A BROAD ABROAD
Get Ready….

By the time you read this, I will be relaxing on a white sand beach, margarita in hand, watching the twins splash in and out of Cancun’s turquoise seas.

Okay, that is optimistic. First, we have to find a house, activate our cell phones, buy a car, and nurse Benji through his 105.1 degree fever.

In a weak moment, I agreed to pack up the house and the kids and move to another country. The thought of embarking on this huge adventure was both exciting and daunting. Preparing to leave was an adventure in itself:

To Do List:
Get Jobs:
So here are our criteria. We needed a foreign school where I could teach high school English and drama and Steve could teach math and science. Additionally, we hoped to find jobs in a Spanish speaking country, where our kids could be in a bilingual program at our school. Oh, and a great beach would be nice, too.

So, I started calling schools, mostly in Mexico, using my very bad Spanish. I had learned to say, “Hello, I am an American teacher. I would like to teach at your school. What is the principal’s email?” I learned these phrases by typing then into Google Translate. So what I may have been saying, judging by the stunned silences on the other end of the line, was, “Hello. I am an American taxidermist. I would like anchovies at your House of Repute. Is your chief an email?”
After about ten of these calls with little success, I phoned the International American School of Cancun, where my conversation went as follows:

“Hello. I am an American teach---.” Immediately, the voice on the other end cut in, “One moment, I’ll connect you to the principal.”

In a split second, the phone connected to an American woman’s voice announcing her name. I was so flabbergasted at actually having the chance to speak to a human that I stopped breathing altogether and became instantly mute. By this time, I had forgotten her name, which she had announced a moment earlier. Regaining a modicum of composure, I stammered, “Hi. Um, I’m a teacher, and um, I wanted to talk to you about….what did you say your name was, again?” She repeated her name, which I promptly forgot again, and I continued my blathering until she, bless her heart, suggested that I send her an email with my information.

We were astonished and thrilled to hear that we got the job, even after my obvious inability to speak the English language. Instead of English, however, I will be teaching Shop.

2. Pack up the House:
In preparing our house for the renters, I made a startling discovery. I am a pack rat. I have saved many an important item from my childhood: a glass hippo paperweight, a Swedish flag/pen-in-one, a pink golf ball and a green-haired troll, to name a few. I am certain there will come a day when I will be asked to join Tiger on the 18th, but only if I can produce that pink ball, pronto. I am prepared for that day.

I have also been hoarding items for my twins, which I will foist upon them without the slightest provocation the day they turn 18. Their This Side Up T-shirts from the hospital, the first party-favor horn Benji was able to blow, and Marina’s personalized china tea set that was given to her as a baby gift. I’d like to let her use it, but she might break it.

The point being…I’ve got an awful lot of junk I just can’t part with. In clearing out the house, we made four piles: take to Mexico, store in our back room, throw away, or donate. Our “storage” room, about the size of a large closet, was to hold all of our non-furniture items that we wanted to keep for our return. Obviously, we needed to be discerning about what we kept. As I packed up, my husband, Steve, stood by with a whip and a steely gaze, disintegrating with a steely glance any unworthy items I might try to sneak into the “keep” pile. (The items in the above paragraph were secreted away into a box at 2 a.m., which I marked on the outside in black Sharpie “Silverware and Kitchen Utensils”. Herr Director need be none the wiser.

Steve’s “Reduce. Reduce. Reduce,” mantra permeated our meals in our final weeks. The challenge: to eat all of the food from our kitchen freezer and the chest freezer before our departure. Now, I had never really kept track of the “Best if defrosted by” recommendations, so some of the stuff in there looked like Frosty the Snowman with Bubonic Plague. Add to that the fact that during the Great Seattle Power Outage, we had removed our frozen meats to a friend’s freezer, but had left the veggies. Some bags broke open and refroze as mush. Steve was unmoved by my desperate pleas to buy fresh vegetables or order take-out. He is, after all, the kind of guy who loves a challenge, and thinks the sign at the “All You Can Eat” restaurant presents a worthy goal. So his frozen food quotas became his mission.

Further complicating our efforts, Steve threw out his back, and used the remaining vegetable medleys as ice-packs. You would think the repeated freezing and defrosting would let us off the “edible-quotient” hook. Absolutely not. Steve kept repeating, “Rubbery, but not bad with salt.”

3. Learn Spanish:
I never studied formally, but I had learned to speak passable “Gringo Spanish”, which consists of phrases such as , “Cerveza, por favor,” and the standards, “Where is the bathroom,” and “How much is this,” – to be said pointing at a ridiculously overpriced miniature turtle that bobs its head when wiggled.

But I wanted more. I hoped that with the help of a few language CDs, within a week or so, I should be speaking like a native. So I got a set of discs creatively titled, Learn in Your Car, and began doing just that. Within a few weeks, I did sound like a native….English speaker. I had begun repeating the English phrases rather than the Spanish ones, just to have a bit of success.
As I practiced, I would listen to the same section over and over, until I felt competent. By Disc Two, I had progressed to the past tense, and was zipping along. It was at this point that I lost Disc One and was unable to review the present tense, which I had already forgotten. Disheartened, I quit the discs only able to communicate in the past tense. I could say, “Where did I go to the bathroom?” and “When did the bus leave?” I hoped to clarify my Spanish by adding words indicating the present tense at the ends of my phrases. “Excuse me, I thought I was lost, immediately.”

And we’re off…

“Well, my bags are packed and I’m ready to go….” Darn, I can’t get that song out of my head. Our hard work paid off, and we headed out feeling prepared for our adventure. From my casa in Cancun, I can appreciate all that we did to get here. As prepared as we were, however, we could only imagine what lay ahead. Stay tuned for updates!