Oink

Can't wait until the Super Bowl as HID has said I can have chicken wings. Woo hoo, just living the life.

dbd33

Last week I thought "let's have some wings, why not wings?" but, at the butcher, they had sold out. It was the week's most difficult moment for me.

Oink

You're right there have been supply issues. This needs strategic planning as I know demand will increase as the game gets nearer. I think a trip to Costco 3 days before should be the optimal time for supply and freshness. Now my only dilemma is to choose my secondary sauce (obviously going with a traditional Buffalo hot as the primary). It's a toss up between spicy Korean or honey garlic.

dbd33

Honey garlic seems effete for such an event, Will there also be kale smoothies?

Oink

It does, I was always leaning towards spicy Korean anyway.

Nearly as bad, non-alcoholic beer.

dbd33

Dear God!

BristolUK

Some of that is quite decent - the chilled variety.
On a hot day, a nice salad goes great with a cold beer. There's something about the combination of the tastes - just like a fried egg with a bit of ketchup or a pint of bitter (or other ale) and a cheese and onion roll. Or fish & chips with salt and vinegar.

If the taste combination is right the alcohol content needn't matter.

Of course you don't get the mellowness or whatever mood you're looking for but it's just an accompanying drink so it's not something needed.

scrubbedexpat143

As a now and then visitor/poster to this site, it both saddens and yes, annoys me that a member would post something like this. Insensitive to say the least, also to my mind unnecessarily rude in tone and entirely missing the basic points of Gordon's posts.

Fortunately, Gordon has kindly (and ever so politely, which I suspect has always been his way of dealing with differences of opinions and entirely unwarranted-for disagreements based on only one poster's negative viewpoint) ignored it, and gone on to write many more entertaining and most edifying posts about his long life and many experiences.

In my long time as a lurker/member I have avidly followed two threads in BE - this one, which I always enjoy and return to first when I log in, and the long-running thread by Philosophical in the Philippines forum, which over the years I thought had taken on all the aspects of Days Of Our Lives, and which I still miss.

Gordon, you are putting in a sterling effort to keep this going, and I hope you are getting as much enjoyment out of writing it as many of us I'm sure, get from reading it. And may I say, long may it go on going on...!

Dann in Sydney (and soon back to Indonesia)

Gordon Barlow

Kind words and generous judgment, Dann. Thank you.

I am indeed fascinated by Life's Turning Points - and am naturally curious how you ended up (if you have) in Indonesia. Would you tell us that some time, please?

I also have a "Back in the Day" thread, on the Rest of the World forum, that you might like. Old codgers willing to share old memories, and younger ones learning things about how their elders lived.

I too used to follow that English chap in the Philippines forum. Some of the stories about his marital situation were scarcely believable, and I came to suspect that he was writing a book and trying it out on the thread. I wondered. What do you reckon?

(There's also a thread of mine on "The Barbie" in the Australian section. I began it to explore why that section was so much less popular than the Canadian equivalent. I've never found an answer, but it's been fun along the way!)

Gordon Barlow

Dann. My only time in Indonesia was a month in 1975. We were both working in Vila (New Hebrides), and flew up to Jakarta for a month's vacation. Stayed with a friend who was manager of the Australian bank CBS there. Then took a train to Bali for a week (hotels near Kuta Beach were $2 a night, as far as I can remember; would that be right?), then back on a train again, via Borobudur. Our son and only child - now 47 - was conceived in Indonesia. I told him that recently, and he asked me which island. I had to tell him "back in those days we were at it every night, pretty much; I've no idea!" I think he regretted asking.

Jakarta was a bit of a slum, in those days, but we loved the rest of what we saw.

scrubbedexpat143

Gordon,

Many thanks for your kind message.
Very soon when we are again in Malang and settled in our favorite small hotel in the city center, I will be posting something longer and more detailed in your thread. For another few days we will be in Surabaya after having more or less given up on Bali this time, a very short stay for us there, possibly too short to do it full justice - but we found it too overcommercialised, too crowded, too many Chinese coughing up Covid germs everywhere, too many tour buses turning the air purple-blue with diesel fumes. Also too expensive. The Balinese had two years of poverty and obviously they want to make up for lost time, this I understand - but I am a pensioner on an adequate but not lavish income, and I wish them well in their economic recovery but I must respectfully decline to make them wealthy again at my expense.

DANN in Surabaya

Gordon Barlow

DANN. I see from the other thread that you have an Australian passport. Interesting! You and I have led much the same kind of lives, it seems, although we have ended up in different places. I let my Australian passport lapse fifteen or twenty years ago. I guess I could still get into Oz again if I wanted to - being born there and all - but I have no reason to go there now. My last visit was in 1995. My two brothers and I exchange emails twice a year. As soon as Hong Kong went back to China - 1999 was it? - Britain offered UK passports to everybody living in the remaining colonies. Only about 250,000 left, at that point. So the only p-p I have now is a UK-EU one, and of course that's defunct now. Norway might not let me in with it! (Norway is where my son and grandchildren live.)

I did work in Canada for 18 months back in the '60s, and was told I could apply for a pension when I turned 65. But I didn't bother. I doubt it would have amounted to much!

scrubbedexpat143

In the '60s when I was a young journalist (= news reporter) in Montreal, I often went to a small Swiss cafe on the rue Sainte-Catherine Ouest for a late dinner - at that time most eateries in the city closed at 9 PM and this was one of very few dining places open late, til midnight as I recalled, I worked the night shift 3-11 on one of the English dailies and I rented a one bedroom 'grot' above a Greek deli in Westmount that cost me CDN$80 a month (in those good old days there were still cheap digs in that elite suburb!) I could walk from the newsroom to this cafe in time to put in the last order of the day before the kitchen closed, that or the owners kindly stretched the rules a little to feed me so late. My favorite dish was poached eggs and spinach on freshly baked rye bread which I recall cost CDN$0.95, big money to me back then. On pay days I would splurge on veal snitzel with roesti potatoes and a mound of vegetables, washed down with two glasses of Blue Nun, the bill for which somehow never made it to much above CDN$3.50. Ah, them youthful days...

That eatery was called The Happy Wanderer. When I first saw it I thought, "well, that sums up my life!" As it truly has. In my 75 years I've wandered to and fro and explored and lived in many interesting places in our big world, much of it at a time when the going was good and nothing seemed to cost much at all. Those long vanished days I was young and had the energy and $10 a day travel was still possible - being me, I was never able to do it all for the legendary $5 a day that long-vanished US travel book series promised, given my taste for good food and chilled local beer...

I was born in New Brunswick and grew up there and in Montreal, moved to New Mexico (USA) at age 7, went back to Canada to get a BA degree and do a cadetship in new reporting, worked at Expo '67 and at age 21 found myself managing an executive placement consultancy! challenging work indeed for one who had grown up in a small town on the Atlantic coast! Then to Toronto, to Vancouver, to California, back to New Mexico, a second time in Vancouver, then to Saigon for a brief interlude before the curtain came down on South Vietnam, to Bangkok, to Malaysia, and eventually to Australia where I've lived very happily for almost half a century. Had many varied careers, owned several businesses, did a late degree in architectural design and opened my own practice. The GFC did me in and I finished my working life as a public servant, by good luck in a post that enabled me to work in several agencies and deal mostly with helping staff negotiate the minefields of several complex computer systems. Now happily retired, living in the country with my SO, traveling when I can and hanging out in Indonesia where the culture is still mostly as interesting at it was when the Dutch left in 1950. In all, an interesting life.

That's my story. This thread is about yours and I am hesitant to say any more for fear of hijacking your 'space'.

As you were born in Australia I've no doubt the mandarins at Border Control (as Immigration are now known) would most likely let you in again altho' perhaps on a tourist visa befitting your more exotic 'global' passport, tho'; we bearers of an Aussie one find it relatively easy to escape to Asian destinations even if we now have to pay for tourist visas. Indonesia and Malaysia were the two last places in SEA to let us in without charge for many years. Malaysia still does with a free 90 day visa easily renewed by a casual hop over a border to another countryfor a few days. Indonesia under Soeharto was equally generous with a free 60 day visa until some years ago when Jakarta moved to a Grab The Cash policy and started flip-slopping (or "ping-ponging" as the Indo media calls it) with a series of pay-for visas, mostly for 30 days. Until Covid changed all the rules I could stay two months in East Java, hop on an early morning flight from Surabaya to Singapore for a new visa which cost a lot (in 2020 I paid S$180) but could be had in 12 hours from an agent in Chinatown, now sadly out of business, and then fly back on an evening flight on the same day if I wanted. Post-Covid Indonesia has now decided to keep all this visa renewal cash in the country and charges Rp500,000 (= USD$35/AUD$50) for a 30 day tourist visa which can be renewed in the country but as a somewhat stiff fee and having to jump thru a number of bureaucratic hoops depending on how greedy the Immigration bureaucrat on duty is feeling that day. In Bali a few agencies want AUD$150-$200 for the renewal (for 30 more days) but the price can easily float up to AUD$250, most likely depending on demand.

I was in Hongkong in 1997 when the curtain dropped on that country's colonial past. The handover was an interesting time. I had friends who knew the last Governor and who told me a few things about the 'insider' goings-on towards the end. A story that should and must be told, in some ways vastly different from the official version. If what I was told is true, I hope Mr Patten will someday write one last book before closing the final page on his most interesting diplomatic career, even if it has to be published posthumously!

Gordon, lucky you to have met your life partner so early on and made a success of it, a true love match from what you have written. In my case, I married two exceptional women but for many reasons our lives together didn't work out, in the '90s while on a trip to Malaysia I met my SO, rather a big age difference but a high degree of compatibility and shared interests and we are yet happily together after a quarter century. I have the freedom to travel and indulge in my passions - photography, writing and watching life around me passing by, usually in out of the way places where few tourists venture to and much of what goes on is unchanged from half a century ago. I know my place and my wandering eye was firmly shut many years ago. Now at the age where (so my doctor tells me) bits of me are wearing out or falling off, age-related health conditions are not yet problems but are starting to show signs of what they will likely develop into in the next decade if I'm not careful and temper my tastes for rich Asian food and too much ice-cold beer on hot days...

On to pensions now. A few decades ago Canada had (or so we thought) a most generous pension and old age services, now I believe somewhat tempered by the passing of time, an up-and-down economy, and changing conditions in the world. My stepdad passed away in 1993 but my stepmom lives until April 2021 and left us (sadly after many years of dementia and later Alzheimer's, the latter confining her to extensive care and depriving her of most of her active mind and most of her old memories) and was well looked after by the country's pension system. As for me,Canada now gives me a small part pension and I am truly grateful for this extra income - if I had stayed in Canada for my entire life and career, I'm not so sure how well I would have fared, but Australia's pension system while not lavish is generous and all the related services ensure I am well cared for in health matters, I can get about using public transport at a minimum cost, and many pleasant activities are available to me at seniors' rates, all of which make my life there good and happy. So I am grateful.

Yes, I've kidnapped your thread and fairly run off with it, for which I offer my profuse apologies and I will say no more about me, me and me - only (ha!) to repeat what I wrote earlier, that you have done wonderfully well with this thread and I'm sure it is a popular one and well followed by many BE members. I find your memories interesting and (certainly to me) a positive welcome respite from much of today's five-minute attention span and Kindle-base literature...!

As for all the effort you've put into this, it is truly memorable and you are to be complimented for all you have written. Have you considered rewriting many of the 'segments' of this thread in a series of personal essays? Self-publishing is easy and not at all expensive nowadays and in times to come many of your family members will surely cherish what you have put into such good words.

PS In any future posts I promise to refrain from such lengthy opuses (or should that be 'opi'?) in your thread. Fingers crossed...

Gordon Barlow

DANN. You wrote...That's my story. This thread is about yours and I am hesitant to say any more for fear of hijacking your 'space'.... And, later, I've kidnapped your thread and fairly run off with it, for which I offer my profuse apologies and I will say no more about me, me and me... And later still, PS In any future posts I promise to refrain from such lengthy opuses (or should that be 'opi'?) in your thread.

Wrong on all three counts, DANN. What you have written in your last post is exactly what I wanted this thread to be about - i.e. other members' Turning Points! Your life has had just as many twists and turns as mine, and - hopefully - other BE members will be encouraged to do what you and I have done. Others' stories are what will be the making or breaking of this thread. You haven't kidnapped this thread at all: it's gone willingly, and I hope that others can see that. So. Apologies not accepted!

I started the thread in The Maple Leaf because moving to Canada brought me a wholly different future to the one I had in mind. Instead of ending up as a respectable accountant in Brisbane, I became a notorious anti-government essayist in the Caribbean, kept from deportation only by the intervention of the Foreign & Commonwealth Office in London. So far on this thread I'm only up to my life as a house-father (#164 above); the anti-government essayist began at the next turning-point but one. So there's more to come - and why not, eh?

You and I would get on very well, if we were ever to meet. Not only have we both been lucky when it mattered, we have ridden that luck and come out ahead of the enemy. (When I was very young, our Dad used to ask the time by saying "How is the enemy?" which he thought was funny. Sigh...) My son and I pretend to believe in Loki, the Old Norse god of luck and caprice. He is a fair master, having no patience with humbug, and as long as one meets him half-way, he will generally do the right thing. When things go wrong for us, it's usually because we've pushed our luck, and he (Loki) has taken that as an affront.

Thanks for your wonderfully long reminiscences to date. I speak for many others - dozens of others, if Loki keeps his eyes on us - when I say we look forward to your filling in the gaps.

Gordon Barlow

Dann. One of the things I remember about life in Canada all those years ago is the beer halls of Toronto 1965-67. The rules varied from ward to ward, and the one I remember had a rule against holding a beer-glass while standing up. All drinkers sat at tables, and when I stood up to take my beer over to another table one of my friends dragged me back onto my seat. "That bouncer left his place on the wall the second you stood up", he said. I had to wait for a waitress to come and escort me (she carrying the glass of beer) to the other table. Another rule forbade beer being drunk in apartment-windows, if the drinking could be seen from the street! Cripes.

I was sent on audits to Windsor Ontario several times, and to New Brunswick for a couple of weeks on some Irving family audit. When we were married, Linda and I drove from TO across to Nova Scotia, via PEI, and another time for a weekend in Montreal. There, we found an English eccentric - the friend of a friend - who refused to speak French except for the words "c'est la meme chose". And - hand on heart, here - he stuck to that even when we went to a nightclub. "Do you want a drink, m'sieur?" "C'est la meme chose". "Is this table suitable for you?" "C'est la meme chose". We found it hilarious. Or maybe we were drunk; I can't recall.

Good times, and some adventures, before we packed up and took a drive-away car down to Florida in April '67 - before Expo. You would have been around then. Maybe we passed in the street somewhere! You weren't the "c'est la meme chose" chap by any chance, were you?