About sixteen years ago, I met him for the first time. My trainwreck sibling brought home this adorable puppy he had no business adopting because he had not one thing in his life that wasn’t a mess. I was furious at my sibling – he didn’t even take care of himself, how could he drag
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May 22, 2011
That second day was our transit to Ko Phi Phi, and I hate to say it didn’t make a great first impression on me. I’m not one for a high season touristy destinations in the first place and PP Island is nothing but a tourist destination. We’d originally agreed to go there because we wanted to spend some time on an island and didn’t have a particular preference while my friend did. It was gorgeous but now we know!
We also got there on a Sunday late afternoon, almost everyone was smoking, we were surrounded by “helpful” hawkers of rides and hotels and my immediate reaction was “Get me OUT of here.” Being hot, tired, hungry, claustrophobic and choking on smoke tends to do that. So we got, and ended up trekking to the back of beyond to the other bay and found ourselves in a hilariously dank, horrid, hole in the side of the mountain room for the night for 1000 Baht. We immediately started planning our escape for the next morning.
My friends were due in the next afternoon so we were out of that room like a shot, after taking a few photos of PP Good View’s crap rooms: my good friend Millipede that hung out on the wall half the night with me so that I stayed awake watching him starting at 4 am, the cracked, stained, holey office ceiling tiles, the neon green bed skirts, the nauseating salmon pink walls, the other creepy crawlers that came in the middle of the night. We missed photographing the towels that served as our blankets, but there will always be the lovely sliding glass doors that couldn’t lock from the inside but COULD be padlocked from the outside. Readers, friends, compatriots, don’t ever stay at PP Good View. I don’t care how frugally you wish to travel, it’s a death trap.
Ahoy Boat! (Us, getting out)
You bet your belly buttons we picked a much nicer hotel after that (like it was hard to improve on that, a benefit of staying in a dungeon) and bedanished to my dear friend’s requested per night budget of $15/night. Yes, I was (over)reacting a little but PP Good View was what you got for that much, or you could stay in town at the dorm rooms for half again that price but “in town” = in the heart of the partying and I’m just too old for that.
Out of respect for my friend’s budget, the fact that she’s been on the road for months and doesn’t have income, though, I was up front with her as soon as she was off the ferry about the fact that the hotel was twice the rate she’d asked me to find and verified that we could a) try again to find another place closer to her budget or b) the three of us were willing to chip in and make up part of the difference if it was too much of a hardship.
I felt like that was fair to all parties. PiC had oked the offer and our other friend agreed that she would much rather stay at a nicer place and pay more to cover a share for budget traveler friend than go too bare bones for health reasons. Friend 1 waited until she got in to pass judgment but being upfront about the money and having options removed any tension from the situation. All were happy with it in the end and paid in full without any reservations.
Our stay at the Paradise Pearl was more expensive than I preferred, but we did get the rate without breakfast buffet included. They would have tacked on an extra 1000 baht per room if you booked online, which works out to approximately $35/day/room, but booking in person they offered me the non-buffet included price and called it a “discount”. That’s not a discount, it’s just the removal of a double-the-price buffet – they charged 250 baht per person if you just paid separately for the buffet. I couldn’t get them to give me a real discount for a week-long stay, but not being forced into an upsell was better than nothing. The rooms were quite comfortable with water, coffee, tea, towels, real linens, and you could pay for internet (so I was only online for a few minutes for the entire week!).
You couldn’t get away from the cursed mosquitos, inside or out, wherever you were. Housekeeping left the front and side doors wide open to invite all the wildlife in. There weren’t mosquito nets and we’d totally forgotten to bring citronella candles/lamps or mosquito coils. I was about to start hunting geckos to keep in our room in hopes they’d eat more of the dratted things! Our dinners were open air affairs too, sitting by the beach nearly every night with the sea spray under the trees, and we were both diners and dinners. Ahh yes, the wonders of the tropics! 😉 I laugh now but we were pretty grumpy about taking on likenesses of smallpox victims. Not exactly a bad tradeoff for these views, and waters, though:
Speaking of island wildlife, the cicadas and cats were unbelievable. You couldn’t hear the ocean for the din of the cicadas. They were deafeningly loud, like construction going on just overhead in the canopies in some areas. It soon became part of the aural landscape but I liked that, at first, it was a bit humbling to be so surrounded by nature as we so rarely are in our walls, concrete and manmade material cities.
You couldn’t go anywhere in the island without tripping over a cat and they were not shy about inviting themselves into the empty seats at your tables. Some especially audacious specimens invited themselves onto knees, and once right into my lap! I don’t share my expensive, very delicious, crab, so kitty was unceremoniously dumped off. (Bitter kitty went on to destroy a cicada so I felt a little guilty…)
Not one of the more forward ones, just a cute momma and her baby
The hours trickled by slowly, as we trekked from hotel to town, to the viewpoint, through the woods and along the coves, boating around some of the islands and bobbed about in the almost unnaturally clear waters. Our days, though, as ever, just melted away. I wore my wristwatch during most of the trip but didn’t bother to figure the time difference. The latter mainly because I had been too lazy to ask the difference in the first place, and then to do the math. I acquired an odd distaste for time differences so I wouldn’t bother.
May 18, 2011
Some of the fun numbers
14 days. 8 flights. 2 ferries. 5 hotels. 2 dozen longtail boats. 5 taxis. 7 tuk tuks. 1 elephant.
We’re back!
And I’m covered in at least 68 mosquito bites, 4 of which turned zombie on me (blisters, gross. That’s never happened before. Thank goodness for our home-grown emergency kit.) Nasty little buggers; I’d forgotten that I might be a tasty morsel. I thought that no one would recognize me when I got back, I haven’t gotten this much sun in a year and a half. I’m like a well-baked gingerbread with the *worst* tan lines. (I’m competing for the Worst Bride Ever Prize; I’m not even going to try to do anything about them before the wedding.)
The journey was something to remember – we flew Cathay Pacific and as @c_vandoorn warned me, the “shell” shaped seats weren’t the most comfortable, ergonomically speaking. But the way to my heart is via food and access/entertainment which they had in plenty. They fed us multiple times so our travel snacks were unnecessary, offering both regular meals that were edible and kind of tasty, as well as snacks on request. Cup o’noodles! The new seats now have outlets at every seat which is totally awesome for someone who carries more than one electronic device and needs to work… which I realize makes me sound a bit like a junkie. I need my electricity, ok?? Annnyway.
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| On the flight over, I read in the WSJ that the reason McDonald’s is doing well is because of their regional offerings. “Interesting!” I thought. In Hong Kong, I changed my mind. Because Broccoli Pie? ERM…. |
We spent an impromptu night in Phuket; after three flights starting at 10 pm Friday night and ending midafternoon in Phuket’s Saturday we (I) just couldn’t bear to proceed on to the islands as planned. PiC could probably have done it but I’m learning to call it quits before permanent damage is done. And since we weren’t already committed to any lodgings in Phi Phi, we just called a hotel from the airport and settled in for the night. Imagine: Ms Type A Traveler going International without all the plans set. *smh*
Dinner that night was at Raya Restaurant in Phuket. Increible! Their crab curry demolished my taste buds but it was worth it for the abundance of crab chunks in the curry. There was probably more crab than curry sauce, if you’d believe that. It was a pricey dinner for the budget I was projecting but the food was a-ma-zing.
Our chicken and rice lunch the following day was even more incredible. I’d found a list of local places to eat online and we wandered down streets following the map with no street names as best we could, hoping for the best because we couldn’t read a lick of Thai anyway. My navigation plan was essentially based on landmarks and hoping I’d recognize the restaurant front from the 1” by 2” photo posted on the website. It worked and for a mere 50 Baht (a jingle under $2) each, we feasted on a combination of chicken, roast and crispy pork over rice with chicken broth and a variety of soy, sweet soy and spicy sauces, accompanied by cucumber and other greens. Basically it’s the Thai version of Hainan chicken. We were struck dumb, it was so good.
Soooo we’ve found our wedding caterer…. 🙂
How to get those delectably fresh ingredients over here?
May 16, 2011
You’ve all been quite patient about the travel photos but I think you can hang on just a few more days whilst they get organized, right? Especially since I’m much more excited about this news? Some of you already know, but we’ve decided to adopt. I was going to hold out, really, I was. We were just looking. And planning, and budgeting.
But that fine fellow from my previous post was adopted out from under our noses before we even had a chance to see him and the realization that if we were going to get a companion befitting our very specific profile dawned – we do have cash on hand if luck forfend, anything should happen, but we could also be looking for a very long time otherwise should we keep waiting for the perfect time. In fact, we could well just be waiting into next year and frankly, my stress levels are through the frakking roof. We both, scientifically speaking, do much better with dogs in our lives. [Please don’t ask for my datasets, they’re not currently organized.]
So we went to meet someone on Saturday, our game plan set: we’d meet him and regroup to discuss. We were not bringing anyone home on Saturday.
Except …..
…..
…..
I did leave behind a fat check for a non-profit breed rescue that’s been caring for this adult fella for the past year so that we can pick him up next week.
Technically speaking, we didn’t break the rules.
We’re both thrilled to bits! He’s awfully sweet, quiet as anything so far, inside and out, just a lovebug from the get-go and loves attention but isn’t pushy about it. If you stop petting him, he’ll wait with hope in his eyes but he won’t shove you about for more even if he’s big enough to. He does gentle nose bumps. I sat on the floor to examine him, head to toe, and he let me do it without protest even though I was a complete stranger picking up his paws, checking his ears, probing his ribs.
I’m grateful to the rescue for their work in keeping him safe and healthy and can’t wait to bring him home next week.
So far, the cost has been $250 for his release, and he’ll come to us with a collar, microchipped, current on his vaccines and preventative medications, neutered, and a full medical history. We will need to buy:
1. A bed,
2. 2 leashes (he doesn’t chew but I always keep a backup and he’s still learning leash manners so we may use 2 in tandem),
3. a secondary collar for training,
4. food,
6. food and water bowls
7. Shampoo
And schedule:
1. Vet appt
2. Licensing
3. Grooming (1st visit will be necessary, I’ll do all his grooming thereafter)
We’ll be getting an unused crate from family and I already have the
Furminator which is a must for this guy’s coat. We priced out the list above and I’m aiming to keep it below $100 for the purchases since we also have to pay for licensing and the vet. And then! The puppy fund for the dog begins in earnest. I have a
ton of budgeting to manage, these days. But having a dog to hug at the end of the day, every day? *happy sigh*
May 15, 2011
There’s so much going on these days to share, that the dearth of posting, in part thanks to Blogger’s downtime at exactly the wrong time, has naught to do with having nothing to say. Though, I’m hearing that blog posts and comments from mid-week were deleted so I suppose it’s a good thing I hadn’t posted anything close to that time – I’d be furious about losing those!
Where to start?
Work.
Thailand.
Dog.
Wedding.
(You’ll note that the wedding falls to the bottom of the list. That is representative of something.)
But I have been writing, organizing and doing and you shall soon enjoy the fruits of my labor.
Budget: Traditionally, my family expects you to spend between $20-30K on a wedding for a standard 300-400 guests (“they pay for themselves” etc). “Thank goodness for formulas” except PiC and I are going off the grid, particularly because “standard Asian traditional” for me would have gone right through the roof to 400 on my side alone. So we’re starting from scratch too.
I love regular budgeting but …. I don’t love wedding budgeting. Maybe it’s because I’m cranky about the mark-up on everything just because it’s a wedding?
No matter how awesome you are at negotiating, it eventually becomes a zero-sum game. You can either have it, make it, or do without if you’re going to hit your budget. Unless someone donates it. So again, somehow, it feels a lot less fun than regular budgeting even though it is exactly the same principle.
Vision: I haven’t got a vision. Or a theme. Or colors. For the love of smooshy, stop asking about colors, please?
Eemusings is also engaged but her take is a bit closer to my attitude of “Not ready to plan yet” despite my probably most-pending-nuptials of the three of us. I could use a real kick in the pants to get moving on making things happen because between now and the projected “Hey, can we do this?” date of early November – we have major work events (June), travel (July), more travel for work (undetermined), weddings to attend (June), work (August), other people’s weddings (September) …
Yeek! Who has time to plan a wedding? Or go to one?
Is it just me or do the years book up really fast? Is anyone else feeling a bit overwhelmed by their schedule and wanting to opt out? (Funny about Money, you come to mind.)
May 8, 2011
I suppose this is a fitting enough post for Mother’s Day. Happy Mother’s Day!
In the aftermath of my venting posts about my brother, The high costs of Parenting Fails, or a Bad Seed Part 1 and Part 2, I feel I did my parents a disservice. In focusing on the mistakes that we made specific to my brother, I seem to have implied that my parents were a) ungrateful, and b) hadn’t done anything right.
Those two bits couldn’t be more wrong.
To compound the wrongness, some, especially after the Consumerist picked up the latter post, said I was asking the wrong question, that I ought to have asked how much I ought to be supporting my parents instead of how much parents should support their children.
To be clear, I wasn’t asking any question in the first place, I was just mad at my brother for being a clown.
But if I were, my simple answer would be this: parents are to love their children completely and equip them with the skills they need to become fully functional, independent adults. Many times, that will mean not just giving them things or money but rather imparting the knowledge of how to obtain those things. And the material support does have an end. The complicated answer is complicated.
Before I can answer the question of how much help this adult child should give her parents, I have to put in context this adult child and her parents as there were a number of assumptions drawn from the limited and rather irrelevant posts above.
Without getting into the details of their lives before us, some of which you can read here about my mom and a brief synopsis here, there was plenty that they did right and much they did to have inspired my desire to support them in return.
This isn’t a blind, enculturated sense of filial duty. Certainly it’s filial but it starts from the knowledge that they chose to sacrifice their established lives to come to a foreign country, learn a new language, and start over to give us a better shot at good lives. They could have stayed but instead chose to trade in their quality of life for an automatic “one up” for us. It was a roll of the dice whether their lives would improve or not since “Land of Opportunity” or not, life in America was equal parts luck (ill or good) and much hard work for the first wave of immigrants; we had relatives already in the States who could testify to the amount of work necessary to make it here. There was no such thing as an easy ride and they still chose to make the leap for us.
Making life even more challenging for themselves, they moved into a tiny predominantly Caucausian suburb instead of the established community enclaves, guaranteeing our better education and assimilation; the freeways creating concrete barriers between us and the vortices of gang violence developing in the LA/Orange County areas where much of our family had already settled.
Upon their arrival, my parents worked every single day, 14 -16 hour days. They never took a day off, never took a holiday and only alternated three vacations between the two of them in thirty years in order to do their duty in taking us home to meet our grandparents. We couldn’t afford those trips, of course but it was incredibly important for us to know them. We occasionally drove into the city on the weekend for a morning to run an errand as a family, but otherwise, my parents worked constantly to make the bills and send us to the best school possible. I never heard a single complaint, so I never knew this wasn’t “normal.”
During my teenage years, the hours actually got longer because they put my brother in private high school having seen one male cousin fall in with the wrong crowd at the public school and come to a tragically early end, planned to pay for our college education and ran two businesses to afford it all. They paid for music lessons and three sports of my choosing before my senior year of high school.
By the time everything started to unravel at the start of my college years, my parents had worn themselves to a thread giving us as much as they could. That didn’t mean they’d given up, though.
Despite Grandma’s illness, living with us, bedridden, and in the past…
Despite Mom and Dad having to tend to her every day even though Mom herself was quite ill requiring surgeries and rounds of medications that weren’t working…
Despite the businesses going south between the embezzlement and the health problems…
Despite the remaining credit card debts from the business and taking us back to the old country to meet our grandparents…
Despite Dad’s inability to get a job due to a combination of ageism and a limited resume that only had “business owner” on it…
Despite Dad’s losing money on his attempts to make money which caused him to spiral into further depression…
Despite Dad’s particularly tough realizations that he’d spent our entire childhoods working only to have his legacy for his family disappear and fear that he might well have lost his family into the bargain…
They still fought for their pride, for my sake, for our survival. Dad kept searching and digging, working odd jobs for old friends who would find something they needed his skills for. Mom was willing to put up with the worst of environments as long as she was helping me with a bit of cash at month’s end. They were driving themselves crazy (and me, into the bargain) for nearly nothing in return but to spare me an hour of work and I couldn’t stand it, so I took everything over. But as long as they could, they tried. We were at emotional cross purposes, all fighting, pulling each other away from our positions to protect one another from pain.
Of course they made mistakes. Desperate people make mistakes. Desperate people care.
Mom’s health deterioration was jagged. Reduced to menial jobs, places where supervisors and coworkers were abusive, she was shorted on wages because her mental and physical health was diminishing in loops and fades; she couldn’t truly function or keep a job. Until I made her stop, she was taking every job she could secure. Even then she tried strongarming my dad into taking her to job interviews when I was away even though she wasn’t capable of working because she was so pained about my working such long hours. She didn’t peacefully accept the loss of her functioning.
My parents are both very grateful to me for my help and communicate that. I’ve no doubt of that just as they know I love them and will always care about them. It may be a frustrating cognitive dissonance to know that and reconcile it with their actions toward my brother that ripple back to me. But at the same time, I understand because just as much as they love me, they love him. He is their child every bit as much as I am.
(More their child, ahem. Nope, not bitter, grumble grumble.)
In all seriousness, I love and respect my parents because for better or worse, they did the best they could with what they had. They always strove to be strong and good people. The choices and mistakes they made out of love for their other child that I disagree with doesn’t change the fact that they also raised and cared for me deeply and deserve to be well-cared for as best I can manage. If the circumstances were different, if they were a bit less unlucky in their health and business manager (the thrice-cursed embezzler!), perhaps things would be different but that doesn’t necessarily follow that different is better.
Perhaps some people might say that having supported them for the past ten years as I have was too much and “enabling” but there’s a hugely important factor: You can’t compare my brother to my parents because they are completely different people.
He might have worked all of three years in his total of 30+ years of life. They’ve worked two lifetimes. He’s done little but been an influence in my life. My parents both gave me life and nurtured me, succored me when I was ill, and would still do anything they could to ease my way now if they were able.
Supporting my brother would be enabling because he could, if he chose, find a way to earn a living and support himself. My mother is no longer medically able to care for herself or be independent and my dad has to care for her around the clock. Supporting them is a matter of their survival as the clock on their finding and holding jobs has long run out.
These past years have been challenging and I know it will take quite a lot more planning and resources to provide for them in their later years. But it’s not really a question for me whether or not I’ll do it.
How I’ll manage it has been a question posed a time or two (thousand).
Getting them safely into a protected home environment where idio-sib can’t moosh in with them is only the first in many steps we’ll have to take to get there since living together’s not really an option.
Getting back to the question: how much should I (we) support them? Well, no amount of money in the bank is worth the loss of my parents from my life, forgotten and uncared for. And PiC, bless his heart and soul, is on board even though I’ve only newly introduced him to Ship Support the Parents as it’s been such a private journey for so long.
Their basic needs will always be provided. They won’t be living in luxury. I can’t afford that unless y’all decide I’m a genius blogger, share this with millions of your friends and I become the next dooce.com. Hardy-har. But they will live in safety. They will always have enough to eat. They should always have some form of safe transport and access to medical care. The cost, even now, is stiff. Each time a situation or a crisis arises, I have to evaluate the situation to see what can be afforded or what the right solution might be given the circumstances and the resources remaining for the year. I hate that I can’t simply wave a wand or a card and throw money at the problems, sometimes.
They try to help in their own way, though I’d not asked for these things. They don’t go anywhere they don’t have to, unless it’s very local so as not to use gas, and they don’t go out to eat, ever. I think they’re doing their very best to show in their daily lives that they respect how hard I work to provide.
The cost in the future will be even higher so as ever, Planning. Earning. Saving. Investing. It all keeps the reality of needing a strong financial edifice at the forefront of my mind.
In the end, everyone has to answer this question for themselves in the context of their own lives and their own finances and their own relationships with whomever they may be called upon to support.
If they hadn’t raised me with love and respect, if they hadn’t treated me with so much care, humor and just plain sanity during my formative years so that for those brief moments before everything went to mush we had a great relationship, this would likely be a very different story. And I know for many of you, or for many of the first time readers who came to the other posts, it is a different story. That’s ok. It makes sense. This is what makes sense for us.
