Ugly Americans

 There are (as I have mentioned before) both good and bad things about the FSLife. When it comes to the bad stuff, the best thing you can do for yourself, and in our case, the kids and I, is to be prepared for anything. Anything in this case includes a GO Bag, or Bugout Bag. If you are also in the FSLife, you are familiar with this item. You probably learned all about it in seminars for developing your own personal preparedness plan , at post or FSI. If you were somehow horribly unlucky and never got one of those seminars, there are a few links you should probably check out, like the page of information  FLO has put together on how to put your own plan together.   I have been going over my own bag, and I decided to share its contents here, so you can get an idea for what (if you're like me) you might want to put in your own bag. When we started this lovely adventure, the portion of the preparedness plan that covered Go Bags frankly sucked . A lot.** So, we took the basic inform

If you are like me, food is a big thing. It is one of those things every other expat I have come across talks about, to no end. I was going to write a more flowery, fancy-pants post on food but frankly my days as of late have been a bit busy with other stuff. So instead, I am going to daisy-chain a bunch of photos taken from the weekend and this week. They all loosely (like the one below this sentence) revolve around getting food here in Sarajevo.   Early morning market run! Sarajevo really has a good variety of fresh vegetables and fruit (and mushrooms!) in its markets. Does it make me sad that my chances of seeing plantains, malanga, or yucca while here are slim to none? A little. But we're not going to starve, and I can still get black beans by mail. Sadly, this is the only photo I took at the local market because I needed my hands free to pick out the fruits and veggies we were buying and storing in our handy-dandy cart. Maybe next visit for the photos. In addition to

I do not know how Lush managed to distill the essence of every agua de colonia every splashed on a little Hispanic kid during their childhood (fond childhood memory, ha!), but that is pretty much what the Dragon Egg bath bomb is.

Sometimes, no matter how much you research information or ask questions of people at post, you will still miss things that would be nice to know. It can be that the information you missed is relatively minor. For example, here in Sarajevo sweetened condensed milk is hard to almost impossible to find on the local economy. So, you can either pick it up in a neighboring country (by driving or flying), OR you can try to order it via pouch mail  and hope that the people working when your order arrives don't decide that your 6 cans of milk are a liquid in excess of 16 ounces and reject the package. Is it an inconvenience if you didn't know this before arriving? Yes. Is it going to impact your life every day? Unless you make sweets every day, probably not.    Regular water outages, however, are a different story. Imagine that the valley we live in is a sink full of water. At night, the water shuts off, and slowly but surely, starting with the homes on the mountain/hills, e