A New Home, and... Disneyland

As excited as I always get for change, the flip side is the emotional toll it brings. So, as we settle in to our new home in a new country, I face the challenges reminding myself that I expected them. That they are all part of this lifestyle. The tricky part about the challenges is that they never take the form I anticipate...

Back-alley noodle stand! Yum!

On the flight over, Luca was a champ—as champ as a 2-year old can be on such a long-haul. We stopped to catch our breath for a few days in Tokyo, taking the chance to tour a few of the city’s highlights despite jet lag and my first-trimester nausea and exhaustion.

We even got to see some old friends from our stint in Seoul (pictured right)!

This about sums up Tokyo.

Luca woke up each morning around 2am, ready for the day. I’ll never forget the three of us cuddling in our bed, watching Cars on an iPad. Or sitting around the tiny table downing our 4am potato breakfast we cooked up in the hotel room’s kitchenette when our stomachs could wait no longer.

It was in Tokyo, at about 11 weeks pregnant, that my belly popped out. Yes, friends, this picture is from TWELVE weeks pregnant (left)—similar to my size at about 20 weeks pregnant the first time around (right). At least I finally realized I was not getting fat, as I’d thought, but getting a ridiculously early baby bump.

Baby 2, 12 weeks vs. Baby 1, 20 weeks

So, one of the basic challenges of our move is that my clothes stopped fitting—most of my maternity wear is in our slow-boat shipment, and I only had a few t-shirt material skirts to make it through. Enter my mother-in-law, whose second favorite hobby is buying me clothes (second to buying Luca clothes/toys, that is). Thanks, Umonee! A few weeks into our stay in Hong Kong, and I had shorts that fit over my belly again.

View from the Peak

In short, Hong Kong is amazing. The skyline is spectacular and there are several interesting ways to tour the city and get a unique view, like the Star Ferry or the Peak lookout.

Our building has a pool, an epic indoor playroom, a small outdoor playground, and a sizable outdoor elevated patio area called the Podium, where Luca can scooter or kick a soccer ball, level with the tops of skyscrapers farther downhill from us. We live halfway up a mountain and then almost 30 stories up. It’s so high that my ears pop twice each time I ride the elevator down. It’s so high that our view is spectacular.

The Podium

The challenge? Sometimes I feel a tiny bit trapped in our building. Not trapped as in I can’t go out or there’s nowhere to go, but trapped as in: Leaving our building takes a fair amount of energy for a pregnant woman towing a toddler. There are hills, stairs, elevators, escalators, extremely narrow and crowded sidewalks with lots of uneven terrain, and extremely narrow and crowded grocery-store aisles. And some days, the sky is thick with polluted haze, and all I want to do is hide Luca’s lungs and my own inside.

When I mention the pollution, Luca’s automatic response these days is, “The indoor playground is waiting!”

Out on the streets and in grocery stores, I often feel like my stroller is a plow. Move it or lose it, people! Other times, I feel plain old stuck, behind someone’s grocery cart or a group of people stopped to talk.

Between my own pregnancy exhaustion, the crowds, a toddler’s needs and pollution avoidance, running errands at all is a day’s big event for me; a huge accomplishment.

Thankfully, there are a lot of order-online grocery options, so I am experimenting.

And thankfully, even when shopping in person, all the grocery stores deliver non-perishables, so if my load is too big to stuff into my umbrella stroller (which broke, by the way, from the beating it took hauling perishable groceries and constantly trekking up and down stairs), I can leave certain items with the cashier and see them that night or the next, left at my apartment’s back door, the entrance to the maid’s quarters.

Oh, does that sound weird? Maid’s quarters? Yes, our apartment has a maid’s quarters, past the kitchen and the laundry room. A walk-in-closet-sized room with its own bathroom and shower. More on domestic helpers in another post.

Settling in is slow-going for me, but you know what helps?

The fact that, as I said, Hong Kong is AMAZING.

There’s a beach! Several, actually, though I’m stuck on the one that’s easiest to get to: trees for shade and calm waters that are so salty my growing pregnant body floats effortlessly and my sore joints get a break. The inaptly named “Repulse Bay” is so far my favorite part of Hong Kong.

Luca’s, too. I took him one weekday morning on the public bus—we sat in the front row of the second level of the double-decker, right up against the window—and the morning was fantastic (though, not fantastic was the hour-and-a-half, bumper-to-bumper-traffic bus ride back downtown. I definitely don’t begrudge the student protestors their fight for democracy, but no matter what the reason—traffic is the worst).

We loved the beach so much, we took Joe back two days later, on the weekend.


And, there’s Disneyland! I’m not sure if it was the general Disney magic, the reminder of my college season-pass-holding days or just the glimpse of home, but I was beyond excited, and my excitement spread to Luca, whose eyes lit up at the thought of seeing Mickey Mouse.

Plus, we rode Hong Kong’s metro all the way, which is a delight in itself, for train-loving Luca.


His first real theme-park ride ever: Small World.

There was no line since Columbus Day was an average Monday in Hong Kong (the U.S. consulate is closed for U.S. holidays), so Luca ran through the switchbacks, not understanding what he was headed toward but knowing, just knowing it would be more than he could imagine.

And it was. He insisted we go on Small World again and again, though we stopped for lunch after the third go-around. He loved the other rides, but kept begging to go back “on the pink boat.”

Joe and I couldn’t get enough of the wonder lighting up Luca’s eyes. There is magic in the sight of your own child’s happiness.

Too much magic

Luca finally fell asleep in his stroller around 3pm, so we began our trek back home in time for dinner.

Of course, today, I was exhausted. Luca and I both were. And it was polluted, so we stayed inside most of the day. But it won’t be like that every day. There is simply so much available to do here.

And we’re going to soak up as much of that pure fun as we can.

Funny to see Mickey on a metro map

The Disneyland Train! Mickey handles and windows!