Best.Smoothie.Ever

At La Luciola in Seminyak, Bali:

Spent the weekend in Seminyak, stayed in a villa at the very lovely mostly excellent Elysian, rained the first morning but all in all was an excellent family weekend. I know it's been a while, but not to worry, The Teeny Travelers haven't stopped - Mama's just gotten lazy with the blog. Might be a pipe dream to think that I'll be able to go back and recap a bunch of recent trips, but you never know. Will get organized again one of these days...

First 48 hours in Singapore

Yes, well, at least for now, we are ALL about the food, as we sort out the fun mundane things like power adapters, schools, apartments, doctor, nanny, cell phone service, etc etc.

Bella, after falling asleep in the van on the way to our residence apt (not too posh, but fantastic location), and then sleeping for another 3 hours:

Noodles with fried wontons for breakfast, from the place at the basement of our building:
The kids' bathroom (complete with itty bitty toilet and itty bitty urinal) at the ION mall:

May have seemed like an impulse buy to the ladies manning the shop, as we spent all of 5 minutes in the store before picking this up. The Nespresso machine that I've been lusting after for literally YEARS:

Beautiful macaroons, ensuring Bella's happiness here, at least in the treats department:
She got a chocolate ice cream cone out of me, too:
Rainbow-colored agar dessert thing:
Chicken nuggets on a stick, mmm:
Gyoza on a stick, for Mama:
Curry puff:
Not pictured: Our first night's dinner of Hainanese Chicken Rice. Mmmmmm.

Macaroons

Bella loves pink macaroons. She'll do ANYTHING for a pink macaroon. I had lunch at Comptoirs de France in Lido, and even though I knew they would have to ride around in my purse for the rest of the afternoon (hence their slightly beat-up appearance), I couldn't pass up these saturated colors - unusual for macaroons - they just made me happy.

Kids in Madrid: Baby Deli

As soon as we arrived in Madrid and started talking over weekend plans with my friend Gabi, I could tell she was absolutely dying to take Bella to this place. It's owned by Carolina Herrera's daughter, and it WAS sooper sooper cute. The food is all organic and pretty delicious, though fairly expensive and in small, kid-sized portions. And, of course, served up with the usual service-with-a-smile that Spain is SO well known for (Can you hear the sarcasm? Actually, the lady behind the counter all but chucked the tray and change at my head; but that was our first day in Madrid so I wasn't used to it yet).

Gabi and I hadn't seen each other in a year, so we were too busy getting caught up for me to take lots of pictures of the place, but it's basically a very VERY upscale version of our @play Cafe in Reston, minus the child minders (I guess you have to BYO). If you happen to be shopping in Salamanca anyway, it's a perfect stop for playtime and a bite.

Baby Deli - www.babydeliworld.com
Calle de Lagasca 54
28001 Madrid, Spain
+34 915 763 810

Fifth column

I decided to make frosting for a batch of mini cupcakes that have been sitting in the fridge, and thought lavender would be a nice change from our usual pink or light blue (for some reason I only have red and blue food coloring). I mixed the frosting (while Bella hid; she hates the sound of hairdryers, vacuum cleaners, or mixers, luckily all things that don't get a lot of use in my house) and plopped it on the muffins, then put Bella to work on sprinkle application. Our new nanny, Yaya Cely, came in about halfway, took one look at my cupcakes, and says, "Why are you making gray cupcakes?"

I guess it's funnier if you've met her.

Because one can only eat so much kebab

Clockwise from upper left: the "it looks TERRIBLE but tastes PERFECT" grass stew, according to the manager at Haji Baba in Shiraz; a first for Mik, not being able to finish his chelo kebab; me with my new favorite breakfast ever, lentil stew and naan; super yummy (REALLY!) lemon-flavored non-alcoholic beers; another view of me + the grass stew (which did turn out to be delicious); the adasi (sp?) lentil stew close up; and the 3rd or 4th of about 9 meat-and-rice (ie., kebab) meals we had in 3 full days in Iran.

Easter Brunch in Beijing

Once we got over an inauspicious start (carsickness in the taxi and having to barf into a pocket of our backpack), and then the horde of adults completely taking over the egg hunt (what did the Ritz Carlton expect, if they include spa treatments and free nights at the hotel among the "eggs"?), Easter Brunch was quite nice.

And is it just me, or is it not quite right to serve Stewed Rabbit in its own Gravy (we asked Bugs to hold up the sign) at a place where the kids were just petting a bunch of little bunny foofoos in the garden?

Danger danger danger

A photo of the nice young man who brought a Sausage McMuffin and Hash Browns to my door this morning. He wasn't much fazed; I'm sure my reaction ("Deng yixianr, I gotta go get my camera!!") was pretty common among foreigners living in Beijing receiving their McDonalds deliveries for the first time.

I looked at my timestamps - a sum total of 29 minutes elapsed from conception ("I wonder if Beijing McDonald's has Sausage McMuffins...") to fulfillment. And that included looking for the phone number, and getting my delivery profile established (YESS!!!), which took some time because I was trying to do it in Chinese, and, of course, was mispronouncing my own address. Time elapsed between phone order and delivery was, no joke, 8 minutes, and cost? 29 RMB = $3.95, including the 7 RMB delivery fee.

I'll say it again: daaaaaangerous.

We should've moved here in 2008

In the four years we've lived in Beijing, the city, and particularly our neighborhood (the "Central Business District," or CBD) has become infinitely more comfortable, more liveable, more convenient for expats. All within a quarter-mile radius, we now have: dozens of cafes and restaurants , all with wi-fi and english-speaking staff; clothing stores like Zara and Mango, which actually stock women's clothing larger than size 0 and size 2; a beautiful park (which I actually think has reached its zenith and is now in decline, thanks to plenty of pooping doggies); and multiple playground and indoor play area options for the kiddies. None of that existed through all of Bella's first year, when my closest option for getting out of the apartment was to dodge traffic and construction to get to the shopping mall half a mile down the road.

Other proof that we moved to Beijing a few years too early, from the point of view of convenience and availability of Western comfort items? IKEA now stocks Bamse bread, and oh my goodness hallelujah, plain Kalle's Kaviar instead of only the weird Dill flavored kind. Round that out with our usual 8 bricks of medium roast coffee, and I think it was the happiest I've ever left the Swedish blue and yellow box in a long time.

Bella and her noodles, 38 months

At Mark's Duck House at Seven Corners in suburban VA last week. She ate an entire (adult-sized) order.

Our Bella's Back!

[Thalpe & Galle, Sri Lanka] After a few worrying days when Bella kept saying strange things like, "I want to lie down for a bit," and "No I don't want to go swimming," this morning we were relieved to see her singing and dancing and running around in circles in the sand again. Nothing like seeing spectacular displays of wanton waste of excess energy to reassure you that your kid has finally kicked an upper respiratory infection.

It's our last full day here in Thalpe, on the southern coast of Sri Lanka. Unlike our other vacations, we haven't DONE a lot on this trip. We've eaten a lot of great sri lankan food, hung out in the pool and on the beach, and ventured a few times out to "town" for dinner or lunch, but for the most part there's hasn't been much reason to stray very far from our beachfront/poolfront room with the big veranda. The first few days when Bella was sick and sleeping a lot in the room, at least Mik and I could still swim and watch the ocean and even take turns running down to the beach. I can't imagine what we would have done had we been staying in a room on the 15th floor of some chain hotel resort.

Yesterday was really the only exception, when we spent the day with our friend Federico, who brought us to a nearby beach (where Mama promptly got spin-cycled trying to ride some badass surf) and then to his beautiful house and plantation in Matara, where we had an amazing lunch and relaxed on his Dutch colonial-style verandas and cooled off in the natural stone pool. So, technically, we still didn't DO a whole lot, we just went SOMEWHERE ELSE to do not-a-whole-lot.

Probably still a few great photos to take today and tomorrow, but above is a slide show of the highlights so far, as well as the links for the three small boutique hotels in which we stayed - all of them faaaahbulous in a LUXE guide kind of way, yet still supremely child-friendly.

The hotels:

The Wallawwa, 15 minutes from the airport, a 14-room hotel in lush tropical gardens. They made up a "princess bed" (really a hot pink mosquito net over the room's sofa) that Bella will probably talk about for the next 2 months.

Fort Printers Hotel, inside the Galle Fort. The staff here got Bella ice cream for breakfast when her tonsils were swollen, and upgraded us to the best room in the house when they saw that we had a baby with us. When they found out how much Bella loves flowers, especially the white frangipani blossoms, they would gather up a bunch every mealtime for her.

The Frangipani Tree, in the town of Thalpe, just outside Galle. Owned by the same family as Fort Printers.

We're learning

[Beijing, China] Don't know if she was playing "boat" on purpose because there were all these fish (albeit frozen) around, or if "Oh look, a boat!" is just what 3 year olds think when they see a styrofoam box.

This is certainly the most "useful" Chinese New Year gift we've gotten; something we may actually use, AND will last a while since it's frozen. Certainly it'll be the first year that we'll manage to get through the CNY holiday season without some sort of produce rotting in our kitchen. Our first year in China we had a wet market stench in our kitchen for months after 2 crates of grapes AND a bushel of pears liquified and fermented. Business colleagues regularly exchange these gifts over the holiday season; I just don't know why they have to be in such enormous quantities. There was one year Mik was given a whole case of super-spicy hot pot soup mix and a whole case of spicy beef jerky. All wrapped very nicely, of course, and after a while we figured out that we were supposed to spread the bounty - which I'm sure all the girls at the office from spicy-eating provinces were quite happy about.

With produce, though, you gotta think quick on your feet. Just last year, our 3rd (or was it our 4th? Yikes!) Chinese New Year in China, we had a couple of giant boxes of LEEKS that sat in our kitchen a good week or so. Every morning, we'd have our coffee in there, look at those boxes and say to each other, "I wonder how you're supposed to cook those..." Eventually we gave up and asked our nanny if she knew a use for them and COULD SHE PLEASE TAKE THEM AWAY.

No, none of that this year. Although a day or two did elapse while Mik momentarily forgot that he even HAD a case of oranges and a crate of apples sitting in the corner of his office, he did dispense with the usual roundtrip that such things usually take. Usually, they go to our apartment for a few days, during which it dawns on us that we could never eat so many grapes/pears/mushrooms/oranges on our own, so we give away a bunch to Bella's teachers and any friends we might run into. Eventually, though, we concede defeat and Mik brings the soggy remainder back to the office, just around the time when they're ready for the compost pile. No, this year he just turned right around and marched the whole lot to the receptionist for redistribution.

Maybe this is my opportunity to share the largesse and clear half of our kitchen cabinet space: lurking in there from Chinese New Years past, before we knew the joy of rapid regifting, are a 5-lb bag of millet (which did come in handy last Christmas as ballast for our tree); 2 giant boxes of dried mushrooms; 4 giant tins of mystery something in bright red tins; and the remaining half a case of the spicy hot pot soup mix. Though I guess it would be a bit of a challenge to find a way to "share" a bag of millet or a box of mushrooms - it's not like when you bring donuts to the office and just leave the box in the coffee room. No, those things will probably just end up staying in our closets at least until we leave China, or maybe even come with us to wherever we live next. In a few years we'll be in our kitchen in Connecticut, or Delhi, or Kandahar, staring at those huge boxes of dried mushrooms that are older than Bella, and we'll say to each other, "I wonder how you're supposed to cook those..."

Wheeeee

It was pretty late in the gingerbread house-decorating process when Lolo came over and suggested to Bella that her decorative elements were really REALLY good to eat too. Bella: "Mama, we're done now, okay?" suddenly seeing the unused piles of m&ms and marshmallows in a new light.

Dinnertime conversation

Speaking in lejon (lion) at a fancy restaurant.
Link to the same video, on Google Video.

Bella tries her hand at camouflage

Bella trying to blend into the scenery at the Ethiopian restaurant earlier today. We've said it a thousand times, and we'll say it again: we'll miss the great food, Chinese and international, when we leave Beijing. There aren't many places (outside Africa, duh) where you can find Ethiopian food other than DC and NYC (last we had was in Adams Morgan). Mmmmmm. Never mind that the injera (spongy pancake bread) tends to expand in your tummy and leaves you clutching your belly, incapacitated and gassy, for the rest of the day.

Link to Google Video if it doesn't embed properly below.

Afternoon snack

Two, no, three of my LEAST favorite things about eating out in China:

1. when they chop up the whole animal into little pieces, sending shards of bone everywhere, so every bite means potential death to your fillings

2. when they give you the head on the plate, just so it's clear to everyone involved that you are about to eat a formerly cute fluffy adorable animal that your daughter sings songs about; and

3. when the same dish had no head and much much more actual meat when I had it 3 days ago. Just some consistency, please, people, so I can decide whether I LOOOVE this place or will never set foot in here again.

Yahoo answers: swallowed shard of glass

No no, everyone calm down, it wasn't the baby. It was just me. I ordered a glass of wine, and only halfway through drinking it did I realize that there was a chip on the rim of the glass. I didn't remember seeing the chip when they set the glass down in front of me, and then had a delayed memory of a sharp "ding" at some point when the waiter was pouring the wine. I inspected my remaining half-glass closely, and when I didn't see any telltale glints of light, drank the rest anyway. I thought of Austin Powers: "I, too, like to live on the edge." Hopefully not the internal bleeding kind of edge, but still. I was sure I'd be fine.

That was four days ago, and for the past couple of days, I've had a sharp, singular point of pain in my throat. Rather than ask any of my M.D. friends, my brother in med school, or, hey, go see a G.P., I decided that I could resolve my swallowing glass issues by Googling. The second search result led me to something called Yahoo! Answers, where apparently you can ask questions and people with absolutely no experience or expertise in the subject matter can contribute their gut reactions and heartfelt feelings. I didn't even need to ask the question myself; someone else had asked it for me about a year ago:

Question: Think I've swallowed tiny chip from glass. Do I need to worry?

I'll summarize the answers: No less than 15 random people chiming in with various versions of "don't worry, you'll poop it out," a few of the "OH MY GOD MY UNCLE DIED FROM INTERNAL BLEEDING, HE DIDN'T SWALLOW GLASS ACTUALLY IT WAS AN AX YOU HAVE TO GO TO THE EMERGENCY ROOM NOOOOOOWWWWW!!" type, and then one person who says, "a small chip? not a shard? dont [sic] worry about it, if you have no pain or tenderness in your throat then it'll be fine in your tummy, and come out naturally tomorrow..."

Uh. Well it WAS a shard, and what if I DO have pain in my throat? And we don't have those German-style toilets with the inspecting platform, so I have NO idea what does or doesn't come out on any given day. On to search result #3. It actually turns out to be a shady site, which my antivirus software says is trying to launch a trojan horse, so I won't include the link. But I love the related search list:

- i have a very small shard of glass in my finger, do u think it will work its way out
- When they say to eat 6 small meals a day what is considered a small meal?
- I swallowed gum?
- Swallowed Plastic?
- about a desecant swallowed?
- I swallowed mothwash. Do I need to worry?
- How wil you know if you swallowed a bone?
- I accidentally swallowed a quarter, will I be OK?

and my favorite:
- I hit myself in the head kind of hard, will I be OK?

Noonoo

Bella and her noodles at Din Tai Fung. Mmmm.

A Picture that Explains Bella's Relationship with Noodles

The Perils of Bringing a Toddler to Brunch

Two reasons not to bring your toddler to Sunday champagne brunch:

1. chocolate fountain
2. the evil looks you get from other tables when your kid's toasting with orange juice in shot glasses