myretroperspective

Until the movers started parading through our apartment door with box after box after box, I don't think I fully grasped that our stuff was really going to make it here. To the other side of the world. It's still sinking in. We believe our household effects shipment (referred to as HHE henceforth) and consumables took their own magical mystery tour to get to Shenyang. If you remember, due to moving from our darling rental house in Atlanta to a smaller furnished Virginia apartment, the bulk of our belongings were put into storage in Hagerstown, Maryland. Then in December we checked off the items on our inventory that we wanted to send overseas from storage and the moving company took that set of boxes, our consumables, & several boxes from our apartment in Virginia and sent them on their way to Shenyang right around Christmas when we ourselves were leaving. Early on we were told the shipment woud make it to DaLian by February 18th, but then heard that they would instead vis...

As I've been chronicling our efforts to round up the right things to bring to Asia as part of our consumables shipment ( p art 1 and part 2 are here), I have to admit this trip ended up being pretty painful in the end. I think mainly because we were shopping on a Saturday... in Northern Virginia... 2 weeks before Christmas. We knew better, but it was a wide open day in our schedule and just seemed best to bite the bullet and shop. Really the parking was the painful part. We stopped at the busiest Costco in the world (literally it is busier than any other costco anywhere), Trader Joe's and Target and spent a good portion of time just looking for somewhere to leave the car. That is one thing I will not miss when we sell it next week! just getting started at costco The shopping was ok. I actually got pretty overwhelmed when we started at Costco, but once we got to the dry, packaged goods, we got rolling and were ok. We went with a list, but definitely added to it as we roamed the...

When I wrote about stocking up on spices at the spice house , I promised follow up posts about my consumables shipment so follow up post I shall.  Here's one of my first tips for assembling your consumables- DO NOT attempt to buy them all at one time!  We made our first costco run Monday night and I felt like it was mostly a success. Honestly if it wasn't for R, and his low tolerance for shopping I probably would have tried to do it all in one fell swoop.  However, I knew that 1-if I was going to shop for 2 year's worth of stuff, I wanted R along to see where the money went and 2-purchasing-fatigue sets in for R after about 1.5 hours of shopping for anything. So we decided to tackle our toiletries, medicine cabinet and cleaning supplies first (basically non-food items).  I took about 20 minutes earlier in the day looking throughout the bathroom and under the kitchen cabinet where we keep cleaning supplies to get ideas of what we could want to stock up on. We went in ...

I can't quite remember the first time I heard about "consumables", but I was thrilled to find out that the State Department determines which posts around the world have a harder time getting their hands on typical American goods and deems them a "consumables" post.  For two years in Shenyang, we're allotted 2500 lbs. of consumables to be shipped to post for free.  This can be anything that will be used up over the course of our time at post- toiletries, food, beverages, cosmetics, cleaning products, etc.   From what I've heard about Shenyang and what I remember about living in Asia, most things you can find if you go to the right place and pay the right price. Still having a supply on hand would be quite lovely.    So a major question everyone faces is- what will I put in my consumables shipment?  I've thought back to being in Asia and tried to remember what brought the most joy in a care package? Or what did we take 2 buses across the city to procur...