Wednesday, March 12, 2014

Emergency Contact Information Form in English & Mandarin Chinese

Jamie's travel schedule, activities at my girls' schools, volunteer commitments, my birthday and a Girl Scout meeting converged at the same time.  Blogging has taken a backseat for the moment.  

My Brownie Girl Scouts are earning their First Aid badge this year.  One of our goals was to put together an emergency contact sheet that had both English and Mandarin.  One of the challenges expats face is what to do in an emergency, how to communicate that in another language, and how to equip people in our home to handle an emergency even if we don't speak the same language.


LBean learning more about first aid
during a recent Girl Scout meeting.
I'd like to share our emergency contact sheet that includes both English and Chinese.  We plan to post ours on our refrigerator and hope we never need to use it!  I had a native Mandarin speaker translate it for me, but I can't tell you if I copied and pasted it correctly.  I apologize for any errors that you might find!  

If the link doesn't work properly and you'd like a copy of the document, please let me know and I will email it to you.  I'd really like to make this available to anyone that is interested.  It is a docx format, so it should be possible to edit it.

Click here: Emergency Contact Sheet in English & Mandarin Chinese

The document doesn't appear to open correctly in Google preview, but I think it will download properly.


Sunday, March 2, 2014

Coffee & Friendship: Indonesia Days 2-4

Read about our first few days in Indonesia here.

Amanda didn’t have to apply any pressure to get us to agree to visit Borabudur, a 9th century Buddhist temple, the next day.  (Feel free to insert any Lord of the Rings references here.  We did…Borabudur, kinda like Mordor)  Borabudur is a UNESCO world heritage sight and easy to drive to in a few hours.  We borrowed their hiking baby carrier, strapped ChinaBean in, covered up our knees and shoulders (required to enter and show reverence for the sight), and began our ascent to the top.  It was a hot trek and we had four girls under the age of 7 with us, so we might have missed a bit of what our guide was trying to teach us.  Never-the-less it was impressive and I’m really glad we went.  We celebrated our descent with our traditional ice cream reward.  We really have eaten ice cream at every major historical sight we’ve visited.

On our way.


There's one in every crowd.



ChinaBean had the best ride.


Listening to our guide and enjoying a rest in the shade.





Going up, up, up.



EBean
LBean
Our friend's daughter, an honorary !Bean



Hot, but smiling.
EBean made a friend and led us down.  I think she might have been running towards the promise of ice cream.

Refreshment at last.


We found a place for lunch, but more importantly a place for the girls to run off a bit of energy.  In fact, now that I think of it, how did they have any energy left?




Dinner was street vendor food.  Yippee!  More peanut sauce, more chicken (this time on a stick, and veggies and rice with peanut sauce.  Amanda said the veggie/rice/peanut sauce was an Indonesian grown-up’s version of a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.  



Kids in bed and time for some adult conversation.
Our last full day was low-key a bit more local.  Laundry for us, kids running around, a quick trip to a grocery store for me to buy peanut sauce packets (what else?), swimming at a local pool and pizza for dinner.  We ended with a family movie night.  It took a bit of convincing for LBean, but the movie Mary Poppins was chosen.  She was a bit concerned it might be scary, but by the end she was marching and singing along.  It left such an impression that she asked for the movie for Christmas.  It’s a favorite now.

Time for a few last pictures.

On the way back to the airport.


The next morning it was time to load up the luggage and head back to the airport to finish up our time in Singapore.  We are so grateful to Jonathan & Amanda for opening up their home to us, even though we bring along a 5-person family amount of craziness.  Thank you for turning over your bedroom to us, showing us your favorite things and what matters to you, and for sharing your life with us.  My favorite moments were chatting with you as we stop at your kitchen sink washing dishes.  Until next time…