Ugly Americans

When a person goes off for Foreign Service training, their belongings (courtesy of the USG) are packed up and shipped off- their final destination a storage facility located in a place called 'Hagerstown'. During the packing/moving phase they also highly that you have the movers write the exact contents of the box ON THE BOX. Which our movers did. Kind of. I also took a picture of each box, just to be safe, but to be honest it was a horrible pack-out and move since I actually had movers walk out on me during day two (I should probably just make a separate post about those two days). Anyways, once you give the go ahead for the U.S. government to come on in and pack/ship your stuff, you are given a book that tells you everything you need to know about moving AND some very important information about accessing/ reviewing your stuff once it has been hauled off. 1. You only get one free admission to the Hagerstown storage facility. Any visit beyond the first is on your di

On Flag Day, when Mike was officially told what post we would be going to (Turkmenistan), we knew next to nothing about our future new home. Over time, we learned a few things about the place, through post reports and from stories told to us by people who had been there. Like the fact that the water is not potable, and you need a distiller to make it drinkable. Or that you need to go to the open air market early in the morning if you are buying meat there, because they have no refrigeration. They just butcher on site. Things like that. We were also told that internet access would not be the same. Significantly not the same, as in 'lucky to get Facebook'. So, understandably there are a couple of things that are going to change once we get 'over there' (aka Turkmenistan). Many of them involve technology- like the internet, cellphones, television, or gaming. You know, what most people take as a given here. The first thing we lose at the end of the month is our cell

It's a little more than three weeks until we arrive at our new home in Ashgabat, Turkmenistan. The time is going by faster than I expected, but most of things that need to be completed for pack out have been completed. Some things still have to wait- I can't get the health certificates for Nara or Elizabeth from Aphis until 10 days before our departure. Our car won't ship until later in the month. We'll be buying our consumables that ship to post this weekend, along with picking out what will be shipped from storage to post. And we will likely get our visas on arrival to our host country. Yesterday we sent out three boxes in advance to post, with items we will need on arrival. The post's HRO has kindly offered to receive our incoming boxes before our arrival and arrange for them to be placed in our new home, which is very kind of him. Our initial pile o' stuff to be sent did not completely fill the boxes. Seeing the opportunity to jam all three boxes to the gill