Fishing for Our Supper

Our week in Sri Lanka was incredibly relaxing and stress-free (after we got there).  Having done five family beach vacations, I've refined over the years what we need to have the best possible (i.e. least stressful) vacation, and this year I was able to get the mix of housing, food, and location just right.  Thankfully everyone loves swimming, so we were happy to spend the entire week doing the same thing every day.  

We would wake up, have a breakfast of massive amounts of fruit, pancakes, eggs, and bacon.  Then we would put on sunscreen, walk through the coconut grove beyond the pool, and onto the beach where we would swim.  Halfway through the morning, we'd reapply sunscreen, go back to swimming, and eventually end the morning in the pool.  Lunch was more fruit and toast.  After some quiet time to avoid the intense sun, we'd swim again in the late afternoon before having a delicious dinner of Sri Lankan curry.  

One morning Joseph and Eleanor had gotten their sunscreen on first and didn't want to wait for us, so they headed out to the beach.  A few minutes later we went out the gate to find Joseph and Eleanor hauling on a rope that was coming out of the surf.  A local Sri Lankan waved us over and told us to help pull the rope, so we all found our places and started hauling.  

After a few minutes, we realized that we were helping the local fishermen to pull in their catch for the day.  They would start out the morning by paddling their boat out past the surf line and laying a long net that could stretch as long as a kilometer.  Then they start pulling it in by hand.  

We were drafted at the beginning of their pulling and didn't realize exactly what we had signed up for.  It turns out that pulling a rope is a lot of hard work, and it's a lot of long hard work when you're pulling a rope that is attached to a kilometer-long fishing net.

At first I thought that we'd were just pulling the rope until the first buoy made it to the shore which is still a long time to pull a rope in the hot sun and increasingly hot sand.  But as we made it to the first buoy and started pulling in fishing net, I looked out to sea and realized how far out the buoys stretched.  

After awhile, it turned into a rhythm.  Walk the net until you reached the coil at the end, then go back to the surf, get a new spot, and walk it up to the pile again.  After 10-15 minutes, walk down the beach to a new spot and resume pulling.  

As I looked down the beach, I noticed another team of net pullers who also were hauling in their fish for the day.  But as we kept pulling and walking the rope down the beach, I realized that we were all pulling in the same net - they were just on the other end.  

Both teams continued to pull, and after almost an hour and half we met and began to haul the net with the fish out.  After all that pulling, we were excited to see what got hauled out of the sea.  When the net finally emerged, it was filled with about a thousand pounds of flopping, squirming fish.  The fishermen opened the bag up, pulled out a couple of live fish, and handed them to us as thanks for our help.

We walked back to the house with aching hands, burnt and abraded feet from the rough hot, sand, and a newfound appreciation for the hard work that the fishermen undertook every day.  We handed the (now dead) fish over to the cook for our dinner that night.  When we ate them deliciously seasoned and grilled, I can definitely say that I have never appreciated fish like we did that night.  

A Pivot in Travel Plans (or Lengths I Will Go for Mangoes)

I love tropical places.  They speak to my soul in a way that no place else does.  Whenever I go to them, I feel like I've found the place that I was meant to be.  They are always warm, they are always green, they have beaches that you can always swim in, and - most importantly - they have mangoes.  

This spring break is Sophia's last one with the family, so we decided to use one of our R&R tickets from the embassy to go on a tropical vacation together.  We'd really enjoyed our last two vacations in Thailand, so when I started my research last fall (I also really enjoy planning vacations), I started looking for places to stay in Thailand.  

However, when I started looking at the travel time to places that looked nice to stay, it started to get complicated.  Dushanbe does not have regular flights to anywhere, and when I started looking at days that we could get out of Dushanbe plus getting flights within Thailand (staying anywhere that had direct flights from Kazakhstan would be too crowded and too expensive), it was starting to look too complicated for a week-long vacation.  There would be ferries and overnight stays and three legs, and none of that looked relaxing at all.  Sure, we can take 24 hours to travel to the US each summer, but I had no desire to do that for a week-long vacation.  Pass.

Then I had the idea to look at flights to Sri Lanka.  We had gone with friends to Sri Lanka in 2022, and all the kids enjoyed it.  I had looked at going back while we were in Kazakhstan, but ran into complicated travel time issues and so we went to Thailand instead.  

When I looked at flights to Sri Lanka, it was a lot less complicated than Thailand.  Just fly to Dubai, have a 2 1/2 hour layover, and make it to Colombo by 4 in the afternoon.  That sounded a lot more like vacation to me.  Ten hours total travel time, including a layover, hardly even counts as traveling when you're traveling from Central Asia.

I was able to find a villa about an hour south of Colombo that had a pool, staff, and was beachfront at a beach with waves.  It turns out that the kids care very little for beautiful, crystal-clear water, white sands, or snorkeling.  They just want a beach where they can play in the waves for hours on end.  It looked great and was a good price, so I rented it.

Then the US started a war with Iran.  The Saturday before we were supposed to leave.  Usually world events don't affect my personal life that much (although there have been definite exceptions), but it really is obnoxious when they do.  And it's even more obnoxious when they get in between me and my long-awaited tropical vacation that is happening during mango season.  At a house that is non-refundable.  

My first thought was to try and move the vacation.  I looked at the rental schedule of the house and there was open time in mid-April, which would work.  We wouldn't lose money and we could still do the vacation.  And it would still be mango season.  However, the kids would have school (we had scheduled the house for the week when their online classes have spring break), and Brandon would have to get the time off.  Plus, we were all excited to go now, not in six weeks.

Then it occurred to me to see if we could get to Sri Lanka via another route.  The embassy had bought refundable tickets, and FlyDubai was already offering full refunds to anyone who wanted to cancel their tickets, so it would be possible to just get new tickets.  First I looked at going through Istanbul, as it would only be two (longer) legs, but all the flights from Dushanbe were already sold out.  Then I looked at going through Kazakstan, and it turned out that one of the twice-weekly flights from here to Almaty was on Thursday night and they had a flight going from Almaty to the Maldives on Friday morning. After that, getting to Colombo had several options.  To get back we could go through Bangkok to get back to Almaty and then return to Dushanbe.  It was longer, but we would still get to Sri Lanka and still have that amazing tropical location.  By Monday afternoon, the new tickets were bought.  They cost almost triple the cost of the original tickets, but we were still going to Sri Lanka.

At 6:15 on Thursday evening, our van picked us up and we began The Epic Trip to Sri Lanka.  It started when we took off from Dushanbe at 9 pm and landed in Almaty, Kazakhstan at 10:30 pm.  The last time we flew through Almaty, it was a complete disaster that involved spending a full day in a hotel room due to a missed flight and experiencing double midnight on February 29 (not a joke) in the airport in Astana instead of being on a flight to Bangkok.  We swore we'd never fly through that airport again, but life has a funny way to turning your words back on you.  

This time there was no double midnight, but we did get to spend six hours - from 10:30 PM until 4:30 AM - in the airport, which was a new experience for me.  Thankfully a new terminal had been built in the last two years and so instead of spending the night in the ninth circle of hell where there isn't even standing room, much less sitting or sleeping room, the kids each got a row of seats all to themselves to sleep on under the incessantly bright airport lights.  It was a whole new level of luxury.

Our next stop was Malé, the capital of the Maldives.  This layover was fifty percent longer, clocking in at nine and a half hours.  I knew that nobody wanted to spend that long in any airport, so I rented an apartment in the city where everyone could relax and get some sleep.  The airport in Malé is on a separate island from the capital city itself, but it is close so I figured it would be a pretty simple exercise to get ourselves there.  This is the part of me Brandon can't stand - the optimistic part that figures that everything should work out pretty easily just because I say so.

It all went well until we couldn't check our three fifty-pound suitcases back in.  We didn't have boarding passes for our final flight, as it was on Sri Lankan, and we weren't sure if our bags would make the connection.  So when we went through the baggage claim after passport control and saw our bags sitting by a sign that said "Colombo," we figured it would be safer to just re-check them ourselves.  But when we went to re-check them, we were told that actually, we weren't even supposed to have been allowed to leave the airport (I guess no day visitors allowed in the Maldives) and now we'd better just take the suitcases and come back later.

So all three suitcases got to come with us on the ferry.  But first we had to find the ferry.  And get money for the ferry.  The money was found, and after several trips up and down the airport, the ferry was eventually found, and we made it to the apartment building that contained the apartment we had rented.  After several trips up the wrong elevator (turns out that elevators in the Maldives are not build to hold 8 people plus suitcases) and then back down and then up the right elevator (in three separate trips), we finally did find the apartment where naps were very happily taken, movies were watched, and teeth were brushed.  There's nothing like long travel times to make you truly appreciate the utter pleasure that is brushing your teeth.  Next time you travel for 24+ hours, you'll know exactly what I mean.  

Then it was back to the airport with everything in reverse.  Including a search for the ferry, which it turns out does not leave from the place it drops you off at.  Thankfully the captain spotted us hurrying along the quay and waited for the enormous family of silly Americans to get on the ferry.  Usually they leave every fifteen minutes, but it's Ramadan and it was near sunset and there was a 45-minute pause in ferry service so that everyone could break their fast.  

Our bags were very happily dropped off (after a 20-minute pause in check-in service because, Ramadan), and we had an uneventful flight to Colombo where we landed at 10:45 - a mere 25 hours after taking off from Dushanbe.  Then it was only a thirty-minute wait in line for passports, a short ATM visit, a stop by the cell service kiosk for a SIM card, finding the driver, waiting at the curb for half an hour for him to get the car and make it back through traffic to get us, and a hair-raising hour-long ride down the highway and small rural roads at 1 in the morning by a driver who wanted to get home as soon as physically possible.  We finally pulled up to the villa at 1:15 AM, 31 hours after we left our house in Dushanbe.  And that was just to get to Colombo.

After a completely fabulous week of swimming, eating tropical fruit, swimming, eating tropical fruit, swimming, riding an elephant, eating tropical fruit, swimming, and eating amazing Sri Lankan food every night for dinner, we had to go home.  

So on Friday night after our last delicious dinner of chicken curry, daal, eggplant, rice, parathas, and papadam, our car picked us up.  The return trip to Colombo was certainly much less hair-raising as there was a lot more traffic, and included a twenty-minute wait to get through a toll booth.  But we made it in plenty of time to sit around in the airport wishing we were asleep while waiting for a 1 AM flight to Bangkok.  We landed in Bangkok around 6:30 and had a lightning-fast layover of only three and a half hours.  It was so quick that nobody even got to take a nap or had time to get bored.  

The flight from Bangkok back to Almaty was 7 1/2 hours - which was, incidentally, the total flight time (not including layovers) of both flights if we had been able to go through Dubai.  It ended with Elizabeth vomiting all of her food up as the plane descended.  

The flight from Almaty to Dushanbe was the shortest one of the whole trip - only one hour - but there weren't any flights from Almaty to Dushanbe on Saturday.  The next one wasn't until Sunday morning.  Not wanting to spend another night (and afternoon and evening) in the Almaty airport, I rented a couple of apartments within walking distance of the airport.  I got to enjoy the functionality of Kazakhstan again when I ordered Papa John's and Krispy Kreme and had them delivered to the apartment.  I really do miss delivery.  

This morning, after getting twelve hours of sleep, we boarded our final flight and made it home to Dushanbe by 1:15 - forty-one hours after we left the villa in Sri Lanka on Friday night.  

I had to laugh when considering the travel times that were involved just to get to Sri Lanka for a weeklong vacation.  The entire point of going to Sri Lanka was that it was convenient and easy to get to.  If I had had a crystal ball - or perhaps just had an inside source in the military - and known what was going to happen the week before our trip, I would have just gone to Thailand.  It would have been easier, and we ended up going there anyway.  Instead we got to have a best-of tour of all the tropical places we've been to since we've started taking tropical vacations (with the exception of Dubai, ironically).  

But I won't complain too much as we still got to go and have an absolutely fabulous and incredibly relaxing week with the kids.  And in the scheme of difficult things that are happening in the world right now, spending ridiculous amounts of time traveling to go and spend a week at the beach doesn't even rate as 'hard.'  It's just silly.  

However, I do hope that next time we go to Sri Lanka (I'm already planning for the next one), we can just get there the shortest way. 

How Do You Get Your Milk?

 We drink a lot of milk in our house.  Growing up, the options for beverages in my family were: milk on regular days and Kool-Aid on Sundays.  Water wasn't anything we drank with any kind of regularity, and I've passed that ethos on to our kids (although we lemonade instead of Kool-Aid on Sundays, and sometimes juice).  I remember going to college and having dinner at friends' houses and being completely mystified as to why they drank water at meals.  It was one of the strangest things I'd ever seen.

After I lived overseas, I missed a lot of things about the US.  I missed parking lots, Target, English speakers, bacon, and milk that came in gallon containers.  I didn't realized what a luxury it was to buy milk in such enormous quantities until it was no longer an option.  In Egypt, we had access to a commissary, so our milk came in half gallon paperboard jugs, complete with 1950 illustrations of how to store milk properly.

After Cairo, milk went seriously downhill.  In Azerbaijan, we were reduced to drinking UHT milk in 1-liter boxes, and our kitchen trash would often consist mostly of empty milk boxes.  Azerbaijan did not have any kind of local dairy industry, so the UHT milk was even more disgusting because it was powdered milk from New Zealand that had been reconstituted and then put through the UHT process.

When we moved to Dushanbe (the first time), my housekeeper found us a milk lady, Jumagool, who would bring fresh, unpasteurized milk by the house once a week.  I invested in a pasteurizer and had to cook, cool, and filter the milk myself every week, in addition to washing and sterilizing all the milk jugs.  That was when I really started missing American milk that came in gallons without any effort on my part.  

Not only was it a lot of work to pasteurize the milk, but the milk often wasn't even that good.  At least a quarter of the milk would taste off, and probably every few weeks, it would just be bad and we'd have to pour some of it out by the end of the week because it didn't keep in the refrigerator.

This continued for four years in Tashkent, and so when we discovered fresh, bagged, pasteurized milk in Astana, it was a whole new way of living.  Sure, it came in one-liter bags and we had to order it several times a week because it only stayed good for 4-5 days, but it actually tasted good (at the beginning of those 4-5 days) and I didn't have to do anything other than remember to order more milk (which didn't always happen on time).  

When we moved back to Dushanbe, I was shocked to discover the price of UHT milk had risen significantly, and we would be paying about $10 a gallon for our milk.  The children, however, had no desire to return to the days of off-tasting chunky milk, so I just resigned myself to spending their college tuition on milk.

The first week I sent my housekeeper out for grocery shopping, however, she didn't come back with UHT milk, but instead with fresh, unpasteurized milk.  So I pulled out the pasteurizer (which I had just questioned its value taking up space in the basement the week before) and figured that if the milk was gross, it was only one week of disgusting milk and we could go back to spending all of our money on boxed milk.

But, to everyone's complete shock and surprise, the milk was good.  And not only was it good, it stayed good for an entire week until we got more milk.  Sure, I had to pasteurize it, but at less than half the cost of boxed milk, it was a lot of money to save on groceries when you're buying 30 liters of milk a week.

So life was good.  We had access to fresh, tasty milk that came in 3-liter bottles (which is almost as good as gallons) that I didn't have to do anything to procure.  It was the best milk we'd had since the amazing German dairy that got flown in to the commissary when we were in Cairo.  The kids were happy.  I was happy.  Brandon was happy.

But my housekeeper was not.  The store that she bought the milk from occasionally would have less than the 10 jugs we bought each week.  Being a conscientious housekeeper, she felt that she needed to make sure that we had enough milk, so she would have to go back to the store the next day and bring us the missing milk before she started work for someone else in the neighborhood.  It was a lot of extra work for her.

So she started exploring other options.  First she found our original milk lady, Jumagool.  I mentioned that the milk had never been that good, so that was out.  Then she found a guy who delivered milk from another milk company, and we tried that for a week.  This time the milk came in 5-liter bottles, which are a lot less convenient to pour from than 3-liter bottles.  Also, they don't fit in the refrigerator very well.  And even worse, the milk was bad.  It started off tasting strange, bringing back memories of Jumagool's milk, and by the end of the week it was just bad.  The children started drinking a whole lot less milk, which only compounded the problem of the milk going bad.

I figured that I'd rather just have enough milk most of the time and deal with the weeks that we didn't have enough milk, and so told my housekeeper to just go back to buying milk at the original store we started at.  Better to have some good milk than too much bad milk that nobody wanted to drink anyway.  

The next week, she came to house with the good news: in a feat of amazing diligence, she had tracked down the milk company that sold the milk to the store she was buying the milk at.  They agreed to just deliver milk straight to our house once a week so that we could always get as much fresh milk as we needed.

The first time they showed up, my housekeeper had me come out to meet them and see how things went so I could understand.  I went outside my gate and discovered a milk tanker parked in front of my house.  One of the guys hopped out of the cab, pulled out 10 fresh, empty 3-liter bottles, opened up the tap at the back of the milk truck and filled up the bottles.  The other guy put on a carrying handle, capped the bottles, and then handed them over to me.  

As I was standing in the street watching this entire procedure, I couldn't help but laugh to myself.  This was one of the quintessentially Central Asian things that happens sometimes, something that you'd never, not in a hundred years, ever have happen to you in the US.  I needed a lot of milk, so the milk company just sent the truck over to my house, and voila, fresh milk for me and my family.  No need to mess with bottling plants, food inspection, handling requirements, or any of those silly things.  If you need milk, we've got a truck that has milk in it, and we can fill some bottles for you while the truck is parked in front of your house.  I think that this will remain one of the more bizarre ways that I've obtained food for my family ever.  But, that's how things get done in Central Asia.

And one day, in the less-distant future than it used to be, when I load up my grocery cart with gallons of pasteurized milk that was just waiting in a refrigerator case for me to come by and take as much as I wanted, I will remember that milk truck with two random Tajiks stopping by once a week for my own personal delivery.  And I'll laugh, but I definitely won't miss it.  However, it will make for a good story for many years to come.