May 2017 - Parties and local hikes

June 01, 2018

Parties

May 2017 was a month full of parties ... a party to welcome new life, a party to say goodbye and a Dutch party.
Definitely a welcome distraction from our otherwise party-less life here 😇... we do live in a state with strict alcohol rules and where bars and clubs are scarce, remember?!

In the US, 'baby showers' are a common tradition. So when Najwa, a lady from Jordan who was part of our international community here, was almost at the end of her pregnancy, I decided to treat her with this American tradition.

With the consumer ideology of the 1950s and 1960s in the US, this baby shower tradition started during the baby boom era and served the function of providing the mother with material goods by 'showering' her with gifts.

In Belgium some people throw a 'baby borrel' for all their friends and family a few weeks áfter the baby is born to avoid all the individual maternity visits in the hospital at a moment that you're recovering from the most intense event of your life 😅.
Sometimes this is also done in the US, however this is not considered to be a 'baby shower', but it's then called a 'sip-and-see party' 😂 ... sometimes it's just wrong to use pictorial language, right?!

Traditionally a baby shower is only given for the family's first child and only women are invited ... In our case it was already Najwa's second child, but it was her first in the US, so close enough 😏; and indeed, just the women were invited because it took place during the week and at that time there were only female non-working spouses in our community.

So we had a fun morning with a great group of ladies from Denmark, Poland, Greece, Thailand, Indonesia, Portugal, Israel, Belgium and Jordan of course, with fun games, cute presents, great international food (most of the parties we do here, we apply the potluck system ... meaning that everybody brings something to eat/drink and in our case, that means an international variety of food), and all that under a blue sky.

One of the drawbacks of being part of an international expat community is the temporary character of it. Most people are here for a mission between 1 to 4 years, so each year we have to say goodbye to a part of our group.

But on the other hand, one of the perks of goodbyes is having a good reason to throw a party!

That summer we had to say goodbye to one of the Belgium families, the Greek family and the Jordanian family.

Again we could do it outside, under a blue sky ... I just love it that you don't have to check out the forecast (with fear like in Belgium) when having a party. Good weather is rather the rule than the exception here in Utah 😎

King's Day or 'Koningsdag' is a national holiday in The Netherlands, which takes place on April 27th, the birthday of their King Willem-Alexander. Besides being a good reason for bringing the international community together once more, it was also an introduction for everybody here to the Dutch 'orange madness' or 'oranjegekte' as they say in the Netherlands. It's a phenomenon where the dormant patriotism of the Dutch comes back with a vengeance by dressing up as orange as possible 😆 (their national colour, originating from the Royal Family who's surname is 'Van Oranje-Nassau'). This madness takes place on every King's Day and every international soccer championship (if they qualify 😜).

Local hikes

In May, spring really kicks in, which means hiking time!
Most of the snow has melted by then and the summer heat is not quite there yet.
During the day in the week I often go hiking by myself, but I also try to organise 1 hike/week for the non-working spouses of the international community, and during the weekend and sometimes during week evenings I go hiking with Geert (and when we're lucky the boys even join) ... like 'John Muir', an influential Scottish-American environmental philosopher, said "The mountains are calling and I must go"!

When I organise a hike for the spouses, I try to be prepared ... so when I wanted to do a hike from A to B instead of an 'out & back', my idea was to park my car in B ... walk by myself to A ... meet up with the ladies and walk together to B again ... and return all together to A with my car 😅. To make sure that my timing would work out, I wanted to do the B to A hike with Geert the evening before.
This was the plan: we drive with 2 cars to A, leave one there, drove together to B and hike then to A, where we would get the car we left there to drive us back to our other car at B ... still following??
This is how the plan went: we drove with 2 cars to A, left one there, drove together to B and hiked to A ... so far so good! However when we arrived at A, we realised that we left the keys of the car parked at A, in the car parked at B!! To be honest, people who know me, will not be surprised at all how something like this could happen 😬
As it was already dark by then, we decided not to go back via the mountains, but we took the 'highway' instead. Fun fun fun 😏
Luckily I did take headlamps with me ánd I wore a very appropriate T-shirt 😆