shopping

It may be just an IKEA chair but…

Sonja Leave a comment

When I arrived in Malaysia 30 months ago I was coming down from an extremely stressful 18 months. My dad, grandmother and mother-in-law had died at approximately 6 monthly intervals, we had put our home of 12 years on the market as after two years on a single income we were reaching the end of our ability to afford it, my job was on the line in a corporate re-structure due to a lack of pipeline work.  There hadn’t been a lot of energy left for me to look after me and my body was showing it.

I definitely had it on my mind to use some of my time to get lighter and fitter but then we survived two months of the haze which impacted on my asthma quite badly. By the time the holidays and new year got underway a new lot of stress was on the horizon with the decision for me to go back to New Zealand for Jon’s last year at school. I remember at one point thinking I wasn’t going to fight menopause weight gain until I was sure I was done.

Anyway around June or July I clicked on a link for a eating and exercise plan on Facebook. I really liked the approach – all the food was real, there wasn’t too much fake science for me to swallow, and the exercise was by and large a known quantity. By mid August I had decided that once I was back in KL I would give it a shot and I started late November. So what does this have to do with an IKEA chair?

The eating plan is focused on small meals five times a day – which is a struggle for me even though I know it works as a weight loss strategy. My normal eating pattern is maybe breakfast then 2-3 lattes, maybe lunch at 3 pm and then dinner. The big attraction of the plan was that I didn’t have to think to much about what to eat assuming I had done the shopping. I like healthy, fresh food and having the decisions made for me about what that could be was all I really needed to stick with it.

What surprised me though was how the almost total elimination of sugar, dairy and wheat made such a huge difference to my energy levels.  I decided even as I started that I would focus on food rather than exercise for the first eight week cycle and that as I had a lot to lose I wouldn’t be totally purist. I would still have a couple of glasses of wine on the weekend, still have my morning latte, still have my teaspoon of sugar in my coffee. Except 12 weeks later – I am down to a piccolo latte with no sugar 3-4 times a week, half a teaspoon of sugar in my first coffee of the morning and none after that. My daily water intake has at least tripled, and even Nick’s personal trainer is commenting on his improved performance from all the fresh vegetables he is eating.

This IKEA chair has been on my shopping list for some time, in fact since a few weeks after we arrived and I wanted a chair with a firm back and arm rests for knitting and other crafts. It was big enough that it needed to be delivered and somehow it just all felt too hard. By the time I walked through IKEA and did other things I would be just out of mental and emotional energy. Then not long after we got back from holiday this year I met some one in the shopping centre for coffee. I was five weeks into the programme and despite walking all over to show her things I still had energy to burn. After checking out how the pick and deliver service worked I went home, created an online shopping list, printed it and took it in on Thursday afternoon.

When this chair arrived this morning(along with several other things)  and I put it together, all I could think was how long it had taken for me to find the energy to follow through and buy it. I am immensely grateful that I made that decision to click on the link to Kim Beach No Excuses back in August and followed through in November.

ETA – since I started this post back in February I have now had three months to enjoy the chair which now Tash has checked out and agrees is a great knitting chair. I also have a great ottoman with knitting storage to go with it!

 

The currency conundrum

Sonja Leave a comment

Familiarity with currency is always a dead give away in terms of how long you have been in a country. I think it grows on you in stages – the fastest step is familiarity with the notes, with the trickiest ones being those that are the “wrong” colour for their denomination. In Malaysia the currency colours go from blue, through green, then red/ orange, yellow/orange a greener blue and magenta. This is complicated by the fact that they are changing the currency and while the blue of a new 1MYR is distinctly different from the 50MYR the same can not be said of the old one (I have a feeling I gave a taxi driver a very generous tip one day!)

Coinage is trickier – it is only when you are figuring it out in another country that you become aware of how much your management of coin is based on touch, not sight. I unconsciously know what the weight of a NZ 50c feels like versus a twenty or a ten, so any visual check is a confirmation of the selection rather than a requirement to determine the value. And the size and shape tells us the value far more than the number on the coin. I am convinced that having to look at a coin to see what the number is the moment when the locals think ” aha – a newbie”

In Malaysia it is made more complicated by the currency transition for coinage – the new 50 and 20 sen are gold and not dissimilar in size and weight to a NZ 50c and 20c. The old ones are silver and bigger, as in the old 2o is about the size of the new 50. Fortunately this change is also frustrating the locals in much the same way as the New Zealand change (was in 10 years ago) did. This means that I don’t get to feel quite such an idiot when I am working it out. And after 6 weeks I am getting to the familiarity level that suggests I know what I’m doing.

Quite apart from the issue of currency recognition is the stages you go through when you assess price. The first few weeks there is a constant mental math exercise going on and for larger items, referencing of the currency conversion app to convert into New Zealand dollars (or the currency most familiar to you – AUD, British Pounds and Euros are the more common here). I have noticed over the last couple of weeks though that for familiar things, particularly groceries  I have stopped doing that and just assess the price in MYR. At the back of my mind there is still a rule of thumb e.g a 50 MYR is in the range of 20 NZ so I can do a quick mental review that 300 MYR at the supermarket is about 110-120  but even that is fading. I can see that it wont be long before I assess how much I have spent in Malaysian terms.

The exception being the Jimmy Choo boots I fell in love with – in that case the currency conversion app comes out to try and prove that MYR5000 converts into a perfectly acceptable NZD figure (it doesn’t 🙁 )