Since moving overseas Thanksgiving has really been about spending it with friends. Over here- thats all we’ve got. Some years we’ve spent it with just one other family, or like last year, we did a neighborhood thing which was a lot of fun (it works out great because you can have everyone’s oven going at the same time, you all converge on one house and *voila* everything is actually hot when you sit down to eat). This year the neighborhood thing and the family friend thing sort of flopped because people have moved, new ones have moved in or people just had other plans. And the thing that is hard is that while *I* have friends and *PC* has friends, we only have a handful of people (‘couples/families’) that we consider *our* friends….like people we like to all hang out with together. I think it would just be sort of awk to invite over one of my friends from work and have our husbands be complete strangers at the dinner table. I dunno. So. That’s where we were yesterday morning. Feeling sort of sorry for myself that we’d be spending Thanksgiving by ourselves.

I try and maintain a somewhat regular workout schedule: 3 times during the week, once on the weekend. I was lazy on Saturday so Sunday was it. So much for the day of rest. I’ve started walking Habu trail with a bunch of ladies from the hood…we probably look like our own stroller strides because there are usually 8 or 9 of us pushing strollers power walking the trail. Walking it is usually a pretty strenuous workout. Yesterday my husband *made* me (yes- made me) run (most…ok much) of it, and I was pushing one of the strollers. On the way back I decided I had two choices: walk it or vomit. And we all know how I feel about vomit. So we started talking about how we only have 18 months left in Japan combined with the fact that Nathan really! wants! to see! snow! and maybe we should go back to Sapporo. And then we started talking about how we shouldn’t really start doubling back to places we’ve been because there is still so much to see. And then Nathan, from the stroller, suggested Korea. And the real problem is if you want to see snow you have to go somewhere cold and going somewhere cold with someone in the 18mo. and younger set is just not that fun. We’ve learned the hard way. So then we listed the places we wanted to go before we left Asia. Singapore has been at the top of both of our lists but its always so expensive to get there (like $1000pp). So we had Singapore, Korea, Taiwan with China being an alternate….I’ve just heard too many stories about people having their white babies GROPED in China and how it just sort of detracts from the whole trip. That and its just dirty and….eh, I think I’d rather take kids that can walk and talk and not take the age range we have currently. So, China is getting put on the back burner.

I was asking PC how much leave he had and he has YOTS and I needle him about how he never takes vacation–they wouldn’t give it to you if you weren’t supposed to take it! When I worked for The Bank we got 4 weeks of paid vacation in addition to every federal holiday and it was RARE that I ever had extra days to carry over to the next year. Use it or lose it baby. We continued to discuss travel and that sort of combined with the fact that we’re losers that would be spending Thanksgiving alone and a plan was born. We started rolling around the idea of going somewhere for Thanksgiving and what would be good this time of year? I priced out tickets to Singapore and at $530- we couldn’t pass that up. So, this year we’ll be spending Thanksgiving in Singapore. Good thing I didn’t buy a turkey.

I did look at Singapore Air because they were having a sale from Tokyo….and if you fly Singapore Air from Tokyo you fly on an Airbus A380. I say that like I just assume everyone knows what that is. I know because I live with Airplane Nathan but for the un-airplane-initiated the A380 is the worlds largest airliner– the double decker plane. To fly the A380 from Tokyo would have been about $2700. The problem was getting *to* Tokyo, the ridiculous price of tickets to Narita from here and having the flights lineup….so cost combined with inconvenience of not-really-connecting flights but a cabosh on that. Plus, Nathan’s head may have just exploded at the notion of flying the A380, and thats not really a great way to start a trip. So we’ll be flying your least favorite airline and mine: United.

Filed under: Travel