Famous last words

The things I do for my blog.

Edited highlights to-date include jumping into a frozen lake, skiing on a frozen lake, admitting that my husband has pointed out the fact that I require depilatory products for my face (whilst surrounded by snow at the time), allowing myself to be pummelled by a bare lady wearing only a pair of flip-flops and some exfoliating gloves (her, not me) and, oh yes, moving to Russia.

Well, that last one wasn't really for my blog but I did do it in the full expectation that mucho blog-fodder would result - which I think you will agree, given the posts I've just listed, is a gamble that has more than paid off.

Something I did not do for my blog however, and a post I hoped never to write, is the one where I detail running the gauntlet of a certain nation's border guards with a visa for my son which we had been wrongly advised would be adequate when, according to them, it was anything but.

And yet here it is, anyway.

Some sweary phone calls to my husband (sorry about that, darling), one missed flight, a night in the world's most expensive cheap airport hotel, a very early start, a flight in which my exhausted son refused to sleep but instead preferred to watch nonsense (which, to cap it all, consisted of a rubbish movie that he had in fact already seen) on the inflight entertainment system, an overly chatty London taxi driver who proved impervious to hints about the fact that both my son and I had been up since 1.00 am local time and preferred instead to regale us with details of parking restrictions at Heathrow airport, an exhausted trek into town, some incorrect paperwork, some more incorrect paperwork, various technical glitches, and a couple more sweary phone calls later I can, however, tell you that I sent the following text to Husband this afternoon:

'Hallelujah!  I have Boy's visa.  Am heading back to your mum's to lie in a darkened room to de-stress in peace & quiet.  With wine.'

I am NEVER doing this again.

Until the next time, I suppose.

Packing it in...

Moscow doesn't seem to like me too much at the moment.  Not only did it put in an extremely poor performance when friends visited last weekend, throwing torrential rain at them, releasing super-strength mosquitoes on their children and - to add insult to injury - closing the doors to the Kremlin on not one but two attempts made to visit it, but it paid no attention when I banged my head and gave myself concussion a couple of weeks ago, and yesterday did it's damnedest to take the top off a couple of my fingers when I was trying to close a door in hurricane-strength wind.

(And if you see any typos in this post, try using a keyboard without the second and third fingers of your right hand before you judge me too harshly, please).

So naturally, given Moscow's hissy fit and the fact that the Boys' school term ends in less than 48 hours, my thoughts have turned to summer holidays.  More especially, the packing that goes with them.

Being an expat presents a special set of challenges when packing to go away for the summer, especially when you don't have just one place to get to and then relax in for a few weeks.  In an attempt to see as much of our families and as many of our friends as possible, our 6 week summer break will cover no less than 4 different countries and 6 different destinations - some of them twice.  Sounds great, and it will be, but dealing with both the UK and southern Europe from within the same suitcase, whilst leaving space for those essential purchases I need to make back home to bring back to Russia is a something of a logistical nightmare.

But it's not the first, and probably won't be the last time I need to do this, so I've picked up some tricks along the way, not the least of which is that once you've decided what to take clothes-wise, take a good look and pull out one third of it and put it straight back in the cupboard or wardrobe; that seems to be a fairly consistent average for the amount of clothes that I bring back unworn from most holidays I go on.

And then secondly, if you have a partner like mine who insists on packing everything else himself to minimise space, do ensure that he also repeats the process before you return from your trip - dirty laundry and all.  It's all about sharing the burden, after all - and you did do the hard work of selecting the clothes in the first place...

For more tips on successful holiday packing, expat or not, short or long-haul, check out Toni Hargis' recent Expat Focus piece on the matter here.  (You might even recognise the names of a couple of bloggers who contributed advice...)

Getting irate about being ripped off; today it's the car hire companies...

I'm not a campaigning sort of a person. Yes, I put my name to lots of petitions, and from time to time support campaigns on Twitter and here, on The Potty Diaries, but overall I don't usually use 'my' space on the internet as a platform to push for change.

But something has caught my attention and it's really got my goat, so I want to try and start a conversation about it. It's nothing earth-shattering, but it is unfair and I find it intensely annoying that the average consumer is being screwed over by a group of companies who think that they can get away with something just because they're all doing it.

What is it?

Car seats.

To be precise, car hire companies and booster seats - and the shocking way that parents of children under 12 are ripped off.

If you don't have children under the age of 12 (or over the height of 135 cm, whichever comes first - see here for full UK government guidelines) this may not be something you're concerned about, in which case click away now, because I am going to have a good old-fashioned rant on this subject.

We are a family that travels. Even when we visit 'home' we are not the sort of expats who are lucky enough to arrive back in our country of origin to a car that's been mothballed during our absence; if we want to be mobile and able to visit family and friends in difficult to reach places in the UK, we have to hire a car. And, with two children well under both the height and age limits for car booster seats in the UK, we need booster seats for them to sit on.

All well and good. But where to get them from?

Essentially there are 3 options.

1. Take booster seats with us

Increasingly we do this, but it's not always practical if we are only going for a short trip (family emergencies, surprise visits etc). Even when it is, in today's world of ever-decreasing baggage allowances I'm not sure how much longer we're going to be able to keep it up. And when you're away for more than a week or so and unsure what the weather might hold for you - welcome to Britain in Summer! - you need clothes to cover every eventuality, so finding the space for two booster seats - even the less bulky kind - isn't easy. Of course, there are companies that help with this (the excellent inflatable Bubblebum and Trunki's BoostaPak are two that spring to mind), but not everybody is in the position to spend the money involved, especially if you have two or more children, and even these options take space.

2. Buy a booster seat when we reach our destination

Because that's every holiday-maker's dream, isn't it, to pick up their hire car and then head straight for the nearest B&Q / Mothercare / Halfords to pick up booster seats for their children so they can safely drive on to their destination? And then of course, what to do with them when your trip is over? Leave them with the car you've hired (hardly 'reduce, reuse and recyle' if you do that every time you make a trip), or try to cram it into your already over-stuffed suitcase along with the dirty laundry? *

Which leaves us with...

3. Hire a booster seat from your car hire company

If you book your car hire online, as most of us do, the option to book car seats - and the cost of doing so - will not show up until you confirm your booking. For some reason - I can't imagine why - the quotation with which you are hooked into a car hire deal won't give you the opportunity to see the price of a car seat. Whisper it softly, but perhaps this is because if you have two or more children, the price is so ridiculous that they don't want you to know what it is in advance.

Hiring a booster seat from the mainstream car hire companies in the UK will cost you a minimum of £4 a day, and a maximum of £9 a day, per booster seat. So say you hire booster seats for a week for two children under 12 years old, that will cost you £56 at best, and £126 at worst. Obviously you're not going to spend that money, especially when the car itself is yours for the week at around £130.**

Instead then, you are forced either to take your own booster seat, or to purchase one at the nearest shop selling them once you've collected the car, and then possibly leaving it in your hire car when you return it. I mean, why not, since you may only have paid £10 for it at Halfords or similar? (I can tell you why not, actually; I am damned if I'm going to give these companies another car seat to add to their inventory for them to then make a clear profit on when they use it for the next hapless consumer with young children).

So here's my question; why don't Europcar, Hertz, Avis, Alamo, Budget, Sixt, Thrifty, Dollar, National and the rest, many of whom make noises about making consumer's lives easier and being family friendly, and safety conscious, to boot, (boom boom) do something about this?

They wouldn't have to give booster seats away for free - heaven forbid. They could take a deposit to the value of the seat against it's clean and useable return (and those of us who have used their in-house models know that 'clean' is not something always guaranteed even when you pay the hefty hire charge). Hell, I don't want not to pay for a service; they could even keep some deposit at the end of the hire period - £5, perhaps - to cover the cost to them of buying new booster seats every 4 hires or so. As if.

As I said at the start of this post, there are far more important issues in the world out there than this right now. But to me this is just another example of consumers being ripped off by suppliers for no good reason other than that the suppliers can get away with it. And whilst that is inherently part of a market economy, I resent that they are making use of my parental wish - and legal obligation - to keep my children safe on the roads, to do so.

What do you think?

*Of course, if you're flying to meet up with family, there's always the option of persuading long-suffering relatives to meet you at the airport with a booster seat you have left with them. Except... that's always assuming they live close enough to do it, and that they will also be happy to accompany you back there on the way to connect with your return flight too. Even the most doting grannies and grandads are going to find that one loses it's attraction soon enough.

** The hire price for a small 5 door car based on a quote received yesterday for 1 week in July 2012

Having your Russian cake and eating it too.

We've just been staying with my parents, and as an Easter gift I took not only a set of decorated wooden eggs, but a Russian Easter Cake for my mother.

A word about Russian patisserie; it looks great. It's all pretty and squirly and sparkly and mouthwatering; in short, a feast for the eye. There's just one problem; it tastes - well, honestly? Rubbish. Dry, bland, boring. To a family that likes cake, majorly disappointing, in other words. We discovered this over two years ago when, shortly after we moved to Moscow, we bought a birthday cake for Boy #2 and cut through the crisp, glossy dark chocolate shell on the outside to find what was essentially a big marshmallow (but without a marshmallow's redeeming feature - yumminess) inside.

So when I handed the Easter cake over to my mother, I warned her that it was 'for display purposes only' and that she could eat it at her peril.

Of course, that's what she tried to do (she is my mother, after all), but after one bite gave up in disgust at the sawdust-like contents. Later that day both my sister and Boy #1 were with me when Mum mentioned that she had tried the cake and didn't like it. Unsurprised, I reminded her that Russian cakes are all style and no substance and this (I pause here to wipe a proud tear from my eye) is what my son then said.

"You see, Gran, Russian cakes are a bit like girls. Just because they look all pretty on the outside, it doesn't mean that that's how they are inside. A girl might look beautiful but that doesn't mean she's a nice person inside. How a person or a cake looks doesn't really mean you can tell what they're actually like."

I looked at my sister. My sister looked at me. And I only just managed to avoid high-kicking across the room and saying 'My work here is done'...

Flies in ointments

In the near future, The Boys and I will be on a plane heading back to the UK for a week. I usually manage to make it back there at least once every two and a half months or so - almost before I even have a chance anything - but it will have been nearly 14 weeks between visits this time and so I've had a little longer than usual to feel the absence of 'Home' in my life.

It's OK, though. Before I start getting carried away about the prospects of politeness in shops, hosts of golden daffodils, Waitrose, M&S Food, London in spring time, the lush countryside, lambs gamboling in the fields, lamb on my plate (I tried to buy some lamb for a casserole I was planning for 10 people yesterday but lost my nerve when I realised that the meat would have cost me nearly $100...), and street signs I can read in less than 4 seconds, I see that the powers that be have dropped a few flies in the ointment to make sure I don't get too over-excited.

For example, whilst the weather gods have been blessing Blighty with blazing sunshine over the last few days, the forecast is that the temperature will drop back to around 11 or 12degC in honour of our visit. And then there is the current fuss and commotion over the potential of the Unite trade union calling out the drivers of petrol tankers (currently delivering to 90% of the UK's petrol stations) on strike, just around the time we are planning on picking up our hire car to start our whistle-stop tour of hard-to-reach friends and relatives around southern England.

Not forgetting of course the fact that the connecting flight from Moscow to London which Husband organised for the Boys and I in an effort to save cash, and which he expressly promised at the time of booking I would not under any circumstances have to take on my own after last time (as in, without him) proved - by the time he got around to organising his own ticket - to have no availability left.

All together now; 'There'll be blue skies over, the white cliffs of Dover...'