How do we get this fancy new internet? Well, it's certainly not a fibre-optic line nor is it a copper telephone line. We have an antenna on our balcony to receive the signal from a radio tower. Now I know how Marconi felt in 1901.
db
Tuesday 19 July 2016
New ISP
Our life in PNG just got a little bit better - we have a new Internet Service Provider. It's not the same as we are used to in Canada, but it's a big improvement from what we've been using for the past year. The speed is 6 times faster and we have 10 times the data available. We can even watch Netflix occasionally and have FaceTime chats again. We still have to monitor our usage and ration it out over the month, but it's a huge step up.
How do we get this fancy new internet? Well, it's certainly not a fibre-optic line nor is it a copper telephone line. We have an antenna on our balcony to receive the signal from a radio tower. Now I know how Marconi felt in 1901.
Anyway, we are very happy to have faster internet access. Now Lori can watch dog videos on the weekends.
db
How do we get this fancy new internet? Well, it's certainly not a fibre-optic line nor is it a copper telephone line. We have an antenna on our balcony to receive the signal from a radio tower. Now I know how Marconi felt in 1901.
db
Thursday 14 July 2016
Groceries
Last week Lori gave you her Top Ten list of things she misses in PNG. If I were to give you my list, almost every entry would be some type of food. Like I've always said - I love Lori first and food second, but it's a close race. I was spoiled in Cairns because I could find everything I wanted, but it's different story in Port Moresby. I thought I would give you a glimpse into a trip to the grocery store here.
Tomatoes are by far my favourite food. I eat a tomato of some sort every day - in a salad or a sauce or just whole with a little salt and pepper, but that has been tough to do in PNG. There isn't a big market for tomatoes because Papua New Guineans don't eat them, but they do grow them for the ex-pats. This is the best tomato that I've seen in 2 weeks.
Because the island is so mountainous, it's hard to find land flat enough to have any sort of large scale agriculture. Most of the vegetables are grown in small garden plots cut into the hillsides, but then the vendors have to get them to the grocery stores and reliable transportation can be an issue. Green leafy vegetables are the hardest to come by. I haven't seen any spinach since I've been here. You can get hydroponic lettuce from the greenhouses in Sogeri though, but you have to be at the store on the right day at the right time to get it fresh and it's never there at the same time. Usually the lettuce is pretty wilted by the time I get there.
Luckily the Zucchini is usually good. Every time I turn on the BBQ, I always throw some on the grill.
The other green vegetable that is usually okay is cabbage (after you peel off the outer leaves). I'm not a huge cabbage fan so I've had to get creative and use it in soups and Asian coleslaw.
Potatoes are hit and miss. These are the best potatoes that I've seen since I came back from Australia and they're still not that great.
The bread is pretty good I must say. They bake it fresh in the store everyday. The loaves are larger than we're used, so it makes bigger sandwiches.
Milk is imported from Australia and it's good, but because it's imported, getting it with a long expiry date is tough. We don't select the milk by type, we just look for the one with the date furthest away. Full fat, skim, whatever; it doesn't matter. We got lucky this week, I bought this on July 13 and it's good until the 19th.
We can't always get fresh milk so we make sure that we have a carton of UHT milk in the cupboard just in case. Anyone who's spent time in the Navy is familiar with UHT milk. It's milk that has been pasteurized at an Ultra High Temperature (hence UHT) and can be stored at room temperature for months. It's regular milk, but it doesn't have much taste anymore. Perfectly fine for tea or coffee but, it's not something you want to drink with a chocolate chip cookie.
One thing that you can always get at the grocery store is canned goods.
Canned fish, like tuna and mackerel, is plentiful.
As is corned beef.
A lot of people live in places without refrigeration, so canned and dry items are very popular. One of the community affairs guys that works with Lori, always has plenty of crackers and tuna in his vehicle to bring to meetings in the villages.
I'm so happy that I'll be in southern Ontario this summer because I'm craving asparagus, spinach, and corn on the cob. Usually I'm talking about bacon when I'm going home, but we have that covered here. It's the fresh stuff that I'm looking forward to this time.
Things are getting better though. A brand new grocery store has just opened up around the corner from us and so far they are doing a better job at getting in fresh veggies.
We are getting new restaurants as well. A new office complex opened on the downtown harbour front and 4 new restaurants are going in - Indian, Asian, Seafood, and a Sports Bar.
A very nice coffee shop called Duffy's has already opened.
We had a couple of lattes and a salted caramel brownie today.
PNG is entering the 21st century, but unfortunately a large portion of the population can't afford to eat in places like this. Hopefully in the coming years the unemployment rate will continue to drop and the money coming into the country from the mining and natural gas projects will make it to the people.
db
Tomatoes are by far my favourite food. I eat a tomato of some sort every day - in a salad or a sauce or just whole with a little salt and pepper, but that has been tough to do in PNG. There isn't a big market for tomatoes because Papua New Guineans don't eat them, but they do grow them for the ex-pats. This is the best tomato that I've seen in 2 weeks.
Because the island is so mountainous, it's hard to find land flat enough to have any sort of large scale agriculture. Most of the vegetables are grown in small garden plots cut into the hillsides, but then the vendors have to get them to the grocery stores and reliable transportation can be an issue. Green leafy vegetables are the hardest to come by. I haven't seen any spinach since I've been here. You can get hydroponic lettuce from the greenhouses in Sogeri though, but you have to be at the store on the right day at the right time to get it fresh and it's never there at the same time. Usually the lettuce is pretty wilted by the time I get there.
Luckily the Zucchini is usually good. Every time I turn on the BBQ, I always throw some on the grill.
The other green vegetable that is usually okay is cabbage (after you peel off the outer leaves). I'm not a huge cabbage fan so I've had to get creative and use it in soups and Asian coleslaw.
Potatoes are hit and miss. These are the best potatoes that I've seen since I came back from Australia and they're still not that great.
The bread is pretty good I must say. They bake it fresh in the store everyday. The loaves are larger than we're used, so it makes bigger sandwiches.
Milk is imported from Australia and it's good, but because it's imported, getting it with a long expiry date is tough. We don't select the milk by type, we just look for the one with the date furthest away. Full fat, skim, whatever; it doesn't matter. We got lucky this week, I bought this on July 13 and it's good until the 19th.
One thing that you can always get at the grocery store is canned goods.
I'm so happy that I'll be in southern Ontario this summer because I'm craving asparagus, spinach, and corn on the cob. Usually I'm talking about bacon when I'm going home, but we have that covered here. It's the fresh stuff that I'm looking forward to this time.
Things are getting better though. A brand new grocery store has just opened up around the corner from us and so far they are doing a better job at getting in fresh veggies.
We are getting new restaurants as well. A new office complex opened on the downtown harbour front and 4 new restaurants are going in - Indian, Asian, Seafood, and a Sports Bar.
A very nice coffee shop called Duffy's has already opened.
PNG is entering the 21st century, but unfortunately a large portion of the population can't afford to eat in places like this. Hopefully in the coming years the unemployment rate will continue to drop and the money coming into the country from the mining and natural gas projects will make it to the people.
db
Thursday 7 July 2016
Life as an Ex-Pat
When we left Calgary in January 2013, we certainly didn’t expect to find ourselves on the other side of the world 3 ½ years later. Now, coming up on our 1 year anniversary in PNG, I am still astounded at the completely unexpected journey we’ve been on over the past few years. Some parts have been amazing, but there have been a lot more challenges than we would have expected. For me, living in PNG is a dream come true in many ways: I have an amazing job – as good as it gets for a lawyer who loves a challenge and being stretched to the max on a daily basis; we’re finally getting to live in a tropical climate (my dream – unfortunately not Dennis’); and Australia, New Zealand, Thailand, Vietnam, Japan, are all within a 5-8 hour flight away (now I just have to find the time to actually use up some of the 8 weeks of holidays I get each year to make it to all of those places!). It’s far harder on Dennis, but even for me, the longer we are away, the more I miss home and the more I appreciate it.
I don’t think that you can really appreciate Canada until you’ve spent some time away. Who knows whether it will last once we return, but I now have so much appreciation for a lot of “small” things in life that I no longer consider small at all.
1. Clean water. Here we can’t use water from the tap to fill the kettle or fill a pot to boil some vegetables - we have to use water from a bottled water cooler. Drinking bottled water in Canada now seems like a ridiculous thing.
2. Clean streets. One of the toughest things to handle here is how dirty everything is. They don’t clean the exteriors of buildings, and you can’t take windows out of the frames for security reasons, so during the dry windy season, which just started, we can barely see out of our windows at home or at the office. And there is garbage, garbage everywhere. There’s no way around it, plastic needs to be banned.
3. Proper medical care (which is free!) and our social safety net. The state of health and the degree of poverty in this nation can make you cry. TB is still a huge issue, the HIV infection rate is one of the highest in the world. And the vast majority of the population can’t actually afford any medical care at all. Being face to face each day with extreme poverty and its consequences is humbling.
Of course, while my liberal Catholic guilt stops me from turning into a complete expat monster (and boy there are a lot of them running around in PNG), and I am definitely grateful for how much better my life is than the average person in PNG and for all the financial benefits that coming here will bring us (early retirement here I come!), I still get to feel sorry for myself now and then, and if you lived here, you’d would have days like that too.
I’m keeping a top ten list of the everyday things that I miss not having. They may not seem like big things, but just imagine not having them or not being able to do them for a year (and OMG we still have another 2 years to go!)
1. Diet Pepsi –don’t ask me why this is number 1 – it just is.
2. Walking by myself.
3. Driving my own car.
4. Internet faster than 1mbps (yes you read that right – and we only get that speed on a good day).
5. Tide laundry detergent and bounce dryer sheets. ( I am SO tired of crappy laundry detergent.)
6. My own furniture (and not the stuff that comes with an apartment whether you like it or not – especially a proper pillow top mattress.)
7. Nice bars and restaurants, and good live bands.
8. Ordinary electrical outlets (not the ones where you have to switch on and off each socket individually).
9. Banks where the lineups are not 50 people long (I am not kidding).
10. DOGS. (This is my real number 1 and likely my number 2-9 as well. I miss Jake and Coco every single day and I cannot wait until we get back to Canada and adopt 2 or 3 dogs.)
Thanks to everyone who has been following along. It means a lot to Dennis and to me to know that people are still keeping up with our adventures (as well as our often boring life as expats). We miss you all.
Lori
I don’t think that you can really appreciate Canada until you’ve spent some time away. Who knows whether it will last once we return, but I now have so much appreciation for a lot of “small” things in life that I no longer consider small at all.
1. Clean water. Here we can’t use water from the tap to fill the kettle or fill a pot to boil some vegetables - we have to use water from a bottled water cooler. Drinking bottled water in Canada now seems like a ridiculous thing.
2. Clean streets. One of the toughest things to handle here is how dirty everything is. They don’t clean the exteriors of buildings, and you can’t take windows out of the frames for security reasons, so during the dry windy season, which just started, we can barely see out of our windows at home or at the office. And there is garbage, garbage everywhere. There’s no way around it, plastic needs to be banned.
3. Proper medical care (which is free!) and our social safety net. The state of health and the degree of poverty in this nation can make you cry. TB is still a huge issue, the HIV infection rate is one of the highest in the world. And the vast majority of the population can’t actually afford any medical care at all. Being face to face each day with extreme poverty and its consequences is humbling.
Of course, while my liberal Catholic guilt stops me from turning into a complete expat monster (and boy there are a lot of them running around in PNG), and I am definitely grateful for how much better my life is than the average person in PNG and for all the financial benefits that coming here will bring us (early retirement here I come!), I still get to feel sorry for myself now and then, and if you lived here, you’d would have days like that too.
I’m keeping a top ten list of the everyday things that I miss not having. They may not seem like big things, but just imagine not having them or not being able to do them for a year (and OMG we still have another 2 years to go!)
1. Diet Pepsi –don’t ask me why this is number 1 – it just is.
2. Walking by myself.
3. Driving my own car.
4. Internet faster than 1mbps (yes you read that right – and we only get that speed on a good day).
5. Tide laundry detergent and bounce dryer sheets. ( I am SO tired of crappy laundry detergent.)
6. My own furniture (and not the stuff that comes with an apartment whether you like it or not – especially a proper pillow top mattress.)
7. Nice bars and restaurants, and good live bands.
8. Ordinary electrical outlets (not the ones where you have to switch on and off each socket individually).
9. Banks where the lineups are not 50 people long (I am not kidding).
10. DOGS. (This is my real number 1 and likely my number 2-9 as well. I miss Jake and Coco every single day and I cannot wait until we get back to Canada and adopt 2 or 3 dogs.)
Thanks to everyone who has been following along. It means a lot to Dennis and to me to know that people are still keeping up with our adventures (as well as our often boring life as expats). We miss you all.
Lori
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