Merry Christmas

Our first Christmas together we celebrated in Toronto. We had enough time to buy a beaver - our classic tree top ever since, get back to Abu Dhabi and eat a sarmaluta, put the tree up and open a present before we headed to New York to celebrate New Year's Eve in Times Square. That was a good year! Always been a dream to spend the night between the years in our favorite city! But no drinking as somebody was working the next day.

The reindeer and the angel guarding our candles...
Guess who is the reindeer?

Last year we met in Paris, walked the streets full of lights and Christmas decorations, shopped a bit in Lafayette and returned to Abu Dhabi to eat a sarmaluta, put the tree up (with the beaver on top) and open a present before we headed to Munich to celebrate New Year's Eve over a snitzel. No drinking that night as somebody was working the next day at 7AM.

This year it was a totally different game. We put the tree up on December 6th (!!!), we started cooking on December 23rd and we had a great get-together with our friends on December 25th. Talking about taking it easy... The appetizers were great (Thank you K), the turkey was divine and even the 10 chocolate bars cake was nice... Pure decadence! But again no drinking, as somebody is pregnant! Do you notice a pattern here?

Merry Christmas to everyone!

The Van's Christmas Tree.
Notice the top beaver.
We got it in Canada on our first
Christmas together.

We hope to soon find out how two of the seven
dwarfs ended up in the Christmas Tree.
And where is Snow White?

The legendary turkey massaged and
baked with love by Mrs Van

20 weeks and why are we so silent recently

We are shyly coming back and seeing that the last post we wrote was almost a month ago...We burry our head in the vietnamese sand and try to blame it one the baby? Isn't this how it works? 

So here is what we have been doing recently:

GROWING... And I don't mean that as a metaphorical term. We are physically growing! Bellies and all... Both of us! 

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Inside Job

Hmm...

We are moving

Since we moved to Vietnam in April (Mr. Van) and in June (Mrs. Van) we had a pretty weird living situation. Our new residence is just on the beach, part of a 'resort'. The apartments had to be re-fitted for family use. Here was our arrangement for the past months:
On the left is apartment 204 - our living quarters that include a kitchen (ex-bathroom) and a room with a couch, table and TV.

On the right side, apartment 205 is our sleeping quarters with a bathroom and a room with a bed. My 'favorite' thing about living in Vietnam is having a bathroom like this. There is no designated area for shower. You can take a shower at the sink, in the middle of the bathroom or even while sitting on the toilet! Brilliant!

Of course to get from one apartment to the other you have to step into the communal hallway.

This is our dining table/desk. Gotta love the view...

And this is the barbaric romanian-belgian way of drying one's clothes when you do not have a dryer or a drying rack (not available for sale in Vietnam, for whoever is looking for a new business idea).

Now we are moving across the hall, to a bigger apartment that has a bathroom in the same living area as the kitchen and the living room. We are forever grateful! We will come up with some pictures after we sort out this situation:

We are expanding

We are happy (and very proud) to inform you that from now on, Mrs Van can be referred to as:

• Knocked up
• In trouble
• Waiting for the stork 
• In a delicate condition
• Human affordable housing
• Drinking for two
• Bun in the oven (or “Bundt” if it’s a girl)

What we are trying to say is that we are waiting for a MiniVan to join us.

We will probably start posting scanned unidentified shapes that we will claim to be the most adorable baby(probably we wont be able to identify it either) or bellies (belonging to both future parents) and cute drawings of baby ducks or baby kittens or baby dinosaurs. Please blame the hormones. All of us are!

10.X.10 - one year later

It's been a year since we went hand in hand together to St. Andrew's Church in Abu Dhabi to get married by our deaf priest who we liked very much and who coached us into married life and warned us of the possible troubles we could run into. That's where we found out that the biggest issues in a marriage arise from 3 very simple causes:

Communication - actually the lack of it...

Money - probably also the lack of $$$

The third one we can't remember… Ops…

We had 2 witnesses, our good friend V. and Mr. A. 

A lot has happened since…

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Steve Jobs

Steve Jobs, the CEO and co-founder of Apple died yesterday at only 56 years old. He was a visionary and I am sure that without his innovation, our digital life would be much more boring today. 
In this video you can watch his 2005 speech at Standford University Graduation. 
3 very simple and humbling life lessons for the new graduates.

SGN Airport Shopping

We have a pretty impressive number of airports that we've seen over the years. But this, ladies and gentlemen, is a new concept for us:

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Understand your spouse better

All women ask themselves at one point "what do men think" and then we spend hours over herbal tea trying to decode their behavior.
All men ask themselves "what do women want" and then they drink a beer and watch a game.
Watch this video and wonder less...
See more of Mark Gungor here

It's raining in Vietnam

We have been silent for a while. I only realized that when Mr Van asked me this morning if people were still reading our blog and I couldn't really say. I was idle in the blogosphere for 10 days. A disgrace I tell you! A disgrace!

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