What's Up?

I wrote an email to a friend from VA this morning, and I realized it is all stuff that could easily make up a blog post.

DS1 is enjoying missionary work. He is getting better at Spanish and is a senior companion now with his first transfer. It seems he is enjoying working with this companion more than the last, as they have similar feelings about how to work, so they are finding more people to teach.

He had starting dating a girl just a month or so before his mission, and doesn't understand now why, even though he prayed about it, he has still gotten hurt, as she quit writing to him a few months ago. We have been helping him understand that God doesn't keep us from pain, even when we make choices that He is okay with us making. The gospel is there to help us grow and give us peace, and sometimes that growth comes with a little pain.

The other kids are learning Portuguese. They had a month-long holiday break and return to school on Monday, but they have had language, math and music lessons to do each day. Changing math programs to Common Core was a little rough on them, as everything is out of order. During first semester, some units they already knew, and others needed information they hadn't learned yet. So, we use the break to fill in the gaps. Hopefully, when they return, they will only be ahead.

DH loves his job! He helped facilitate Joe Biden's trip here for Dilma's inauguration over the holidays, which was a lot of extra work, but his day-to-day job has been fulfilling for him.

DH and I were both part of a small vocal ensemble that gave a couple of Christmas concerts. It was made up of people from the UK and US embassies. We had a lot of fun!

Along with Portuguese studies for me, as well, I have been trying to clean up my diet. I seem to catch every bug that comes my way lately, so I cut out sugary snacks for the last two weeks and am feeling better. One more week to go without any for this challenge I'm doing with a friend from MN, and then I can ease back into the occasional piece of chocolate or dessert after dinner; not the daily overdose of processed sugar I was hooked on. I'm also trying to put more fresh veggies in our diet. I was really used to preparing frozen veggies in MN and VA, but they are terribly expensive here, while fresh veggies are cheap. It takes a lot more planning and preparation to buy the right amount and the right ones for meals without letting any go bad, so I have to get better at meal planning, as well. Lots to learn when you move to a new country, for the whole family!

Spread Across the Western Hemisphere

My family is spread across the Western Hemisphere this week. DS1 is in Riverside, CA, on a 2-year mission for our church, as I may have mentioned at some point. DS4 is in Pantanal, Brazil, and DS5 is in Minas Gerais. Both of them are on week-long school trips. DS3 will be leaving on Friday for the weekend to attend SPMUN, which is being held (as the first two letters indicate) in São Paulo. So, we look like this (or will on Friday, at least):

You can see what kinds of cool things DS4 and DS5 are doing on the school website, here: https://sites.google.com/a/eabdf.br/middle-school-trips/home/2014-pantanal

But I will mention that DS4 has already been piranha fishing and on a nighttime safari, just to get you interested. There is also snorkeling down a river in his future. Apparently, some of the kids on the trip have been a little unruly at times. DS4 assures me that he was in the other group. DS5's trip has been more of an historical adventure. I don't have a child on the Amazon trip, but DS5 should be going on that one next year, so you can see what is in store for him in the future, if you want to.

So, the house is a little quieter here this week. Today, DD & I walked to the produce stand after she got off the school bus. After we made our purchases, I saw the pile of coconuts the gal was selling, and asked how she opens them. She showed me a cool tool, similar to an apple corer, but with a sharper point. She said they cost around R$20 (about USD $9). She proceeded to open the coconut with it at the core and stick a straw in the hole she created. She gave it to me, and said we didn't have to pay for this one. I'd say that was a good move. She will have a return customer. I found coconut water to be pretty gross when I tried it from a container in the grocery store, but DD and I liked it fresh. As I understand it, we can open up the coconut and eat the flesh when we are done drinking it. We'll see if we have a knife sharp enough to handle the job.

We still await our HHE shipment. It has been at the 8 days to delivery stage for a week and a half now, so hopefully we are getting close. DH's boss was supposed to be getting hers this week, but was just told that isn't happening. She has been here for five months, and has been at the 8 days to delivery stage for over a month. I'll chalk up some of her delay to the World Cup, but it really isn't looking so good for us right now, is it? I guess I can hope for sometime in October.

***Update***

I just looked at Find My Friends, now that it is evening and DS4&5 should be in their hotel rooms for the night. This is cooler than the earlier map I made, even though it doesn't have DS1 on it, and DS3 hasn't left for São Paulo yet.

How do I Organize a Pack-Out?

It has occurred to me that there are a lot of things a new FSO family doesn't think about when packing for the first move to DC. I believe I described the allowances for HHE and UAB and airline baggage elsewhere, so I will leave that for you to find elsewhere on my blog. Here are some tips I just gave a newbie on Facebook:

If you don't know where you are going, that can make this more difficult. You want to consider what electronics you would and wouldn't be willing to run from a transformer if at a 220 post (things with heating elements should go in boxes marked to stay behind at a 220 post, and make sure the movers don't mix in anything else). Try to make sure those things you might want to leave behind are in boxes separate from other things. We lucked out because in Brasilia they converted many houses to 110, and we got one of them, because our movers packed things together that otherwise we would have wanted to leave in storage. Ice skates packed with rollerblades is fine if you are in a cold climate, but not in Brazil...Also consider if you get assigned to an apartment, will you want your gardening supplies and snow shovels? Make sure they don't pack them with your standard tool set, or you will have to take it all when the time comes. Also, confirm in advance a second HHE shipment on your orders for when you leave DC, as you are bringing stuff in your minivan, or else you will have too much stuff to go in UAB. Sometimes I hear that it is tricky to convince them to do it if you have only a short stay in DC. We had 11 months, so it wasn't a problem for us. Finally, watch your packers! Insist on a small crew so you can see what they are packing and make your own inventory list, as theirs won't be nearly detailed enough. Set your pack-out date for at least 2 weeks before your move so you have time to put your foot down and reschedule if they don't want to cooperate with agreed terms. If you feel rushed by them, you will cave, and then you will regret it for years when you discover stuff is in storage that ought to be at post. (End of FB post)

I have been thinking a lot about things I wish had come in our UAB and didn't, due to our rush at our last move, as well as due to the fact that we were moving into an apartment initially. Here are things I want to remember next time.

Laundry baskets

Small rugs

Trash pails

Panty liners

Crock pot (or buy one immediately if at a 220 post, but if shipping, make sure it is in its original box)

Shark

Sandwich baggies

Ziplock bags

Get Out of Town!

Last night, we took the kids to the embassy for happy hour. I had read in a recent CLO (Community Liason Officer) email that there would be a happy hour, but I had ignored it. I'm a Minnesotan; happy hour is where single adults go to drink and meet people where I am from. But when the kids came home from school, most of them (without even hearing the others tell me) told me that their friends were all going to happy hour, and could we go, too? After our youngest daughter, age 6, asked, we finally realized that there must be more to happy hour than drinking.

Sure enough, the soccer and basketball courts and the playground were full of kids, so we stayed a couple of hours and let the kids have fun. DH and I talked to other parents, and while we were there, I received an invitation to go shopping to a market out of town with another EFM (Eligible Family Member - what all of us spouses and children of people in the mission are called). So, this morning, we took off at 9am and arrived in Paranoá about 20 minutes later.

I finally felt like I was in another country. The town looked a lot more like what I had seen in Santiago, Chile, a couple of years ago. The stores we went two were little, crowded shops, with incredible pricing. I spent the equivalent of $35 USD on groceries that would have cost double or triple if I had gone to one of the local grocery stores. I'd say that the prices were even better than in the U.S. I got 8.25 lbs of apples, 2.25 lbs of bananas, one large avocado, three ripe tomatoes, and several pounds of baking potatoes at the produce market. From the butcher, I got 4.4 lbs of ground beef, and on the street there was a rotisserie chicken vendor, and I got one large chicken from him. $35 total. I'm going back every Saturday, now that I know about it.

UAB Arrived! HHE and POV at Port (I think)

Our UAB arrived just over a week ago. It took seven weeks from our arrival date, and that is really good for Brasilia (in most of the world, I hear it is normally two weeks). I may have mentioned how messed up our pack-out was. The movers' late arrival, and subsequent haste to get packed quickly, led to only the first two boxes containing what we really wanted in our UAB. The other four boxes were a jumbled mix of stuff.

Next move, I will not only put colored stickers on everything, but I will also divide up each room into piles. That way, if push comes to shove, we won't just give up and let the movers load up whatever they touch first into the UAB.

Things I will never allow to be shipped in UAB again: ceramic dishes and pictures. The packers actually put six of my small plates in a stack with only one sheet of paper in between them. Guess how many pieces they were in when they arrived? Your guess is as good as mine...I can't count that high. I also lost a large plate and several bowls and mugs. Luckily, it was just my cheap IKEA set, so it wasn't a big financial loss. Unfortunately, IKEA doesn't sell my set online, so I can't replace them unless I get a family member to go shopping, wrap them up really well, and send them to me (any volunteers?). DS1's Cross Country photo frame glass was the other major casualty. There is really no good reason for DS1's stuff to be in our UAB, since he isn't even here with us, but we have a cupboard full of his stuff already. It was definitely marked yellow for HHE.

Things I wish were in my UAB: laundry baskets and trash pails. I only brought two laundry baskets to VA with us, and they didn't make it here in the UAB. I will definitely want laundry baskets next time around. I miss them very much. Really. Okay, throwing laundry over the banister down to the main floor is kind of fun, but then I have to pick it all up, and...well, you can't throw laundry back up the stairs. Trash pails would also be nice. I did get one in the UAB, which happened to be my bedroom pail. I appreciate it very much, and wish all the children had their trash pails, too. Today I swept up a pile of pencil shavings off my younger boys' bedroom floor. Maybe I am completely wrong here, but I imagine my children actually using the trash pail if there is one. *Dreams*

We are told our HHE and POV are in Rio. That means that they might be in Brasilia by the end of the month! However...I am a little concerned by the email we were copied in on the other day. It was from the guy in charge of shipments on this end asking the guy on the D.C. end for the bill of lading for our second HHE shipment. My thought is that if they didn't get that along with the other one, we may find out that there is only one shipment at the port, not two. Let's cross our fingers that it isn't so. It has been over a year since we have seen the bulk of our HHE, and our kids, especially, miss their stuff. There are a few things in there that I'd like to see, as well.

As for the POV, I am hoping for speedy travels. Once it gets here, it can be a couple of months, still, before it gets plates and we can drive it. I am starting to go a little bonkers without a car. We have a minivan from the motor pool on weekends, which is wonderful, but it was a little disconcerting when we had to have our kids call a taxi to get home from their basketball game the other night. They had never been in a taxi before, and their first time was in a foreign language. At least there is an app for that.

What to Expect in Brasilia (Focusing on Prices)

I was told several things about Brasilia that I didn't find to be accurate once I got here. The first was that everything is 3x the cost here compared to the U.S. This is not true. There are things that cost 3x as much as in the U.S., but it is far from everything.

We went shoe shopping for our kids' athletic activities last weekend. Athletic shoes cost exactly the same here as they do in the U.S. if you go to the right store. I had been warned that shoes would cost more, but having bought shoes for growing boys a lot in the past year, I knew what current prices were.

Food might cost 3x as much as in the U.S. if you are accustomed to buying prepared foods. Breakfast cereal is terribly expensive. Ice cream is really that expensive. Oats are nearly impossible to find, and when you do find them, they are expensive. Peanut butter is crazy expensive - around $10/lb (one small jar). However, some of these items can be purchased at the commissary, if you are with the embassy. Peanut butter is still more expensive there than back home, but I can handle $3.74/lb, as the cost is seriously offset by produce prices. I was also warned about olive oil, but haven't noticed the price or quality issues I had heard described.

If you normally shop around the outside edges of the supermarket (produce, dairy, deli, meat), you will find that most foods you buy are at or below the prices you will find in D.C., with the exception of milk. Milk is more expensive, but not as bad as I was thinking it might be. I was also told that it was hard to find, but it is everywhere. Maybe it is harder to find in Asa Sul or Asa Norte, but in Lago Sul, I have seen it at every grocery store. It is in 1 liter bottles or bags. The bags are cheaper, and for those of you in the upper midwest, they resemble the bagged milk at Kwik Trip, but are half the size. One bag of milk will cost somewhere between $.75 and $2 USD. Different stores seem to have widely varying prices, and there are frequent sales at some stores. The bottled milk tends to be about $.50 USD higher than bagged. It is certainly more convenient, but the quantity we go through has made me a fan of the bags. Chicken and beef are the meats of choice here for our family. We tried sausage once and didn't like it, but maybe we need to experiment with more varieties before we make a decision on it. Beef is pretty cheap here. Ground beef is about the same price as back home, but steaks are a fantastic price here, and the cuts are high quality. Chicken is about the same price as back home, but not as well-cut. We can even get rotisserie chickens from a nearby grocery store, and they cost about what they did back home...maybe a little more than Costco, but about the same as a regular grocery store.

The difficulty buying oats surprised me, but I had to laugh when I finally found the flour after searching the grain aisle for 10 minutes. They put it in 1 Kilo bags. That's about 8 cups of flour per bag. I'm used to dealing with 25 lb. bags of flour at a time, so I bought about 10 to satisfy my cookie-making sons. As for the price, I think it was a little higher than back home, but don't quote me on that one. I was in a hurry and didn't calculate it out fully. That's one thing about this new lifestyle...we get a COLA adjustment, and it means that I don't have to be as careful with our grocery budget. It is there to make up for the areas where things cost more.

The other items in Brasilia that are seriously expensive are housewares. Some things line up with prices back home, but then other things don't. For example, pillows. I figured we would buy pillows here, as we threw ours out in MN and used the ones that came with our furnished apartment in VA. We have pillows in our welcome kit, but ought to buy our own. Pillows that look like cheap Target pillows back home cost about $15 or $20 USD. I'm thinking I'll see whether I can order vacuum-sealed pillows on Amazon so they don't constitute a bulk shipment.

I'm not sure why so many people told us that prices were so high here. One guess is they haven't lived in the U.S. for a while. Milk used to be $1/gallon in the States not that long ago. Now, it is $2.50-$3.50 per gallon, depending on the state. I can also remember when I could get cereal for $1/box without going coupon-crazy. Nowadays it isn't uncommon for it to be upwards of $4/box. But I can see where if someone lived outside of the U.S. for the past decade, they might not have a good basis for comparison. Food prices really inflated after corn started being used for Ethanol production.

I am really glad we have the commissary, though! There are certain items you just can't get here. Salsa, certain chips, cake mixes, syrup, peanut butter, jam...I love the commissary. In fact, I think I will go there now.

Catching Up: POV, HHE, UAB and Luggage

My last two posts were separated by a large gap, during which life was really busy with getting ready for our move. Since one of my purposes of this blog is to help new FSOs with exactly those things that went on during those last months in D.C., I had better do a little catching up.

The Test:

First, I should mention that my husband passed his Portuguese exam with flying colors. He got the examiner he was afraid to get (he had her as a substitute in class and she was rude, mean and scary), and someone who didn't even speak Portuguese was the assistant examiner (I think there is a term for that person, but I can't recall it at the moment). DH says that this most likely resulted in the lowering of his score by a half point on the speaking portion. At one point, he gave him something extremely convoluted to translate to the examiner (translation isn't even supposed to be part of the test), and since the examiner herself didn't exactly know English enough to be able to make the leap between both languages and understand what the other guy had him translate, she thought DH made a big mistake, which he knows he didn't. Ugh. But he did get the highest score of anyone in his section - tied with one of his classmates, who got a half point higher on speaking than reading, the opposite of his.

One thing to understand about language learning at the FSI is that each department is a little different. Some departments try hard to work spouses into the full classes, and other departments try really hard not to. Some have extremely high failure rates, despite being fairly easy languages, and other departments have higher pass rates. Occasionally, a department gets so puffed up with how hard a language they are that other departments start failing more people just to show that they are a tough language, too.  This is what we get when we have foreign nationals in charge of teaching languages. On the positive side, native speakers are better teachers of their languages because they understand their own languages better than non-native speakers. It is also easier to pick up a native accent when you learn from a native, and the opportunity to learn about the culture and nuances of the language is invaluable. On the negative side, natives have pride issues; it is to be expected. I am sure if this sort of institution exists in other countries where Americans are teaching alongside other foreign nationals, they suffer from the same malady.

The Move:

I don't know how well everything went yet, as we have only been in Brazil for a month and don't have our stuff yet, but this is what we know...

I scheduled the POV shipment well in advance, and completed all of the required paperwork, both for the transportation coordinator and for post. I got a little nervous when, the day before it was scheduled to be picked up, the transportation company didn't call to confirm. I shot an email over to our transportation coordinator, and he confirmed it for us. (I have to say that the transportation guys are awesome. They answer questions quickly and get stuff done in a hurry.)

Since we have a large family, we have a large van. When I say large, I mean 12-passenger E-350. The State Department will pay for normal-sized vehicles to be shipped (up to 800 Cubic Feet), but ours was 833 cubic feet, so we had to pay for the overage, which amounted to around $900. We considered selling it and buying something once we got here, but after looking at the prices in the newsletters from post, we decided that we would have to spend three to five times what we would get for our van in D.C. on a vehicle in Brasilia, so we shipped it. We hear it is likely to take between 3-5 months to get here. Yes, even after paying for rental cars and the like, we will do better just shipping it. Our post is unusual in how long things are transported to post, by the way. Most places don't have such long wait times.

I also scheduled the pack-out of our HHE and UAB well in advance. I missed the part where the Transition Center moving guide suggested scheduling the pack-out 2 weeks in advance, in case issues arose, and scheduled it for the Thursday before the move. We had to be out of our apartment on Monday by noon, and we were to leave for post on Wednesday. On Wednesday, we got a call confirming our pack-out for between 2-5pm on Thursday. On Thursday, DH had the day off to help sort HHE and UAB and help with the move. The movers called at 4pm and said they were running late. At 7:00pm I started getting nervous and started calling and emailing all of our contacts. No response. At 7:30pm the movers arrived, to my relief and annoyance. Only two men showed up to start. They didn't have all of the right boxes, but started on the UAB, with a box that I learned after the second team of two arrived was smaller than they ought to be using, which probably decreased the amount we could have packed into UAB. They weighed UAB as they went...I never heard what the HHE weighed in the end, although they promised to email me the next day and let me know. Hopefully we won't be surprised in the end. By the end of the night, there were six or eight movers. I was so tired I don't remember exactly.

Since I heard on the boards that UAB and HHE typically arrive within a week or two of each other in Brasilia (again, not typical of other posts across the globe), we had them pile clothing and other items that didn't need wrapping and really filled space in the UAB to maximize our weight allowance. All weights include packaging materials. UAB's weight also includes crates, so packing them full of items that filled the boxes made sense to me. That way, there would be fewer boxes, packed more densely. They typically add 10 pounds to each box to account for crating. HHE weights don't include any crates, so putting items that needed wrapping or were awkwarly-shaped automatically qualified for HHE, since we aren't working with shipments that will arrive months apart. Of course, as soon as the second team of workers arrived, they just started putting whatever they wanted into the UAB and my instructions went unheeded for the last couple of boxes. Hopefully that didn't mess up my carefully-devised plan.

The movers were at our apartment until after 12:30am. When the movers hadn't yet arrived at 7pm, I had gone online to figure out what to do, and one thing I read was that we could turn away movers after 5:30pm. While I could have refused them, I didn't feel I really had that option. The movers already had jobs scheduled for the next day, and I seriously doubted that they would come back first thing in the morning. Since we had to be out by Monday, we let them in and let them stay, while our children fell asleep on couches. It was not ideal, but I did not feel we had a choice. Next time, we will schedule our pack-out for two weeks ahead of our move.

Traveling:

Brasilia may have some long waits for UAB and HHE, but one advantage to all of Brazil is the two bag/70 lbs. per bag allowance on planes. All State Department moves get two bags, but they are normally just 50 lbs. each. What this means is that each of our family members could have two checked suitcases (totaling 140 lbs), one carry-on suitcase, and one backpack. Have I mentioned we have a family of 8? Yeah, we could have had 32 pieces of luggage. We had 31, due to a miscalculation on my part. See, before you leave D.C., you can ask to see your HHE at the warehouse in Haggerstown. You can even pull a few boxes. There was this one box that said "suitcase" on the inventory list, and I knew we didn't have our large red suitcase with us, so I figured that was what was in that box.When I got home with that box that said "suitcase" on it, I found it was my scrapbooking tote. This was not useful, and got packed back into HHE from the apartment. I subsequently forgot to purchase one last suitcase. Thus, 31 instead of 32.

One good reason not to have too many packers pack your house is so that you can try to do a little bit of inventory on your own as they work. Supposedly, we can tell moving companies that we want fewer packers. As I have figured out that you never really get a choice in any of this, I think that next time, I will label all items (or at least groups of items) and ask the movers to use my labels as their inventory descriptions. 

Anyway, I forgot to buy another suitcase, so we ended up with 31 instead of 32. Also...make sure you check over all of the suitcases and instruments/instrument cases when you are still in your destination airport. We discovered after we got home that our son's French Horn case was cracked open and the horn has a weld that is broken. This is a super-cheap horn, luckily, but we don't know whether this happened on the plane or in the parking lot when DH tipped over an entire cart full of luggage. If we knew it happened on the plane, we could have filed a claim, but we were tired and were not as observant as we should have been.

DH just told me that our UAB is being cleared through diplomatic customs right now, and that he was told that it typically takes 3 days, but not to hold my breath. It has only been a month since we arrived, and I was told to expect about two months, but we have recently heard of some coming through in six weeks, so it could be sometime soon. POV and HHE are on the ship, expected to hit the port close to September. Customs normally delays things for quite a while after that, so I won't hold my breath on those, either. However, things are sounding better than I had been told to expect.

Speaking of that, my next post will be on the difference between what I had been told to expect and how I perceive things to actually be.