Victory is mine!

One Year Behind and Looking Forward to the Other Two

2011-11-17T20:58:00.001+02:00

Thunder-Thunder-Birds!

On year in Romania and we continue to really enjoy our time here. June was a busy month. We went the first week to Mamaia, located on the Romanian Black Sea and saw the Thunderbirds. It was awesome! I have never seen them before. The things they can do with those jet planes are simply crazy. It was a quick vist of 2.5 days, but it was great. The Romanian Black Sea is OK, colder than the Bulgaria. Their hotels are mostly old, the service sucked. Now I know why all the Romanians do not go to their sea.

After Mamaia, I went to Bulgaria to celebrate my 20th anniversary from high school graduation. My class was 35 people. Only about 15 came. Some people I have really not seen since we graduated in 1991. Everybody was pretty much cool and 5 of us were out until 4 am. It is interesting to see how everybody has grown up. This was the weekend of June 10th.

Sunset over Mykonos

The weekend of June 16th, Mike and I, we went to Mykonos for 5 days. I have not relaxed like that ever in my life. Mike organized the best vacation up to date. The goal was to go to Mykonos and party like its 1999, however we established early on that laying on the beach like a giant slug for hours under a nice umbrella and pushing a button that summons a waitress that brings you wine and mussels all day, is so much better. Yes it is very expensive but damn it, it was worth it.

In July, we celebrated America's birthday with a big 'ol party in the AMB's house. The theme was Hawai'i. All the guests wore Hawaiian shirts or outfits. The facilities guys even built a 10 feet tall volcano. They did a great job. The thing actually slowly grew up through the night and kept making angry noises and spat lava. I think the Romanian guests didn't know what to do with it because it was something they have not seen before. There was a lot of dancing and tons of food. I didn't have anything but tuna seviche. I was too busy dancing I guess.

In July, the little one turned 3. It is crazy how fast time flies. We invited about 10 kids and their parents to a bouncy castle area. There was a lot of running and throwing stuff. We found the best birthday cake place ever in Bucharest. They made him a Lightning McQueen car cake that also tasted super yummy. Usually, cakes are either nice looking but taste like crap or they taste yummy and look blah. Well, we scored with one that was both yummy and looking great. I never had anything like this when I was growing up. I am glad that we have the opportunity to have such parties for him. Romania has bunch of those kids play areas. The super cool part is that they are either in the malls or the place itself has a restaurant. The parents can chill while the kids are tended by nanies of a sort. It gives you time to have a meal without chasing a child. A very good idea!

August we went to the Bulgarian seaside. We experimented on the way down and took a ferry over the Danube. When I say ferry, I don't mean those nice big fancy ones. I mean a platform that fits about 12-15 cars that putters between the two countries. It was an experience that added about 1.5hrs to our travel time. Needless to say, we did not repeat it on the way back. My mom met us at Sv Vlas and so did Bonnie, Neil and Sofi. I liked the resort, but I was sad to see how the beautiful wild beaches have been ruined. The big hotels have either built giant walls to support them or have built cement platforms with umbrellas on top, so they can charge you for them. The service was great. The food was great. It is totally much cheaper than Greece or Romania, but I think that next year the family vaction will be in the Southern part of the Black Sea in Bulgaria. There is no huge resorts there, so it is more native still.

In September, the Embassy moved to a new building. We have been working towards this one single moment for over 2 years (I just for 1). It was an event! Coordinating the move of 4 buildings into one. Hundreds of peoppe packing. Getting computers and phones and security systems online was insane. It was exhausting but we moved. Now the commute is a bit longer and we are no longer smack in the middle of the city, but we have a new beautiful building. Everything is clean and pretty. There is no more old moldy attics and staircase of death. We have a nice new building!

This is it for now. I will cover October (I won best costume at the Marine House Halloween party) and November (trip to Zagreb and Marine Corps Ball) in couple of days, or months, knowing me. Good night!

2011-08-31T21:21:00.000+03:00

Shakira, Opera, Rapture and Farewell

Shakira was AAAAAWEESOME! It rained during most of the concert and umbrellas were not allowed. We did not have any garbage bags to cover ourselves with and no one will sells us theirs even though Mike offered 100 RON (over $30) per bag. Oh and it was so freaking cold, I thought I was going to die. We stayed thought, we stayed until we heard "waka-waka". Of course it was the last song and I have never felt such joy, because that meant we can leave.

We proceed to run in the rain to Lipscani and lost the rest of the group. Mike and I huddled under the heat lamps of a Turkish restaurant, where I proceeded to take my shoes one by one and empty them, because they were full of water. We then found the rest of the group in the Gin factor where we continued the night until 2 am. It was totally awesome!

The next week it was a different musical event-we went to the opera and saw Rigoletto. It was lovely and it was an opportunity to get all dressed up.

Then we were told that it is the end of the world and that Rapture will happen on May 25. We made sure to celebrate the night and wish Drucker a farewell at the same time.

2011-05-07T08:55:00.000+03:00

The reason that I am not writing in the blog is not because there is nothing interesting happening, as it was in Botswana, but because there is so much stuff that I truly have no time. And it is not parties or crazy adventures, but just stuff to do.

During the week, usually I get home at 5:30. Mike is still working, so Nikolai and I hang out and sometimes I cook dinner too. It has been raining every day for the past week, so we have done much during the week, but the goal is to go out for a walk every night before his bed time. Again, there are so many cool little streets around us with amazing old-style houses. Michael just discovered another street while biking, couple of weeks ago. It is a side street that I go by every day on the way back from work, but I didn't know it existed (the last 5 words were typed by Nikolai, who wanted to help me. I think this is a good way of learning the alphabet, don't you). I will take some pictures and load them so I have them for posterity.
I also drove down to Bulgaria by myself only with Niko. It took us 4.5 hours which was great. It was Easter and Mike didn't have any holidays, as Easter is not a holiday in the U.S. but it surely is a holiday in Romania. I took couple of extra days too and made a nice 5 days off with my mom and grandma. We drove back with my mom and she stayed with us until Saturday, so it was nice. Mike was super busy at work, so we couldn't take advantage of baba being here, but it was still nice to have my mom over.

We also had a 4.9 earthquake at 5:30 am on May 1st. The cats did not indicate that the earthquake was coming. They were sleeping like the dead. Niko on the other side was up at 3:00 am. I tried to put him to sleep by 3:40 am but at 4:15 am he was up again. As Mike was not sleeping too and he was downstairs on the couch, I took Nikolai to bed with me only to be woken up by the bed shaking and the closets rumbling. It wasn't scary but at that time I realized how unprepared we are if the BIG earthquake that is overdue by 10 years hits. I knew where the passports were and that was that. Mike came flying up the stairs put his jeans on and said "Let's go outside" which by the way is the worst thing you can do, if you are not sure that the earthquake is gone. The buildings here are enforced for earthquakes but stairs are always the weak point. We have decided to do get a "go bag" ready. This way in case something big happens we can pick up and go. This also means that we have to take pictures of all our belongings-TVs, laptops, cameras, jewelry, etc. They are all insured but in order to claim them, I have to show serial numbers.

We are also planning our vacations. Yes, "vacations" is what I said. As Bulgaria doesn't count as vacation anymore, because we can go any time we want, we are venturing around. Mike and I will go to Mykonos and baba will come up here to take care of the wee one. Then we will take one vacation or possible two with him. Ioana has invited us to France in August for as long as we want and we also are talking to Neil and Bonnie about possibly going to the Canaries with the kids. I have no idea where I will find all that vacation time but will see.

Last but not least, Mike and I are going to a concert today. We will see Shakira on Constitution Square. I think I have not been on a concert since 1996 when Mike and I saw "The Cure". It will be fun. We are going with Matt and Heidi and Lauren. Hopefully, tomorrow I will remember to post my impressions.

2011-04-10T20:42:00.000+03:00

Spring is Here!

We were sick pretty much for a month at this point, but the sun has started coming out and I think we are almost all up to par.

Heather, our college roommate that we have not seen since 1998, came to visit us the weekend of the 11th-13th March. It was great to see her and I would like to say that we had a very good program set for her. On Friday we went to a Romanian restaurant for some traditional duck with sauerkraut. Yummy! On Saturday morning, we visited the Romanian Palace of the Parliament. Holy crap it is an amazing building! It is the largest civilian building in the world or the second largest after the Pentagon. Everything in it was made in Romania. For example, Romania did not have any silk production, but the Romanian dictator wanted it all from Romania, so they created a silk farm just so they can do the wall coverings for the Parliament. The work is amazing!

Later on Saturday, we were invited to Bucharest's own movie award ceremony. We had no idea what to expect but knew it was a black-tie event in a friend of mine's house and that we had to bring an acceptance speech. When we arrived, each of us had a tag pinned on the back with a name of a movie star. We had to mingle with the rest of the guests and ask questions and try to guess the name of the star we represented. I was Kate Blanchette, Mike was Jeff Bridges and regretfully I cannot remeber who Heather was. Anyways, once everybody knew who s/he was, we sat for a very different dinner. We each received a blank menu and a list of 15 movies. We had to select the order in which the food represented by the movies should be served. I really did not know what to expect. As dishes came out, we realized that some of the movies were not related to food but to utensiles. There were several times where people got only food and no utensiles, or just utensiles and no food. The food was super yummy! Kevi, Laurie, Ray and Valerie were amazing hosts. After we were done eating, the award ceremony kicked in. Each of us won an award (yes, they went all the way and created gold stars out of wood and painted with gold paint and put them on a piedestal with a plaque stating the award). When the winner went to the podium to receive the awards, s/he had to pick from the box of the acceptance speeches and read it. I won for best dramatic performance in a short animated film. It was a total blast. I have never been to any other party-ever!

Then on Sunday we set off to Sinaia for the nearest to us castle-Peles Castle. I have never been inside a castle before and for my first one this one was rather spectacular.

Regretfully, I in order to take pictures inside, I had to pay 30 Euro to use my own camera and I was cheap so I didn't, but please take my word on it the woodwork and the stonework was so intricate, I couldn't belive my eyes. I also found out that a palace, aside of the ballrooms and the reading and drawing rooms is just a lot of apartments and bedroom for cousins and other royalty visiting. Holy crap where was a lot of freaking rooms. And every single one has it's own theme and color. Very unique!

2011-02-27T08:32:00.005+02:00

Winter in Eastern Europe

It finally caught up to us. It started with e visit to the kid play area in one of the malls. It resulted with the wee-one being sick, then Mike and then me. Of course Nikolai got back to normal in 2 days. However, Mike and are still coughing and congested. It has been two full weeks. We have not been sick like this for a long time, if ever. And I put in this, the cold we all got the last couple of weeks in Botswana in July, that led to my vocal cords being inflamed for close to 4 months. The good news is that we did not let this stop us and on Friday, Feb 18th, we got organized and drove down to Sofia for President's Day. The original idea was to leave on Thursday and spend several days skiing/snowboarding. We ended up leaving on Friday and spending majority of the time indoors and not going to the mountain even once, but it was good. We saw friends and family and my mom helped with Nikolai.

2011-02-06T18:11:00.006+02:00

It is I, the worse blogger ever!

I would like to blame Facebook for my slackiness. It is just so much easier to type a quick status every day rather than typing weekly updates. But that is not an excuse. I see my blog as my censored diary. One day I will look back and at least have some record of my life. I have found that Michael has much better memory than me for long term events. I forget everything and I am afraid one day when I am old I will remember nothing. Then I will be able to turn back to this blog and recollect what I did during my life.

We left Botswana on August 1st via a car ride by our friends Natalie and Kalvar to Johanesburg. We spent a night there and really hoped to have an easier trip home, but that was not to be. Again, SA did not fail us and made us run around with the cats. Initially, they were to be dropped off at the check-in along with the luggage. After some substantial arguing, we were told that the girls have to be taken to the cargo area, that was 2 miles away. This meant that I had to hustle to the plane with Nikolai and carry-on luggage by myself, while Mike had to run to drop off the girls and get to the flight. We were sure that he won't make it, so we said our good byes. His saga was worse than mine as the girls could not get on the same flight as us. That meant that he had to find a cat sitter for the night. He didn't have enough cash. He borrowed cash from the taxi driver and once everything was settled he had to find an ATM to pay back the cabby. I was sitting at the gate, ready to hold the flight when I saw him running. He made it!
The flight was a nightmare. Nikolai would not sleep. He also got some weird rash on the palm of his hands and it itched like hell. He cried so much that he threw up. Again SA sucked! The stewardesses were giving me napkins to wipe the puke and watching me. I was on the verge of a nervous breakdown. If I wasn't for sure that there is an air Marshall and he will zap me, I may have lost it and started screaming. I surely tried to rip the seat belt off the chair, but they build them tough. After 18 hrs of an insane flight we made it. I was so happy to be home. Jen and Matt welcomed us to their house and we should have stayed there for all 6 weeks. But no, we, like crazy people, spent the next 6 weeks traveling like mad. We were in VA for a week. Then we went to WA for 2 weeks. A week in the WA trip I went to LA to visit Kj and then Mike and I we went to Lv to meet Bruce, Chris, Jaime and Dave joined us too. When we came back to VA, I spent a week of consultations and went to SC. Then it was time to get on the road again. OMG, the trip to Bucharest was a dream. Nikolai still did not sleep but it was only 8 hours to Frankfurt and then 2 hrs to Bucharest. Piece of cake! When we arrived, the girls were waiting for us in the baggage area and so was Anna Maria.
I am really enjoying Bucharest. It is so close to my mom's house. She has come to visit us 2 times already and we have been there 2 times too. As Mike says, vacation has a new meaning for us, because Sofia is only 4 hours away from here. There are three beautiful parks in less then 5 minutes from our apartment so the baby is a happy camper. I am really excited about spring and on. We have trips planned and just being able to walk through a big city that has so much life and stuff to do is great.

That's a year in a nutshell. I will work on updating the blog more often, I promise.

2010-03-22T10:37:00.005+02:00

March 2010

(yes, I took me a year to publish this)

What a busy month it has been!

The first weekend of March, we decided that is it time for us to go and finally see "Avatar". As it is well known by all our friends, Mike is coo-coo when it comes to movies, so has to either see them in the most perfect movie atmoshpere or not see them until they are availble on Blu-Ray. Well, that meant that we had to find a place where we could see "Avatar" in 3D. The closest place that showed it in 3D was in the movie theatre of the Monte Casino Resort Hotel in Johannesburg. So yep, we went to a different country to see a movie. It was very nice though. The Monte Casino has 3 hotels, a little square and bunch of restaurants in and out and of course a ginat casino.

It took us about 3.5 hrs to get to Johannesburg after the mandatory McDonald's rest stop in Rustenburg. Nikolai was left behind with his nanny and uncle E-Rock, who came from Selebi-Phikwe to babysit.

We hit a pseoudo sushi place, that was simply awlful, but the bad taste was counteracted by the great time we had at the roulette tables. we had no idea what was going on but in the end after starting with 200 Rand we came out of it with 400 Rand and that was only after 15 minutes of playing.

**************************

8 Feb 2011-regretfully, I don't know what else we did in March 2010. I know that I chased away a guy out of our yard that was trying to reach in the house through the window and steal Mike's laptop and other stuff. It was 4 am and I was checking on the little one when I heard a wierd noise coming out of Mike's office. I walked in half asleep to see a short teenager on the other side of the window reaching in through the window screen. And what do you think I did? I clapped really loud and yelled "HEY!!! GET OUT OF HERE!! HEY" and clapped couple of more times. Of course after the first "HEY" he was gone in a jiffy. I woke up Mike who started talking rather loud of how he is going to get his gun. He does not have a gun, but he has a very real looking made in China toy gun with a laser sight on it. So he went through the entire house and looked out of all the windows. I called Post 1 and they in turn called the roving patrol who was there in less than a minute because they were in the area. Once they were in the compound, Mike flew out of the house like a bullet and searched the entire yard. They could not find anyone. Mike found one of his golf clubs laying broken in half next to the office window. It seems that the thief tried to bend the metal bars on the outside of the window and couldn't do it cause the club broke. So he went for the package of sand paper and lifted up the window screen started reaching in and I walked in on him.

We found where he came from in the morning. Out neighbours are never home and the house next to them is a shack where two "youts" live. They must have jumped over to the neighbors and then climbed up the very convenient pile of dirt and leaves that took them to the top of our fence. Where they simply stepped over the electric fence and on to a tall mulburry tree.

Of course, for safety the facilities folks cut the tree down and we made sure the electric fence is always up and running strong.

We also found out that we were not the only victims. They seem to have gone through the neighbours' yard but all they could get to was the big trunk of Embassy stuff that they had left on the front porch. Couple of days later there was a break in the Angolan Embassy which was two houses down from us. It seems that they got the biggest lute there. They stole the Ambassador's big screen TV from his office and bunch of other stuff.

They never got caught.

I think we also ended up in Selebi-Phikwe and visited Erich but I can't remeber for sure.

2010-01-03T18:17:00.019+02:00

Vacation Time in Cape Town

After, 1 year and 2 months in Botswana and we finally made it to Cape Town. I have a high school classmate of mine that lives here now and she has been waiting for us to visit for the past year and two months.

This is the most lively place that I have seen on this continent. My friend and her hubby just finished their new house, so they were ever so kind to let us stay in their old house, which is fully furnished, 3500 sq feet beauty that is less than a five minute walk to Big Bay Beach. We have been here since December 19th.

******

And now I continue on January 6th. We have been home since Jan. 4th. The stay in Cape Town was great. Just the ability to walk to somewhere was amazing. I really miss walking. It is not that I can't walk here (even through there are no sidewalks and it is 100 degrees) but there is no place to walk to. In Cape Town within 5 minutes I can get a mini boardwalk that had 10 restaurants and little stores or another mini mall with restaurants and more stores. So much life, it was great. I also realized that I missed the ocean. It is not that I live next to an ocean back home, but I see a large body of water every day when I go to to work in DC. In Gabs-desert! No water! The smell of the ocean, the waves, the wind and kite surfers-it was great!

I am happy to report that during our vacation, we did not visit a single ER. It was close but we managed without it. On Dec 29th, Nikolai woke up screaming which was followed by a giant puke. He had some sort of a super stomach flu. Then, on Dec. 30th I got it. It felt like I was run over by a truck. Everything hurt, but I still went to the mall to get my hair done. I almost passed out on the chair but damn it I was going to look good and passed out. Of course, on New Year's Eve was Michael's turn. Needless to say, this was one of the most uneventful New Year's eves I have ever had. We did not eat anything solid all day. The evening I decided that we can be brave and made some macaroni with a bit of butter and salt. Nikolai went to bed at 8, Mike and I watched James Bond's Casino Royal and we went to bed at 11:00 pm. Our neighbours celebrating at midnight woke me up, so I knew that 2010 has arrived and that was that, just another night.

Thanks to my friend, we went on a day trip to see some cool penguins and then on the next day to the wine country. It was very nice. As I mentioned on Facebook, the South African wine country looks exactly like the Virginia one. If we were not driving on the wrong side of the road and the signs were not in Afrikaans, I would have sworn that I was back home.

The vacations received 2 thumbs up and I am planning to go back in February with Nikolai for President's Day. Botswana is way, way too quiet for me.

On the way back, we had the excitement of looking for the beloved stroller on the Jo'burg airport for 45 minutes and successfully finding it. Then on the Gabs' airport we arrived but the luggage didn't make it until the next day.

Here are some pictures of our vacation to prove we actually were in Cape Town:

http://www5.snapfish.com/thumbnailshare/AlbumID=3589960014/a=106932564_106932564/

2009-09-07T09:55:00.006+03:00

Almost 11 months

I know it has been over two months since I wrote last, but we were so short staffed with the yearly rotation cycle, that from 5 of us we were down to just me and Rich (the GSO). I had to do HR while he was also covering Management Officer and Facilities. Needless to say it was rather hectic. Again, I would like to reiterate that working for the government is super busy. I have no idea who spreads the rumors that government employees are slackers and it maybe true in DC, but out here in the trenches ( I have been hanging with the Marines too long) it is a daily battle to survive. So here I am super busy and then the people that work for me are sick or somebody died and they have to go to a funeral (the funerals here take a week), so I was also short staffed for the past two months. Today is Labor Day and it is the first day I have had off since I came back from vacation on June 5th. I was sick and went went to work, Nikolai was sick and I went to work, I am just a work goer. And now being September, we are in the end of the gov't' s fiscal year so I see this as the final push which culminates with having Sept. 30th and Oct 1st off as it is Botswana's Independence Day. Yes, I do get all US and local holidays, so there are some perks to my job.

Oh, yeah, I was also thrown in the world of bidding for my next position by myself. I thought that I have one more directed tour, where I get a very short list and pretty much am told where to go, but nope! Two days before bidding was opened I was told that I am on my own. What is bidding in the Foreign Service? Well, it is a lot like going for a new job in the private sector. I needed a resume and bunch of references. Then I had to create a list of the places I wanted to bid on. It took some hard core research but I got them down to six in the following: 1. Zagreb; 2. Bucharest; 3. Kiev; 4. Madrid; 5. Jerusalem; 6. Bogota. I would also like to add Kuwait but Mike is not very excited about it, so I still have it as pending. Once I knew where I wanted to go, then I started e-mailing the current finance officers and other listed contacts and asking them for more details of life at post-Internet speeds, nannies, schools, air quality, traffic, etc. Once I was sure I really wanted to go there, then I e-mailed the Management Officers or whoever the listed contact was and told them that I am the best EVER! and sent them my resume. I know that Bucharest has checked all my references. I have e-mailed just my top three for now and the CFO of the European bureau. I will push the top three for couple of more weeks and then see the other ones. This week, I will e-mail Zagreb and tell them that they are still my #1 choice. I really hope to get a "handshake", which means lock a job before all bids are due in by Oct. 5th. It will be perfect! Otherwise, I am not sure what happens. If I don't get a handshake, I guess any empty place left can be assigned to me. And those are not the ones that I want, but any other open spot.

I also got tenured in July. Getting tenured is an important step, because it tells them that I have proven that I am in for the long-haul meaning I am career foreign service officer. Who knew that I will be a diplomat for the US government back on August 30th, 1973 when I was pulled out of my mom almost 2 months premature, because the doctors believed I that have died and they were trying to save her. Hmm!

2009-06-28T12:47:00.004+03:00

It's cold!

Holy crap it gets cold here! This also makes for another weird experience-wearing a coat and pantyhose during a 4th of July reception. Yes, we had ours this past Friday and it was in the back yard of the AMB's house and it was freezing. I had a wool coat down to my knees, with a suit underneath it and I was still pretty chili. So now I have experienced Thanksgiving and X-mas by the pool and 4th of July in a coat. What sucks is that every plan we try to make for the real 4th, has to be during the day, more like between 3 pm and 5pm because the rest of the time it is in the mid-50s. One cannot really say-please come to celebrate b/w 3-5. We'll see what we'll do.

We are starting to talk about our next vacation. Based on the last one, we are most def coming home. Now we just have to figure out what month will be best and how we go about to see friends (VA, CA and UT) and family (WA & CO) in couple of short weeks. I am also getting close to finding out what will be my options for next year. I called my HR lady and she said that by middle of July, she will be able to tell me what we have for next year. I am very excited! It will be my first time to have more than one option. It will still not be the normal bidding, because I am not tenured, but it will be better than just one option.

2009-06-18T16:46:00.004+03:00

8 Months for Real this Time

And to think that I deal with numbers all day and I could have counted properly that from October to June are 8 months not 9. Oh, well, I guess wishful thinking. It is not bad, just it is as if we live in Ashburn and that is it. Ashburn is the big place and everything else is smaller. This gives you an idea of the feeling of utter boredom I feel every day. It's not that we will go and party every day or every night, but come on! Not even Tyson's around us. It is all Ashburn and not in the current days of Harris Teeters and Targeee, oh no, I am talking 7 years back-empty f

fields and 2 strip malls.

The new exciting restaurant that just opened is Rodizio Brazilian Grill. The sushi place closed and now we have more beef. Finally, somebody clued in that there should be no sushi in a land-locked place where the dowries are paid in cows. Duh, make a beef restaurant and ta-dah, there is one. We will probably wait for a month before we visit it, so they can get their stuff straight.

In other news, we are styling with two Internet providers. In a typical start-up fashion our original provider over sold the band width and last week Mike was seeing the crazy speeds of 8 Bytes down and 1 Byte up. Yes, this is B without a K in the front. So, he did some research and we found that Orange offers 256KB for a reasonable price and 5 GB of downloads. He signed up and now can work without a problem. What sucks is that the Vonage is still bad. We can hear perfectly fine, but the upload, or us speaking is bad, so it sounds crappy. As usual this makes home feel so close, yet so far. Sniff!

I loaded the pictures from the vacation for everybody's viewing pleasure.

2009-06-07T22:30:00.006+03:00

8.5 Months

We have officially been in BW longer than Liberia. Granted, we were on vacation for 3.5 weeks, but still we are here longer than any other place in Africa before.

Speaking of vacation, let's recap the experience from hell. We were supposed to be on the flight out of Johannesburg to Paris at 19:40, however Air France oversold the flight (I know shocking!) so they moved us to the flight at midnight. We spent 5 hours on the airport. Gratefully, we had Air France lounge access, so even though N. didn't sleep, it wasn't as hard as it could have been. Then we flew for 12 hours and upon arrival in Paris and waiting for our luggage, we realized that N's suitcase wasn't there. It was 15 C (mid 50s F) in Paris and N had only 2 pj's and one set of clothes from the carry on. Thankfully, I had 2 blankets, so that was helpful. We arrived on Saturday morning. On Sunday morning, Michael woke up with pain in his lower abdominal area. It got worse in the next hour, so he hopped on a taxi and went to the closest hospital in Paris. I called the Embassy and spoke to the duty officer asking for help and the dumb lady was of no help. During this time, Mike was going through test and scans. The doctors found that he has an infected appendix and required surgery. I made my way to the hospital to see him before the surgery. I also called my cousin and she said that she will make it back to Paris from Rabodanche by the evening time. The hospital looked awful. It was old and decrepit. I have seen hospitals like that in Bulgaria, but Paris, come on! Mike had the surgery-endoscopy, in the evening. It went well. The next day (Monday) I was supposed to be in class, but I had no one to take care of N. I went to my cousin's in the afternoon and left N with her and made my way to the hospital-AGAIN! Mike was much better. He was in a room that smelled like pee. Let me tell you how fast I had to remember my French-very fast, because no one speaks English. Everybody was so polite and helpful but still didn't know English. Mike was released on Tuesday at noon and took N and went to my cousin's for the afternoon, so she could help him. I made it to school on Tue afternoon. The rest of our stay in Paris was amazing. We went to the Louvre for a day. N managed to poop himself to such extend that everything was covered in poop in the middle of the Louvre. I didn't have a spare paid of pants or socks so I put his legs through the sleeves of his wool cardigan and wrapped his feet with blankets. He looked pathetic, but he was warm. I have always loved Paris-the cafes, the tons of people, the fact that everybody smells great and looks amazing. There is also all the culture stuff to, but that is a given. I would love to live in Paris for a longer period of time and give Mike the chance to actually see it. Oh and I wouldn't have been able to do it without my cousin's help. It was a miracle that she was there. Oh yeah and the suitcase came on Tue, right after I spent crazy amounts of cash to make sure my baby doesn't get sick in this cold weather.

We left Paris on Sunday for BG. Mike was having some pain on the site of his surgery but it wasn't anything bad. Of course that is not true! By 1:30 am on Monday, he was in total pain and on his way to a Bulgarian ER. I called the Embassy at 1:30 am and the nurse was very helpful. Mike was admitted and was put on IVs of antibiotics galore. On Tue, the scan showed that the body has contained the infection into a puss pocket (I know it sounds great!) instead of infecting his entire abdominal. Mike was in the hospital until Thur noon. The entire time the nurse and the doctor of the Embassy were there, giving me updates and working with the hospital. It was such a difference from our Paris experience. OK, so after this Thur there were no more visits to the hospital. Mike stayed on antibiotics for 5 more days and now is at 100%.

On Sunday, May 24th was N's baptism. It went great! N did great up to the point when the priest dunked him in the giant baptism bucket (not sure of the word) and poured water on his face. The poor baby has not slept since 06:00 am and was so tired and this was the final straw. He flipped out! Couple of minutes earlier a British group of tourists has entered the church to see it, because it is one of the oldest and most preserved churches, and they were so excited to see a baptism and were taking pictures. So right after N got dunked and the priest handed him all hysterical to his godfather and the Brits were snapping along, is when he started peeing with every cry. The priest jumped back very fast and the entire church started laughing. The poor baby kept crying and peeing for about a minute. He had a perfect parabola trajectory. We have it on video for posterity. He was upset for the rest of the ceremony and all he wanted was his mommy, which is kinda hard when the godparents were supposed to hold him. After the baptism, he fell asleep in the car and slept through most of the lunch. Th rest of vacation in BG was calm. We knew we had a 12 hrs layover in Paris on the way back, so Mike found a great apartment for that time. We also tried to get seats next to a bulkhead, so we can put N in a bassinet, but because I bought a full ticket for him, we couldn't because the system assumes that he is over 2 years old if he has a full ticket. Helloooo, we went to Air France's reps and she said we have to do it the day of the flight. The day of the flight came and we made it to Paris nice and safe. The hotel/apt was great. We took naps, relaxed, oh and before we went to the hotel we actually secured the seats we wanted. It took 30 mins and Mike pointing at N over and over showing the Air France lady that, yes he is indeed a baby, not a toddler. Sorta relaxed, we left the hotel to check in our luggage. We made it to the counter, only to encounter a lady with an attitude. From the beginning, she was asking stupid questions such as-why are you going to Botswana and do you have other form of IDs (beside US passports, helllooo). The final part of her craziness was when she said we can't take the stroller to the gate, then she changed her mind and said we can't the baby chair on the plane and the stroller. Finally after she called her supervisor and I showed her that the chair is approved for plane travel they decided that they will go ahead and charge us for the stroller as excess baggage, because the ticket for N was bought as a toddler, not a baby and all he gets is 20 kilos. It made no difference to them that nobody has ever charged us for anything on any flights, because WE ARE TRAVELLING WITH A BABY! Mike argued, I argued, another manager came and in the end we had 2 managers and 2 check-in reps telling us we have to pay 47 euros per kilo for the stroller and the 1 kilo that N's suitcase was over. If anybody would like to know the digits, this is what it meant-both made over 10 kilos @ 47 euros per kilo they wanted 517 euros for a stroller and a kilo over, which is over $700. And they kept saying, "Sorry, there is nothing we can do!" WTF is wrong with AIR FRANCE and these particular French. They said that Air France in Joburg has made a mistake when they didn't charge us so they are correcting it. The original counter wench said the "THIS IS CHARLES DE GAULLE AIRPORT AND WE HAVE DIFFERENT RULES" Duh, lady, we flew out of CDG 2.5 weeks earlier on a flight where N didn't have his own ticket and should have been charged for his 20 kilo suitcase and the chair and the stroller but weren't. But, no, nothing will make them listen. They kept printing some stupid paper and circling that we each got 20 kilos as if I am retarded. In the end I asked what were our options and there were two-pay or leave the stroller behind. So we did, we left my baby's first stroller on the French airport! I took my sleeping son out of his stroller, while I was crying and left it on the scale. I asked them what they will do with it and the bitch said "Oh, it's trash". I wish I could have hit her. Maybe, I should have hit her at least to make me feel better. I asked that they donate it to charity and not waste a brand new Italian stroller. Well, this went on for about an hour and at this time we were late for the plane. One of the managers, a dude, escorted us through passport control and security. I kept crying and he kept saying "I am sorry, there is nothing we could do". Mike called it BS, because there is some thing they could do. They can just put the stroller on the plane. The flight was long and I kept thinking about the very first stroller N had and how one of my girlfriends and I spent months choosing the right one so it could be driven with one hand and closed with one hand, so it will be easier for travel and then I keep seeing it sitting on the baggage conveyor. I am still so sad about this. Those people have no heart and no brain and are total asses. No wonder everybody thinks the French are asses. It is because of people like those, they were admitting they made a mistake and wanting to punish us. Well, when we landed in Joburg and I was carrying N and dragging a carry-on the Air France/KLM manager was at the door. She asked me if I needed my stroller and Mike told her that it was taken away from us. She couldn't believe it, but then she is Dutch and it seems like they have hearts, unlike the French. She lent me an umbrella stroller for the 3 hours in Joburg and we gave her all our information. She said that she will try and get it back for us. I am not holding my breath, because I can see the French bitches destroying just out of spite. This week we are also writing letter of complaint to Air France and every other airline that is member of the star alliance. I woke up 2 days ago, thinking that I should have thrown down my dip. pass on the counter (because we travel with our normal ones otherwise) and told them "I am taking this stroller with me and not paying a dime, if you have a problem, well you better call security" but I was in such shock and disbelief, plus we haven't slept for the past three nights because N is teething, that I just tried to reason. As if reasoning with a bag of leaves makes any difference.

We made it back to Gabs and we even stayed until all the luggage was out, just in case they loaded the stroller after the fact. Nope, no such thing! Heartless assholes! I am never flying with Air France ever again. EVER!

I have bunch of pix from the baptism and Paris but will have to load slowly. I will attach a link as soon as I do.

Next vacation is in the US where we will fly with United or Delta.

2009-03-21T21:29:00.004+02:00

5 Months

I fell of the bed yesterday. Yep, all 146 lbs in slow motion fell with a thump! I thought I will break my leg. It was bad! I sat on the bottom edge of the bed to look for documents and brush my teeth. My left leg was straight on the bed and the right was on the bed frame. Well, I must have been brushing pretty vigorously, because I started tipping over to the right-the ground part, not the soft pillowy part. So, I tried to put my right leg down on the floor, but instead I stepped between the frame and the mattress. At this time I was totally falling, while still holding my toothbrush in my mouth. I calculated that if I continue straight down I will either break my leg or for sure dislocate my knee. So I took action and started twisting to the left. Thankfully, this was enough to move my leg up enough, but I still fell from waist high. I couldn't scream, I didn't want to wake up the wee-one. Mike was in the living room and also of no help. I clinged to my trusty toothbrush and whimpered. Now my left thigh is black purple and both of my shins are swollen and bluish. It sucked, but now it is totally funny because it was all in slow mo. I have no idea why I didn't try to lean towards the bed or something, but no-nothing. Just a thump! Pretty sad!

Did I mention that I am the hardest working gov't employee in the entire freakin' gov't? This is just not right! I had all sorts of trainers and visitors from the middle of January until the end of Feb. My people were in training and on vacations and I was stuck doing everything. Once I realized I was doing everybody's work on top of mine, I sat them all down and told them it was over. They just stared at me. I put 2 people on performance improvement plans and still nothing. I am not sure if it is the culture, but there is no initiative whatsoever in any of them. I show them exactly how to do something and I get it late and wrong-aaaaaaaaa! I have no nails left from stress! And why should I care? My predecessors surely didn't, that is why the dept. is such a mess. If there is no change in the next couple of weeks, there will be some firings in the future.

Otherwise, I miss home. Actually, we miss home. It is not that here it is bad, but when we have nothing familiar around us, it slowly gets to you. I also miss my friends. E-mails and talking on the phone is just not enough. In Liberia, the community was so tight that we missed the lifestyle but not the comraderie. Here, no one hangs out with anyone. I mean some of the people at work hang out, but I don't know a single other person from the other Embassies. Right next to us we have the Indian, Angolan, Swedish, Chinese, French, German and Nigerian Embassies and we don't know a single person from them. I have heard that in civilized posts you feel very lonely, but Botswana did not count as one. I hope it gets better. We are venturing out of the city next weekend, so that hopefully will make it better. We are going to Tuli block. It is on the western tip of Botswana. We are staying in the Tuli Lodge-www.tulilodge.com. It will be interesting to finally see all that beauty that everybody talks about. It will also be interesting to go on a game drive with an 8 month old baby. People keep telling me that predators sense when there is defenseless something in their midst so they come out. This means that if that is true, we will be seeing lions, cheetahs and all sorts of other predators none stop. I will give an update when we get back.

Oh, Mike organized a mini Texas Hold'em tourney in January and it went great, so right now he is hosting a second one. I am again the only girl in a house full of boys. The youngest one is sleeping (thank you, Jesus!!!) and the rest are drinking and playing cards.

There are no cool pictures. The only picture I am adding is the one from back in January when we went for professional photos. Mike and I look like the album cover of an 80s band. Enjoy!

2009-01-19T07:33:00.006+02:00

3 months

(January 2009-yes, I am posting it in Feb 2011)

Yep, we have been here for three months. This is crazy! Time is going by fast and yet not that fast, because 3 months compared to 2 years, is not that much time.

We started thinking already about our vacation. We really want to go to Paris, so it seems that vacation will be May in Paris. I have not been there since 1995, so it will be interesting to see it again. I really like that city. Nothing is 100% as I have not spoken to the boss, however it makes sense, so it should work.

Nothing really exciting is happening here. Work, home and back to work and then back home. The weather is still beautiful with occasional picturesque thunderstorms. I have to go to the desert and check it out in the next 2 years. I hear the storms in the desert are amazing.

Last week on of the ladies organized a Bollywood night and I got to see my first, EVER, Bollywood movie called Bride and Prejudice. I knew the movie will rock as soon as I saw the guy that plays Sayeed in Lost is in the movie. He was singing and dancing-it was great!

What else did I want to talk about? I write entire posts in my mind and when time comes to actually put them down on paper, so to say, I always draw a blank. I think I wanted to talk about Botswana but what exactly I don't remember. I believe I have already mentioned that it is a very nice country, with very nice, polite and educated people. The Prez lives across the street and I hear him coming and going with his heli but have not seen him yet. He is a young guy, ex-military, so he is trying to work on his people to help them stop the HIV spreading. I was talking to some CDC friends of mine and they told me that in the villages the rate of HIV infection among the women is up to 50%. This is crazy to think that I am surrounded by so much potential death. I hope none of the people I know die while I am here. I lost an employee in Liberia to Hepatitis and Malaria mix, so I cannot have something like that happen again.

It is interesting to see how the global economy is affecting little Botswana. The country lives from diamonds and safaris. At this time, not many people are buying either, so they are talking about dipping in the cash reserves (I didn't know that countries have cash reserves too). I hope the diamond mine doesn't close, because we are scheduled to visit it on 13 Feb.

In other news, I am totally pissed off at my bank, so I am going to ditch them. Bastards raised my credit card interest rate to 29.99% for no reason and did not tell me. I have other credit cards asking to give me more credit with no interest for a year, but nooooo Bank of America are assholes and tried to screw me. Michael closed the card after he tried to talk to the customer rep. and she told him "Well, Sir, if you are not happy, you can go to another bank". Can you imagine? So we are! Yes, I am still mad about this even though it has been over a week, since the incident.

2009-01-04T13:33:00.004+02:00

10,11,12/104

Christmas in Africa is so not a real Christmas. It is just not right to have blue skies and 100 degrees Fahrenheit. We had the tree and the gifts and the decorations but it never felt like Christmas. Same thing was for New Year's Eve especially when we spent it home and almost missed the New Year's because we were watching "The Dark Knight". Thankfully our noisy neighbours started yelling and others exploding fireworks, so we had the chance to mark the beginning of 2009 and then resume watching the movie. We were in bed by 1:30 am and my beloved child, who did not care that I went to bed late, woke up at 6:30 am. This taught me a lesson-I may go to bed late, but it is guaranteed that I will wake up early no matter what.

In other exciting news, we didn't have water in the Embassy most of Tue (30th) and Wed (31st). Something happened and the water was cut, then Gaborone Water ( I have no idea if that is their real name) fixed it but we had no water pressure. I live close to the embassy, so I could go home to go to the bathroom or to take my people over for a bathroom break. It was interesting. As you can tell, nothing much happens here and with a baby nothing much happens altogether. One of the peeps from the Embassy had a "White Elephant" party on Dec. 26th, but our nanny has been on vacation since the 24th , so we couldn't go. Then the Marines had a party for New Year's and again we couldn't go due to lack of nanny. Michael and I are learning to spend a lot of time together AT HOME! I think I already mentioned that and it continues to be true. There is a saying in Bulgaria and I translate " the female pig ate warm meals until she had piglets"- meaning you had a life until you had kids, after that they are your life. Now I actually know what it means.

2008-12-22T13:51:00.003+02:00

9/104

We were supposed to go to the Jwaneng Diamond mines last Tuesday-12/16. It was a tour set up for everybody interested, where we would have been taken into the mine all dressed funny and see where DeBeers Botswana (Debswana) gets all the diamonds from, but it did not happen. Here is a link for further educational purposes when it comes to Botswana diamonds. The reason for not having the tour is due to Christmas vacation. Helloo! What is up with this country? They closed an entire mine for Christmas. And that is not all, the Botswana Telecom Corporation is also closed until the 5th, so one of the ladies here got the phone cancelled for non-payment and now she is S.O.L because there ain't nobody to help her. Honestly, I think that the Embassy and some of the mall stores are open for business. Yes, some of the stores, not all of them. Oh yeah, and there maybe a world recession but the people of Botswana have money because every day the grocery stores and all other stores are full of people shopping like mad.

The AMB had a Christmas party in his house on Friday and it was nice. We sang Christmas carols, while it was 95 degrees outside, had some good food and great deserts. After that, Mike and I wanted to go and have a drink somewhere, but every place we went to was full, crowded and loud, so we went back home. The sad part is that we saw so many people that were for sure driving drunk. Making 10 point turn out of the parking space, hitting the light post while getting into the parking space and a lot of driving without their lights on. I want to bring the FJ here, so I can ram people in case of somebody's stupidity.

Let's see what else...I think this was it. There are no pictures, because we didn't do anything. I was supposed to go to a Setswana wedding past Saturday, but the offspring was filling the vaccinations he got on Wed, so I stayed with him.

2008-12-11T21:14:00.007+02:00

8/104

Stuff I have learned while being here: there is such a thing as a baboon spider. It is gigantic and hairy. I am glad that I have not seen one yet but if anyone wants to read more about it, be my guest: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baboon_spider

Also, we found out that the director of the Peace Corps in Botswana's dad was the one that invented the pop-up turkey ready thingy. Who knew that the daughter of the man that made sure that turkey's are perfect for everybody is right here with me? We found that during the "what are you thankful for" part of Thanksgiving dinner at Deb and Tom's house. Speaking of Thanksgiving, we had a great time. Tom is a true culinary genius, even though his full-time job is with the CDC. There were two turkeys, thanks to Tom and Kim. There were tons of side dishes and 6 types of pies. Regretfully, the offspring had a meltdown at 7:45 pm and I left with him and only a piece of pumpkin pie and a piece of coconut pie. I thought my beloved husband, who stayed behind, will think of getting the tons of leftovers or at least couple of more pieces of pie. But noooooo, he came home with 4 rolls. What the hell! 4 ROLLS! Yes, I am bitter, can you tell. (the truth according to Michael: there was nothing left, by the time I left). I call whatever!

What else can I share with my captive audience? Oh, yeah, here is a link of all the recent pictures. They are on Snapfish because it allows me to load videos too: http://www2.snapfish.com/share/p=89191228825225101/l=450569404/g=106932564/otsc=SYE/otsi=SALB

I got a big fake Christmas tree and honestly I was very sceptical that it will look good, but please you be the judge, because I think it looks damn good. We are waiting on all the presents to arrive so we can put them under it. and for now, all we have is the presents from Kj. However, the tree is still very nice.

We also got all our stuff and the car too. The stuff was all in tact. We are missing only the small X-mas tree I ordered last year from Hallmark and the little connectors for one of the TV stands. To think that there was a packer with a thing for little X-mas trees and stand connectors is rather weird. Anyways, I am really grateful that I have a housekeeper because Mike had help during the unpacking. We are fully unpacked. Without her, it would have taken forever.

The boy is growing fast and still doesn't know how to roll from his tummy to his back. He is fully skilled in the rolling from back to tummy, but not the other way around. This translates in waking up during the night-between 2-5 times per night, so I can roll him back from his belly to his back. I tell ya, every month it is something else that stops him from sleeping through the night. I know that next is teething, so I have preemptively ordered some teething pills, so I am ready.

Work is getting better, slowly stabilizing. I organized a X-mas party and ordered bunch of Victoria's Secret stuff for my 7 girls. Today, I got the present for the one guy who works for me and the party is tomorrow. We are going to have traditional Botswana food. I know it is meat for sure and some other stuff. I will give you my review after the party. Botswana is the country for me-meat, malls and both of my neighbours have mango trees that drop their fruit right in my yard. Hello! I couldn't have made a better choice. Yes, I miss home and my friends-A LOT!-but I get to see my baby everyday at lunch and I live less than 5 mins from work, so I can run by the house if need be. I believe I mentioned this already, but I am still happy with my choice. Well, I am off to bed, as Michael is happily killing people on his Grand Theft Auto 4. Aaaaa, just like home!

2008-11-12T18:31:00.010+02:00

2, 3 & 4/104

Here I go again with the counting! But I think it makes the time go faster. If I don't do updates every week, due to lack of excitement, then I may move to semi-monthly updates.

As you may have gathered by now, Botswana is totally different from Liberia. It is a normal country. A real country with power, running water, functioning sewage system and malls. Yes, I said it-I HAVE MALLS! There are about 3 open area malls and bunch of little strip malls. There are also 2 movie theatres that show the movies that came out back home with only a week or two delay. We have not gone to a movie yet, because the nanny- Dorothy, has been with us for only a week and a half, but I told her when I hired her that she should expect to work late night one night per week every week. We will test her nanny ability on Friday- Nov. 14th, when we go to the annual Marine ball and she stays home with Nikolai. I am a bit nervous and keep having mini-nightmare scenarios running through my mind, but I keep suppressing them and thinking positively. The ceremony starts at 730, so I think that I will start getting him ready for bed at 645, which is about 1 hr and 15mins earlier than usual, but that will allow me to give him a bath, feed him myself, leaving her with only taking care of him if he wakes up when we are gone. I am sure it will all be fine!

The week of Nov 7th, as a welcome gift to me (this is a sarcastic remark), was a budget conference in Gaborone that hosted every single finance officer and their senior local employee from around Africa along with bunch of people form DC. As the local person, I was constantly asked about all sorts of things and from an entire week of sessions and budget classes, I was able to attend only 2 classes altogether. I have never been happier to be at work as the week after conference. Plus it was Veteran's Day and this gave me a day of supposed relaxation. I honestly don't know what is to relax anymore. Having a baby that is 4 months old and not sleeping through the night is getting to both Michael and me. He is totally adorable(the baby that is), however I would appreciate if he could start sleeping through the night and not having the need to eat at 230 and at 530. I was hoping that when I start him on solid food, it will help, but it has not made a difference yet. He eats his rice cereal at lunch time and he seems to be handeling it pretty well. I will try this week to give him some of it around 4 pm and maybe that will help with him feeling fuller, longer.

I have been writing this since last week and at this point the marine Ball passed and so did the Greek Festival. The Marine ball was nice, however more mature unlike the one from last year when people were dancing around like mad. The nanny did a good job. Niko did not fall asleep until 930and woke u at 230 and 530 as usual, but she seemed to have done a good job.

The Greek festival was rather lame because they were running behind on everything. It was supposed to start at 7 pm however the speeches started at 830pm. The food was buffet style with only 2 stations for over 500 people. We had Niko and were hoping that by 10 pm we would have caught some of the entertainment, but that was sooooo not true. We left at 10pm and they were barely getting ready to do the raffle. I guess later, according to the Marines on our table, it got more interesting with plate breaking and belly dancers, but at that time we were long gone. Next year, we are keeping the nanny and going solo.

What else, hmmm, oh yeah, the weather here is crazy. We have gorgeous days and suddenly-thunder bolts and crazy lightnings storms and the noise shakes the entire house like an earthquake. Well during one of those climate events one of the trees in front of our house decided that it was not worth living for and jumped out of its roots. This resulted in us being blocked in and waiting for the facilities folks to come and rescue us. This was an interesting call at 7 am from the Marines- Ma'am, it is Post one. You seem to have a tree in front of your house and you can't go anywhere. Regretfully, my colleague Alison was on her way to the Embassy, so when I called to tell her that I will be late, she offered to come pick me up, so I did not benefit of the tree death.

Oh, did I mention that on Fridays we work only until 1:30 pm. Granted we go to work every day at 7:30 am, but I live less than one kilometer from the Embassy so that is not that bad. I am actually reaping the benefits of being stationed out of the US. I live super close to my house and come home for lunch every day to see my baby and my my other baby and can I get home in 5 minutes flat if need be.If I had stayed back home, I would have never seen my babies, like ever-never!

I blame Michael for not having pix. I was trying to load them and he started flipping the switches on the circuit breaker, because it was acting out earlier so we had it off, so I lost my load. Booooooooooooo! I will try and edit it with pix tomorrow. Plus, I can't find the digital camera to show you how glamourous I was at the ball.

2008-10-26T17:22:00.007+02:00

Here we go again! So, these are the last 26 days in a nutshell:

-3 days of packing out of our house-a.k.a the move from hell;

-fixing house up for renters and realizing that Home Depot's promise to match any color is a total lie, thus making the walls of the house look as if Picasso got a hold of the brush;

-moving to one hotel only to move out the same night because we were given a smoking room because of the cats and the hotel did not care we were with a baby;

-moving into corporate housing in Falls Church-1 bedroom apartment;

-realizing that 1 bedroom means sleeping with the baby, which translated into not sleeping at all

-moving into a two bedroom apartment;

-in the mean time Michael kept going to the house to finish stuff up and mail boxes to Botswana, while I kept going to work and consultations. Thankfully Niko loves the car!

-Move out of Falls Church on Oct 8th and drive to Charleston, SC with a stop in Richmond to have a USDA vet certify the South African intransit permit for the girls;

-Spending 4 hours in Richmond because the Ashburn vet f-ed up and we had to find a new vet in Richmond that had to re-examine all three girls;

-Getting to Charleston after 12 hrs on the road;

-Spending 5 days in Charleston and actually taking a breather;

-Showing up on Oct 14 at the Charleston airport with 3 cats, one baby, one stroller, one baby chair, 3 suitcases, 3 carry-ons, golf clubs and a portable crib at 830 am, when the flight leaves at 1230 to ensure that Matilda is comfortable in cargo;

-Spending 4 hours arguing with Delta that Hristo and Sylvia are allowed to be in the cabin and losing the fight

-Setting up Hristo and Sylvia with cargo cages for them to spend the night in Charleston and leave the next morning with Matilda

-Flying from Charleston to Atlanta- 2hrs

-Flying from Atlanta to Dakar-8 hrs and 30 min

-Flying from Dakar to Johannesburg-8 hrs

-Getting all the luggage and checking in the hotel after some tense search for our reservation and price change from $200 per night to $400;

-Calling Delta cargo to check if the girls left to be told that Sylvia passed away

-HELL, HELL, HELL, HELL, HELL, HELL

-Booking an extra night in the hotel to wait for Hristo and Matilda

-A lot of crying and disbelief that I will never, ever see my little baby girl again

-Talking to the vet that did the autopsy to find out that she had a thyroid problem and she was maintaining herself by eating a lot and drinking a lot of water, so when Delta did not feed her and give her the extra water, her kidney's failed. I told Delta that they are old and one of them will not make it, but somehow I told you so is not making me feel better;

-Anger at my Ashburn vet that supposedly checked her thyroid but did not check one specific hormone. Make sure that you double and triple check every time you talk to a doctor or a vet, because they all suck!

-Meeting my high school classmate and friend that flew from Cape Town to see us on the 15th

-Picking up Hristo and Matilda-ALIVE!-but covered in pee and poo on 16th.

-Smuggling them in the 5 star hotel and giving them baths

-Leaving fancy hotel on 16th Oct and driving-in the opposite way-Michael was amazing as if he has driven backwards all his life-for 5 hours from Johannesburg to Gaborone, Botswana.

-We arrived successfully to our new beautiful house on Oct 17th to start our two year tour in Africa.

Yep, that's pretty much it. I realized that the choice to come back to Africa was a good one, because I live less than a mile from my work and come home for lunch. We already have a gardener and a housekeeper and next week we will hopefully have a full time nanny to entertain the young one all day.

Our freight made it, after some more tense moments because Niko's formula was in it and in some boxes that we mailed, however the boxes were stopped in DC because they exceeded some sort of a cubic dimension. We were down to enough formula for one more meal when the air freight came minus his crib and mattress. The logistics people are looking for them.

My first week of work went smooth and Michael already has Internet and is again on his beloved conference calls.

I still have to take pix of the house and Gabs. Our neighbours/sponsors rock and they make us feel very welcome.

2008-07-15T22:36:00.005+03:00

38/40

I am enormous! Now it looks like I swallowed a dinosaur egg. Even with this giant, super heavy mid-section, I still have not reached the part of-"get him out of me". I am guessing that is because I have heard that the part of taking care of a baby and a child is much harder than being pregnant, so I am perfectly fine if he chooses to stay in as long as he wants. There is no rush!

My work is super cool and letting me work from home these last weeks for most of the time. It is getting hard to sleep as the belly is rather heavy, so simply not having to get dressed for work everyday and sit in front of a computer in an office is great. I assembled a command center at home and in half laying position with my feet up, the work gets done much faster and I am super productive.

My mom has been here for a week now and helping around. Every person with babies has told us that the mother/mother-in-law help is priceless, so Michael's mom is coming also for 2 weeks later in the month.

There is really nothing exciting besides trying to control my eating so I don't gain 100 lbs in the last 2 weeks and going to the doc every week to be checked and told if there are any changes. The question I plan to ask this week is regarding the size of the noggin of the baby. If he has a giant noggin, I would prefer not to have to push him out of my nose-thank you very much.

We have almost everything ready. The big items we still need are the dresser, the glider and the milking instrument. We should have the dresser this week and bunch of the little things-bottles, burping clothes, etc. Going to Babies R Us is not that scary anymore!

2008-05-21T02:43:00.005+03:00

30/40

Wow, only 10 weeks left! I am so not ready. I don't look pregnant from the front, however sideways I look enormous. I also am a firm believer of waddling. It makes walking much easier. Plus, I can't wear heals anymore, so I will be one of those people that wears the sneakers to work and then change to heals. I haven't done it yet, but I know that the time will be soon. The good thing is that I make sure to walk a lot. My goal is to walk 10,000 steps a day, so I bought a pedometer and I average 5,500 to 10,000 a day. It is hard but damn it I will keep walking until the end. I have been slacking on my yoga, so the walking is the only thing that keeps me in check. I have gained 20 lbs since last November and I hear that in the last 2 months the baby gains between a pound or two a week, so I am in my own personal hell of imagining how I will gain a total of 35 lbs and then it will take me forever to lose it.

We watched "Knocked Up" yesterday and by the end of the movie I was hyperventilating and Michael was holding my hand so tight as if he was pushing that baby out. The thought of the delivery is freaking me out and try not to think about it, but I write down all my questions to the doc, so I can ask her. She has the ability to explain everything so calmly that it makes me feel better.

Otherwise, work is fine, the kids are still happy to be home and Michael keeps working like mad every day.

The several days we spent in Cali were the bestest. As I have mentioned to couple of people already, if the current job doesn't pan out, I am totally moving to the OC. But for now we are on track to be in Botswana by middle of October.

2008-04-21T03:09:00.004+03:00

26/40

I am big! This picture was from last week-25. I believe I have gotten even bigger in the last week. The weird thing is that is looks like I am curving my back to stick my belly out, when in fact I am not. I am being curved forward and backwards and my lower back kills by the end of the day. This darn JLo booty of mine!

We had a second ultrasound last Thursday and it went well. Everything continues to look normal and he is still a boy. My due date was moved from 7/27 to 7/21, but I have chosen to ignore all dates and go with the flow. He happily kicks me every day and I am glad to have such a bizarre experience.

Otherwise, life is as normal as it usually is when we are home. I go to work every day and Mike works from home, like crazy! On the weekends, we stopped going to baby stores because we have finished the registries and found the stroller that I wanted. Now, we use the weekends to hang out with each other and our friends. Everybody keeps telling us to enjoy these last months of being just the two of us, so we are doing just that.

The feline girls are so happy to be home. Hristo keeps running around the house and Matilda and Silvia just lounge around in the sun as usual. I feel bad that I will have to take them back on the road in couple of months, but they will have all their stuff this time around because we are taking all our crap next time we get on the road.

Next week we are going to visit our friends in Cali and I am happy to take some time off to chill with them. I think we can call this a babymoon-the last vacation before the baby comes.

2008-02-20T00:44:00.002+02:00

New Week Count-17/40

WOW! Liberia seems so long ago and far away. We have been home for a week and still trying to get in the normalcy of life, but it is starting to feel like we never left. As soon as Mike's brother, Stephen, and his girlfriend, Kim, leave this Friday, we are going to be alone in our house as we like it.

Last week we got back on Monday, 11 Feb, right at the same time as Michael's dad arrived from Seattle. He stayed with us until Sunday. It was nice to see him. Overall, the week was crazy busy and I am happy that I took it off. We had 6 suitcases that I had to go through and put stuff away. That took about a week. We also had to get stuff for the house-comforters, linens and other normal stuff that is in our air luggage or ship freight. The air stuff left on Sunday, 18 Feb and should be here by the end of the week. The ship freight and the car will take about 3 months to get to us. That is why we went looking for a car and bought one-Infiniti FX 35. It looks like a good car for baby and it also has the sport's package, so Michael is happy with the big engine and 20 inch tires.

I have seen all my friends, with the exception of Ray and continue to have a giant grin every time I go to a grocery store and see all the food that is available to me right away. And I don't have to buy it right away, because tomorrow I will be able to get it again. My dream of eating Red Robin Five Alarm Burger and giant juicy tomatoes came true the day we arrived. I ate the burger so fast, I thought I was going to die, but I was so happy. I pretty much have been very happy every day. The top of my elation is reached every time I go to Wegman's Grocery Store. I am convinced they put some sort of drugs in the air in the store, because it smells divine and makes me smile every time I go inside.

I still feel guilty for leaving right before Bushy's visit but it was good to see an OBGYN. I was behind on couple of tests, so they took couple big jars of blood to catch up on the tests and also do the big tests that were due at week 16. I also scheduled an ultra-sound appointment on 29 Feb so they can check bones, head, and heart and potentially find out gender, as long as the mini-O’Connell is willing to cooperate.

Michael started working the day after we came home. He is so happy to have the super fast Internet that he works 8-10 hours a day.

Regarding my work, I am still in la-la land. Tomorrow, I have a meeting with my Career Development Officer and I hope to find out where I will be working. Otherwise, I plan to keep going downtown to check e-mails, finish checking in and see if AF needs me for anything.

No exciting pictures for now. We took some pix while packing and traveling but the thingy that lets you load the pix from the camera to the laptop is still MIA, so I can't load them.

2008-01-25T13:33:00.000+02:00

28/104

So little time, so much stuff happening! If anyone our there did not know, I am pregnant. In the world of Monrovia that is not good, because of the non-existent medical care and malaria. I am over 13 weeks and have not had most of the necessary test done. The Post's doc is doing everything she could to give me all the information I need. At this point I have requested to curtail,which means leave earlier than my term. Usually the pregnos are kept at Post until 34th week. This is not a place that a pregnant person can be. Yes, I know the Liberians are pregnant here, but they grow up having malaria twice a year at least. I can't even imagine what will happen with me if I get it right now.

It looks like we are coming home and it looks like it will be fast. I have to have some of the major genetic tests done by mid-February, so I think this is what doc and HR are gunning for. I will keep you posted.

Sorry, no pix, but I have had tons of work on top of everything and don't have the time to load them.

2008-01-10T12:49:00.000+02:00

26/104

Wow, I have not written a single thing for about a month. Well, one can imagine after my last post my mental condition, but I am glad to report that everything happens for a reason. After Michael and I spend the entire weekend of Dec. 15th-16th wondering what to do, my mother had a brilliant idea. "Why don't you guys come to Bulgaria for the holidays?". Holy crap! DUH! I can't believe we did not think of this ourselves. So on Monday- Dec 17th I requested the Travel office to check if there are tix to Bulgaria. By Tue we knew that there were and that it will be a long 4 leg trip, but we did not care. We left Liberia on Friday and arrived back in civilization and this time on vacation in Bulgaria on Saturday Dec. 22nd. Again, wow! I was so happy!

The country has not changed much but that airport is brand new and beautiful. We were so tired when we walked out of the plane after 20 hours of flights and twice sitting on the runways for an hour each time, that we did not even realized we were walking on a brand new exit gate-retractable gate thingy and everything. Previously, we walked off the plane to buses, but not anymore. Michael clued in first and for about a minute we were not sure were on the correct airport. Only after we walked out in the gate area and I saw writing in Bulgarian that we were sure we were in the correct country.

The holidays were great with my mom, my grandma, my uncle, my aunt and my cousin from France, that I have not seen for maybe 13 years. We spent X-mas Eve at my grandma's. Something I have not done since 1995. For New Year's we went to the club of some friends of hours. The club plays only 80's and 90's music, so needless to say I was in heaven.

Michael and I walked around the city pretty much every day. We hung out with our best man and maid of honour and some other friends. We saw 3 movies-National Treasure 2, The Golden Compass and Beowulf. It was great because BG has the best movie theatres under the sun. Large seats with tons of space for your legs, you reserve your seat and the speaker systems are unbelievable.

Honestly, being there without having to worry about electricity going off or taking shower fast enough so the hot water doesn't run out made such a difference. It is not that we were stressed out, just very tense.

The 2 weeks were perfect and I wish we could have stayed longer, but oh well, duty calls so we flew back on Monday Dec. 7th. Thankfully, we had a stop an overnight stop in Brussels again. I was sick and flying was a nightmare. Another good thing is that our luggage came, unlike the luggage of several other people that we know who flew either in our plane or other airlines. And the final cool thing about our arrival back in Monrovia is the spotting of the Iron Maiden plane. I know at this point everybody is pretty puzzled about what the hell am I saying. But while I was slowly wasting away in the VIP waiting area, Mike went to check on our luggage and passport. He came back and said:"You won't believe it but Iron Maiden is here". Well I thought he has lost it, so I went to check. Nope, the man was correct. There on the tarmac of Robertsfield International Airport of Monrovia was a large Boeing with Iron Maiden written across it and the tale had huge painting of Eddie the Mummy. It was rather surreal. The next day Michael did some research and I guess the group does not start their tour until the end of January, so the plane is flying around the world. Check the website, it shows the plane and also has Mike's e-mail. We could not take a picture because of security reason's but this is what we saw:http://www.ironmaiden.com/index.php?categoryid=8&p2_articleid=734

It was an exciting and relaxing vacation. Also the pool and tennis court are finished in our compound and the weather is only in the mid-70s, so somehow Liberia does not feel that bad yet. The new thing that bothers me is the smell of burning fires. The entire country smells like a camp. I guess Liberians are cold, so by 6 pm they start lighting fires to warm up and the entire city smells of fire and dust. Not very pleasant, but I keep my windows closed and I am cool for now.

I think this is it in a nutshell the last month or so.

2007-12-15T19:49:00.000+02:00

21/104

22.5/104

12/5/2007-Great news- we are going home on January 11th. I am waiting for travel to make the reservations today, so I can get my travel authorizations, but my boss already approved the time off, so we are going.........

12/15/2007-This was the beginning of my post at week 21 but now that we are at week 22.5 it is no longer true. I found out that a large humanitarian mission is coming to town mid-January, so we will be super busy. At this time, we won't be able to come home until March. It has been hard couple of days. We looked in leaving ASAP but there are no tickets. Even if we leave, I have to be back by the 7th, which leaves no time to really travel 4 days and 20,000 miles. I had to cancel my training and the trip that we were planning to Cali to visit our friends. By not going on vacation in January and potentially leaving in March will put us at Post for 8 months. I hope I can keep it together. I have been getting very abrupt with all the beggars and bums that keep following me. I still give cash to the kids but the grown ups get only a super evil look. I will write more a bit later and put some pictures. Right now, I am watching Fox News on our newly acquired Armed Forces Network decoder, that shows American TV. Sigh! Sniff!

2007-12-01T17:59:00.001+02:00

20.5/104

Soooo lazy! Actually we have both been pretty busy, but then on the weekends, we have been super lazy. Plus I guess the fact that our Internet provider-West Africa Telecom (WAT) got raided by the Liberian Telecom Agency (LTA) was not very helpful. The LTA shut them down because they were saying that WAT did not have the proper paperwork to operate on the specific frequency they are using. Based on Mike's two week research, it is more along the lines of WAT not wanting to pay a fat bribe to the LTA, so they are shutting them down. It totally sucked to be without Internet in the house. Mike had to come to my work and chill in my office. He couldn't plug in his laptop in the network, but he could work on his database and when he needed to send an update he will use his thumb drive and take it from his laptop to my work PC and send it through his Gmail. It was tedious and when we found out that WAT aint' going to start working soon again, he went and signed up for another provider. This was another $1,300 he had to pay for hardware and 3 months of service. It is working much better that WAT, but this is because it does not rain like crazy anymore. I hope that by the rainy season, we have another solution, because the new provider's-Comium, signal won't cut it through the rain. At this time we have paid $3,000 for Internet services. This is just insane! Mike actually checked into renting his own satellite time, but that was $5,000 a month so we are still doing better.

The other exciting thing in November was the holidays we got. Not only the 2 American-Veteran's Day and Thanksgiving, but we also got 2 Liberian also-Prayer and something else day and President Tubman's B-day. We had a day off every week in November. It really sucked that we had to work on Friday after Thanksgiving and the Friday after Tubmans's birthday, but hey, at least we got 4 days off.

Thanksgiving was weird. It did not feel like normal Thanksgiving. The entire embassy was invited on T-day to the Ambassador's and we ate as pigs. I was so full that I did not eat anything until the next evening, when the US military that are here with the UN, had their own dinner and we were also invited. Two turkey dinners in a row and I did not have to cook-that rocked. But again, because there is no decorations and it is 90F degrees the feeling of the season is not here. The Lebanese stores are selling fake trees for about $300 per tree that looks like Charlie Brown's. I decided that X-mas will not be that insignificant, so I bought a 3 ft tall tree from Hallmark. It is totally decorated! Now it just has to come before X-mas.

Mike's 33rd birthday was also on the 25th. I had ordered his presents over 3 weeks ago, but as usual UPS could not make the connection with SN Brussels, so we had no mail for a week. Never fear, though! He still got his presents. They were simply printed in great colours from the net. I got him the Sony PSP and some games, movies and other gizmos. All the stuff came during the week after his B-day, so now he is fully stocked and very happy. The PSP is a cool thing.

We also ordered all the X-mas presents too so hopefully they will get here in the next 25 days. Otherwise, the little X-mas tree will have a lot pictures hanging off it. It will be an interesting X-mas. Most of the international community is bailing out. There will be here in the Embassy, so I have started to ask people that are staying if they want to do a Secret Santa. I am hoping the pool at our compound is finished in the next couple of weeks, so we can have a X-mas by the pool. Totally weird, I tell ya!

I think this is it for the past 2.5 weeks. There are some Thanksgiving pix and we also went to dinner to Elizabeth's (she works for AID and is leaving for good on 9th). She made some good pot roast and I inherited her ice cream machine and hair dryer. We now have the power to make our own ice cream. Kinda experimented the first night we had it, throwing soy milk, heavy cream, sugar and pineapple, but it looked weird. It tasted great, but it is now frozen solid in the fridge. Oh yeah and lastly a very sad news-Michael killed the "Set it and Forget it" last week. We were having Adrian, Cynthia, Tom and Kristin over for roasted chicken and to watch 3rd season of "The Unit". Well, Mike had just made a joke over the phone to Adrian that the rotisserie was broken and we are having hamburgers when he put the chickens inside the rotisserie and plug it in. Only to hear and see a loud "BOOM" and a lightning coming out of the socket. My beloved plugged the 110 V appliance directly into the 220 V plug, instead into the transformer first. I screamed and then very wisely I stated "Babe, you killed the "set it and forget it". Mike took it apart in about 5 seconds flat, only to see the charred insides of the chip that make it work. We had to bake the chickens in the oven which was fine, but still the rotisserie was so much nicer.

Here us a few pix of the last two weeks: http://www.kodakgallery.com/I.jsp?c=pa74m2q.b6zdscvu&x=0&y=-rkiuuc

2007-11-11T19:48:00.000+02:00

18/104
(4 months)

We are back to our twisted reality!

On the way back from Germany, we spent a night in Brussels. Wow, I love this city. It was so much different than Germany. It's not that the architecture was different but the Belgians are so much more different than the Germans. They are just much more livelier and fun to be around. We made our way to downtown Brussels with the help of a Bulgarian guy, who we met on the train platform while trying to decipher our way to town. He was one of the few other guys on the train platform. When we introduced each other, he said his name was Anatoly, so I thought he was Russian and asked him if he was from Russia. He said "No, I am from Bulgaria". Imagine his shock when I started talking to him in Bulgarian. He almost fell over. It is coolto do this to people, it never gets old to look at their faces once they are trying to process how is it possible for this blond chick to be Bulgarian. Anyways, we exchanged e-mail addresses for the future.

Oh, while in Brussels I had some mussels-yep the mussels of Brussels are not just Jean-Claude Van Dame's. They were so good! In Brussels, they have streets with restaurants one after the other. They all have outside seating with special heating awnings, so people sit outside even in the middle of the winter. We decided that if Brussels ever becomes as an option for me, we are totally going to go for it!

Then we got back to Monrovia!

I had 250 e-mails and 200 cable to go through, so I can get back on top of things. Regretfully, no one left me alone for 2 days, so I can catch up. Instead, I had to go through all this reading AND do the daily things I do, along with little things here and there that keep coming up every day.

The kids were super happy to see us. Tom took great care of them and even let Silvia wean him every now and then so she doesn't feel totally lonely. The Internet is so-so, but by the looks of it, all the sites that we use are unblocked, so Michael can work and I can continue loading pix on Kodak. I also started using Snapfish, because I can load everything there super fast and load all the videos also.

The exciting thing this week was the 232nd Annual Marine Ball that was held on Saturday, 10 Nov, the actual birthday of the Marine Corps. The Ball is usually "the event" for every Embassy around the world. Needless to say, for us in Monrovia, the chance to get all super dressed up, wine and dine and dance is even more exciting.

Alright, so I had my dress figured out (it was the same pink dress I wore for New Year's back in DC, where Kj, Greg, Michael and me had a great time) and Michael had his tux and he fit it in, so we were good to go. NOT! I had no idea what to do with my hair. I am still in a search of a way to make my hair look like Marilyn Monroe. I did research for days and I thought I had it all figured out. NOT, AGAIN! After I burnt my skull several times and had a nervous break down with giant crocodile tears related to the absences of normal hairdressers in this country, I decided I will just curl it as usual. That seemed to work and it took over an hour at which time we were late. And once I was done, my head looked horrendous. The back and left side were wet when I was curling and hair spraying, while my right side was dry. SO, the left and back we skinny curls cemented to my head and the right was cute and fluffy. Nervous breakdown number 2! I feel bad for Michael who was just walking around me trying to give suggestions, while I was yelling and crying and deciding to stay home. It must have been at that time that Tom decided to check on us. According to him, he heard me yelling and freaking out, so he did a U-turn back to his apartment and decided to help Michael by ironing his tuxedo jacket. Well, I followed Michael's advice and tried to wash my hair, so I can just scrunch like usual. Mind you the ball starts at 6 pm and at 615 pm I am just re-washing my hair. So, with having my hair sorta looking like a wet dog and tears continuously pouring out of my eyes, make-up application was not possible. Michael came to the rescue, yet again-a tequila shot! Oh yeah, that did the trick. By 645 pm I was fully dressed and made up and running out the door to the embassy car to take us to the restaurant. Weeeeee! We got there and socialized for about 10-15 mins before all the ceremonies started. I sometimes wonder, how can Michael deal with me when I am having a hysterical fit over my hair. Thank goodness, they are few in a year!

We were at the ball until about midnight. Food was great, met bunch of people and danced. Granted the music was not dance or rave, but I did the best of it. I even made Michael dance couple of times. It was so much fun and I can't wait until next year's ball. I am starting hair and dress planning now, so I will be ready and not have to experience the same stress.

Here is a link to the photos and videos of the last week: http://www2.snapfish.com/share/p=356151195123272460/l=322418260/g=106932564/otsc=SYE/otsi=SALB

2007-10-23T10:37:00.000+03:00

14 & 15/104

OMG! Civilization! We made it to Germany on Saturday, Oct. 20! Total reverse cultural shock.

There are smooth roads, electricity, snow and cold weather. There is also food! The flight from Monrovia to Dakar to Brussels to Munich was alright. There was a crying baby, of course, right next to us, but we survived. My mom was waiting for us at the baggage claim area and then we we rented a car. Michael was in highway heaven! The autobahn, yeay, baby! He kept being passed by BWMs and other hot cars and he could not follow them, because my mom freaked out the moment he went over 65 mph. I felt bad for him but at least he was able to go over 65 mph. The average speed in Monrovia is about 5 mph-MAX!, so it was a pleasant experience. The sight of snow was mesmerizing also. AND THEN, we saw a McDonald's! OH MY GOD! We both had Big Macs and I thought I have died and gone to heaven. McD's fries and BigMac-to die for!

The lodge is great. I now know where mine and yours tax payer money go and I approve. The lodge is right next to a base and it is used by all armed forces, so the soldiers can come here and relax with their families. Having the conference here was a good idea.

We had the car only for a day and have been walking and taking the bus during the past week. The first week went by fine. I was in training from 0900-1630, while my mom walked the streets and studied the city and Michael worked his tail off. Another reason for him to be in heaven is the 18MB Internet that we have in the hotel. We brought with us his work laptop, my work laptop and our home laptop along with the Vonage and the wireless router. The room looks like a NOC ( the ones that do not have the Telecom background, this means Network Operations Center). In the past week that we have been here, Michael has been able to download all the shows that we usually watch back home using the Bit Torrent sites. In techno-geek lingo, he downloaded 50GB, yes GIGA!, in less than a week. I have no idea how he is going to go back to Liberia and to the 256 KB on a good day.

We have been going to all sorts of restaurants while in Garmisch-Partenkirchen. The best, I think was an Indian called "Bollywood". They had menus in English. You may think that with a US base in the town, there will be menus in English everywhere, but you will be dead wrong. Couple of days ago we ended up in a Chinese restaurant. The menu was only in German and the waitress and owner spoke perfect Chinese, good German and not much in English. Our meal was a surprise altogether, because we had no idea what we were ordering. It was pretty good too.

We spent Saturday, 27 Oct, in Munich! We stumbled over the city centre and it was very impressive. Old buildings, huge churches, stores-stores everywhere and millions of people. Of course there was McDs there too and we, of course, visited it again. I love the fries! It was good to be in a big city again. The cool thing about Munich this week is that the European Music Awards will be here on Thursday-1 Nov, so there are posters everywhere and I am hoping that Robbie Williams will decide to wonder off to Garmisch so I can meet him in person. (Please note it is Robbie, not Robin- http://www.robbiewilliams.com/). Otherwise, Germany is a nice country, very well organized, but no offense to this area, it is pretty boring. Not sure why I feel like that, but it is not just me. Neither Michael nor my mom would like to live in this area. It is safe to say that if Munich ever becomes an option somewhere down the road, I will put it as my last option.

Then my mom left on Sunday and I started a new week of training. This entire week is dedicated to the review of the three budgets that the Finance Office in the Embassy is responsible, which means that me and the senior finance analyst from post that is here with me, Kemo Sheriff, will have to sit with reviewers and go over every section and tell them why we need the money and what we are planning to do with them in the next fiscal year. The fun never stops in the world of government finance, let me tell you!

We are here until Saturday morning after which we fly to Brussels. We are going to spend a night there because there is no connecting flight to Monrovia until the next day. Our great neighbour, catsitter, housesitter and friend Tom gave us an article that his girl Jeannie sent him, telling us what to do in Brussels in 36 hours. Let me tell you, we are ready to check the capital of the EU. It sounds like a nice place and the simple fact that I will have sort of an idea what the people are saying to me, unlike here in Germany will be a positive thing too.

Overall, great experience for now. It was much needed to go back to the real world because when you are getting used to poverty, no electricity and water and constant despair your mind gets warped. People should not get used to this way of living because it looks like there is no hope and that is not good.

Here are the pictures from the past 2 weeks:
http://www.kodakgallery.com/I.jsp?c=pa74m2q.5tznjv36&x=0&y=drpdnh

2007-10-15T15:41:00.000+03:00

13/104

X-mas has come in October for our family! Yes, indeed we have finally received the ship freight a.k.a. HHE (household effects). We sent it on May 30th, so it took 4 months for the stuff to cross the ocean and go to Belgium, because all stuff must first go to Belgium to be logged in, AND THEN, it gets put on another ship that made it way to Senegal and chilled there for a bit, AND THEN it came to Freeport of Monrovia, where it chilled for about 3 weeks until it was delivered to us. Mike worked all day on Friday to get all the electronics set up and empty as many boxes as possible. He and our housekeeper, Patrica, did an amazing job. On Saturday we chilled and on Sunday, we just got into it and we were done. The house looks like our house now. We still have to hang the paintings around the house, but everything else is great. It is crazy that it took us only 2 days to empty 4,000 lbs of crap. Oh, I am also very happy that we were super smart and spent tons of cash at home to buy deodorant, gallons of olive oil, industrial size Windex bottles and what not. Now we have all that crap, that costs here about 3 times more than back home, all prettily arranged on great shelves in our spare bedroom. We refer to it as the store. All we have to buy from the local market is meat, veggies and alcohol. Everything else is already bought, paid for and stored in "the store".

You can tell I am excited about all the stuff being here, can't you? OK, let's see what else happened in the past week:

The Office of the Inspector General continues with the total audit of the entire Embassy and left on Saturday 10/14. Now we are waiting on the final report.
The American International School in Monrovia opened officially for business on Oct 8th. It was great! The Pres came by-Ellen Johnson Sirleaf. Every single ambassador and diplomat was there too. The downside was waiting for the Pres. That girl knows how to make an entrance almost 2 hours later than the scheduled time. Thankfully, we were under tents, but there was no air moving. Trust me it is hot between 130 pm and 300 pm on a October afternoon in Monrovia. The kids came out to wait for her, but after some time, Dave, the Pre K-K teacher brought them back in, cause they were not looking very happy to be out in the hot day. The Pres. is cool. She gave a great speech off top of her head. Very good speaker altogether.
We also had the 1st Annual Chili Cook-off at the Marine House. I was a judge along with 4 other people. There were 9 contestants. It was sad that a Canadian-Layal, won the first place-dinner for 2 with the Marines. It was fun over all!
A new club opened up the street from our house. It is called The Embassy-I know very innovative. It is a club like the one back home. Very nice, good music, but the bartenders need to learn how to deal with hundreds of people ordering drinks. After some time, the girls in our group had to start ordering drinks, because the boys were not having any luck. The first night was free, but going forward they are going to charge $10 cover charge. The drinks also have DC prices-$7 for a mixed drink and $4 fora bottle of beer. I understand that they are trying to attract only certain type of people to the club-foreigners, but come now. This is freaking Liberia, not DC. The sad part is that there is really no other place we can go dancing so we are stuck. Also, if you think about it, calling a club The Embassy and putting prices that only foreigners can pay, well they might as well paint a bull's eye on top of the club. But the drivers keep telling me that Liberians respect foreigners and they will never hurt them. I believe them.
Tom's girlfriend Jeannie visited us from DC. She is lawyer back home and she is really cool. We all went to a beach near by. It is called Thinker's Beach. Wow! It was great! There is a little restaurant right on the beach. They keep bringing you drinks and food all day if you want. It also looked like they are building more of the restaurant and maybe a little hotel, so I expect during the dry season to spend a lot of weekends at the beach. Our doc is supposed to test the ocean water in front of our compound soon and see if it is safe for us to swim in the ocean. Safe, meaning that there are not tons of crap and nastiness in the water. As previously described people use the beach and ocean for a sewer dump, so even though it looks amazing and gorgeous it could be full of bad and evil bacterias.
Michael had his hair cut and he looks his hot self again. The barber was great and for $10, he did a great job. I am so happy. Now if I could find somebody to do highlights for my hair, it would be perfect. There is a Thai salon 2 blocks from our house. According to their menu, they offer highlights, but I am really hesitant to have a Thai leaving in Liberia mess with my head. I think sitting in the sun is doing it's job for now and I continue to get blonder by the day.
I am still sick. It has been a month of coughing. Yesterday, 10/14, I even got a fever. This was a day after Mike was brought down by some food poisoning spell. He woke up on Saturday feeling like crap-nausea, headache and all the usual stuff that comes with it. I kept giving him toast, plain rice, chicken soup and water. The entire day he was suffering, but on the next day he was almost back to normal. So then it hit me. Today I am staying at home, over medicating myself with anti-cough pills and relaxing. My back hurts as does Mike's. I think I have overstretched something from coughing. We have no idea why Mike's back is jacked up. He has not been lifting heavy wights. Just the usual.

The kids are great but we are still not sure who will take care of the kitty litter while we are in Germany for 2 weeks. Oh yeah, my fancy automatic kitty litter got totally fried and I have been cleaning it manually. The humanity! Our housekeeper is afraid of the cats, so I can't make her clean their litter. As a side note, I was informed that some Liberians ate cats and dogs during the war, so my employees told me to make sure that we don't lose the cats and especially Hristo, cause she can feed an entire family for weeks.

Lastly, our friend Matt (the Marine) left on Sunday-10/14 for good. It was rather sudden. Initially, he was expected to leave on 10/10, then he was told he has to wait until the mid of November before he can go home. I was happy because that meant that he gets to be here for the Marine ball on Nov. 10th. He organized the entire thing and it was only fare for him to enjoy it. Then, the Marines had some big bosses over last week, to meet and great the new Gunny and they told Matt he is good to go home, so now he left. He is retiring from the Marines and staying in the DC area, so we will hang out when we go back home in January.

This week we leave for Germany-yeay! By Saturday, if all goes well, Mike, me and my mom will be rocking the Edelweiss Lodge in Garmisch. The average temperature for the next 2 weeks is supposed to be about 40F. Compare this to the constant 85F we have been living in the past 3 months. Needless to say I am already cold thinking about it.

Here are pix and videos (yeay, baby, Snapfish let's me load everything in super speeds): http://www2.snapfish.com/share/p=526151192486143812/l=312409927/g=106932564/otsc=SYE/otsi=SALB

2007-09-30T14:35:00.000+03:00

11 & 12/104

Holly crap it has been so busy! The end of the fiscal year is Sept. 30th, but I have been working like crazy for 10 hours a day, including the weekends for the past 2 weeks. Alright, so let's recap what happened since last time I wrote:

9/19 Wed, 9/20 Thur, 9/21 Friday-WORK!!!

On Friday, 9/21, we were invited for a movie night at the Marine House at 1930, but at 1900 Nick (the Marine) called and said that some part of cable is not working, so no movie. Mike and I ended up in the Mamba Point hotel, where Fridays is Taco Night. Overall it was OK, but I don't think we are going back. All I have to say is imagine Tacos made by Lebanese or Liberians that have never actually had a Mexican food. I rest my case!

On Saturday, 9/22 (My mom's 60th B-Day-Happy B-day, mamo!) we took a National Geographic type of trip on a train to the Bong Iron Ore Mines (http://www.bong-town.com/). We were about 12 people from the Embassy and about 10 more from the Mercy Ship. We put the cars on flat beds, did not strap them, because we were told the train goes only about 30 mph and we were off-80 miles East into the bush. The ride was great! We had the option of sitting in or on top of our cars, or go to the VIP car and chill in style. Needless to say we all went to the VIP car. Please take note of the super luxurious VIP car. Mike said that he expected to see Lincoln come out and wave at us at any moment. The inside was equally illustrious as we were chilling on hand woven wika chairs and couches-yeah, baby, yeah! The train ride was about 3 hours. During that time, we ate and drank and waved at the kids in the villages. The only negative was the lack of a bathroom. The guys found a solution but the girls had to wait until we made it to the mines, where there was still no bathrooms, but there was a lot of high grass and jungle, so it was not that bad. Once at the mines we got the cars down and drove around while our guide-Lloyd Lambert (missionary) told us what was what. These mines are not in use any more. The Germans left in the early '90s when the war started getting bad. Liberia has tons of iron ore and they are barely getting companies back in to start mining it. The good thing about the abandoned iron mines is two fold: 1. Piles of iron ore pellets that certain members of the family could climb, jump from and collect (not me)2. the abandoned mines have turned into huge lakes, that people can swim in. Neither of us swam because I had visions of some horror movies where an animal comes and eats me from the bottom of the Earth. Other people swam and they said it was great. Also while at the lake, one of the girls from the Mercy Ship had her camera and watch stolen. It happened before we joined them. I guess the locals send the kids up front to distract the gullible foreign girl, while they sneak around and grab and run. Mike assisted in keeping them back by parking our car at the end and every time locals will approach he will turn the alarm on. It worked like a charm!

On the way back, while people were loading the cars back on the train, I decided to give the candy I have brought to the kids around the pseudo train station. Well, I started with kids and then suddenly I had grown men around me grabbing candy. As I could not hand out the candy fast enough, I gave the bag to one of the numerous hands. That led to a mini riot where grown men were fighting over milky ways. Needless to say I retreaded rather quickly back to the safety of the VIP lounge. Overall, it was a great trip!

When we got home we relaxed for a little bit and then went to a farewell party of 1 of the Red Cross guys we know-Martin. On Sunday, I went to work for about 4 hours due to the end of the fiscal year and the need to spend all the money we have by Sept. 30th.

The following week-Sept 24-28th was all about work and receptions. I worked every day for about 10 hours a day. On Thursday and Friday I also had 2 reception to go to, so the day was super long. The Thursday reception was in Patricia's house for all the major vendors that we deal with through the year. For 2 hours, we wined and dined people from the airport, the port, FedEx, DHL and every other major company that we work with all year. On Friday, the reception was in the AMB's house. It was to celebrate the opening of the American International School in Monrovia. I am not sure if I mentioned previously, but I volunteered to help with the school when I first got her-wow! almost 3 moths ago, and now I am the Treasurer of the school. It is pretty interesting to create a school. Any who, the reception was with all the people that helped with the restoration of the building and what not. I was exhausted by Friday, but the good thing was that all the money were spent and the school was open for business!

Mike has spent the last 3 weeks in a constant battle with the Internet provider. They blocked all the websites that he uses for his work, Kodak gallery and the Vonage, hoping that this way they will boost up the speed. Needless to say, nothing got boosted except Mike's blood pressure. He has given them an ultimatum at this point-make it work or I am going somewhere else and telling everybody that I know that you suck. We'll see if this works.

On Saturday 29th, we went out with bunch of people ( I know shocking that we went out!) and ended up in one of the casinos again. My beloved hubby won $7, which was great!

This week and for the next week too, the Embassy is being audited by the Inspector General. This means that 10 guys are going over every single department in the embassy and making sure we are doing our job.

In upcoming events is the arrival of our ship freight that is at the port, reception in the AMB's crib for all management local staff to thank them for the great job they did at the end of the year; 1st Annual Marine House Chili Cook-off; official ribbon cutting for the school, where we expect the president of Liberia to join us and a BBQ in Patricia's on the Oct 8th-whatever day, I think Columbus Day!

I have bunch of pix from the mines but I will have to go through them to make sure I don't bore y'all to death. This means-pix will be loaded later!

2007-09-19T00:21:00.000+03:00

10/104

Who said Monrovia is boring? It ain't me! We went to 3 parties in 2 days and had to make ourselves leave by 2 am due to our curfew. The UN also has the same curfew, but none of the other NGOs or the Red Cross do. We look like total losers leaving before everybody else, but what can you do-rules are here for our own safety.

OK, so the first 2 parties were on Friday. We went first to the Marine House. It was a pot luck and welcome party to the new people in the Embassy. There was tons of people and so much food. Michael played pool and I was mingling as usual. We stayed there until about 1030. Then, we ran home for me to change because the next party was cocktail party. Not for real, more like bunch of people needing an excuse to dress us. I had to represent, so I changed in little black dress and totally represented. As you can see from the pictures, we had fun for sure. By 1230 am the rest of the Embassy possy showed up and soon Adrian was manning the bar. There was a lot of drinking, however I was the responsible one and did not drink. Sometimes, I wish we were like the Marines. They have their own driver, because they are not allowed to drive. Only the Gunny can drive, so he has the best of both worlds. Either drive or get the driver to drive him. Hard choices! Well, we were home by 2 am.

On Saturday, we played v-ball. Needless to say, we were not very good, especially after getting home at 2 am. All the hard core v-ball players treated us as special needs and I got mad at the boss of the Red Cross, who was making comments in Italian. I don't speak it, but I had an idea that he was not being nice. Next time, if he messes with me, I am so going off on him. If he has something smart to say, he better say it in English or I will be teaching him some Bulgarian.

But I digress, back to parties. On Saturday, we heard of a UN Latino party in the German Embassy-I know very global! We were planning to go and get our Latino groove-on, but then we heard that it is special guest list and we will not be able to get in. Nonetheless, bunch of us decided that as we are US Embassy and we are members of the UN and friends of the Germans, we should be able to get in. We mounted the cars and off we went! Yeahhh, you know, NO! We were totally rejected! I have never been rejected an entry to any party or club in my life. I can't believe that I got rejected in Monrovia by the UN. That was no cool, so we decided to drown our sorrows in a near by casino. We have never been in any of the local casinos before that. We got there, had some drinks and Mike went to play black jack with Lee and Jonathan. They were gone for about 20 mins, so I decided to check on my investment. He was still in the game along with Lee. Jonathan had already lost and was just observing. After another 10 minutes of game, Layal came and told us that now we can get in the Latino party, so we had to leave fast. Mike had already given me $25 in chips, because this covered his investments plus $5 on top. I went to cash him out and then he made another $20-yeay! He made money!!! OK, so off we went to the UN Latino party, to only stay outside the damn compound again. Even though we have 2 guys from the Navy and the Air Force that are under UN come to get us, we still could not get int. They made us feels like total punks. And by us, I mean there were 10 of us. Oh well, their loss. So we left, AGAIN! and went to bar/club called New Jack's. Wow, I was so happy we went. There was no live music-thank God! They use MP3s and the music was great. Of course, we left on time to drop off bunch of people and be home by 2 am. On Sunday, I woke up sick. How the hell can I get a damn cold in freaking Africa! What the hell is wrong with the Universe. To top it all it is the end of the fiscal year, so I went to work on Sunday. My head was all swimming, but I had to pay bunch of stuff so I went. Mike took care of me when I got home. I am so happy that we packed some Tylenol Cold. I have been taking it for the past couple of days and am getting better.

Mike got his laptop from work and can finally fully log into his work. His life is getting back to the normal non-stop work and going to the gym. Just like home!

We also found out that our ship freight has finally showed up in on Freeport. It took 3.5 months to get to Monrovia. Now we are waiting for it to be cleared and then-X-mas time in September!

Here are the pix from week 10: http://www.kodakgallery.com/I.jsp?c=pa74m2q.1j3k5efe&x=0&y=9i3rh2

2007-09-16T19:14:00.000+03:00

9/104 Part Deaux

Here are the pictures. Please -pay close attention to the gravity defying ice. We have no explanation to why it shoots out like that. Michael believes it has something to do with the equator. Whatever the reason, it is really cool and strange:http://www.kodakgallery.com/I.jsp?c=pa74m2q.8u4j8dqi&x=0&y=bhf0it

2007-09-11T16:58:00.000+03:00

9/104

The rain is starting to not show up every day and constantly. In fact, there has been sun every day. It still rains but there is a beginning and an end. The days of constant grayness and water pouring out of the sky are gone-oh so I hope!

On Friday-9/7-we had the honour of being present at the 2nd swear in ceremony for the new Armed Forces of Liberia. The first time around, about a month ago, there were 90 recruits and ten thousand people to cheer them on. This time around, there were 503 recruits and not as many people, but it was still exciting. The US army along with DynCor, did a good job training the new soldiers. It was cool to see the local staff that came. They were so excited. As one of them said "It has been a while since I have seen a well trained army". If you think about it, most of them know army that is here to kill you and not protect you. Mike and I, were there along with the Ambassador and couple of the military people of the embassy. The rest of the folks did not make it because they were expecting the same huge crowds like last time. Well, we ended up sitting behind ministers, generals and other officials along with every Ambassador in site. It was cool! During the ceremony, I found my favourite Nigeria general. He is in charge of the Liberian Army, until they can get a General of their own. He is great-huge, in full camouflage uniform, loud and very general-ly. I wanted to take a picture with him, but did not get the balls to go to him and ask for one, because he was surrounded by other military dudes. I took pix of him with the other military dudes, so you can judge for yourself on how very African general-ly he is.

The weekend was sorta mellow, which was good. On Saturday, Mike and I tested our margarita maker (thanks, Linds for telling us to buy it from Costco). It works like a charm. We watched a movie and around 11 pm, Sarah SMSed us telling us they are in a bar hanging out, but we were in no condition to drive.

On Sunday, Mike went with Dave to Firestone to golf. They were gone for 3 hours, so I watched E!Entertainment Television, in order to stay in touch with reality and then went to the roof and tanned. Needless, to say tanning at 2 pm on a sunny day, when you are 8 degrees away from the equator is not the brightest idea because one burns pretty fast, but I did not care. I am still so excited that it is sunny. My tan is looking great though and my hair is getting progressively blonder, without much chemical help. On Sunday, we also went to Sarah's for dinner. Girl can cook! I keep telling her that she will make some man very happy. There were bunch of people there but besides Sarah and me, there were 2 other girls. So when the male majority started watching football there was not much we can do but watch too. In a way it was nice, because it was like home. Mike is not a football person at home, but here he was pretty excited to watch and talk smack about other people's teams.

Then the week started. I got 2 pairs of shoes that I have ordered from Spiegel. Regretfully, my retarded self must have pushed some wrong number because one of the pairs was a ballerina flat-iiiiiuuuuuuuu! I hate flat shoes of that kind-iiiuuuuu! So, now I am trying to find who has 9.5 show size and sell it to them. It is a great shoe, just not my type.

This week I also got my travel authorization to go to Germany for 2 weeks between Oct 19-Nov 4th. Each year the finance officers meet by region an discuss best practices for a week. I, as a newbie, was selected to spend an extra week to work on my 2008 budget. This translates in 2 weeks in Garmisch, Germany-yeah, baby, yeah! Mike is also joining me and so is my mom for the first week. I am so excited to see civilization and mountains and Starbucks and paved roads. I am very giddy right about now! Oh, if anyone wants to see where we will be here is the link:http://www.edelweisslodgeandresort.com/home.html

Kodak Gallery is acting out so I could not load the pictures. I will post them separately.

I am still trying to load the videos we have taken too, but Google video keeps timing me out for some unknown reason

2007-08-30T17:31:00.000+03:00

8/104

What a crazy week this has been!

It started with my Birthday. Yeay, me! I am so much wiser compared to last year, NOT! My peeps at work decorated the Finance Department with posters all over the place. They had them on the outside door, on the counters, on my office door and a big banner in my office. The cool part, aside of them doing this for me, was that they actually created them in MS Word and printed them, because there is no party supplies store here. They also chipped in and got me a nice wooden frame.

Mike also did great! He took me out to lunch and to dinner. The dinner was in the best restaurant in town called "Beirut", where I stuffed my face with Lobster-yummmmy! Michael was giddy the entire time, because he had found the perfect gifts for me. When I got home, he gave me my 4 gifts. Honestly, I did not expect anything fantastic because we are in Liberia-Hellooo! However, Michael out did himself. He somehow, through his countless wanderings through the city, found a gift store that had the perfect gifts for me. Cute and pretty and they smell good! I got cute porcelain bear, a very cool candle, a big bottle of Jack Daniels and a gorgeous traditional Liberian gold ring called the "V" ring . You can see why from the picture. Even though it is in the box you can see how splendid it is. Well, it was a great B-day-yeay!

Then we had another 3 day weekend- I know we work hard but we party harder. This time we decided to bail on the city and explore Liberia. We endeavoured on a 120 mile, 4 hours trip to the Liberian Agricultural Community (LAC). This is the 2nd largest rubber plantation in the country, after Firestone. OMG! The 4 hours just about killed me. It was torture for me, but Michael loved it. He got to 4-wheel all the way and the car loved it also. The place itself reminded me of a bed and breakfast. The "Executive Lodge" has only 4 rooms. I was pleasantly surprised from the rooms. Very Western with cable and all. There is a little restaurant at the lodge and a bigger restaurant at the recreational hall. The rec. hall also has a pool, pool table and ping-pong tables. The LAC also has a pretty nice golf course. Honestly, I am not the one that can grade golf courses but it looked nice and Michael enjoyed golfing. We were a group of 7 people so we spend the weekend lounging, eating, playing cards, playing golf and me specifically taking care of the super cool dog-Willie while his mom and dad, Yuko and Doug, were playing golf. The nature was amazing. I kept expecting to see some crazy animals come out of the jungle but all we saw were extra large snails and beetles. It was a good weekend!

Then 4 more hours of driving hell. And as we had the tallest car, we were nominated to be the leading car. That led to us getting stuck in a giant mud hole. Thankfully, we had picked up some tow ropes from the motor pool before we left, so it took about 15 minutes, but we got pulled out and back on our merry, jiggly way. There were other exciting mud adventures, however the greatest adventure happened at the entrance of Firestone, about 40 miles out of Monrovia. As we were the leading car again, we pulled toward the entrance of Firestone. We have to drive through it to get to the main road to Monrovia. Well, we pulled up and there are people that live around the entrance. This time, there were a weird number of people crowded around. We stopped and waited for a little bit, hoping the road will clear. Interestingly enough, the people kept coming suddenly it looked more like a big crowd, then looked more like a mob, especially when some of them started running towards us. All 3 cars had radios, so I got on the radio and called the car behind us with Adrian, who also happens to be the Assistant Regional Security Officer of the embassy. He instructed us to pull back and wait it out. We did, but I was a bit worried. There were a lot of people and we were 3 SUVs with diplomatic plates on. Then came a lonely UN car and Adrian along with Esley (Navy dude) went to chat with him. At this time we heard that somebody has killed 3 people and the mob has gotten a hold of the killer and were planning to kill him. Well the security forces of Firestone were not going to let this happen so there was a battle going on right in the middle of the mob in front of us. Adrian came back, after talking to the UN guys and told us to keep an eye on him and when he starts pushing through the crowd to follow him. So we were sitting there for a minute or two. I was keeping an eye on the crowd, while Mike was keeping an eye on the situation around the car. AND THEN-the UN guy started slowly turning and heading towards us and away from the crowd. At this time a nice chunk of the crowd started running and stones and other objects flying. Needless to say, I was on the radio using my radio lingo to Adrian, who was simply going "MOVE, MOVE,MOVE". Michael did not need more that that to gun the car in reverse and maneuver us through waves of people in a very pleasing speed. We then followed the UN guy through some crazy back road. Well, really not a road, more like high grass and mud and villages. I have a video of the driving away event that I am trying to load and post for you viewing pleasure. Sorry, no video of the mob because I was a wee-bit afraid about my skin and pictures or video were not my prerogative. I am so not going to be a war journalist! Once we got on the main road again, we pulled over and took pictures. The faces you see, are faces of relive and joy of life.

As I said, this was a crazy week! I will be happy if we don't have to experience another week like that in the next 2 years, thank you very much.

Here's pictures for week 8: http://www.kodakgallery.com/I.jsp?c=pa74m2q.83l89jai&x=0&y=7isl01

2007-08-28T17:51:00.000+03:00

7/104

We had a nice 3 day weekend because August 24th is Liberia's Flag Day. On Friday, we finally made it to the weekly volleyball games that are held in the compound. It is a bunch of people from the Embassy and a bunch of Red Cross and UN people. OK, those people are hard core! They play in the rain, with crazy winds and it is sand volleyball. I played and had some nice shots. Michael was significantly better than me because his shots actually resulted in points, while mine were just assists. I also discovered that I cannot serve worth crap and it is really embarrassing to have 10 nations making fun of my serve. Oh, I also found another Bulgarian. Her name is Dilyana and she is visiting her Italian boyfriend for his B-day. She sucked in volleyball too, so suddenly we started getting offended on national basis. "Hey give it to the Bulgarians, they don't know what they are doing" was not very cool. Bulgaria has one of the best men's and women's volleyball teams. The fact that Dilyana and I are not on those teams, probably is the reason they are really good. On the way home from volleyball , the main boulevard that we take home-Tubman, was blocked off by the UN troops, because I guess there was some sort of a march of children with flags. Well, we took one of the back roads and were stuck in hell-a traffic for about 40 minutes. Michael tried to maneuver out of it, however we ended up facing about 20 Pakistani UN troops that looked like they are about to yell at us, so we turned around. I tried to take a picture of them, but the huge mud holes made everything shaky and when we stopped to turn, I was afraid to take pictures straight in front of them. They had guns and looked very scary!

On Saturday, we stayed home-I know no party this weekend. It's not like there were no parties in the town. Au contraire, there were 2, but the volley ball pretty much killed us the day before so we stayed home.

On Sunday, we ventured to the Firestone Rubber Plantation. We adopted for the day the new teacher from the newly formed American International School Monrovia. His name is David and he is about 22. Just got here a week ago. He is an avid golfer and Firestone has a pretty dissent golf course. We also invited Dilyana and her boyfriend. All 5 of us drove about 40 mins out of the city. There were various obstacles on the road, but we manged to get there. While at Firestone, which by the way is enormous and has about 100K residents, we got lost couple of time. We finally found the golf course, where Michael and David went to play a round of golf, while Dilyana, me and Chris sat in a hut-like structure, drank Coke and got rained on through the roof. After about 30 minutes, Michael and David came back, totally soaking wet, because it was raining during the entire time they played. And yes, they both had the huge umbrellas, but the rain here comes sideways, it is really cool. We made it back to the city, just in time to catch the brunch buffet in Royal Hotel. It is not bad at all!

We also got some more mail on Monday. It was all cat food and cat treats, but hell-it's mail. On Tuesday I checked and I had my people magazine and a B-day card from Ray. Thank you, Ray!

In case any one wonders, my birthday is on Thursday-30th. I am working on making August 30th a national holiday in each country I end up. This year, they had a short notice, hopefully next year I will get my requested parade.

Michael went ahead and planted some of the seed we brought with us. We have tomatoes, catnip, basil, onions, sage and something else growing in big pots on the balcony. He is also going to try and grow the tomatoes up-side down as we'all have seen in the the Sky Mall brochures on the planes.

Here are the pix from week 7: http://www.kodakgallery.com/I.jsp?c=pa74m2q.b17zxqlm&x=0&y=-758fgg

2007-08-20T13:49:00.000+03:00

6/104

The week was ruled by preparations for the birthday August Bash that was held in the Palava Hut (the swimming pool area) on Saturday-8/18.....

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What is wrong with me, how can I not mention the most exciting thing in the world of Chez O'Connell-OMG!-we have Internet in the house. It happened on Saturday, yes it did take 3 days since install to actually get connection, but it is up and it is working. We hooked up the Vonage phone, so now we have a 703 number in Monrovia. As previously mentioned, everything was installed on Wed-8/15th (my grandma's B-day), however the HQ for West Africa Telecom is in France and there was a holiday on that day, so the French did not activate the account. Thursday and Friday WAT worked on it, but it was all up to the French and it is August, in France, so I don't think the French people were in a working mood. But Saturday it worked! It is so nice to have Internet in the house and to be able to just pick up the phone and dial anyone without having to worry about huge International call fees. OK, so at this time the only outstanding issue is the ship freight. It is supposed to be here on Aug 23, however we are realistic and apply the T.I. A. (This is Africa) rule and don't really expect it until the beginning of September. One has to significantly lower oneself's expectations in order to survive and not go absolutely bonkers.

...........

Back to the B-day party-it was great, tons of people showed up. Well, compared to the Red Cross party, where they had 200 people it was not that big. I think because it was held in the Embassy compound and you couldn't just show up-your name had to be on THE LIST. We had about 50-60 people, or maybe I was seeing double, but the fact the all the hard alcohol was gone (3 big bottles of vodka, couple of bottles of whisky, 6 bottles of rum, couple of bottles of gin and tequila, etc) and I think most of the beer (3 kegs of Club Liberian Beer, 4 cases of Heineken and other such large numbers), leads me to believe that there were tons of people. All the B-day people drew names a week before and bought presents for the person that we had. I got Matt and I got him a really cool hand made sculpture, sorta like the "Thinker" made out of ebony. The crafts here are amazing. I am holding back to buy everything in sight. And everything is ebony or other nice wood and of course it is all hand made.

In other news, Silvia is driving me crazy. Michael is on a mission to fatten her up and since we got the food that she likes, she does not make the coughing noise any more (thank goodness) but she is always hungry. Particularly for the soft food. Every morning I wake up around 5 am with a devil cat standing on my chest and screaming her head off. I have been strong and not given her any food, but I don't think she is giving up. It is a battle of the wills. I am the supreme species on this planet and the dum-dum feline should listen to me. Now can somebody tell me how to relate this to Silvia, because I don't think she is getting the memo. Hristo, on the other hand is an angel. She plays around with the toys we brought from home and sleeps on our bed. Now, I have to get Matilda here and the family will be together again. Steve (Mike's bro, who is babysitting Matilda in VA) is sending me a picture of her. I want to see my grey baby because I miss her, a lot.

Last but not least we finally got some mail after 2 weeks of UPS missing the drop to the flight here. It was like X-mas all over again. We got a package from Mike's brother from VA. He sent us my favourite robe and towels that I forgot, along with the mail that got there after we left. Mike got some shirts and I got some dresses. The kids got their shipment of Fancy Feast and we'all arere very happy.

Here's pix for week 6: http://www.kodakgallery.com/I.jsp?c=pa74m2q.1fjjugjm&x=0&y=d9kryt

2007-08-17T11:36:00.000+03:00

Pictures

Here are all the pictures from Week 5: http://www.kodakgallery.com/I.jsp?c=pa74m2q.2lmq3spe&x=0&y=g0ss9u

2007-08-15T15:18:00.000+03:00

5/104

Ahh, another week has passed and we still have no Internet at home. Michael has a new calling-get Internet or death to them all. Today, Wed. 8/15/07 (my grandma's B-day, she is 84!), seems to be the day of Internet installation. Following the rule of 3, meaning that everything happens after 3 tries, we are good to go. Michael has been researching all sorts of options and they are surely adding up to more than 3. One would think that people here don't want to make money. If I knew that a rich foreigner is choosing me for an Internet provider, I will be calling him every hour. Here it is different. We call and then call and no one calls you back. People are sorta laid back, I guess. No urgency, what-so-ever. They don't do it on purpose, I am sure of it. That is what they know and how their culture is, so I try to adapt. Michael on the other side is on a mission to teach them the Telecom-East Coast way. If you tell me that you will call me, you better do it or your manager will hear from me. And with 85% unemployment, one would think that the people with the jobs will do everything they could to keep them. But then, they know that the skilled and qualified people to do the jobs are few and far between, so it gives them some sort of job security I guess.

Otherwise the people are very nice. They are sometimes, too nice I think. Case in point with our shipment. If Michael hasn't stepped in and fixed it, the local employee would have still been trying to get it for us. They don't want to make waves. When the local employee was asked why he is not escalating or writing a letter of complaint to the shipper, his reply was "Let's get the shipment first and then we will complain". Not to make waves!

Another observation is that all beggars on the street are men. The women of this country have jobs. They grow fruits or buy the fish from the fishermen and then sell it on the side of the street. They always have some sort of an enterprise going on. There are men with jobs obviously, but a nice chunk of the beggars are able bodied men. It is just easier probably to beg than to go to work. Oh, and the men are the one constantly peeing on the street in plain view of the world, not the women, thank you very much.

People are poor by all standards. There is some sort of a beginning of a middle class, based on the Liberians that work for the NGOs, the embassies and the UN but it is just a vague beginning, nothing firm yet.

It is interesting to see kids being bathe in the streets with the rain water that is pouring from the gutters. It is cute, because the kids don't know better and they are happy and splishy-splashing through the water. Overall, the people don't look tormented. For example, one can look in the face of anybody from the ex-Soviet Union that is over 40 years old and see how tired they are, while here it is not like that. And people have no wrinkles-for real now, how is that possible. I think it is the 100% humidity all the time, no fat in the food and everything is natural.

This past week we had couple of more people leave from post. Thanks to Aaron, who so gracefully left me his amazing umbrella, I have now one of the coolest umbrellas in the country. When it is closed it is a stick that goes pass by waist. It has flaps and a pulley system. Overall, I am the envy of the compound, because no one thought of asking Aaron for it and now it is mine, all mine! Michael keeps plotting to take it from me but I have fought off his hostile umbrella advances.

Last Friday we went to a near buy "cafe" where they had some live music and drinks as expensive as a DC club. It was nice, but the live music is starting to bug. They think that if the speakers are at the loudest it is the best. Oh well, we continue to search for a hang out spot.

I am not sure if I mentioned that there are 8 people with B-days in August. So, on Saturday-8/18 we are having a party. Thanks to one of the girls here who is a web designer, we have the coolest invitation. The inspiration is the Justice league-yes, it was my idea, thank you. I am the sexy Black Canary. We took digital photos and she put our head on the chosen super heroes. What do y'all think?

And finally one of the funniest things in a long time. Mike, me, Tom and Dan (dudes from work) were coming out of the rec. hall after lunch. Dan, a gentlemen in his late 30s, turns towards me and points in my chest asking "Where did you get these? These are nice". I am sitting sort of speechless, but Mike and Tom, who are on the same brain wave, look at each other and Mike says "Yes, Dan these are nice, why do you want to know". At this time, Dan clues in and turns all red. He was pointing at the necklace-that I use for a badge holder, not realizing that he was pointing at specific general area-yes, my chest, where my badge is hanging. Poor guy got so red and Michael and Tom went off on all sorts of jokes. Now, every time they see Dan they keep asking him "Hey Dan, these are nice. Where did you get them from?"

I have pictures from the week but at this time I cannot find the attachment to download the pix on the laptop, so I will load them separately.

2007-08-06T16:49:00.000+03:00

4/104

Alrighty then! Another week has passed and we are still here and still sane.

OMG! The greatest thing ever-the air freight finally made it! It came on Saturday and I swear both Michael and I were like kids on Christmas. Four giant boxes full of stuff! It was great! The kids got their fancy kitty litter and no longer have to pee and poop in a backing pan. I got more clothes and a nice amount of shoes. Not all the shoes, but I think I am at about 30-40 pairs now. The rest should be here with the ship freight. Michael finally got his rotisserie grill and his blender (the same one that Lindsay has with the Margarita dispenser) and a nice toaster. Needless, to say Michael has been waiting for the rotisserie, well I have been waiting too, that the moment the boxes were empty, he started setting it up and soon enough we were staring at 2 chickens spinning happily on a stick and smelling very yummy. The electricity went off only one time and after an hour or so, we had the BEST grilled chicken ever. The Giant, Harris Teeter, even Wegman's, yes even they, can eat their shorts. The "Set it and Forget it" grill is the BOMB! Two days later we had meatballs that were also grilled to perfection in 25 minutes in the amazing grill. I can only imagine the good food that we will be eating once the BBQ comes-yeay!

Oh, the saga with the car continues. We have the car, sitting all nice and pretty in front of the building. Regretfully, the Liberian Foreign Ministry is on African time and for the past week-yes, one week-they have not had the time to sign and stamp a piece of paper that will register our car. We have the plates, the poor general services office folks have been calling 3 times a day and still nothing. We are hoping that today, being exactly one week since the documents were submitted, will be the special day and we will be able to get the plates and drive.

Last Saturday, 8/4/07, we went to a "Farewell/Welcome" party of our neighbours-The Red Cross. It was a great party! They had BBQ, live music and a DJ. We were partying it up until 130 in the morning. Then we stumbled home, because the party was only 2 blocks away from our complex. It is regretful that we have 2 am curfew. The non-curfew nations were there until 4 am. Our landlord-Kassim, was also at the party, where he delivered a very grim news followed by a hysterical laugh. He said "Our pool engineer died today. He was crushed by a wall. Hahahahahahaha! (Hysterically)" I was in shock! Apparently, the guy that was also our pool engineer, was inspecting a sea wall of a hotel, because it was eroded. Well, right then and there a giant wave slammed in the wall and it fell on top of him and the other person with him. Our dude died and the other person is in critical condition. I felt really bad, because after feeling sorry for his family I thought of the fact that now our pool will never get finished. I am awful, I know!

On the feline front, Silvia has me worried. She makes the "I am doing to cough a hairball" noise but nothing comes out. It is scary, because Humphrey was making such a noise and then they found he has a bum heart. I am hoping it is just a hairball. I have ordered from PetSmart's site a hairball removing food. We also bought some Vaseline (Thanks, Jen) and we rub it on her paws so she can lick it, hoping that if it is a hairball it comes out one way or the other. Hristo is divine! Runs around the house like crazy and then sleeps all day. Steve said that Matilda is doing good and that they give her all the love and attention she demands.

Michael is good. He has been coming to one of the residences and plugging the laptop into the Internet. This way he can get some work done and download Big Brother and Eureka. Thanks to Mishi, we have a cool website that gives us every single show that we want to watch. This way we will be up to date on all the shows when they start.

I have been thinking of the home. I can see our house and the roads, without giant holes. I have visions of Bloomingdale's and civilization. Yeah, I miss it! I miss my friends-I miss you guys! Look now I made myself all teary. Ok, well I miss it but I am fine. Can't write more-too hard.
Off to lunch.

4/104 Pix: http://www.kodakgallery.com/I.jsp?c=pa74m2q.cijxno6q&x=1&y=-xisxaa

2007-08-02T14:10:00.000+03:00

Welcome to shipment hell!

Yesterday evening they brought the container with the car inside. Michael was very giddy and taking pictures of how a little forklift is lifting a giant container with a car inside. We were supposed to open the container and get the car out, but oh no! This would be too nice if something went smooth. The seal on the container did not match the number on the shipyards documents, so they could not open it. This morning, they called a person from the port to come and witness them unsealing the container, in case something was wrong. Thank God, the car was in tact. YES! We have a car! Michael drove it home, where it will sit until we get the registration and the diplomatic plates. This should be done hopefully by tomorrow because there is a set of tags in the embassy already. There were 2 more cars that came with ours and the other 2 people were very nice and gave the only tags to us, thus ensuring that Michael can go out and about. They will have to wait for another week or so, until they get their tags.

In the world of air freight, we received a conformation from the Director of Cavalier Logistics-Mike Ball, a.k.a Michael's new best fiend, that our 4 boxes were moved from Kenya Airwaves cargo hold to DHL's cargo hold. This was last night after the logistics company spend the entire day trying to get a hold of somebody in Abidjan. The last thing we knew was that the 4 boxes should be on the DHL's flight to Monrovia this morning-Thursday, 8/2/07. However, no one at this time can confirm if the boxes were on this flight or not. Michael has called DHL in Monrovia and they have no clue. But the car is here! Yeay!

The ship freight is still chilling in Antwerp until Aug. 7th, when it, supposedly, will leave and come this way, to be here by August 23rd. I will believe it when I see the container in front of my building. Until then-I do not believe anything!

Tonight, I am invited to a reception to celebrate the women in business. It will be interesting too meet bunch of females and talk about business.

Oh, yeah and we just heard that the air cargo did not make it on today's flight and the earliest possible flight it may get on is on Saturday-8/4/2007. This sucks!

2007-07-26T16:11:00.001+03:00

3/104

I thought of a new naming convention of my stay. If I am here for 2 years, it will equal to 104 weeks, therefore I can use the Borg naming convention and this week is 3 of 104. I am geeky all the way ( Hi, Matt!)!

The week started with a nice BBQ in the house of the GSO (general services Officer)-Patricia. She had it in our honour. It was our and the new Vice Consul's honour. Patricia lives on the compound in a very cute and nice house with an amazing view. The lady in front of me is the new Vice Consul-Alma. She arrived on the same flight as us, which makes us closer. The dude across from Mike, in the white shirt is the Ambassador and the dude in the front of the picture is our neighbour from apt. #5-Chris. His wife is sitting across from me-Quan. Th rest are bunch of embassy peeps. It was a very nice to hang out in a place without iron bars everywhere. I am totally still jealous of all the people that are on floors 3-5 in our building, like Chris and Quan, cause they have no bars and a crazy-nice view. I was happy that it did not rain that day. In fact it has not rained for 2 days. Yesterday was gorgeous. I was asking around if the dry season is like that and I was told that the dry season is pure hell of heat and humidity. It gets so warm, that the water in pool is too warm to get into. This will be an interesting experience starting October. On the positive side, when we go home in January, we will be super tan compared to the rest of the crowd.

Other interesting things about Monrovia is the absence of things. I am not talking groceries or normal buildings and houses, but for example I already mentioned there is no traffic lights or traffic signs. There is also no ambulances, fire tucks or police cars. There are policemen, that are dressed exactly like NY cops, but they walk and they have billy clubs in stead of guns. There is also no old people. By old, I mean grandmas and grandpas. The average life expectancy is 40 years, I believe, so there are people in the 50s and 60s, but I have not seen an old person in the way we are used to see, meaning people in their 70s and 80s. Maybe in the villages, but most definitely not in the city. Showers in people's houses are also probably absent, due to the constant smell of body odor everywhere. And finally, there is no ATMs. The previous finance person started working on converting all local employees to direct deposit last August and by this May, they were required to go to direct deposit, because they simply did not trust the bank. During that entire time, he was also talking with the largest bank here-ECO Bank, about setting up an ATM in the Embassy. I am happy to announce that the ATM became fully functional on Wednesday-July 25th. During the time the bank technicians were working on it, all the local guards came to check it out and kept asking questions. Even my Senior Financial Specialist was asking me questions of how it works. We sent an e-mail telling all the local employees to come by the Finance office to fill out the applications for their debit cards and it was like X-mas. People were coming asking questions and being very excited about having a bank card. We had to read the applications to some of the people because they can't read. I will have to do workshop on "How to use the ATM" and to protect your card and PIN, because they don't know. These are people in their 40s that have never seen an ATM. Also, there are no coins such as quarters or pennies or any of those. Everything is paper. And of course there is no dishwashing machines. Everything is done by hand by eaither me or Mike or in near future, maybe a housekeeper. This is insane if you think about it!

In other news- WE HAVE CABLE! I was so happy! Michael spend 3 days dealing with the satellite company and their technicians and the day it was supposed to be installed, he told me that the satellite card was not activated and we have to wait until the next day. I was OK with that. Then we went home and I was giving the kids some food, when I heard the TV on. I thought he was just watching of of our special DVDs with 20 movies on it, but the more I listed the more it sounded like the news. Of course, I went to check it out and holy shit, it was BBC news. He totally lied to me to surprise me. He is so cute! We also got all the 7 boxes we mailed ourselves the day we left. They looked as if a semi-truck has rolled over them. All the frames I had were broken. The big converter that was in 2 boxes, surrounded by Styrofoam and peanuts was dented. It looked like they were stuck in the diplomatic bag and then crushed. The pictures show exactly how bad it was. One can imagine the force that was used that a packing peanut looked absolutely flat.

In feline news, I have run out of dry cat food and now I am experimenting with various soft food, that the kids either hate or love. Also, as the picture shows, Michael was absolutely right and Silvia jumped off the balcony on her 3rd outing. Mike went to get her, while I looked at her wonder around. She realized that what she did was stupid, quadrupled in size and ran back and forth in front of the balcony for about 20 seconds, while we were asking her what she was doing. Silvia proved to us she is not stupid, because she jumped back on the balcony and ran inside.

Regarding our stuff, that was shipped by air, after 3 weeks in Kenya-the country is 4000 miles to the East of Liberia, Michael got finally fed up and went to war. He found the e-mails of all VPs and directors and all higher ups in Cavalier Logistics and e-mailed all of them with a very stern e-mail. Needless to say he had the right to do it, because 5 times we were told that the air freight is coming and 5 times it did not. As of today, the stuff was moved to the Ivory Coast and, Inshallah, it will be on a flight from Abidjan to Monrovia tomorrow morning. We have received a call from the VP of Cavalier Logistics profusely apologizing and personally assuring us that they are working on it. We'll see!

But the car is here-somewhere! We should get it in our possession by next week. We also had a great Liberian independence day on 7/26 and we also went to a party with bunch of foreigners-Europeans and Australians on Friday, 7/27. It was fun to meet tons of new people and talk about nothing. And last but not least, there were fireworks in Monrovia. It was Saturday evening and we were aware of it, but a lot of people were not, because they don't have radios. So the Chinese ( I know, right!), sponsored the display on Saturday. It was great! We have pictures, but I have not loaded them yet. We were on the roof watching them. People were cheering. The next day we heard that the people that did not know that these were fireworks, thought that it was a coup and started packing. The sound of fireworks is exactly the same as the sound of mortar fire, so people were freaking out for a short period. I guess fireworks were banned in 1980 by President Doe for unknown reasons, so these were the first fireworks since then.

Oh yeah, one more thing that does not exist here is local TV stations. I have no idea what is the temperature or what is going on, because we have no radio and the TV channels are all South African, other African and European. Oh well!

Michael has found a good time to keep himself busy besides searching for Internet providers-he is in charge of coordinating all things done to the apartments that are currently unoccupied and working with the landlord to git'er done. The poor Lebanese guy-Kassim, has no idea what is going to happen to him. Mike is all over him about the gym, the pool and other things that have to be fixed before new people move. And because this is purely on a volunteer basis, because he is a good person, we are getting new entertainment center that will fit the 42" TV and all the other electronic things from the General Service Officer as a thank you for helping us out. Isn't' this nice?

I wrote a lot, I am done.

Here's pictures from 3/104: http://www.kodakgallery.com/I.jsp?c=pa74m2q.5hyxazoi&x=1&y=oli3ok

2007-07-21T19:16:00.000+03:00

Week 2

I still have not adopted the idea that we will be living in Liberia-hellooooo-for 2 years!

Life is getting normal, I guess. I have been in my work for about week and a half and it is starting to slowly make sense. Not all the way though, but I think that the 7 weeks of Finance training in Arlington helped out a lot. Everything is buried deep into my mind and now I just have to search for it and use it. I have already told the 6 people, reporting to me and my boss, that they will have to document everything they do and we will operate under a Sarbanes-Oxley model. It was rather peculiar that my boss did not know what Sarbanes-Oxley was, but then they don't have that in the government. Here it is called A-123 directive. Very fancy! I also have started examining the various vouchers that are given to me for certification more in detail. It is my ass on the line, so I want to make sure that I cover it as much as possible. Overall, I am glad that my boss along with the other American officers will be here for at least 9 more months. I should be able to learn a lot from them, because they have all done the job for sometime now. I am also very lucky to have my friend James. He has been in the Foreign Service for over 15 years and knows Finance inside and out. I e-mail him at least twice a day for advice.

I wish I could take pictures of the embassy compound. It is built on top of a hill and it overlooks the ocean. There are gorgeous palm trees and weird other plants, that I have never seen before. And of course there are tons of cool looking lizards that are everywhere. They take off when you come close to them, but otherwise are harmless. I am happy to report that I am yet to see a snake. The embassy is on Mamba Point, green or black mamba snakes, and according to people on the compound there are tons of them in the grass, however I am yet to see one.

It sucks that we are on the 1st floor, because some of the views are of walls and barbwire, but as I found out apartments are assigned based on grade and me and Tom (one dude that also came here about a month ago) are the lowest grades in that building. We have all sorts of other agencies in our building, so it will be interesting to meet everybody. But for now it is just us and another family from AID. We moved the furniture around our apartment. The living room now resembles the living room in our house. The government takes good care of us. The apartment is fully furnished and they also provide a welcome kit of the most essential things one needs until our stuff arrives. The downside in living in a danger post is the danger. This translates in high walls with barb wires everywhere and all windows have prison-like bars and the doors have steel doors on the outside. The good thing is that we have a keys for each steel gate, so when we feel like actually hanging out on the balcony, we can get out in the open. I have let the girls on the living room balcony and they were initially scare, because of the sound of crashing waves, but by the second time around, Hristo was balancing her fat butt on one of the ledges. I am working under the assumption that they won't jump off the balcony, because it is sorta high, but Michael is convinced that we will be chasing cats around the compound in no time.

Every Tuesday and Saturday we have a shuttle that takes us around to go to the 4 grocery stores. The experience is mind-blowing, because the moment we step out of the car, we are surrounded by people selling the extra fancy Chinese DVDs (1 DVD-20 movies-$5, not a bad deal)

or umbrella vendors (2 umbrellas for $5), I was also offered a live baby goat, that I did not buy, and of course the various limb-missing individuals. We went with our AID neighbours to an outside market, where you pick a person to guide you around and buys stuff for you and you tip him in the end. I did not come out of the car and let Michael fend for himself. I had a flashback of the day when my mom and I were in Istanbul, after hours of being pulled into stores by the local merchants, I saw Kapili Charshi (no idea how to spell it). All I saw was a sea of people and I could not go in. Thankfully, there was a McDonald's near by where we sought refuge. There is no McDee's here, so I just choose not to get out of the car. The driver was pretty understating. It is interesting to talk to the drivers. Most of them have been with the embassy for over 10 years. They tell us about the war and how people were hiding in the Embassy compound, while mortars were coming over the walls. They also can point out to us, which ones are the ex-combatants and tell us to lock our doors when we are around them.

We still have no TV, no Internet and no Vonage in the house. Also, all our freight is somewhere in la-la land. We know for sure the meaning of "This is Africa" as kept repeating it on "Blood Diamond"

Here are the links to the 2 albums I have on Kodak Gallery:

Week 1 http://www.kodakgallery.com/I.jsp?c=pa74m2q.ayhynxsm&x=1&y=y7e38z

Week 2 http://www.kodakgallery.com/I.jsp?c=pa74m2q.1wns9mhy&x=0&y=9cx8o2

2007-07-18T15:03:00.000+03:00

Week 1

Ok, so it rains here. I knew that? It rains a lot and for looooong periods of time.

I have finally found the time to download the pictures I loaded from the camera to the laptop to my phone and finally to the PC. At this time, I am trying to load them to Kodak Gallery and put the link to it, so everybody can see our trip. There are bunch of movies that we shot at landing in Brussels and Monrovia, but they are much bigger and it will take some time to load these puppies up.

Ok, the current situations is as follows:

We are the first ones off compound in the past 17 years, so we have this great apartment right on the ocean, but we have no Cable (we have a TV and DVD player, thanks to the Welcome Kit the Embassy gave us), no Internet and no phone.
Work is still rather confusing and I keep being asked to make tons of decisions that I don't know anything about;
People are great-both Americans and Liberians and occasional UN personnel that we met and the grocery store.

Michael is on a mission to get the Internet but the prices here are insane. They want $5K to install the satellite Internet and $500/month for 256KB. It only goes up from there. The satellite TV is better when it comes to prices, but not by much. At least the building is already pre-wired for that type of service so, we don't have to pay for that. There are no landlines in the country, so we use cell phones for now for everything. We are hoping to get the Internet up so we can use the great Vonage phone we got. It is currently sitting on one of the coffee tables, looking very distinguished. There is no light signals in the city of 1.5 million and no traffic signs.

The grocery stores are another thing. here are 6 stores that have the sort of the type of food we eat. The insane part is that everything is tons more expensive. For example, we found onions yesterday. It was exciting, because they are hard to find. We paid $9 for 6 onions that are as big as eggs. The milk is triple ultra pasteurized, because it comes from Lebanon or France. I guess all the cows were killed during the war so they have no more cows.

There are chickens, though. They are the 2nd in population after the dogs. All dogs look exactly the same-skinny! The cool thing is that people actually stop for them in their cars and kids have dogs on leashes. Michael is happy when it comes to the chickens, because there is fresh chicken breast in abundance.

People follow you everywhere you go and either try to sell you stuff or beg for money. We have met Tony Montana. He hangs out in from of the grocery store on the main street in front of our compound. We were also asked by a student from Gambia, if he can stay with us. There are people missing every limb you can think of and they are everywhere. OK, not like millions but every time you look out there are several people missing something.

The roads are horrendous! Huge pot holes and I was told that with the rainy season not in full swing, they will only get worse.

I have also observed that peeing on the street is normal and will consider doing it too, pretty soon!

It is weird to be stared at the entire time. I hope that with time, people will get use to us and stop starring.

Well, this is it for now. The picutres are still loading on Kodak Gallery, so I will add the link later.

2007-07-01T22:31:00.000+03:00

Wow, I haven't written anything in so long!

Tons of stuff has happened but the most exciting one is the new job-THE DREAM JOB! Yep, I am so in the State Department. I started March 5th and have been in training for 4 months. My first post is Monrovia, Liberia. We leave in about a week and a half for that very exciting place.

The government is very organized when it comes to the move. Bought an SUV-shipped it! Bought tons of food, multi-systems electronics and other staples-shipped them too! Tomorrow is the final shipping of the air freight. I am trying to figure out if I should ship all my shoes and leave only couple of pairs for the week ahead or leave a nice chunk here and put them in my suitcases. I am thinking ship most and if I need new ones in the next week I should buy some more.

The one thing that I have not figured out yet is what to do with the kids. At this point, we decided that we will leave Matilda with Steve and Kim for couple of months. We should be back in the US around the end of the year, so we can pick her up on the way back. Now I am stressing about making sure that both Hristo and Silvia stay with us in the cabin. I heard horror stories about cats ripping their nails off, while scratching on their cages in the cargo. I wish my mom was here. Then maybe I could have left Hristo and Matilda. Oh well, I am hoping for clarity in the next week.

Overall, I was doing good with the occasional "I am freaking out, man" moments, but last week it got worse. Especially yesterday, when we had our farewell party. Every time, I said "bye" to someone and watched them walk to their car, I was teary-eyed. I think it is the anti-malaria pill that is messing with my head and making me very emotional. There is no reason to be sad, it is not like I am going to a gulag and never coming back. Plus, some of my friends I see once every couple of months any ways, so it will not be that big of a difference. It is most def the anti-malaria pill.

Everybody keeps asking me if I am excited. I am not. Because I have nothing to be excited about. I have seen pictures of Liberia, read tons of articles and went to a bunch of websites, but it is still pretty foreign to me, because I cannot relate it to any personal experience.

A bit freaked out about the new job. All this training did was leave me scared of how much responsibilities I will have and the many ways I can mess up and be held accountable. I guess it is good to be afraid and make sure you do everything by the book.

Well, Mike is napping upstairs with Hristo. Silvia is totally asleep on the cat house and as usual Ninja cat, as Kj calls her-Matila is no where to be seen. Kim and Steve went to clean their car, so I am sitting in the living room in a swim suit and a towel, because I was tanning at 2 o'clock in the afternoon-not a good idea, and it is quiet and peaceful in the house. I like the very quiet sometimes. Calms me down and helps me think. I hope I can figure out the shoes dilemma by tomorrow morning.

Oh, our neighbours from next door stopped by the party last night. On the way out they gave me a gift. I thought I took the entire thing out and it was this hand made elephant pulling a carriage and another elephant pushing it. It is very nice and it is for good luck. I said thanks and they left. Well, later that night I check the bad all the way cause it kept feeling heavy. There was a jewelry box with a necklace and a pair of earrings. I feel really bad for not seeing it last night. Now I am on the look out for them so I can run out and thank them profusely of the great gesture.

2006-10-03T00:53:00.000+03:00

Ok, so I am blond, so sue me!

I was making drinks last night. I turned to Michael and asked him while looking at the new fridge door: “Hey baby, what kind of ice you want-crushed, cubed or light”. Then, in astonishment of the never before seen 3rd type of ice, I exclaimed: “Baby, what is light ice” and pushed the button. At this point the light on the front of the fridge came on. It still took me 2 seconds to realize that “Light” stood for exactly that-light, not light ice. Needless to say, Michael was looking at me in disbelief, while at this point I was laying on the kitchen floor-laughing my head off.

In other news, I am not the only crazy person in the house. Michael woke up last week from a very explicit dream and realized that he is laying on his stomach and very slowly with rather rhythmic thrusting motions he was humping the bed. Yep, this is my household! It is so much fun!

The downstairs is almost totally done. I have to paint the other side of the door in extra bright white and hang it. And this will be it. We will work on the crown molding slowly in the next couple of weeks and hopefully have it done by the time my mom comes.

2006-09-27T00:27:00.000+03:00

Old!

I have been going through other blogs on this site and I am perplexed because other blogs are much customized but mine is kinda boring. I am determined to find out what to do to make it spiffier.
Otherwise, life continues to be great (knock on wood). Oh, I also discovered that I am old. After painting the downstairs room for 2 days this past weekend, today while brushing my teeth, my back seized up and today I have been in a very unhappy place. I cannot take a deep breath and sometimes while walking I go through little convulsions and hold on to the walls, because my back gives up on supporting me and I break in pain. Rather unpleasant experience!
The funny part is that the other members of my team are also jacked up-Nick is sick and Patrick hurt his leg. So, our side of the room is all about sneezing and moaning.
From the happy side of town, Jen starts with BE on the 9th. Yeay! We get to hangout again and have fun here as opposed to XO, where the fun has seized to exist.
I am planning on a trip to KS to visit Kj. She has been going through some sad times, so I am going to cheer her up and see the new kitten. Plus, I need some time off and 4 days away from VA and work will do me good.

2006-09-19T18:45:00.000+03:00

ZEN I AM!
I am learning patience with every day I have to drive to work. It is not that now I have to drive to Tyson’s-oh no! It is the drive itself. Every single day since I started working in Tyson’s I have been in traffic hell from the moment I left the house. I used to get mad and yell at people, take the HOV by myself or sing like mad, so I don’t have to yell at people. But today I believe I reached a Zen state and really did not care anymore. There is nothing I can do when a manhole cover is broken and traffic is backed up for miles. I took an alternate route, which meant a lot of traffic lights and school buses picking up kids. It took me 1 hour and 27 minutes to pass 15 miles at an average speed of 12 mph. I got mad only once, because some kids were taking their sweet time to get on the bus, which meant that we were all sitting and waiting for them, so we can move. Anyways, besides that little incident of madness, I think I did great. The fact that my car is stick and I have to go 1st-2nd gear all the time does not bother me anymore. In fact, I have been enjoying my car, because it is very mobile and picks up fast when fast is neede

2006-08-01T23:10:00.000+03:00

I started my new job on July 10th. After some orientation and training, I was thrown in a very mellow atmosphere. For the fist week, we had nothing to do, so I used the time to set up my benefits, direct deposit and all that and take 10 different classes. BearingPoint requires that each employee have 40 hours of classes a year. Well, I started now and already have 52 hours. I did not take 52 classes. I took about 10; the rest came from Orientation and Training. Then last week-Thursday, I think, I was finally given a contract binder to review. I think I finally get what I will be doing-make sure that what the engagement teams have submitted, when it comes to revenue and adjustments, is actually correct and makes sense. The first binder took me 3-4 days to complete, but this was because I had to wait for my trainer to tell me what to do and where to look. I hope that it stays easy like this. I think the simple fact that I don't have the added responsibility of dealing with direct reports and their direct reports, makes my life so much easier. I have one little thing that I take care of and when I am done, I am done! Sweet! Today, we went for the first part of the medical clearance. After sitting around for 2 hours, they took some blood, did TB test, I answered bunch of questions and now we have to go back on Thursday for the results. I want this process to go through smoothly and fast. I am patient and at this point I am prepared to wait for a year. My new job promises to be different than what I have done before, so as long as I get to do something from time to time and not sit around all the time-I am good. E-bay is slowly becoming a very good friend of mine. I have not bought anything-YET- but it is eminent. I also installed every messenger under the sun, so I can keep in touch with everybody. It sucks that there is no privacy, so I can't really talk to my mom or Mishi on Skype. They talk to me and I type back. It is tedious! Oh well, it makes the time go by. My mom is coming again in November. She will be here for X-mas and New Years. I think she is destined to see VA only in the winter-hehehe!

Jamie got married on July 29th, or at least I think so because this was the plan. I left her a voicemail, congratulating her but have not heard back from her. I should call again to make sure. I really wanted to go but with the new job, by the time I went to get tickets, they were almost $700. I really want to go on vacation. This is the first time in over 4 years that I am spending the entire summer home. Everybody else is going somewhere and I want to go too. I told Mike to plan it for September. His mom and dad come in the end of August for 2 weeks, so we can go after they leave. In the mean time, I am thinking of visiting Kj in KS for couple of days-Thurs through Sunday. I have the free tickets from AirTran, so I can go whenever I want. I should just go and stop talking about!

Tomorrow, I am supposed to hang out with Carrie. I have not seen her for almost a month. After Meg's visit, they went on vacation with the kids, then the kids were sick and last week I got busy right when we were supposed to hang out. Now we have established Wed as our hang out day. I will try to come to work tomorrow around 8, so I can leave by 5 and meet her by 6 at pool. Even though the pool may not be such a great idea, because here it is 101 degrees and with the heat index (whatever this means) it is 110. Hm, I should check what this is in Celsius, because in Fahrenheit to me it is just "Hella HOT!" I keep telling Mike that this is how Dubai is and he will also not go out there as he is not going out here. Well, if something happens and State falls through, I am set to go to Dubai. Hopefully it will still exist in the next couple of years with all the Middle East hoopla that is happening now.

I am bored! E-bay here I come!

2006-07-05T02:07:00.000+03:00

It has been a while since I wrote anything. I guess I have been kinda busy, plus every time I thought of writing something, I could not remember how to get to the post a comment part of the page. This time I decided that I will figure it, even if it kills me. Well, I am still here and posting.

I was thinking of taking a nap after celebrating Jen's b-day, but now I am stuck watching "White House Pets" and cannot stop. Interesting fact, Millie's Book (this was Bush Sr.'s dog) sold more copies than the autobiography of Bush Sr. Hmm, who knew?

I am kinda bummed that Kj has not called or written. I checked her blog and there has been no posting since June 20th. I am just guessing she is busy.

I start my new job on the 10th. Kinda excited! I am just happy that it will be out of telecom and that I get to learn new skills. Some people were telling me that BearingPoint is not stable, but you know what-whatever! It is a huge company and it can give me room from growth.

I have not gone to the gym for almost a month. I have not gained any weight, but I think my muscle tone is shrinking, so I know I have to go, but I don't have the time. I dropped my 2nd accounting class, so I can concentrate on the new job. I will go again in the fall.

That is all for now. Megan is here from UT, so we have been hanging out. This is the reason that we did not go to KS to visit Kj and Greg. I wanted to show her more of downtown, but with the 4th and all, it has been crazy. Plus it has been so freaking hot and humid, I can barely breathe, so her UT-high altitude lungs are barely moving.

I am still excited about State. I have to schedule our medical clearance in the next week or so and also have to check how do I sign up for the language exam and get studying. All I want is the clearance process to go by fast, let's say six months, not the dreaded year that everybody is telling me. Well, in either case I will be fine, because I will be in a new environment.

Oh, the other thing is that now with State seriously in the picture, the question of kids is all weirded out. Do we have kids before I leave, if I leave at all? Or do we wait for couple of years and see how it goes. We have not spoken about it, but maybe we should. All together exciting couple of months!

Mike is making his ribs tonigh. He also bought tons of fireworks-woohoo-and now I am totally sleepy, my show is over and I am going to nap. The Israeli soldeir is still kidnapped and it looks bad.

2006-04-11T02:42:00.000+03:00

I think, I figured out how to use this now. All I wanted was to comment on my friend's blog and I ended up with my own and still have not commented on friend's blog. Wierd!

I would like to rule the world one day, but still have not figured out how to achive this. Any ideas?

I thought that if I became the Secretary General of the UN, I would achieve my goal. Now, I am not so sure, because the UN needs some serious reforms. So what now? Hmmm, I still have no idea.

2006-04-11T02:35:00.000+03:00

Hello!