Category Archives: Travel

Lost in three languages

Posted on by
Reply

Last night, we arrived in Hong Kong, the “fragrant harbor” city, the land where East supposedly meets West. It’s a city where all the announcements are in Cantonese, Mandarin, and English (in that order), where signs are labeled in traditional Chinese, simplified Chinese, and English. I was lazy about reviewing Cantonese before we arrived and figured I could get by with my decent Mandarin and English, but because I am not used to speaking Mandarin on a daily basis, I was caught off guard a few times when I needed to respond in Chinese and paused for uncomfortable seconds, which indicated to others that I wasn’t a native speaker.

After checking into our hotel in the Central/Sheung Wan area, we proceeded to scout out our first desired meal — roasted duck and goose. We arrived at a restaurant where a friendly server greeted us at our table and asked me in Cantonese if I spoke Chinese. I responded back in Mandarin after a two-second pause, and said I could speak Mandarin Chinese, yet when ordering, I ordered certain dishes in Mandarin, certain dishes in Cantonese, then stumbled on how to say the word “goose” in either language. The server could see I was trying to read the Chinese and told me how to pronounce “goose” in Mandarin – “e2 (2nd tone).” Friendly Chinese people always compliment you when you are trying, and this one said to me, “So smart – you can speak both Mandarin and Cantonese!” It’s kind of funny because even though it literally sounds like a compliment, the underlying meaning is, “We feel sorry for you because you aren’t fluent in what should be your native language based on your ethnicity. But we’ll make you feel good about yourself for at least trying.”

I really never properly learned Cantonese since my grandparents’ native language was Toisan, which is what I spoke when I was little, so all my Cantonese knowledge has been based on listening to Cantonese and identifying its similarities to Toisan, even though native Cantonese speakers say they are two completely different languages, and that Toisan is pigeon/loser Cantonese. Looking back, I wish I had made more effort to learn Cantonese. But when I look back at my college experience, though I majored in economics and minored in women’s studies, what I am most happy about is that I studied 3.5 years of Mandarin Chinese. It’s helped so much with communicating with other people, developing rapport, getting around China and ordering food, and even understanding cultural nuances based on the idioms used.

The other thing I wasn’t expecting was how friendly in general people would be here. The only thing I could compare Hong Kong to would be mainland China, where I spent four weeks in the summer of 2006, so in my head, I was just preparing myself for rude service and pushy people. Service overall has not only been smooth and easy, but also warm and smiley — not what I was expecting at all. Sometimes I forget that Hong Kong is technically a part of China as an SAR, but it certainly feels like a world in itself — different currency, different passport, different standard of living, higher level of cleanliness, and even higher level of friendliness and service as I am seeing now.

Bruised

Posted on by
Reply

After my course of antibiotics ended for my whooping cough, I read that a convalescence period is to be expected for the following two to three weeks, when I would still have cold-like symptoms of coughing, stuffy and runny nose, and phlegm. What I was not actively thinking about was that my back muscles and ribs were sore and bruised from all the coughing and vomiting, which was all exacerbated by the constant laughing from the Jacob-Barber family Christmas celebrations of games and food. Since Christmas festivities typically begin in the family from Christmas Eve through the last full day we are in town, that’s five days of nonstop talking, laughing, and coughing induced by laughing. By last night, my muscles and ribs had flared up so much that it hurt just to speak, so I had to lie down, use Deep Heat and tiger balm, and take anti-inflammatory pills. Then this morning, I woke up at 3am feeling like someone was stabbing me in the right side of my ribs, but it was just the pain of the rib bruising and the desire to vomit that woke me. I coughed up a lot of phlegm over the toilet and wondered what terrible things I’d done in a past life to have this feeling. The center of my throat felt like something was stuck in it, but I couldn’t vomit it out because it hurt my ribs too much to exert that level of effort. It’s like I was stuck in a state of pain that I couldn’t rid myself of, and it was all ultimately exacerbated by laughing and having fun. How masochistic. These are the things you learn about your body when you are really sick. I never thought that I could bruise my ribs or make all my back muscles sore just by coughing before, but here it is.

 

 

 

Mum meetup

Posted on by
Reply

After coming back from Tassie, Chris and I met up with his two good friends from college who are both his age, and also married with two kids each of their own. Both had their youngest children just this past year and were sharing their stories about expensive childcare, au pairs, and how being parents has changed their life (and eliminated most of their free time). I told them the horror stories I’ve shared with everyone about how even farther away I felt from motherhood after seeing Chris’s cousin’s wife not being able to enjoy her brother and sister-in-law’s France wedding as much because of her two screaming children, and they insisted to me, “Oh, no! Don’t let that put you off. Children are so cute and fun! You will love it once you have them!” They asked me if we were planning to have children soon after the wedding (I’m sure they just assumed I was closer in age to them and Chris), and I immediately said no.

We spent most of the time talking about their children and their experiences with being parents in general. They are both intelligent, interesting people outside of being parents. But listening to them talk about their parenting experiences made me feel so bored. I know that sounds mean, and parenthood and raising children are very important and certainly not things to take lightly, but I wanted to hear more about them and their own lives. Oh, wait. Their own lives are all about their kids now. I forgot. They did say that they wanted more outside of being mothers, and that they would continue their careers even though of course, it would be a challenge. It’s always a challenge, whether external or internal, to have children and then have a life outside it. You always feel guilty because you think, what if I did more for my children and spent more time with them — maybe that would make the quality of their lives better? These are endless thoughts for a topic that has no definitive answer.

Uh oh

Posted on by
Reply

I haven’t talked to my parents over the phone in over a week. It’s mainly because I was scared for them to hear my voice; this is the worst I’ve ever heard my own voice, and it often hurt just to speak given how heavily coated with phlegm my vocal chords were. I didn’t want to scare them into thinking I was dying, so I just emailed my dad to let him know I was a bit under the weather and would call when I felt better and could speak. I guess this didn’t go over so well with my mom, who freaked out and thought I was dying. I eventually revealed to them that I contracted whooping cough, so of course, dad printed out Web MD articles about the most extreme cases of whooping cough, where people have broken ribs, gotten brain damage, and had to suffer from extremely violent coughing for over 100 days, and I’m sure this added to my mom’s paranoia. The important thing, I thought, was that I caught it before the 3-week mark (that’s when my doctor said you would be doomed to violent coughing for three months because it would have reached maturity in your body and at that point be indestructible), so my antibiotics would work and help cure me by Christmas day. I thought they would be happy about this, but my mom freaked out even more.

“I know who is responsible for you getting this, but I’m not going to say,” she said in her accusing tone. That’s her nice way of saying she blames Chris. “You traveled and got this in that country.” No, not really. It’s not Australia’s fault. Everyone’s immunized from it here. Colds in New York don’t just magically become whooping cough in the Southern Hemisphere. I picked it up in New York. She wouldn’t hear it, though, and insisted she was right and “has wisdom,” and that she didn’t want to hear my lies and excuses. “And why didn’t he bother calling me when he knew you were sick and I was worrying? There’s absolutely no respect here.”

You can never really win with irrationality and paranoia.

Foodie mania in Tassie

Posted on by
Reply

After a couple days of antiobiotics, I am slowly regaining my desire to eat, and not just plain food. I didn’t realize before researching Tasmania what a foodie mecca it is, as it is famous for its great variety of fish, high quality oysters, leatherwood honey (among other varieties), all things dairy, particularly cheese and milk, and endless different fruit orchards. We had Tasmanian oysters last night just with a drizzle of lemon, and they were by far some of the creamiest and sweetest ones I’ve ever had. We tried trevalley fish, which is a local type of white fish, and its flesh was very firm and meaty — perfect for a good searing or being coated in batter or breadcrumbs for fish and chips. We had them in both preparations and were stunned by how satisfying it was. In just one day, we visited a honey farm (and saw all the honey bees at work, along with a great education on the different roles of bees. Who would have thought that the youngest bees of the hive actually act as real “under takers,” sweeping out any and all dead bodies to keep the hive clean!); a salmon and ginseng farm (tried hot smoked salmon for the first time, as usually smoked salmon back home is raw smoked, and even had a salad dressing with ginseng spice in it, which we ended up purchasing because of how unique it was); a raspberry farm (I was ignorant of the fact that there are many varieties of raspberries, and not just due to color); an ice cream factory, and a whisky (yes, they spell it without the “e” here) distillery (wow, is hard liquor expensive in Australia!). I lamented at the end of the day that we only have less than a day left here before returning to Melbourne and realized that you could easily spend weeks exploring Tasmania (or Tassie, as everyone colloquially calls it) and still not get through everything. And that was after everyone told us how “small” Tassie was! There are wine trails, endless foodie tour routes you can take, and of course, lots of hiking with incredible bays and scenic trails you can take by car or by foot.

This is the closest we have come to Antarctica or the bottom of the earth, and who knew how overwhelming from a food perspective it would all be?

Throat

Posted on by
1

After a day of antiobiotics, I still couldn’t sleep through the night and had to wake up for my coughing fits. But when I finally did wake up fully in the morning, I found that I actually did feel different. Today, for the first time in about five days, I actually could feel that I had a throat. It’s been blocked for what felt like eternity, and now, when I swallow or clear my throat, it actually feels slightly cleared! There’s no thick coating of phlegm there this morning. I still can’t speak properly, as every time I try to speak, it hurts a little unless I increase my pitch, and it comes out sounding like I am croaking or short of breath. It’s been weird to hear my own voice like this and feel myself being challenged to breathe when I speak. But I can already feel that there is light at the end of this dark tunnel.

Tasmanian doctor

Posted on by
Reply

Despite violently coughing and vomiting up food and phlegm, there was no way in hell I was going to cancel this long weekend trip we planned to Tasmania. I could rephrase that again as, there was no way in hell that Chris would have cancelled this trip, too. Being a native Australian, he has been very embarrassed to share with others that he still hadn’t visited Tasmania, but would use the excuse of taking me to finally see it himself. This trip was happening regardless of how sick I was.

Well, we arrived. Then on the very short car ride from the airport to our hotel, Chris had to stop the car so I could vomit up more phlegm. I felt like I was going to pop out all the veins in my face at that point, so we found the nearest doctor and made an appointment. I could barely speak at that point, so every word out of my mouth took effort. At the doctor’s office, after a thorough (and croaking) discussion of my timeline of symptoms, checking my vitals, and the doctor just happening to be there at a time when I had another coughing and vomiting fit (well, she heard through the thin walls since I did this in the bathroom and not in her lap), she determined that I had contracted whooping cough and would need to immediately start a course of antibiotics specific to this highly contagious respiratory disease. I wasn’t sure if I was in heaven or in hell — in heaven because finally, someone had given me a diagnosis that made sense that would rid me of the violent fits that had been exhausting my entire body, or in hell because… who gets whooping cough, especially at my age? And also, who would have given to this to me… back in New York?!

The other amazing thing is that I’d never had to visit a doctor during any of my international travels until today, so I’d never personally been exposed to medical practices outside of the U.S. Who would have thought my first visit would be here in Tasmania, with a doctor so casual that she didn’t even tell me her last name when introducing herself and only gave her first name? She listened and was extremely patient. I can’t even remember the last time I had a doctor who had given me that much time and shown so much compassion towards me. It’s as though every time I described another symptom in the week and a half timeline, it felt like she was feeling the pain, too. She gave me her phone number and said to ring her office at any time, and let the receptionist know she specifically said she’d fit me in any day I needed to see her in the next week if needed. I was so touched and grateful. “No worries,” she responded and smiled.

And don’t even get me started on the cost. I have no traveler’s insurance, no extra insurance I paid for through my own insurance plan, yet the cost of my visit was so affordable, and the price of my antibiotics prescription so low that I know for certain that every single American back home is being screwed, some even being pushed into debt and bankruptcy because of the senseless cost of healthcare there. If I were a foreigner visiting the U.S. with the same situation, I’d be terrified to know how much my visit would have cost.. and the cost of my prescription medication. Anyone who defends the American healthcare system has zero perspective on the rest of the world and the “true cost” of healthcare. Health is a right, not a privilege. Without health, you don’t have a life.

Choosing health

Posted on by
Reply

When I was a junior in college, I took a development economics course that explored economics and its complexities in third-world countries (I learned in that class that it could be perceived to be politically incorrect to even use the term “third-world,” so instead in our discussions, we had to use the term “developing” countries to differentiate from “developed” nations like the United States or the United Kingdom). In our very first session, our professor asked us a simple question: Take any developing nation in the world where the great majority of people are struggling and living on $1 USD/day or less. If you could choose one area of concern to tackle first, which would it be and why?

A few areas were given as examples, such as education, defense, health, water supply (in terms of cleanliness and ability to drink). I didn’t hesitate for a second and immediately jumped on education and started to build out a case for it. We got into small groups (our class was only about 20) and were organized by issue, and in the end we fought it out. And as important as education was, as much as we all strongly believed that every child should be entitled to formal schooling and learning how to read, write, do math, and learn about the rest of the world, my team lost. Why? Because you cannot succeed in educating a child if the child is too ill or even dying and cannot attend class.

I realized during this debate how naive I was and how I had taken my own life and life’s privileges for granted. Sure, I’d had a cold or a fever or an infection here and there growing up, but access to clean water, nutritious food, and basic healthcare have never been a problem for me. I never had to worry about issues like bugs eating away at my skin at night to the point that my bones were exposed, or suffering from endless infections due to being tested HIV positive at birth, or constantly vomiting hour after hour due to some fatal illness that no one could diagnose for me because I had no doctor within driving distance. At that point in my life, I’d only traveled to one other country — China, and even there I spent the majority of my time in the major metropolitan area of Shanghai and was never exposed to extreme poverty. I didn’t even know what it was. It wasn’t until I traveled to Vietnam two years later and went out to the countryside in the central part of the country when I really saw poverty stare at me in the face.

The reason I thought about this now is that the last two days, I’ve been stuck at Chris’s parents’ home, bed and couch-ridden with extreme respiratory infection symptoms. Every few hours, I’ve had to spend time kneeling in front of a toilet, vomiting up what felt like endless food and phlegm. I’ve actually been sick for the last almost two weeks, but it wasn’t until earlier this week when I realized the symptoms could be far worse than just a cold. People with a common cold don’t wake up three times during the night to violently cough and vomit for ten to twenty minutes at a time. They also don’t break capillaries under their eyes from coughing so hard that it feels like their faces and eyeballs are going to pop out of their skulls. Every time I got in front of the toilet and had tears running down my face because of the severity of my cough and vomit, I thought about how stupid and naive I was to choose education in that development economics class debate and completely disregard health. Would I, in my current state, be able to attend class and learn about World War II or organic chemistry and actually be able to pay attention and take all this information in? Sure, I’m not dying (at least, I don’t think I am). With my current illness, there’s absolutely no way it could be compared to the ill children in sub-Saharan Africa. But I feel terrible every time I think back to that course and think that I disregarded their basic human needs of health because I subconsciously assumed that would be fine (by choosing education), even if consciously, I knew it was so far from it. Times like this are when I check my privilege and remind myself of all my developed world comforts and how I take them for granted, even with broken capillaries and vomiting through the night.

Wedding RSVPs

Posted on by
Reply

We brought dinner over to Chris’s friend’s house last night. This friend and her husband recently had a baby in July, and despite that, they are planning to come to our California wedding — with the baby, a car seat, and a whole lot of diapers in tow. It’s a heart warming thing to think that despite all the people who have declined that these new parents will be coming, even when it is harder to travel with an unpredictable infant with unpredictable needs. I was so happy when I saw our wedding invitation posted up on their fridge with magnets. Our wedding invitation is being loved!

Since we have made our wedding date and location official, we’ve heard all kinds of reasons for declining, everything from cost (understandable), limited leave time (unfortunately, understandably), having conflicting international non-profit work travel at the time of the wedding (that sucks but at least someone is doing something to help others with his life), being due for a baby the week after our wedding (very unfortunately understandable), having three kids under the age of five and being too difficult to travel (well, I just feel sorry for them and having three kids to deal with and no life outside of being a parent, which is one of my many life nightmares), and scheduling an extended holiday right before our wedding (not so understandable, but I’ll get over it). At the end of the day, our wedding will be what it is with the people who will show up. The ones who don’t show up, it will be their loss. The best thing to know is that of the people who do show up, they are proving that they care enough and are willing to make the effort. The others won’t matter as much. On the morning of my wedding, I won’t be lamenting that these people didn’t show up; in fact, I won’t even think about them at all and could care less.The only person in the world I will be really sad about not being there is my Ed. And in his case, he really had no way of making it.

The mango man

Posted on by
Reply

I was so overwhelmed with how fragrant and cheap the mangoes were at the Sydney Fish Market yesterday that I decided to buy three fat ripe ones from one of the market stands. Little did I know that we’re technically not allowed to bring fresh produce over state lines, so if we were to strictly follow Australian laws, I was not supposed to go from New South Wales back down to Victoria with my mangoes in hand. Chris informed me of this when I met him at the end of his work day, and I was devastated. I told him we needed to eat one of them and just risk getting the remaining two confiscated through airport security later that evening.

We went back to our hotel, where I went up to the hotel bar and asked them if they had plastic cutlery to give us. The bartender politely gave us some after some wait time. I returned back to Chris where he was sitting in the lobby, and he asked where the plates were. Silly me, I had forgotten we needed plates! So I went back to the bartender with my mango in one hand and the cutlery in another, and I asked him if we could borrow some plates. He looked at me from one hand to the next and asked me how I was planning to cut that mango. “With the plastic knife you gave me?” I said, smiling back at him. He smiled and laughed, shaking his head. “No, no no,” he replied. “I will cut the mango for you.” Someone who looked like the manager said they could not give me a real knife to cut, but they’d happily cut it up for us. I got so excited at this; this man was going to cut a mango I brought in from the outside just like that, no charge, no nothing! Most places would never do this for you. He cut it neatly, cubed the mangoes and peeled the skin back so professionally (“Of course he knows how to cut a mango; he’s Indian!” Chris exclaimed). He presented it to me and told me to enjoy, and I thanked him and brought them back to Chris.

As an American, I felt a strong need to tip him or give him some sort of compensation. He just did this service for me and expected absolutely nothing, but I felt compelled to do something, anything for him to show my gratitude. I know he would not accept a tip given local customs, so I thought about what else I could do.,. I could give him one of the two remaining mangoes! I took one of them after we finished eating and presented it to him. He laughed again. “Do you want me to cut another one for you?” He asked. No, no! I said to him. “This is for you to take home. Thank you for being so kind as to cut my mango for me.” Of course, he said it was unnecessary, that he was happy to cut it for me and could not accept my gift. “I have many mangoes at home,” he said. I insisted again and said he must take it, so he did. He thanked me profusely and I said goodbye to him.

I will always remember this man as the bartender who cut my mango and expected nothing from me. This completely made my day.