Category: Nebulous Items
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Tiny Notes From Hanoi: It’s Like Downton Abbey, Except Different
We have a house, people. A whole house to ourselves, partway down a narrow scooter-wide lane, off a side street, a block from the lake. After two months of living out of suitcases, over a month living with family (both sides, on both sides of the Atlantic), and over three weeks camping out in hotel…
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Tiny Notes From Hanoi: Everything is Amazing When You Leave Your Phone at Home
Yesterday I left my phone in the hotel room when I went out with Thwack strapped to my front. We were just popping out for a moment to hunt and gather some sort of lunch for me before I had to take a cranky, snoozy baby back to the room for a midday nap.…
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Tiny Notes From Hanoi: A Home, a Banh Mi and Thou
Welcome to Day 2 in my return to blogging, miniature stylee. Today we went and visited our new house. It isn’t ours yet- there is a lovely Danish family still living in it- but we got to have a second look around it for the first time since we paid four months’ rent up front…
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Tiny Notes From Hanoi: It’s Kinda Different With a Kid
Welcome to this exciting new series of (hopefully) near daily updates on our very recent move to Hanoi (like, last Friday)! Between living in a compact little hotel room in an area without walkable sidewalks (but with a fine cacophany of scooters roaring at all hours) and having Thwack full time and having two separate…
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How to Pack for the Person You’d Like to Become
We moved out of our little terrace house last weekend. Our dining room full of boxes is now stacked neatly in the third floor spare room of a sprawling Victorian house in the groovier bit of Leicester. We have a surprising amount of stuff for having just moved here last November with a 30kg…
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What I’m Talking About When I Talk About China
A few weeks ago, I was randomly contacted by someone working for an expat relocation company. He wanted me to write a guide for Suzhou, a city I spent a total of one afternoon in several years ago, interviewing for a temporary job doing localization editing work for a Chinese video game company producing martial…
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Leicester is For Food Nerds: A Tangentially Culinary Introduction to an Unlikely Place
Leicester (lɛstər/ les-tər) isn’t exactly on the global culinary map. It’s barely on any map at all, except perhaps one detailing manufacturers of, say, sturdy meat pies or Indian sweets. Rumour has it that people have traveled vast distances to get a big box of Burfi from one of the sweet shops in…
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This Is Still Not a Mommy Blog (Even Though That’s All I Do All Day)
Before I spawned my urchin, I was adamant about keeping the metalepsical church and state firmly separated. I read all of those books about the importance of keeping your grown up self intact and building a life where the baby mostly fits into your rhythms and routines rather than the other way around. I was pretty…
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A Totally Impractical Guide to Camping in England With a 4 Month Old Baby
Last weekend, we borrowed a car from our crunchy granola car-share group in Leicester and drove to somewhere in Derbyshire (pronounced, approximately, Darbəshr, in case you aren’t intuitively British*) in the cold, grey rain, for a fine weekend of family camping, frantic trail cycling (which we hiked at a leisurely pace) and multi-roomed tents more elaborate…
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The Happiness Project Revisited: Are We Happy Yet?
Yes, I’m still plugging away at the Happiness Project. I’m now more than half way toward the end goal of 100 days of consciously making note of happy moments. I missed one or two days along the way, unable to find anything overtly happy to document. I refused to allow meh to be accepted…
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I’m Learning Vietnamese, Y’all: What You Really Need To Know When Learning a New Language
I’m Learning Vietnamese. I Think I’m Learning Vietnamese. I really think so. So I’m learning another language. I’m adding Vietnamese, slowly and poorly intoned, to my slapdash mental collection of half remembered words and phrases from a dozen countries. I may have mentioned this once or twice already. After a decade of trying to cram Turkish…
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Feed Me, Leicester: Sichuan Brothers Hotpot (Woohoo!)
Remember last week when those guys at Momondo took us out for lunch at Kayal down on Granby Street and we stuffed ourselves on spicy seafoody things and massive dosas stuffed with lovely fragrant smashed spud and whatnot? Well, this week they took us out for dinner at another establishment of my choice. After walking past a…