Five things I don't like that everyone else seems to

This is an interactive post... your responses are required to make this worth while, so the more people who respond the more worthwhile this post will be... if it's just the two of us that won't be that interesting will it? Also, coming up with five is encouraged though not mandatory.
See the five things

Josh:

1. American Idol (or any singing competition show really)
2. Ice (in most all its forms, slushie, ice cone, in a drink, instead of snow, etc...)
3. Cell/Mobile Phones
4. Reality TV
5. Please don't stop reading this blog and or begin to hate me but... U2 (To explain... I don't dislike U2 in any true meaning of the word but aside from about three songs of the hundreds that they've recorded I don't really like them.)

Megan:

1. Blogs (ironic I know)
2. Board games
3. Birthday Cake (well really cake in general)
4. Mushy Food (nothing soft and goo-ey)
5. Video Games

Just some things I've noticed

Things I’ve noticed lately that remind me I am not working where I have ever worked before:

1. How does a country exist without binder clips? We looked at the stationary stores when we first moved here, and I looked in the supply shelves at my office. They just don’t exist. I am highly dependent on binder clips. I think they are a lovely invention, and I don’t know why they haven’t jumped the pond. What I did find on our office shelves is in this photo. I giggle every time I look at it.

Welcome to the Land of UK paper clips... note the comparison to a traditional US paper clip on the right, not the best picture but you still get the idea.








2. My brain insists on being surprised every time the man who sits next to me answers his phone with an English accent. I’m in England, for goodness sake. How many weeks before this doesn’t catch me off guard?
Read the rest...


3. I have been here for 3.5 weeks now, and I still haven’t been shown how to do my timesheets. I do, however, know where the fire exits are, where to gather outside if there is a fire, and that I definitely need to sign myself out if I leave so they know I’m not here. Why? In case there’s a fire, of course.
4. A coworker asked me what Michigan was like, and the conversation eventually turned to a discussion of the American and Canadian plain states. I explained that flat Nebraska was the most tedious part of the 24-hour drive my family used to make to ski in Colorado. This innocent comment was greeted with an awed, “But it only takes 14 hours to drive to Italy from here!” Man, we are going to Italy.
5. My first week, I completely forgot three times that my work week ends at 12:30pm on Fridays. I even rescheduled something and asked Josh to run an errand for me because it had to be done during business hours. Then suddenly I would realize that, wait, I don’t have to do anything that afternoon! I would be home before dark! And each time I remembered, even if it was just randomly at my desk on a Wednesday afternoon, I would get this little thrill and grin involuntarily…
6. My office has the thickest 3-ply toiletr paper I’ve ever felt. Doesn’t that just seem like an extravagant waste of money?
7. I get paid monthly. Really? Every FOUR weeks?
8. While we are on the topic, I am told by our accountant that 20% of my pay check goes towards taxes. Another 10% goes to National Insurance. And I thought the healthcare was free here.
9. This is not work-related, but seems to go with the previous item. Some friends here told us that you can get aspirin with codeine over the counter. Yet if you are at hospital in great pain you get administered morphine. Morphine! Codeine to morphine seems like a big jump until you think of the assumptions we make about the way things should be based on our own experiences. Codeine and morphine have been around so long that the National Health System doesn’t have to pay any drug companies a proprietary fee. The NHS is cheap, as it well should be. So all those pain medications we Americans are so familiar with from sitcom jokes or our own experience are partly made possible by the way our country handles its health problems. How interesting.
10. Finally, I get paid about the same amount as I got paid in the United States. I don’t quite understand this. As far as I can tell, salaries are roughly in line with each other. That makes sense until you look at the prices of just about every thing around here. Food, clothing, toiletries… most of these goods are roughly twice the cost of equivalent items in America, so how can one get by on the same salary? Part of this may be my comparable American salary was from New York City, where I imagine it was a bit higher than it would be in the Midwest. But not by enough. The only thing Josh and I can think of is health care. Could the amount that Americans spend in healthcare make up that difference? It seems a stretch…

Smile for the camera!

We used Skype to call home from Asia through the internet, but now that we've stopped traveling, we have finally gotten around to setting up our webcam. Talking to adults from afar isn't too difficult with audio only, but the webcam certainly makes conversations with kids a whole lot more fun. That is, if you can get them to stop making faces at themselves. These snapshots of my sister's family are an excellent example of how not to use skype if you want to have a meaningful conversation. But it is fun to see how many people you can fit in front of the thing...




Plus, Cheddar the Cat can get in on the event:





(If you use skype , we'd love to talk to you! Please ask us for our Skype name.)

Black Friday

Black Friday. Although I am not participating in it this year, my 4 years in retail are enough for me to set this day apart from others. What a weird day, the busiest shopping day of the year. What a weird country, that this day is such a big deal for us. Apparently it's a bigger deal for some than others, because someone cared enough to make this Excel spreadsheet about it. Crazy! I also have to say I find the very idea of all that buying and selling almost overwhelming, and it makes me a fan of celebrating buy nothing day! But right now... well it's rather a mute point when you live in another country isn't it?

P.S. Who needs a Christmas holiday season?

English

A few nights ago I went to a pub with some coworkers to prep for the Euro 2008 qualification football/soccer match/game. Someone asked me what my husband did, and I told him my husband was still in school. He laughed and said I should probably say, "He's in college," unless I want them to think I'm doing something illegal with a minor. When I got home, I mentioned something about the game to Josh. "Match", he said. And the field is the pitch and cleats are called boots. And it's a football match, not a soccer game.

We all speak English, so why is this so difficult sometimes? I now have this underlying sense of dread that I'll say something in front of the wrong people and make a complete fool of myself. Honestly, I think it's only a matter of time...

Happy Thanksgiving!

Josh searched three grocery stores to find canned pumpkin. When he did, it was Libby’s America's Favorite Pumpkin (who knew?), directly imported from the USA. After asking a grocery store employee for help, Josh bought the last two cans while the puzzled employee told him that a man came in earlier last week and almost cleared them out. What we want to know is what that American, as he is most surely American, is going to do with 8 cans of pure pumpkin. We’d also like to know if we can come.

A Forgotten Statistic

41 : The number of times asked if we wanted a ride in/on a rickshaw/auto/horse/mule/camel/elephant in 15 minutes outside of the Taj Mahal.

For those of you keeping track that means 2.73 times a minute or once every 22 seconds.

Open Wide!

My Trip to the Dentist by Megan Feenstra Wall (that just somehow feels appropriate)

England doesn’t feel that different to me. I forget on a daily basis that I am a foreigner, and I experience a little thrill when I remember. I am reminded when my co-workers open their mouths to speak and when I try to cross the street only to be forced a few more meters down the road by the maze-like fencing that prevents a wayward pedestrian like myself from crossing in a straight line anywhere near the intersection. The fact that I have to work on Thursday (Thanksgiving) also reinforces my foreign-ness. But often I forget.

My visit to the dentist last week reminded me that things don’t work the same everywhere. If you want to feel like your mouth is a well-kept secret, go to a British dentist. However, if you want to feel like it’s going to stay that way, I’d suggest you look further afield.

Read the rest...I had heard that children under 18 got free dental care in England, along with pregnant women and women with a child under the age of one. That so impressed me that I was willing to dismiss the English bad teeth stereotype as part of a bygone era. Well, it wasn’t much more than a week after we’d arrived when I was given a chance for first-hand scrutiny. Somehow, my tongue noticed that a tooth far back in my mouth had changed. No longer smooth, its jagged edge felt suspiciously like a missing filling. While it didn’t hurt, I began to worry about a newly exposed cavity in my mouth. So, now in the land of free healthcare but notorious for its bad teeth, I needed a dentist.

It took 11 phone calls. The first seven dentists I called were not taking new patients, through the National Health System (NHS) or privately. One receptionist told me I could go on the private patients’ waiting list, and I might get an appointment in a little over two months. Many asked me if I was in pain. I thought they were just being polite.

I called the university health centre to ask for advice and was given a new number to try. This 9th call was to an NHS dental help line. From there I was given a list of four more dentists within 20 miles who were probably not taking patients- “But why don’t you at least try?” I was also told that if I was in pain I could go to the emergency dental surgery. That just didn’t feel necessary, and I wasn’t sure what it would cost.

The tenth call failed, but the 11th finally proved successful. The very first question I was asked (before I’d even explained my situation) was if I was in pain. Apparently pain is an indication of your dental importance. While the dentist wasn’t accepting new patients, he would see me this one time. If I was missing a filling, we would schedule a second appointment. Basically, if he liked me, he could decide to put me on his patient waitlist, and it was possible that in six months time I could be a regular patient. I took the first available appointment with a sigh of relief. I didn’t need a regular dentist.

The woman on the phone told me you couldn’t miss the dentistry. It was over an optician’s office about a half hour walk away. Right; you can miss anything with English directions. Roads change names on a block to block, even a side of the street, basis. I walked past it twice before I noticed the optician’s. No dentist, though. After an older man came out from a plain blue door next to the windows of eyeglasses, I crossed the street to check it out. Sure enough, a tiny plaque on the door said Dental Surgery.

I proceeded up the stairs to a tiny room with well-touched, once-white walls to register. I read a pamphlet about the NHS dental system while I waited on a rather battered pale green chair. As the woman on the phone had told me after some prompting, regular check ups and cleanings were part of a first band of service costing 15 pounds. If further work like a filling was needed, then you moved up to the second band which was somewhere around 40. I figured that $30 wasn’t bad for a teeth cleaning. An elderly man came to sit beside me.

A patient, an older woman, walked out of a thin sliding door immediately adjacent to the receptionist’s desk, and I was called up. I had assumed that the door went somewhere, the first of many wrong assumptions in that office. It instead led to a room just big enough for fairly modern dental equipment within spitting distance of the reception desk, which was visible through an open second sliding door. I think it was intended to be part of the reception. I sat down on the chair, and the dentist asked me when I'd last had my teeth cleaned (a year ago) and if I’d experienced anything unusual lately. I explained that I was afraid I’d lost a filling. Let’s have a look, he said with an eastern European accent. He asked me to lie back, apologizing for the state of the office. We are under renovation, he said. (Where? I thought.)

He then proceeded to do that new patient thing where he listed notable items like fillings and receding gums with a cryptic sequence of tooth numbers that the dental hygienist (the second receptionist, it turns out) scribbled down. As he went, the tone of his voice seemed to change. He had seemed surprised at me initially, as if young women were not his typical clientele. Then as he went from tooth to tooth, his tone grew more and more impressed. With each tap and poke, he seemed to gain a genuine sense of wonder at my mouth, as if he’d been granted a special gift that day, a mouth finally worthy of attention. He even chuckled at one point.

When he was done, he had me sit back up and said that what I had thought was a missing cavity was nothing of concern. I had had sealants put on my teeth when I was probably a young teenager and one of them was chipped. He could reseal it, but he didn’t think it was at all necessary. “I would recommend no further treatment,” he said. “Your hygiene is excellent.” He said this last bit three times.

Excellent. Huh. I have a few fillings. My teeth are straight, thanks to adolescent orthodontics, but have moved back slightly. They are more off-white than white. I rarely floss. I left my mother-in-law’s dentist in Iowa last year feeling like my gums were receding at an alarming rate and my teeth would probably fall out before I was 60 if I didn’t start flossing soon.

This dentist handed me my bag and opened the sliding door. What? That was it? In my confusion, he ushered me out with almost with a sense of regret that he couldn’t look at my teeth longer. He gave me one last look of admiration before turning around and sliding the door back shut. The name of the elderly man who had come in after me was called.

"Fifteen pounds please," the first receptionist said. "For that? " I asked involuntarily. She didn’t understand my annoyance. In the end I left without paying because they wouldn’t have a credit card machine until after the renovation. I just got a letter yesterday reminding me I owe them. If he hadn’t been officially listed by the NHS, I would have wondered about that. Perhaps I could have argued for a teeth cleaning if I'd been more alert and less puzzled, but after all that, why bother? My teeth are a fine specimen, and my dental hygiene is excellent!

Growing Home

I miss home. Perhaps that's not quite right, so let me try again, I miss homeness. We've been away from anything that was a home for almost a year now and between the moving, the buses, the flights, and who knows how many time zones, the idea of having a place feels incredibly distant.

Leaves always make me think of home... not sure why.

Specifically I think I miss that feeling that comes with being home. When I was in college and would go to my parents' house there was a specific smell and feel, an atmosphere I felt at home that I missed at school. In New York, there was an ambiance to our little space, the way our couch felt and the quiet seclusion of the inside of our apartment after walking down a bustling city street. Since we left, though, that ethos has been lacking. We have not been in one place long enough to have a home, the absence of which I feel quite strongly right now. We were only in Colorado for three months and much of that time was spent outside of the house. Those few months were certainly not enough time to feel settled in to the place. And then there was the traveling, moving from place to place to place... Now we are in England and while we will be here for a while (a year at least), I wonder if that is enough time to find a home or if we will simply be living in this flat.

I think homes are made from the wake of our routines. My home becomes shaped by where I put my coat, what I do when I walk in the door, where I sit. It takes time for these things to become habitual. I can't say as I think homes are built or constructed (as if I can construct a space with that kind of atmosphere) but rather grown. Homes, at least in the past for me, have emerged literally from the woodwork and from the couches. Home is the space between my actions, the negative space that gets filled with the parts of me that aren't doing things. It is the feeling of being wrapped up in a warm blanket with a cup of coffee and falling asleep. It is not as if we can actively make a house/apt./flat a home; it happens in its own time and in ways I don't really understand. Home(ness) creeps in slowly and surrounds the places we live...in time.

I think this is why I would get so frustrated at New York City residents who claimed it as their home only a few months after moving there. I knew people, many people, who did so in their eagerness to bear the label of New Yorker... despite not knowing the culture and ethos of the city. Such statements seem to cheapen the idea of home (or homeness) for me... as if home and my address are synonymous.

And with that I sit in the top floor of a gorgeous old English house that I hope will feel like home... but I doubt it will. If we stay here longer than a year then there is a chance but if we move somewhere else, well then we are back to being homeless again... despite our address. What I find ironic is that most of my classmates growing up were desperately trying to get away from home, but as I've continued to grow and continued to travel, I'm surprised with how much I miss it or at least the idea of it. And how right now, after moving around for a while and fulfilling dreams I've (we've) had for years, what I really want is to settle down and start growing a home.

The Sunset

The offical sunset time was at 4:06 today. We are still over a month away from the winter solstice, I can't even imagine what that will be like... Funny I only think of things like this occuring in remote places, like Alaska and Northern Canada...



PS Also note the UV index. Why do they even bother mentioning it around here?

Statistics made fun! (2 of 2)

Well, here it is. More unending information about our trip to Asia. This is the second, and possibly more entertaining, of two lengthy wrap-up posts on our trip. Here we take that information and put it into hard and dirty facts. Remember how we spent more time waiting in airports than on airplanes? Or how we got ice cream 47% of our days? Or how we saw four dead people on the trip? Well, here are more such facts. (Yes, many, many more.)

Trust me, you might find these amusing...
Please keep in mind that some of these are subjective and relevant to our experience only. (I don't know why I felt that I had to say that.) Miscellaneous is perhaps the most interesting category, so keep scrolling!

Places

12	Number of “countries” visited (Macau and Hong Kong separately b/c separate visas- we realize the real answer is 11)
13	Number of countries planned to visit (no Indonesia and Maldives)
18	Number of borders crossed
	Favorite border crossing: Bangladesh to India at Burimari
	Most hellish border crossing: Thailand to Cambodia at Poipet
.
4	Shortest number of days spent in a country (Singapore)
35	Longest number of days spent in a country (India)
.
$40	Most expensive entrance fee (3-day pass for Angkor Wat)
$20	Most expensive fee barely worth it (Taj Mahal- ok, it's worth it, but that's a lot of money for a building)
16	World Heritage Sites visited
Nepal	Country where we visited the most World Heritage Sites
Bagan	Favorite ruins (in Bagan, Myanmar)
.
Nepal	Poorest country we visited (according to the UN)
Bangladesh	Most corrupt country we visited (according to the UN)
Myanmar	Most oppressive country we visited (hands down)

Visas

4	Number of visas acquired in advance
$647	Total amount spent on visas
$100	Most expensive visa per person (Bangladesh)
free	Cheapest visa (Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Hong Kong, Macau)

Expenses

$6.06	Smallest amount spent in one day (July 20- our flight to Dhaka was cancelled and the Bangkok airport took care of us!)
$119.70	Highest amount spent in one “normal” day with no flights/visas (June 13- travelling from Koh Tao, Thailand to Penang Malaysia by ferry and train. Next? Singapore Zoo day)
.
$45	Most expensive single souvenir (a blanket from Jaisalmer, India)
$230	Most expensive single item (the flight from Bangkok to Dhaka)
$3000	Biggest savings (getting our flights to Asia with NWA miles)

Accomodation

Transportation

90	Hours spent waiting at the airport
88	Hours spent on airplanes
.
24	Hours of longest contiguous ride on mass transportation (train from Ajanta Caves to Bangalore, India)
20	Hours of longest bus ride (Inle Lake to Yangon, Myanmar)
15	Hours of most exhausting bus ride (Indian border to Kathmandu)
.
Thailand	Best train (night train from Chomporn, Thailand to Malaysia)
Nepal	Worst buses
Bangladesh	Worst driving (India and Cambodia close seconds)
Myanmar	Strangest driving (because of the sudden switch to right hand side driving even though most of the vehicles were made for the left!)

Food

$.13	Cheapest glass of beer (Vietnam)
$.50	Cheapest full meal (Angkor Wat, Cambodia)
$50	Most expensive meal (Sunday brunch in Bangalore, India)
.
47	Percentage of days with ice cream
65	Number of ice creams purchased
6	Number of ice creams purchased that shouldn’t have been (due to undisclosed electricity outages… turning anything frozen soggy)
.
Singapore	Best country for food (India is up there, too)
Bangladesh	Worst country for food (But Myanmar was close)
Bangladesh	Best cup of tea
Vietnam	Best cup of coffee (see next item)
Sweetened condensed milk	Favorite new food item (who knew this was so tasty in coffee?)
Vietnam	Country with most "interesting" meal
Cambodia	Country with favourite meal (But really, how to choose? Foreign Correspondents’ Club in Pnom Penh, Cambodia, create-your-own spring rolls in Hoi An, Vietnam, The Strand in Yangon, Myanmar, or street food in Thailand)

Miscellaneous

1	Number of near-charging rhinos encountered
2	Pairs of underwear Josh took along
3	Number of t-shirts Josh took along
4	Number of dead people seen (pulled out of the river in Pnom Penh, in the river in Singapore, on the street in Delhi, and Ho Chi Minh himself in HaNoi)
5	Feenstras met (Mom, Dad, Jennie, and 2 Dutch folk in Myanmar!)
6	Number of locals who asked us to take pictures of themselves and then mail them the photos
7	Number of people who asked for our contact information in Bangladesh (mind you, contact information does not mean email address. Most people didn’t seem to have one.)
15:40	Hours spent underwater
16	Number of books read by Megan on the trip
25	Number of books read by Josh on the trip
26	Number of Bird photographs taken
27	Number of photographs taken of ourselves, by ourselves
3,668	Number of photos taken altogether
4.46	Gigabytes that absurd number of photographs now takes up on our computer
.
12	Shots (vaccines) received before leaving
382	Prescription pills bought in the USA
69	Number of times offered drugs in Asia
.
Myanmar	Place of most awkward moment (or the man who kept asking about my sister in Dhaka)
Laos	Place of best happenstance experience (a business party we got in on…)
Malaysia	Place with weirdest Pinocchio-Rudolph-esque bug ever seen
Endless	Number of statistics Megan & Josh could keep coming up with

Statistics made fun! (1 of 2)

These are a few pages from my Asia journal.
Yes, they indeed show a ridiculously anal, itemized account of our every expense.
Yes, we actually wrote it all down.
And yes, I am actually admitting to it.
Now most people might guess that this was done to keep ourselves on budget. That is not exactly true: it helped us spend more! Our trip proved what Josh and I already suspected: we are incredibly cheap, don't like to spend money, and are fairly good at not doing it (plus we complain when we do). How else would we have been able to save up enough to take off for 8 months so soon after living as grad students in New York City? Saving a dollar here and a dollar there may not add up to much, but when a dollar here is a meal there and a dollar there is a quarter of a night's stay somewhere else, each cheap peanut butter and jelly sandwich contributes!

So the accounting was actually a necessity to prove to ourselves that we were indeed well under or at budget. It allowed us to spend more, to splurge on things like Mr. Minh's moto tour and a second round of diving in Malaysia. But what's fun right now is that it let us figure out just where our money went... thanks to Microsoft Excel! So get ready for some fun and crazy statistics from the spreadsheet from hell.

Here’s just a sample:
We spent more time waiting at the airport than on airplanes.
We spent almost 9.5 days on buses.
66% of our guest house rooms had attached bathrooms.
Our cheapest night cost us less than $2.
We saw four dead people on the trip.
Bangladesh has the best tea.
We had ice cream 47% of our days out.

Find out what ridiculous percentage of our money was spent on transport (plus some other interesting stuff).
Let's start with some graphs.
First, here's how our expenses divided up:

We can't believe that our transportation took up 37% of our total expenses, especially since we usually took the low-budget routes. I guess it makes sense- we covered A LOT of ground in 5 months. I think we could have done the same trip in a year and things would have evened out a bit. As for our pre-trip expenses, we had to get almost every vaccine known to humankind, so this includes things like my final Hep A&B and Josh's Tetanus booster. We did take malaria medication for much of the trip, but that was the cheap Walmart variety. Our insurance was only about $420 for the 5 months. Still, altogether pricey! Finally, that diving amount both horrifies and comforts me. We spent so much! But think of how much our trip really cost if you don't include that splurge...

A country by country account also reflects where we dove:
We included the costs of transportation in the country totals (unlike the daily amounts budgeted by guidebooks like Lonely Planet which do not), but not any flights between them. It's also interesting to compare the graph above with the number of days we spent in each country below:
That gives you an idea of which countries cost more on a day to day basis. A little strange that Bangladesh and Cambodia ended up so high, but the reasons are on the chart:

Did you notice those exchange rates listed? We really did take out over a million (dong) from an atm in Vietnam! Also, the largest denomination of Myanmar currency kyat (pronounced chat) is a 1000 kyat note. One USD is about 1200 kyat, so when we changed a few hundred dollars worth, we basically ended up with a few hundred dollars worth of one dollar bills to carry around!

We've got a whole lot more random stats, but I think we'll put those in a second post. One can get too much of a good thing, I think, even with statistics. So stay tuned for such tid-bits as...

Our cheapest full meal cost $.50 while the most expensive was $50.
25% of our guest house rooms had TVs.
We covered an area roughly the size of the United States.
We encountered 1 almost-charging rhino and 5 Feenstras on the trip.

The Cost of the War in Iraq

We don't really talk about politics on this blog and I can't say as we intend to but I ran across something as of late that I wanted to share quickly (without going into the politics behind it). The cost of the Iraq War is currently about 467 billion dollars, numerically that reads 467,000,000,000. That is more money than I will make in 9 million years (assuming I make 50,000... which I think is a shooting a bit high) or 124,000 lifetimes (assuming I work for 75 years at that 50 grand rate). Or one could say that would buy me 11,675,000,000 gallons of beer at my local pub. That's alot of money.

OK, Megan's selection of "next-best" photographs...

It's true. I did think that Josh de-selected some beautiful photographs from our collections (see his recent post), especially some of the ones including people or implying a further narrative. So here we go. Here are MY top 36. Well, not entirely- I think Josh got most of the good ones. So while these may not be the "best", they are at least quite compelling....
So here are the second top 36. (yes, we'll stop after this.)
See the top 37 through 72-ish





(Some of these are better looked at large (by clicking on them) in order to see the people and expressions. Of course, I apologize if they end up monster size and too big for your web browser...)

































Oh. And number 72...