is it dead?

My goodness, it's been a few years. A few things have happened that have taken this away from being an expat blog. It's been 10 years since we last country-hopped - how settled have we become? We also became US citizens. Just in time to vote... but let's not talk about that. So, what is this blog now? Is it dead? [pokes it with a stick]

I think it's time to give it a few palpitations and see if there's life in her still. This year was BIG. We're revved up, we're making travel plans, and given the mass exodus off social media, I think we just might get back to updating this when we travel. Next up: our train trip from SF to Seattle in a sleeper car. 

And Then It Rained

We finally have some seasonal weather. That pouring rain that goes all night long and leaves everything thoroughly soaked has been and gone a couple of times. Our first significant rainfall since early spring. The succulents suddenly bloomed and now I'm hauling them close to the house for shelter from the cold dips in temperature we often get this high on the hillside in November and December. The lemons are ripening and the winter garden is emerging.

Caelen selecting a pumpkin for Halloween

Austen is in his third month of attending both a Waldorf forest preschool two days a week and a more traditional preschool the rest of the week. Caelen has a couple of different nannies who cover me every day while I work. He got into the groove very quickly. He's nearly finished potty training already and will turn two in December. Austen's preschool is letting Caelen enroll in January due to his signs of readiness (the usual age limit is 2 1/2). This will really thrill him. He wants to go with Austen each day so badly and Austen is so excited to have him join him. They won't be together at a school like this again for another three years.

Speaking of school we are registering Austen for Kindergarten for next fall. I am hoping for him to be accepted into a full time outdoor Waldorf program. They have the most magical venue and Austen is in love with the place after his tour. It doesn't hurt that most of his close friends are headed there too. So fingers crossed everyone! It's a lottery.

Joel is busy as always. It seems like he's been on a work trip nearly every week since the school year began. He's been home most weekends and for a few weekdays here and there but it's been pretty sparse. The boys are pretty used to being just with me and we have our routines down but there are always sad bedtime goodnights. I can't wait for the holiday season mostly because the travel ends for a little while.

My company is picking up lots of speed at last now that the kids are taken care of for a stretch each day. I took some time this year to really think about who I want to work with and what direction I want to take my portfolio. A maternity leave is both a curse—because it takes years to get caught up to your peers again— and a blessing—because you can change course and no one really notices the shift except you. I never had to cut loose my science & tech companies before I veered off to serve arty boutique companies. I'm happier and no one had to get ruffled about it. I post things I'm working on all the time if you are curious.

Everyone is still asking if we got the new Green Cards yet. No. Joel just checked the processing times and they are now processing Nov of 2016 and we are early Feb 2017 so I figure early Feb 2018 we should be good to go. But who knows. We're all itchy to travel and even taking about expatriation for a short stint if something comes up that looks good. One expats, always expats. Can we ever settle?

Apocalypse: Week One

It begins! #WomensMarch #sfo #Sfwomensmarch pic.twitter.com/Jh7mCWV74F

— Stacey (@singaporestacey) January 22, 2017

It was worse than we thought. Much, much worse. On January 21st, like millions of people around the world we took to the streets to walk in the Women's March. San Francisco was the last city to walk. The sun went down and the rain poured but we followed an energetic hopeful crowd into the night and were filled with awe. The power of many is a great elixir for the tired, the scared and the unheard. I tried out Facebook live and streamed in my friends and family, my sister-in-law who was visiting came with us. It was a powerful day. But it was just one day.

Executive order after executive order from the Tweeter-in-chief has assaulted the nation with more catastrophic humans rights issues than any of us have the bandwidth to fully comprehend. My god, do I freak out about my rights as a women or the continuing abuses on the front lines of the DAPL protests? Oh wait there's more. The Affordable Care Act is on the chopping block leaving millions to suffer. Climate change disappeared from the government website and gag orders were signed limiting the free speech of government scientists and now THE MUSLIM BAN IS REAL. I just can't process the horror of reading that Syrian refugees who went through the most rigorous vetting process imaginable and traveled all the way to the US were then held. Some deported on arrival but many just in limbo. The cruelty of this defies any logic. It's like a cat playing with its prey for amusement.

I wanted to run down to SFO and join in with my fellow horrified humans but I read a little blurb about who should and who shouldn't go to these airport protests. There in black and white the words "permanent residents and visa holders, do not put yourself in harm's way" and then I realized that's me. I'd be in harm's way. My status does make my opinions less safe. If protestors are arrested or even questioned at some point anyone with a mere Green Card as their anchor to this tumultuous land might have it stripped away. I have to find another way to help. I've signed stuff, I donate to the ACLU (and so can you here https://www.aclu.org/action) and now we wait for someone else to fight for us on this one.

Ahead of us, we have more peaceful marches and some opportunities to be in the numbers. I have more love for Canada right now than I know what to do with. I am so proud of the way these ridiculous issues are being dealt with at home - except for the pipeline seriously Canada get a grip on that one -- but I still care too much about California to walk away. This is our home now. We stay, we fight as long as we can.

One tiny American problem

Caelen was born in the US and he's never been off American soil. He has an American birth certificate, a Social Security Card, health insurance, and he's sporting a Bernie Sanders button on his Ergo carrier like a local. Like many American babies, he's the first generation born here to two Green Card holders. Caelen is also allowed to become a dual Canadian citizen so as soon as we had his birth certificate and Social Security number we applied for a Canadian citizenship and passport. There are no consular services here so Joel had to take the application into the Canadian Embassy office in San Francisco to have his application witnessed and checked for accuracy and then sent to Canada. Low and behold, those applications were returned citing a lack of photo ID. Photo ID is something hospitals make for each baby born in an institution but for a baby born at home or a birth centre, there is no ID card given. This wasn't a problem for this application when we did it for Austen in Singapore. We don't really want to have Caelen traveling on a US passport as it separates our family but it seemed like the only way to get his Canadian passport would be to get the American one first. We had to apply in person so the clerk at the passport office could see and photograph Caelen. A few weeks later THAT application was returned with a letter stating there isn't sufficient evidence that he was born in the United States. They rejected both his birth certificate and Social Security card stating that he needed additional evidence due to the fact that he was a non institutional birth. [headdesk] They sent a list of additional pieces of evidence needed to support his citizenship claim. On the list were two items that are actually illegal for me to obtain or mail to them. Armed with a stack of visa bills, receipts, letters from Joel's employer and my midwife, we've sent off a parcel to the Department of State. Now we wait.

To be continued...

Stacey and Joel: six years, three international moves and a baby | @offbeathome

Two years after it published I stumbled on an this article about us on Offbeat Home & Life. I'm tickled that they used it. And it's no surprise to our blog followers that we moved yet again in the past two years.
Stacey and Joel: six years, three international moves and a baby | @offbeathome

Flight 8501

It's been a horrific year for air travel in SE Asia. Each of these accidents has moved me deeply. I find it particularly chilling looking at the flight path for flight 8501 and thinking about how many times I was in a small plane flying over that very patch of water. It could have been me --my family--scattered like leaves in the water.

Our friends here in the US see the CNN images and regard it as just one of the many tragic events of the week. But not for our family. We're sifting through the articles and discussing the details as if part of us is still back in Singapore. We do this every time something happens in a place where we've lived. Our circle of caring is wider, our potential to be devastated is greater. I never thought of it this way before but it's true.

Expats collect experiences and friendships and lay down tiny roots that we never fully pull away when we leave again. I don't think I'll ever stop leaping to my feet when I see "Singapore" run across the screen on the evening news. Our thoughts are very much with the grieving families of the people lost on flight 8501.

How to pack & move in three days

So we flew home Sunday night and then we packed up and moved three days later. People keep asking us how we managed to pull it off. This is our fourth relocation and this is generally how it goes.

Day one: pre-pack anything that we need to have with us for immediate use. Pre-pack anything we need to have shipped directly to our temporary place for the first month or two. We can do this in one day. This time it took 7 hours.

Day two: packers arrive. This time we just had three guys and they packed up all our furniture, clothes, books etc in about four hours. We spent a few additional hours checking their labels and ensuring errors weren't made

Day three: they filled the truck. This has always been a half day activity for us because we always live in fairly small places though it was a bit longer this time because they had to also stop at our storage locker. Our cleaners arrived at noon and we'd done the walk-through by 2:30. 

And that's how we roll! We had phenomenal support from our neighbours and friends who brought us food so we could just power through and git 'er done. 

As we drove away we decided to take the PCH out of town. A nice way to say good-bye to this chapter and usher in the next. 

Expativersary: our first year in Santa Monica

A year ago we were dragging four heaping luggage carts, a cat carrier and an 8 week old baby through customs at LAX. We marveled at the cold breeze that caught us off guard when the glass doors rolled open and we spilled out out of the arrival doors.

There were many moments in the following weeks that left our mouths agape and eyes wide. So many little details of American life that we'd simply forgotten about. We were still expats. This is not our home country but we'd lived in California before. It was almost a feeling of repatriation but without that same level of let-down we'd have felt if we were shunted back to Vancouver. This was our first destination outside Canada and we felt our time here was cut too short the first time and we'd never lived more than a few months at a time in LA before. Southern California was largely a new place to us.

This re-entry to the US had another new feature. We were on an L1A visa with all the countesy this "premium" visa affords. There has been a sudden lack of hostility at the border. Being on a TN1 or an H1B visa was tumultuous in the past. We've been through many humiliating and terrifying encounters with border guards who were merely underpaid and working under the assumption that all immigrants are inherently evil.

We were able to rush through our Green Card paperwork and these cards should be arriving any day now. Our old drivers licences just needed renewal and my Social Security card was a simple as a 10 minute visit to the Social Security Office where it appears I was ushered to the front of the queue and processed with impossible precision and courtesy. My card arrived a couple of days later. Our lawyers filed for a work permit for me just after we arrived and that too tumbled out of an envelope in the mail in a very short amount of time. It would seem that which visa you get does matter. A lot.

We're looking for a house to buy once the Green Cards do show up. It will be our first home even though over the past 13 years we've looked at buying homes many times. The market has always been too unstable or our jobs too impermanent. It feels funny to be planning more than a year or two ahead and not seeing a new country again on the horizon.

To sum of this year I have to say it's been easy. Making friends and getting oriented in our seaside home has been fun. I have never tired of watching the sun set over the beach every night nor have I ever taken the fresh breeze for granted. I am in love with farm-to-table slow food restaurants we've visited and am so happy to be able to serve up local organic food again for my family.

Of the things we miss, it's our friends back in Singapore and the side trips we used to take we miss the most. We also miss the late night walks in the Botanic Gardens and spicy Peranakan cuisine. I'd love to go back soon for a visit and would welcome another stint of time in SE Asia though right at the moment this is exactly where I'd like to be. Cheers!

Grapevines in Santa Barbara

Wine tasting room in Santa Barbara

Picking Strawberries

The hashtag

I started a thing on twitter where I number my thoughts that I feel are related to reverse culture shock in our move from Singapore to LA. I'm up to 54 now and thought it would be fun to archive them here. It was particularly fun to read the first ones again.

Culture shock #54: smiling! When you smile as you pass someone on the street here they smile back. #reversecultureshock
— Stacey (@singaporestacey) September 2, 2013

53) I've been hit-on more in the past 24 hours than in my past three years in Singapore combined. #reversecultureshock
— Stacey (@singaporestacey) July 21, 2013

52) I had to watch Adventure Time to understand current pop culture references. #lumpies #reversecultureshock
— Stacey (@singaporestacey) July 21, 2013

The trouble with moving

Whenever we move customs has to clear our container at the border and our relocation company spends a lot of hours preparing the manifest and paperwork for this. During the last two moves this was a breeze. This time they pulled our shipment for secondary inspection at the port of Los Angeles and then updated our container's status to "undergoing extensive search." For what? I have no idea. The folks who packed it were the best moving team we've ever had and each and every detail was taken care of. There's not a single thing in there that could possible be a problem. We have to assume it's a random selection.

Looking for a place to stay

The reason this really sucks is our temporary housing check out date is Tuesday (yes, THIS Tuesday) and this place is overbooked so they can't extend us. Our new apartment is empty save Austen's new crib in his bedroom and our enormous fridge. So all of a sudden here we are, four adults, a baby and a cat looking for a place to stay for another week while we wait to move in. It's high season for this area and I have ONE day to somehow find a place with that kind of space and availability. Everyone pray to the apartment gods, or call your long lost cousin at US customs. We're going to need all the help we can get.

Homesickness or just memory appreciation?

Everyone I talk to about travel has a different take on homesickness and a different experience of it. When I was a kid my family moved 3,000 miles and I was a miserable homesick wreak for a year and took longer than that to really settle in. (Lesson learned: move with a 10 year old at your ow risk). Later on in my teens and 20s I moved around quite often within Canada and didn't really have an issue. The difference I think was moving on my terms and having the ability to own feelings of loneliness or nostalgia and put them somewhere more productive.

When we moved to California in 2007 I thought I'd be homesick because that was a big move. I only remember being homesick a couple of times in the first few weeks. After that I was just too distracted with our new challenges to be looking backwards. There were certainly a lot of hurdles in our first year there and it was also on our first expatriation. The learning curve was sometimes a painful one and I was at times frustrated but I wasn't really homesick.

When we did the move to Singapore we were felt like our time in California was cut short since we'd only had 2.5 years there. Our good-byes were tearful and we miss lots of things from that life. Every so often I get a pang when I see a photo of the Golden Gate Bridge or a familiar bottle of wine shows up at Cold Storage (at 4X the price). I'm convinced it's not really homesickness because it doesn't linger and I don't want to head back. It's just a moment of appreciation for a great adventure we had. So I'm re-branding this particular pang as "Memory Appreciation." The well adjusted sister to homesickness and a much better travel companion.

Care to join us?

A lot of our friends especially in the US have contacted us lately to ask us about a job opportunity in Singapore they are considering. They want to know what the job market is like and what they should ask for in a salary and if we like it here. I don't know about every job area, for instance I don't know anyone in oil and gas or mining here. What I do know is a bit about the finance, media and entertainment and software end of things. So this is my attempt to share some observations about the job market I've made over the past year while networking and chatting with expats in these fields.

As luck would have it

There is no such thing as luck. There is only adequate or inadequate preparation to cope with a statistical universe.

—Robert Heinlein

Do I believe in luck? I'm not so sure. I believe in chance and I think we all have chances given to us all the time. We make decisions, we turn down offers for perfectly good or completely the wrong reasons. Sometimes we take risks, sometimes we calculate those risks and other times we just jump.

I met my husband a very long time ago. We were 11. It was chance. As teenagers we had the opportunity to become friends, that was a calculated risk (with diary pages to prove it). When we were 21 we decided to turn that friendship into a romantic relationship which was a moment where we both just jumped. Ten years later we are both really happy about that jump.

When we first moved away from Canada we used to hear some people say "you guys are just lucky" in a dismissive tone that just made me bristle. Why did it bother me so much? Well, it's like saying to me "you don't deserve this, you just sat on your ass and the world was handed to you."

I think sometimes these back-handed comments are jealousy or insecurity. I also think sometimes they just come from ignorance. The romantic idea of moving abroad is pretty abstract to most people. They couldn't imagine just upping suddenly and expatriating. And that certainly would be unimaginable. I don't know any expats who just woke up one morning and left. Most of us planned for a while, some of us many years even planned our jobs and educations around making a move one day. With that kind of planning and focus it's hard not to end up on an adventure.                

Singapore Expats poll

Most of us really don't know how long we'll live here but just for fun, I made a poll. Do you think you're in for the long haul or just passing through?

Cheers and happy Friday!

How long do you think you will live in Singapore?
1 year or less 1-3 years 3-5 years More than 5 years (but not forever) Indefinitely Forever, no question about it
	Results

Expat basics: before you move to Singapore

I get a lot of messages from people about to move to Singapore who want to know what to do before they arrive. I've only done two international moves but I think we made most of our biggest mistakes the first time and felt pretty on top of things on round two. Here's a list of  things I think are really good to do before you set foot out of your home country. 

Banking Switch your home banking over to an international bank at least a few months before you leave. HSBC and Citibank are good options. Make sure you have some money successfully wired over before you arrive so your first trip to the bank is as smooth as possible. 

Insurance Take out a comprehensive expat health insurance policy from your home country. No, you are not allowed to use travel insurance. We've used David Cummings Insurance in Vancouver and they were great for getting us set up with a plan for our US immigration. We later did a policy with BUPA based in London.

To add an extra note for folks heading to Singapore: I haven't seen any Singaporean health plans that don't absolutely suck. Unless your new job comes with a full expat policy from your home country, assume the local policy they are going to offer you is going to be 80% useless. The crazy thing is, your company's HR department will think their plan is great. They also think it's normal for families to spend all of their retirement savings if someone gets hurt. It's a cultural difference and one that unfortunately can get you in some very serious financial trouble.


A warning to women: expat policies usually do not include maternity coverage. Maternity insurance is an additional policy with a 10 to 12 month waiting period before you can claim. Even the most expensive expat policies do not cover women who are already pregnant. Do not leave your home country pregnant or intend to get pregnant in the first half year of your relocation. I've met far too many trailing spouses in Singapore who ended up playing Russian roulette with their pregnancy. Just to throw a few numbers out there, a C-section could put you out $22,000 sg and a premie baby could be around $250,000 sg. 

Address change.  Moving away when you don't have a forwarding address is really complicated. In Canada you can do int'l mail forwarding but in the US you can't (I guess the US can't imagine anyone leaving?). I recommend getting a mail box at a private mail forwarding company. Set up the address change before you go. Once you arrive, have them bundle mail once a month and send it over. We used Bongo this time and they were awful so just avoid that one. 

The Expat Experience

A lot of people have asked me how the relocation is going so far. I'm surprised to find myself saying that it has been much easier than I thought it would be. In fact, it's been easier than our move to California. One factor is, we've done this before and had a lot of things organized long before we left our last home. Another factor is that Singapore is simply set up for people to arrive from all over the world and be up and running in a few days.

Going to the Ministry of Manpower to get an employment pass was about as complicated as ordering a coffee in Starbucks and took a total of 10 minutes. We found an expat cell phone plan complete with cheap long distance and shorter contracts. We haven't needed credit checks anywhere. The banks seem so un-phased by newcomers, they are willing to set up accounts with the idea that we'll establish a permanent address at a later date. In a country with such modern business infrastructure and so many rules I thought we were going to be fighting The Man at every turn. In reality this well oiled machine knew exactly what to do with us.

If you're wondering what kinds of things we miss, both Joel and I agree that we miss natural cool air though we're finding 24 degrees celsius at night is starting to feel chilly now. Joel misses the good road cycling in California but he's excited to start mountain biking here. We both miss organic local food and good wine. In all we're really happy with our new locale and have no regrets. Cheers!

An odd state of being

I find it very strange to be a non-resident Canadian visiting Canada. And what makes it more odd than other times we've been home is that we no longer reside in California and we have not arrived in Singapore so we have absolutely no address to speak of. Filling in forms and doing 'normal' things like banking is awkward when you don't live anywhere. We are forever agonizing over what box to check off or what address to put on things and eventually we've had people just bend rules for us after some pleading. Aside from just the general oddness of being gypsies with bank accounts we've had to re-enter the world being ex-pats requiring all kinds of weird and wonderful services. Looking forward to having a real address soon!