Happy Anniversary To Me

9 years of marriage under my belt. Nine.

It kind of sucks that on my anniversary I would spend some time thinking about all the naysayers, all the people who, that long time ago, said my relationship wouldn't last. Nine years is solid, respectable. Nine years says I don't have to prove my self to anybody anymore. Then why do those people still take up some of my precious brain-space? It's not like I'm still wounded by that anymore, I don't feel wounded. It just crosses my mind.

In any event, I'm really excited about Year Ten.

My Guest Room Doesn't Accept Guests

Do you remember that my husband's youngest brother and his wife live with us? He moved here three years ago and we call him Chachoo. She followed a few months later - getting a visa to the US takes time - and we call her Dulhan. Well, at the same time we left to visit Pakistan in October, Dulhan also left the US to visit Pakistan - only she won't return until mid-January. Chachoo is still a student so he had to wait until winter break but he too left for Pakistan this week and returns with his wife in mid-January. So this means that for the first time in three years, save for a few days here and there when they travel, only my husband, myself and our kid will be living in our house for the next six weeks. It's like normal Americana 'round these parts, folks!

I seriously don't know what to do with myself.
(Except to walk around my house without pants on, of course.)

I mean, hypothetically speaking, if you took a shower and then realized that the pants you wanted to wear were still in the dryer, you'd have to dress up in other pants just to go downstairs and get the pants you want just because you don't want these people seeing you without pants. It can be a hypothetical hassle. But if no one lives in your basement bedroom, you could just go downstairs wrapped in your towel to get your pants, no useless changing in and out of sub-par pants. Not that this happens to me.

In all seriousness, we really miss them. I have tried to explain how I feel about out living situation and usually people don't understand when I say that I want them to live with us forever, but I do. It is so nice having them around. Part of that is just due to personality, we really like them and get along really well and they seem to like us too. I can think of lots of members of my husband's family where this kind of living arrangement wouldn't be quite so easy or comfortable, but with these two it really just is easy and comfortable. Another part is having kids, it's so much easier to have other family around when you have a young kid.

I definitely want them to stay, but that will depend on where Chachoo finds a job after his graduation this year. We pray that he'll find something close by. And a lot of our own short-term future plans depend on that too, since if they stay we need to find a bigger house in the next 2 years. It's the size of our house that can be a little frustrating, not having them living here with us. If I had a huge house and our bedroom was on the same level as the washing machine, I could get my pants any which way I wanted to. Hypothetically speaking.

Karachi in October

Prior to this most recent trip, I had only ever visited Pakistan in December, with trips sometimes leaking into January. December/January weather in south Pakistan is delightful. During the days on our prior three trips, it was not hot at all and maybe even cool-ish. During the nights, my brother in law once looked shocked that I would head out to dinner without a jacket in the "freezing" 65 degree Fahrenheit weather. Those are basically ideal temperatures for me to be in, regardless of where in the world I am.

I was nervous that traveling two months before our usual window would mean it would be unbearably hot for me, and got conflicting reports about what to expect. A friend said October was one of the worst months for "loo" - some kind of sweltering heatwave. My sister-in-law traveled the year beforehand in October and said it had been fine. We were pigeonholed into our travel dates with no wiggle room at all, so I would just have to deal with whatever it was.

And it was hot. Not unbearably so, I guess, since I obviously bore it. But for me, for mid-sixties loving me, it was was whatever rests just underneath bearable. Barely bearable. I know other wives of Pakistanis who've traveled there in summer months but I think I just could not cope.

It was in the high nineties during the days, and maybe the eighties during the evenings. M's family house in Karachi has no air conditioning at all, not even any "room coolers" which sound like fans connected to water misters that people drag from room to room but take less electricity than a/c units. His house doesn't even have any ventilation, it's a concrete box and while there used to be high-up windows that would help with air circulation, they were cemented shut since I was there last to reduce dust buildup inside. Every room has a ceiling fan and our room also had another standing fan. Sometimes when we were eating lunch or dinner they would turn the ceiling fan off so our food didn't cool down and instantly beads of sweat would be falling into my plate.

The electricity would also go out a lot more than it used to. They have a generator, but it had fallen into disrepair since we'd been there last. So when the electricity went out, my MIL or BIL or husband would have to spend a long time trying and re-trying to get the generator to turn over and start. Sometimes this would take ten minutes and sometimes it would take an hour. It didn't matter how long it took because every morning at 7am when the electricity went out and our ceiling fan stopped rotating, I was awake immediately and could not sleep anymore. I needed constant, direct air circulation from the two different fans in our room to be able to sleep in the 80+ degree weather. At our house in the US, we have the air conditioning set to 74 in the summer and 68 in the winter, so 80+ or 90 degree weather was too hot for me to sleep in. I know people all over the world sleep well in much, much hotter temperatures and it's not a passing of judgement, it's just what I'm used to.

My son also had a hard time, especially in the beginning. He complained about how hot it was and I was concerned that he might be miserable the whole time. He adapted much quicker than I did, though, and after two or three days didn't mention the heat again until maybe the last day. We had a couple of days when we were out in the hottest part of the hottest days we were there, and we did all we could to keep him cool. We forced water into him and kept his hair and shirt wet, pouring bottled water over his head. All the other kids looked fine and he was drenched and red-faced but still happily playing cricket and running around like a crazy person.

The Fourth Time's The Charm

(Isn't that what they say?)

Hey! Guess where I was in October? PAKISTAN!

Months ago, I started talking to Mian (my Pakistani-born husband) about wanting to visit Pakistan this year. It had been three years since our last trip in 2009. We'd planned to go in December 2010 but towards the end of last year my husband felt that Karachi's security situation was bad enough for us to abandon any travel plans there. This year, I really felt like we just needed to go.

I had a lot of reasons for that. First, traveling with kids is hard and in 2013, it's about to get a lot harder for us. Traveling before the end of 2012 was an ideal situation. We could not go in 2013 so skipping a trip in 2012 would mean that we wouldn't get back to Karachi until 2014 - meaning up to five years since our last trip. Second, I've always heard the language-learning window is around age four. Our kid is six. But I still think it's helpful to cram as much language in their little heads as possible as young as possible. Even with 3-4 full-time adult Urdu speakers in our house, my son's Urdu comprehension was still kind of spotty and he often produced English answers. Not a failure by any means but not anywhere near where I'd hoped he would be. I felt like even a few weeks at this age would be very beneficial for his language development. Third, we, thank God, had the resources available to go at this point. Not something we can always count on. Lastly, the kid is in Kindergarten and that's about the last year we can expect his school teachers to look the other way while we pull him out of school for a frowned-upon school year recreational trip. (Traveling over the December holidays wasn't an option for us.)

My husband, though, was being difficult about the whole situation and it ended up me kind of pushing him into thinking about the trip. He's kind of old-man like that sometimes. He just wants to stay in his garage and leaving the house for anything can be a struggle, be it a trip to a dinner at a friend's house or a trip to his childhood home. One of his issues was that our proposed trip was incredibly short - only two weeks. He also wasn't entirely convinced the security situation was much better. We went back and forth about it for a long time but eventually I got him on board. Partly he got on board through istikhara but mostly he changed his mind when I found really crazyily extra-cheap tickets. Like, "double-take" cheap. Like, "no one I know has ever traveled to Pakistan for under a thousand dollars" cheap. Like, "buy them right now in case it's an internet glitch" cheap. When I told him I had three round-trip tickets on Turkish airlines for a trip in October that coincided with his brother's trip (the bro that lives in Saudi Arabia who we really wanted to visit with him and his family) for only $925/person, he suddenly changed his mind.

But, then another small glitch. M is a US citizen now. He can't travel to Pakistan without a visa, a NICOP or a POC, and he had none of those. We couldn't figure out the NICOP/POC things, so we thought a visa would be the best choice. By the time I found those tickets, we had less that 5 weeks before departure and the Pakistani embassy in DC said the time for a visa would take 4-6 weeks. Uh-oh. We quickly prepared and sent of a visa application, not knowing if it would be rejected because he was instead supposed to be applying for one of the other things. (On one site it said that one of them is required for expat Pakistanis - still not sure about those things...)

Another glitch - kid's passports are only good for five years and though we hadn't realized it until checking on his visa validity, our kid's passport had expired! So we had to prepare and send off a rush application for a new passport for him. Assuming that got back in time (which seemed likely), and my husband's Pakistani visit visa was approved and returned in time (which was at the very least possible) we would be going to Pakistan.

(Let's just pause here to realize that neither my son or my husband had the travel documents ready to travel to Pakistan. Not the Pakistani-born one, not the Pakistani-heritage one. But me? 100% caucasian American no-Pakistani-affiliation-except-tangential had a valid visa and passport and could go there at the drop of a hat.)

When ticket shopping, we saw that the cheap option flew through Istanbul. M suddenly got the idea that wanted to visit Istanbul. "What's the difference between visiting family for 14 days and visiting them for 11 days," he said, "especially if it means you get to see Istanbul?"

So somehow, someway, everything worked out. We got the visa with two weeks to spare, the passport as well. (Turkish visas can be obtained by US citizens upon arrival in Istanbul.) We spent 3.5 days in Istanbul and 11 days in Pakistan. Our kid's first non-Pakistan international travel, my fourth trip to Pakistan, and the kid's third.

Details to come.

The kid spots and points to a Pakistani flag right smack dab in the middle of all the Turkish flags on display in Istanbul's grand bazaar.

 

Presenting Pakistan to Five Year Olds

My son's preschool teacher has traveled recreationally to 30 countries. She lived in (what was it? Taiwan, maybe?) for two years, teaching English to kids. A big part of her lesson plans include teaching the kids about the different parts of the world. The celebrated The Day of The Dead, Mardi Gras, Nowruz, and countless others I can't even remember.

She asked M if he would come and talk about Pakistan to our son's class of 12 five year olds. She did that with another kid whose father is from Chile. We did that once before, last year, for a different group of kids. He read a kid's book about Pakistan, told them a few words in Urdu, and they tried on a mirror-decorated kid's vest. They couldn't try on the hat as there'd been a recent lice outbreak.

The kids are older this year, and can probably handle a little more information, so I'm soliciting suggestions. M thinks he should print out pictures of, as he said "markets, buses, farmers, some new buildings, people with folk dresses." I think he should write out all the kid's names in Urdu on pretty paper. LuckyFatima suggested we play a little music and have the kids do some bhangra, which I thought sounded fantastic. I can't think of any foodstuff we could share - it would have to be pre-packaged and contain no nuts. I thought of kulfi but that would be expensive and very heavy for the kids...

(I am trying to be sensitive to our kid's feeling about this. I'm not going to force him to monkey around as a prop and say things in Urdu or dress him up, but I'll ask him how he would like to participate, if at all.)

Any other suggestions?

He Meant Move, Not Cow Poop

It took almost ten years of being in an intercultural relationship, but I've finally found the funniest example of the V/W Distinction problem. My Pakistani-born husband speaks English wonderfully, but occasionally his native Urdu trained tongue slips and he pronounces certain english words the same way he did 9+ years ago when I met him. Usually this happens when he's been speaking a lot of Urdu, such as this weekend after skype-ing with his brother and mother in Saudi Arabia.

I've tried to describe the V/W distinction to people before, usually I use the west/vest illustration. When I met my husband, he couldn't pronounce the two words differently. He even once said he couldn't really hear the difference. Now he does pronounce and hear the difference, it just took practice. Just like the difference between my dental and retroflex t sounds when trying to speak Urdu. I couldn't say or really hear the difference and still often require correction from my family and my ever-patient Urdu teacher, LuckyFatima. (She even makes house calls!)

From now on, though, when discussing the v/w distinction, I'll probably reference the conversation my husband and I had this weekend. He was painting some cabinets in the garage and wanted help moving them around without messing up the paint job, so he came inside to ask for my help. But what he actually said is "I'll need your help to manure the cabinets."

See, folks? The difference between v and w is important. You might want to say maneuver, but you'll get a ton of crap from your wife instead!

Valentines Through the Years

I love Valentine's Day. When I was a kid I always had at least one Valentine. My mother. Even if it was sacharine sweet, I knew when I woke up Valentine's morning and went downstairs, there'd be a card and a small, heart-shaped box of candy waiting for me. Even as a teenager where I yearned for ANY OTHER Valentine, preferably of the opposite sex, I still appreciated that box of chocolates.

We celebrate Valentine's Day in my own house too. My son's daycare has always had the kids exchange valentine's cards. This year we did this one from Family Fun magazine:

I also made a handmade card for my son. Well, I wrote the inside, Mian drew the picture. It's me holding a heart-shaped balloon with my son's head in it. Festive! I also got him a Phineas & Ferb Valentine's day book to read at bedtime and this model of the human body (Valentine's heart - like a Real heart - get it?! Valentine's Day, a fun time to squeeze in some biology lessons!)

The husband never celebrated Valentine's Day in Pakistan ("People do, I didn't," he said.) The first Valentine's day gift he gave me was a bouquet of roses, and Easter chocolate (ha ha, funny story about that here), and a CD of some music I'd heard and liked at his friend's house once. Then we to his grad school advisor's house for a dinner he'd thrown for a graduating student - the first time I'd ever meet his (also Pakistani) advisor. Lucky for me he was also married to a non-Pakistani woman.

I never had to tell him to celebrate Valentine's day. I think he was just so excited to have a significant other, he really wanted to buy flowers and candy. It hasn't always been that way since though. There have been years we said jointly that we wouldn't celebrate, and we've never ever gone out the actual evening of Valentine's Day. That would be madness. But we usually do try to buy each other some little thing, and have a nice dinner the weekend before or after.

This year, though, he asked "We're not exchanging gifts, right?" and I may have irrationally yelled at him. Okay, I yelled at him. He is making me write that. In my defense I'd been asked that "We're not exchanging gifts for....." question about three other events in the past 18 months, so I was (apparently) starting to build up a little resentment. We're all fine now. We went to a dinner paid for from gift cards from my grandparents and I hear some gift is coming my way, though I have no ideas for gifts for M, and Valentine's Day is only five minutes away. I better get to bed quick so I can stall and have the work day tomorrow to think of something! Otherwise maybe I'm the one who will be irrationally yelled at next.

(Oh, whatever, it wasn't that bad.)

(Yes it was, he said.)

Happy Valentine's Day everyone!