FS Relocation

“Green Thing in the Driveway” Gets an Upgrade!

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Its hard to get everyone out the door.  Making kids sit in the car and actually wait for you, while you close up, grab the shopping list and turn off the oven is the only way to go….  When I would get frustrated enough at getting a certain person to actually depart, I found myself saying “PLEASE get in the car…NOW….It’s the green thing in the driveway”  and shuffle him towards the door.  Hence “Green Thing in the Driveway” was born and lived there — in our driveway — for seven years.

G.T.I.T.D has now made a monumental journey across the Pacific and is now “Green Thing in the Basement – complete with the upgrade of (temporary) diplomatic plates.  The most modest car with diplomatic plates that I have ever seen, I might add….I think I see a couple of new dings too.

Here are some not so great shots of the car in our basement parking lot….(hey – I got it down there…it wasn’t easy…3 levels of weirdly laid out basement which are totally confusing) …

A pic for my VA friends (remember that sticker?)… Well it made it to the Philippines:

And Here’s an A.T.I.T.B (I’ll let you work that one out)  with our car:

Now the question is whether I have the guts to take it out on the road?

Air Shipment Has Arrived!

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When you leave for post, your baggage is limited to whatever the airlines deems as the rules on how much you can take.  Usually these days this looks like 2 suitcases of no more than 50lbs each, plus a small carry on suitcase, plus a personal item.  That a total number of items per person of 4.  There were three of us, so that was going to be at least 12 items to count in and out of every taxi and transportation experience from door to door.  Then Robert’s very kind and very cool cousin (Yay! for Susie.  Thank you…thank you…) used some of her air mileage to upgrade us to business class.  This is always a great thing, but when you have 24 hours of flight ahead of you, the upgrade way surpassed “great”.  We also got business class baggage allowance which gives up to 3 pieces each and more generous poundage.  We ended up with 13 pieces total, and alot less carry-on/personal items to schlup around.  Even with all this crap in our entourage, it still doesn’t equal that much stuff to live on for up to 3 months while we wait for our household effects.  Its amazing what you really need to bring from a travel printer, to cameras, personal important documents, etc. etc. before you even get to clothes.

To help with this situation, the government provides a welcome kit for your home when you get there.  Think saucepans, sheets, towels etc.  It also allows you ship a small amount of personal effects by air.  Extra clothes, office equipment for me, really useful household stuff etc.   Anyway…the air shipment arrived last weekend!  I will gloss over the experience of discovering the packing job that was done and some of the unfortunate consequences… and just move on to how great it was to get three huge cardboard boxes full of long lost treasures from distant NJ.  Here are a few pics:

P.S.  Our main stuff is due to arrive in March.

An Accompanied Tour

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The dust bunnies have precious few places to hide in this partially furnished apartment.  So they roll down the edges of the hallways like something out of a John Wayne movie.  The brand new rugs throw up new lint, which feeds them until they turn into large tumbleweeds and the air conditioning blows them around.<Insert theme from “The Good, The Bad and The Ugly>. After about 10 days of living in a cowboy movie, I decided living here without a proper broom and mop was not an option.  So, as previously mentioned yesterday, we set off in search.

Now we are a proud owner of an Orga Super Mop <read: metal stick with a cloth attached>…, which left me with the next reality of mopping all that floor space.  It is wonderful to have all this square footage to spread out.  I can’t hear the TV or other people’s phone calls, and there’s always a quiet corner to read or hang out and look at the view (a favourite pass time).  However, someone needs to clean it occasionally <sigh>..…

So accompanied by my new aforementioned mop, I thought it would be fun to get the job done and share a little more of our new home.  (There are five bathrooms, for goodness sake!)

So off we go starting in the kitchen:

Door behind leads to maids area, utility room and more bathrooms and toilet…not even going there right now..

And off towards dining room.. Note electric sockets in the kitchen.  We have both 110 and 220 and all electric gadgets are color coded, orange or green.  Make sure you plug the right one into the right socket or BANG!

And onward through the cavernous living/den area:

And then there’s the entrance way:

And the hallways:

Master (and other bedrooms):

And finally my -soon to be– office.

PHEW!  Maybe hiring a little help might be a good idea?!  What’s is going be like when we actually get our stuff?!  More photos then….

New Routines

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I’ve meant to post several times during the last week or so, but as you can imagine, its been busy.  We’ve also been going to bed really early in what feels like an alcohol-free drunken stupor.  I guess the jet lag just takes longer when you asking you body to make this big a shift.

Its been interesting having the holidays as our first impressions of Manila.  The streets have been relatively car-free (sorta) but the shopping malls have been heaving.  Today is the first day of “normal” as everyone is back from vacation.  So we’ll see what “normal” looks like in the grocery store at 10am this morning when I go out shopping (again).  Here’s a few of our new routines as we work at making everything new around us feel like home:

1.  Exploring.  On foot.  We don’t have a car yet and as we are in a city, exploration is limited only by the soreness of our feet.  So we’ve done a lot of miles walking around our neighborhood.  We’re currently surrounding by many new skyscrapers.  Both residential and commerical, completed and in-progress.  In fact, there must be about a dozen new skyscrapers going up around up I count what I can see from each direction.  There are plenty of empty grass plots too, awaiting the construction on the next tower.  This area used to be an American army base, a long way away from the city center, but now it considered metro manila and catching up fast.  Lots of interesting sculptures around too.  Here’s a close up of the one in the first photo:

The three trees are a metal sculpture.  Pretty cool!

2. Shopping.  You can get anything and everything here.  We haven’t really begun to see the extent of it, but it clear that you get find almost anything…  As the main focus has been getting food in the house – as the cupboard is literally bare – we have done numerous foot tours to the nearest supermarket at a giant shopping mall called Market Market!.  MM is a four storey mall that includes a department store, a fashion bazaar, a furniture bazaar, restaurants, a food court, a mini funfair for the kids, 60 open air market stalls, and what must be 200+ stores.  Oh and there’s a big supermarket in the basement.  Shopping there on Christmas eve for basic food items was a nightmare.  Crowds like you wouldn’t believe.  But I’ve learnt that arriving at 10am when they open gives me about 1.5 hours of sane shopping time before the crowds start arriving for lunch.  The following photo doesn’t give any kind of idea of the masses of people, but when you are in the thick of it, whipping out your camera is not an option: Latham and I got a kick out of the sculptured hedges that were made into the shape of different animals with plastic heads poking out:On a completely unrelated note, here’s one more photo of the giant snails we keep meeting on our travels.  Latham’s head included for scale:

That’s all folks.  Off to buy a mop.  Sick of washing the kitchen floor on my hands and knees!

First Glimpses of the City

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Its Christmas Eve and we went out for a walk in around Fort Bonafacio, our area of Manila.  Then came back and had a swim in the pool.  Its cool (for Manila) – only about 75 degrees today I would guess, but still pretty humid.  Lots of smog too.  Here are some first pics from our apartment windows.  I tried to take a few long and closer shots to give a sense of perspective.  The fuzziness you see are a mixture of the smog, photographing through tinted windows and the reflection of the glass…so sorry for the quality…but it should give you some idea:

Here’s a long shot of the living room from the dining room.  Everything is sparsely furnished until our stuff gets here:

A little closer.  Note the floor to ceiling glass windows:

Sitting on the sofa and looking out, the golf course takes up a lot of the closer view.  The large very attractive pool is down below on the left.  To the right, the towers of the financial district (Makati).   You can also see the sea in the far middle horizon, but the camera can’t pick up that detail:

Crisper pictures to be had out of my kitchen window, as I am not battling the sun on the glass so much.  (Panoramic views all round from every room):

Let the Train Take the Strain

/ wrightsolution / 4 Comments

So here it is …my first promised blog post from the start of our new adventures.  The blog is straight out the WordPress box.  No fancy graphics or RSS feeds…and sorry, no pictures either as I can’t figure out what I did with my camera.  (Must be in one of the boxes?)  I will get to all of that, but here from our suitcase-strewn apartment in Arlington is at least some word of what’s going on..…

Robert arrived late Weds night by train.  Spent the night and planned to drive the car back to DC late Thurs afternoon ready to be picked up by the shipping company for transport to Manila.  An early call on Thurs morning brought news that snow was hitting Virginia and Maryland and they wanted the car earlier.  So Robert split early and headed into what turned into 5 hours of snow-inflicted gridlock on 295, but he made it despite bad drivers, icy roads and a very low gas gauge.

And, we too,  did it.  10 hours of packing, 17,482 items later…all the stuff made it into the van and Latham and I headed to the train.  Packers were done by 5:45pm, and our train was 7:55pm – pretty good timing, I thought.  We had enough gap not to panic, but not too much time to sit around in the freezing cold.   Researching the timing was tough. The packing company “does not advise that you travel the same day as your pack out as we are not liable for any expenses incurred if there are delays…” blah blah blah.  Of course, I had no bloody choice and had to do my best estimate (without much input from them) and turned out to be a good one.

So we bought the Amtrak tickets and were on the Trenton NJ platform with 10 minutes to spare.  I noticed the NY bound train was an hour late and thought “glad that’s not us” and boarded our train which was on time.  All went well until about an hour into our 2.5 hour we stopped just shy of Wilmington, Delaware and we told that overhead cables were down in multiple locations between Wilmington and Baltimore due to the snow.  We limped into Wilmington station.   The announcer said that they weren’t sure how long the delay would be but all trains north and south of Baltimore had come to a stop.  One hour went by,,,, two….. three.  After 3 hrs of sitting on the Wilmington platform at 11:30pm, they announced it would be at least a couple more hours until the train would move again.  We bedded down for the night across two seats each.  Covered with my coat and with my bag as a pillow it wasn’t too bad, certainly a lot better than a plane. I caught a little sleep.  At about 2am the train starting slowly moving and crawled to Baltimore at half speed.  Finally we got into DC at about 4:30am and a taxi cab ride later, we stumbled into Robert’s apartment at about 5am.  Not the perfect end to a very long day…some might say unlucky…but I say lucky as our train wasn’t canceled (like so many others) and we didn’t have to turn around and go back to our (non-existant) home….  Til the next time I have a reliable internet connection…