let the packing begin

Yesterday started off as a miserable day. Audrey had spent half the night crying about all sorts of things, though I couldn't make sense of most of it. Somehow she thinks that learning Japanese is the way to go and her friends will like her more if she knows Japanese and besides there are more Japanese in Portland (totally untrue). We spent an hour arguing about why it was good to learn Vietnamese and how there is a whole community of Vietnamese people in our city, with grocery stores and restaurants and churches and all sorts of stuff. Plenty of ways to keep up with the language skills. But the real problem is that she has been so incredibly shy to use it. Her vocabulary is pretty amazing; she wrote a story in Vietnamese on Friday. Yet she refuses to use it. So this was the source of a battle between languages, though I tried to convince her that she can be trilingual, too, and that's even better than bilingual.

So I hadn't gotten enough sleep; despite not being able to sleep and getting to bed at 3am, I still rose with the sun at 5:30am. Ah geez.

I was a grump, no doubt about it. So I do what I always do when I'm angry/sad... I started throwing things. No, not really. I started cleaning. Honestly, it's too bad that I'm not sad more often as it's kind of a nice side effect. ThenI started packing up some stuff to ship back. There are some gifts. Some clothes. Some shoes we never should have brought. We packed it into any bags and boxes we could, then met Ha at the post office (buu dien). I was hoping to be able to pack it all into one box as I'd done a couple of weeks ago, but there were no big boxes, so it got packed into three small boxes. The separate packages increased the total a ridiculous amount and what should have cost me just over 2 millionVND in one box cost me 4.4 millionVND in three boxes. I probably could have re-bought all the stuff in the States for less than the $275 I spent to ship it home. Seriously. That's like two-months' salary for many people around here!

It didn't really help my mood, but I paid. Now we'll have less to drag around with us as we make all those stops on the way back to Portland. And, as Audrey said, it'll be like Christmas when we get back. We'll have gifts for people and things we haven't seen in a month. I hope it makes me happier then.

I finally got some better sleep last night, though, so while I'm quite perturbed about spending all that cash, I know it's done and over with. No reason to stew on it. Just remember, I'm not bringing any gifts back with me on my next overseas adventure. -wink-