for a full day of meal prep, and there are no specialty cooking items.

With the house packed up, we had to decide where to sleep.  We get ten days worth of accommodations, so we booked the Homewood Suites which is just down the street from us.  We booked a room that could fit the girls too, but they spent their time at my parents' house, where they each got their own room, rather than their own side of the sofa bed.  The hotel actually had dinner included three days a week, which turned out to be pretty tasty.  The girls agreed to hang out with us for the Wednesday premier of the new Disney+ show Loki, which we had all been looking forward to.

It's so funny to think that the last time we stayed in this hotel, Vivian was closer to the age Elena is now, and Elena was just a little baby.  Time certainly does fly.  

The next day, my mom and I took the girls to Potomac Mills to address one of the main things that come up as children grow, they need new shoes! We made our usual trek to New Balance and got them some bouncy sneakers, but we also made a pit stop at the Crocs store, because Vivian still only wants to wear Crocs.  We also had to get new shorts for both of them.  Vivian got a bunch of navy blue ones, because she can wear these to school as part of her uniform.  Of course, shopping is hard work and requires a reward, so the final stops were the Disney store and Auntie Anne's for pretzels.  There were some happy kids on the drive home.

I got in on the action too.  Vivian was so excited that we had matching shirts.  Even though she is catching up to me in terms of height, I treasure the fact that she is still my mini-me.

The girls enjoyed their time with my parents.  My mom makes pretty braids in Elena's hair, and my dad will sit and watch Disney movies with them.

Having them taken care of, meant that Jeff and I could do stuff like go out to eat at Cheestique.

Mask restrictions are being lifted, and things are going back to normal here.  I'm a bit sad that we'll be going back in time as it were by going to Malaysia where the infection rates are still very high, masks are required everywhere at all times, and right now there is a lock-down in effect until June 28 and everyone expects it to be extended through the summer.  We have been lucky enough to have this year here to recover though, so we're ready to go into the fray once more.