Things I am looking forward to:
• Seeing my family and friends again. It can be tough living so far away from all our family and friends, I can’t wait to see them all again. I’m particularly looking forward to catching up on all the gossip with my friends, seeing my grandparents again and letting my mum cook me dinner (hint, hint mum! I’m joking, of course!). Obviously seeing my family and friends again is at the top of my list of things I’m looking forward to, but it very nearly was knocked off the top position by...
• Seeing my cat again. Yay! I get to see Miffy again soon! I know she will be so happy to see me too!
Yay! Another excuse to post a picture of Miffy!
• Hot showers, every single day. Heaven!• Reuniting with all my clothes and shoes. It feels like I’ve been wearing the same old clothes, day-in, day-out for the past 15 months. Every day is a variation on which of the 5 pairs of long pants will I wear to work, which of the 3 pairs of shorts will I wear on the weekend combined with which of the 5 t-shirts I own. It’s going to be a sensory overload when I get all my old clothes out of storage and have bags and bags of clothes and shoes to choose from. I can’t wait!
• Reuniting with my hair straightener. As I’ve mentioned on this blog before, my hair is pretty much always an unmanageable mess. Straightening it is one of the few ways in which I can control it. My hair will be in for a nasty shock once I start brandishing my hair straightener again! Similarly, I have bags of other cosmetic items to re-unite with, like all my bottles of nail polish – currently being lovingly preserved in my parents’ fridge. I haven’t had painted nails for 15 months! That is mind-blowing for me, especially seeing as I used to paint my toenails a different colour every week!
• Driving my car. Apart from a couple of wobbly attempts at driving the motorbike, I haven’t driven anything bigger than my bicycle for a while now. It will be great to get behind the wheel again and drive at 100km/hr down the highway. (Shock! Horror! Such speeds are unimaginable on the roads in Vietnam! – except for the resident hoons that is.)
• Going to the beach. It seems particularly unfair that we have spent the last year or so living in a tropical environment, near the coastline, and there is not a proper beach anywhere nearby. The ‘beaches’ in the Mekong Delta are not what I’d consider beaches at all – they are mud flats and I have absolutely no desire to go swimming in any water that is cappuccino brown. I cannot wait to go back to some of Australia’s picture-perfect sandy beaches with sparkling clear blue water, sigh!
• Earning money. Volunteering is a great experience but I am looking forward to having some cash again! Once I find a job that is...
Once again, I have to list food and drink separately after the jump.
I love food but, although I’m no culinary champion, I am a bit embarrassed to be looking forward to food like sandwiches and meat pies!
• Sandwiches and meat pies. Not at all classy but I’ve spent the past 6 months (at least!) craving salad sandwiches or a beef pie with potato and mushy peas.
• Cooking. We don’t do much cooking here in Soc Trang, not when eating out is so cheap and tasty. Our culinary creations are limited to tuna, tomato and mayo on a baguette or pasta with bottled pasta sauce. It will be good to crack open my cookbooks again and start making the dishes I love, like Indian curries, eggplant lasagne, sweet potato fries, flourless orange cake....I could go on and on!
• Pub meals. Another embarrassing addition to this list but I can’t help it! I really, really crave a good old pub meal. Preferably a chicken schnitzel with some salad and chips.
• Avocados. To go on my salad sandwiches and to go in my...
• Salads.
• Non-bloating beer. Coronas, Sols, Pure Blondes...all those ‘girly’ beers.
• Stone fruit in summer time. I’ll be honest, I struggled with missing out on cherries at Christmas time. Not to mention apricots, nectarines, peaches...
• Chocolate. I cannot wait to be able to walk into a store and have a huge variety of chocolate to choose from, it is likely I will drown in my own drool.
• Wine. I cannot wait to be standing in front of rows and rows of wine, knowing that I can choose any one of them! Until December last year (when a big supermarket opened in Soc Trang) it was impossible to buy wine and chocolate in Soc Trang. We had to make special trips to Can Tho and HCMC just to stock up. There were a couple of unpleasant occasions where we ran out of one, or (even worse) both.
• Cheese. Another item that we cannot buy in Soc Trang. Along with...
• Olives.
• A special mention here: Dan says that he is most looking forward to having steak and sausages again (I hope he doesn’t mean both in the same meal).
Finally, there are some things about returning home that I’m not looking forward to. They are:
• Being unemployed. Which goes hand-in-hand with...
• Job-hunting. As well as being unemployed we will have to cope with...
• Being homeless. At least until we find work and somewhere to live. But worst of all, we will be returning to Australia just in time for...
• Winter. I’ve been living in the tropics for the past 15months! Plus I was never very good at coping with the cold (I used to get cold in Darwin!). There is a very real danger that I could severely annoy everyone I know when I return back because I will not quit complaining about the cold. Apologies in advance.
So those are my thoughts on returning home. We leave Soc Trang on Sunday for HCMC. We’ll spend a couple of days there then, on Tuesday, we leave Vietnam for good. But I suspect that we will return someday.
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