Days 333 to 344 –Thurs Oct 1 to Mon Oct 12 – Back in Ottawa

We start our apartment search on Day 338 at around 11am on Craigslist, find something interesting posted around noon, visit it at around 3:00 and have agreed to take it by 3:15. The whole process takes around 13 days less than expected.

When I tell my mom we've found something so quickly, she tells me I have a horseshoe stuck in my body. (This may explain how I set off metal detectors even when my pockets are emptied. )

The apartment has its pros and cons, like any place:

Pros:

• It has three bedrooms, a private backyard, free parking, a washer and dryer
  
• There's a library branch about 7 minutes away
  
• Pierre and I can still walk to work
  
• We're one minute away from the Rideau Canal.

Cons:

• There's no decent grocery store or gym within walking distance
  
• The living room is fugly.

The Big Con:

• We can't move in until December 1st

In spite of the Big Con, we know we can't turn it down.

Here are pictures of the apartment as it stands now:


The Dining Room/ Living Room :


The master bedroom:
The back yard:

Until then, we are doing a bit of informal couch surfing. For the first week and a half of October, we're graciously hosted by our friends Melanie and Al. At the same time as we adults all hang out together and get caught up on the latest news, Pierre and I also get to try our hand at being babysitters and playmates to their 4-year old daughter and 18-month old son. The kids are great and very patient with our sub-par snack-making abilities and our clumsy (but fairly quick) diaper changes. We read books, go for walks, colour in books, and get to know Madeline and the Wiggles.

leavin'

It's been awhile since the last post- we've been busy the past few weeks with lots of things, not least of which was packing up our apartment and sticking it into storage (we finished at 3:30AM on Friday, October 31st). Since moving out of our apartment we've been staying with friends, doing some final errands, and taking some time for visits with friends and family. We fly out on tonight (Sunday) at 7:00 pm and our trip has three legs: Ottawa to Toronto, Toronto to Seoul and Seoul to Bangkok (31 hours in total, including a 12 hour stopover in Seoul). We should be in Bangkok by 9:00 PM Thai time on Tuesday evening, most likely a wee bit jetlagged.

Our luggage:

Sustainable souveniring

Watched the "Where the hell is Matt (2008)" video again tonight on a whim. I first ran into it a few weeks ago when a friend passed the link onto me as possible inspiration for a travel project. Every time I watch it, it blows me away. Beautiful images, beautiful music, beautiful idea.

I love this kind of travel project. It strikes me as being sustainable souveniring - you come, you see, you leave with something special you've made. Sometimes it's polaroids of a garden gnome in front of international landmarks (like in Amélie) and other times it's videos of you dancing in 40-odd countries around the world with hundreds of people (like this Matt guy).

And, most importantly, it's more fun and accessible for other people - far easier than 2500 photos and/or a 3 hour slideshow.

Once, one of my best friends decided to do a travel project someone who couldn't join us on a two-week vacation. She wrote "we miss you" in her notebook. Then, for two weeks, she diligently went around to random people (shopkeepers, butchers, tour guides) asking them if they'd be willing to hold the note towards the camera and look sad while she took their photo. The album was a huge hit with her friend, and my memories of the people we met while taking those pictures are some of my favourites from that trip.

Pierre and I have talked about doing something, but haven't figured out what we'd like to do yet. Probably won't have time to think about it 'till we're on the plane...

Care and Feeding of Electric-tarians

From the start, Pierre and I have divvied up our to-do list for this trip. In general, we try to to be conscientious about not only taking on those things that we like doing. For example, I don't mind packing and sorting so I tend to do a lot of that and end up leaving any internet research (among other things) for Pierre to do.

I decided a few months ago that I'd volunteer to be in charge of figuring out what power converters we'd need for the trip. I took a few stabs at searching the internet for travel kits, but all the ones I found said "not suitable for electronics".

This was a problem - we've whittled our list of electric travel buddies down to the basics but they're all electronics: big camera, little camera, ipod. No matter where I searched (high, low), I couldn't seem to find one that could be used on electronics.

So, I asked Pierre to give me a hand, and it took him all of two minutes to figure it out. (Now that I think about it, it would have been a lot more efficient to assign the electric questions to the electrical engineer.)

Verdict: The plugs for electronics are already built to convert different power supplies. The text descriptions pasted to each black electronic plug explains this (though not in those exact words). All you need is an adapter to stick on the two built-for-Canada prongs to suit whatever sockets you meet. So the power portion of our luggage will consist of only three plugs and an adapter. Much less than I thought we'd be able to get away with.

Le Logo

We originally had a hard time deciding on a blog template because I found that all of the pre-made blogger templates felt a little too generic. However, since we don't have the time to design and code our own design, I finally decided that a visually catchy logo image was the way to go, and designed this.

It started with a rough sketch that I drew in a car while waiting for my friend as she paid for a tank of gas. I sat down later at home and put the image together in Visio. I went with Visio because I've been using it for years. Visio's actually a flowcharting software, and definitely not the first-choice software for graphic artists - it's probably the visual design equivalent of playing the saw. But I knew I could make a nice graphic quickly and not have to worry about any learning curve.

The tick marks that make up the border were part of my rough sketch, as were the dots and different fonts. There are 365 tick marks with one in a different colour to indicate the one day that we're not taking off. (No, I didn't count them one by one - I made groups of 10 and then just copied and pasted). Pierre suggested that the whole 365-ticks thing might be clearer if the border was made out of bundles of five (like in the top right-hand corner of the image). I thought that might make it a bit too busy, so I just put in a couple. (Which, incidentally, is slowly driving him crazy. By the time you read this, there will probably be just one bundle instead of two).

The heads showed up by accident when I was trying to find ways to decrease the height of the image without changing the width. They were too cute to pass up.

Templeton and the Wabi-Sabi mobile

Spent half of Sunday clearing out one of our rooms. Pierre's friend kindly lent us his van, a chevy, for the weekend. It's the most amazing vehicle - if I didn't know better I'd swear that it had some Undetectable Extension Charm on it - we only had to do two loads. On top of that, it's the ultimate wabi-sabi mobile - very charming.

Our storage place - Just Right Storage - is very cute. It definitely passes the cute test. Not only is it well organized, they've personalized the space so that it's easy for you to not only remember your locker number but to locate it: they've named each hallway after a street in Ottawa, and put up actual street signs to help you navigate.

Any local Ottawans who are sticklers for details would probably find some of the intersections a bit irksome ("Pshaw, like Blackburn and Chapel even intersect..."). But for the rest of the us, it's so much easier to remember 61 Rideau than "Section G, lockers 12" (or however it is that other places name their storage lockers.)

For the next year, our stuff will live in Templeton 54.

What's the plan?

- Thailand and Cambodia for a couple of months
- 6 or 7 months in China in Huizhou, where Pierre's brother lives
- a trip to Russia for a couple of months

That's as detailed as our trip plans are so far - we're planning to just figure it out as we go, and work in any side trips or waystations that seem interesting. We fly from Ottawa on November 2nd and land in Bangkok on the 4th.

In the meantime, we're getting tourist visas and shots (rabies, meningitis) and prescriptions (malaria) as needed. Packing up our apartment and wrapping up things at our jobs will take up most of our time until we get on the plane.

Packing sounds like a lot of work, but so far coordinating that has been far less overwhelming than last summer where we had a (very small) wedding to organize as well as the move from our apartments into a new home. Anything that doesn't involve having to find a dress and shoes is fine by me.

Year less a day...

...because that's what our collective agreements (fancy word for a contract) with the government allows us as a sabbatical: a one-time, year less a day leave without pay for personal reasons. Both of our bosses were not only open-minded to the idea, but willing to accommodate all of the inconvenience that a year-long absence brings with it, and we're very grateful to them for that. Without them, this trip wouldn't be possible.