From Confusion To New Beginnings & Blue Spaces

As I sit here, unsure of where to begin, we are comfortable in a mooring in Amsterdam Marina. Its chilly but not unbearable, despite it being early July. There is condensation on every single window panel, or maybe its rain, Dutch weather never ceases to amaze me. You can have all four seasons in the span of an hour! I mean it! A few months back, I recall seeing a beautiful sunny day suddenly turn to rain, and from rain to snow, and from snow to hail...only to end in a rainbow of a day.

We are in Amsterdam as we prepare for what we are telling ourselves will be the adventure of our lifetime. In all honesty, I am scared to the core. I am scared of the unknown. I am an anxious person, always have been, and this morning, I woke up with my salivary glands working overtime, I was so sure I was going to throw up!

Have you experienced that feeling? When you feel nauseous, and you are stuck somewhere you don't want to be sick in, like a car (think of car sickness) or a plane (more of the same) and you try to hold it in. You begin to breathe deep, you close your eyes, but you feel this insane experience of your mouth flooding with saliva? Yeah, that is how I woke up this morning! So maybe its because of my inner ear issue, or maybe its anxiety, whatever it is, I woke up feeling like I was going to throw up.

I suffer from Ménière's disease. Its a fancy name for an inner ear neurodegenerative condition. In short, if I am not careful with my sodium intake, or my water intake, or even something as "simple pleasure" as a single glass of champagne or a cup of coffee that isn't decaf, I suffer for it. I suffer from nausea or headaches at best or from severe vertigo, hearing loss and crippling fatigue at worst. 

I was diagnosed with this neurodegenerative condition some months ago, just prior to our family leaving Hong Kong where we were based for the past 14 years together. I personally have lived in Hong Kong a total of nearly 30 years, but my husband and I have been together 14 of that. In truth, I likely have suffered from this condition far longer, I just never put two and two together. It certainly got worse with stress, as that is a catalyst for exacerbating the symptoms, and let me tell you, stress has been the backbone of the past year of my life and the lives of so many people globally thanks to the Coronavirus Pandemic. 

I'd like to then start by introducing myself, my family and I suppose, our mission. I am not entirely sure how good I am going to be with doing so, but I hope to give a basic picture of where the cards lie at this moment in time and how we hope to play them going forward, but first, it would help if one has some sense of the past that brought us to this choice of a nomadic existence, even if its not always clear to us what it is we are doing. 

2020 was a traumatic year for so many people. We were living in Hong Kong at the time, I owned and operated a restaurant and my husband was working as a pilot for Cathay Dragon, the regional airline of Cathay Pacific Airways, part of the Swire Group. At the beginning of 2020, my husband was still flying into China, and I believe even into Wuhan sometime back in February when the Pandemic was beginning to become more globally accepted as a real and eminent threat. 

We knew, at least I am certain we knew, in Hong Kong, that this was going to be the next SARS, and people were watching the news coming out of China closely, but the rest of the world still seemed miles behind. I think for me, personally, as a restaurant owner, I was watching the development more from a financial nightmare perspective as we had barely weathered a year of political upheaval which had put a dent in our bank balance enough to have us hoping that 2020 would be the year we got a breather. As China cracked down on political dissent and a general fear for ones free speech became obvious, it also meant that in some sense, for the local market, things could return to normal. Normal until Covid-19 hit. 

Masks were worn by many, but not all of Hong Kong, as at that point we were still not sure if it was as bad as SARS. I had personally lived through SARS when my eldest son was about 4 years old, and I recall not being too careful myself, although I do recall protecting my son. At the time we knew that SARS affected the very young or the very old, and I was about 27 years old at the time, in the prime of my life, socially, so I would confess that I was careless at best and negligent at worst. I was working at an American brokerage firm at the time and I recall my entire team leaving Hong Kong to work in New York, covering Asian markets, staying up through the night eating pizza at their desks and sleeping through the day. I stayed in Hong Kong, being non-essential in many ways, as did three others: some grumpy English guy too old to care, Joanne, the back office local hire, and the second in command at the time, an American guy who's wife was heavily pregnant and in no position to travel. 

Yes, I recall SARS being pretty insane, but they never shut everything down or had a lockdown. People were told to wear masks to protect themselves, but it wasn't mandatory like it became with Covid-19. Cinemas still operated, bars remained open, nightclubs still operated, restaurants still served food without restrictions on how many people could sit at a table. Maybe many businesses struggled, but I recall that within 4 months or so, life returned to normal and it went back to being difficult to get into the trendiest clubs in the city and Prosecco prices went back up!

That isn't how it played out this time. Over and over we saw the talking heads downplay how bad things were or could get...and look at where it got us. Cathay Pacific had to cease most flights out of Hong Kong, so my husband didn't fly any scheduled flights after early March 2020. Initially it felt like he was getting the best of both worlds, not having to work but still getting full pay. For those that don't know, at the time, Cathay Pacific Airways, and Cathay Dragon, at least for the expatriate hires from over a decade prior, having a job with them was the pinnacle of pay grades for the Airline industry. As my husband says, the golden days of Aviation are over...

So there he was, getting full pay for no work. Then came the request for people to volunteer for unpaid leave, to help the company out. They would take 1 month unpaid leave and that salary would be taken out over 4 months so one didn't suffer drastically with meeting financial commitments in a city where rents are astronomical, school fees are a nose bleed and cost of living is sky high. It didn't hurt as much, my husband volunteered for this because he believed it was for the good of the company and the company promised that this would be remembered. Many of his colleagues did as well, although some did not, and I couldn't help thinking that they were in some way out of touch or that they weren't considering the greater good, the reality was more likely that they had overextended themselves in their investments, likely a house too many or a fancy car payment that couldn't be overlooked. In the end, the playing field got level whether they liked the cards dealt or not. When Cathay closed Dragon, those that took unpaid leave were rewarded and those that didn't were not.

As a pilot, to stay current, you need to be doing at least one take off and landing every 35 days, and so it became this insane matter of scheduling all these grounded pilots for a simulator session every 35 days. From March 2020 through to October 2020 when my husband and all his colleagues were laid off without much warning, the only flying my husband did was in a simulator. The wait was excruciating, but he never gave up hope that the company would come back from the brink of death, like some Phoenix rising from the ashes. I personally was hoping for news, any news at all, that would bring it all to an end. The waiting...it was so painful. 

While my husband waited and I saw more of him than I had in years, it became the norm for us to see so much of each other that I was almost glad to be stuck at work as it was the only break from the painful reality of watching his anxiety mount with each passing week, but even my own work became a living hell in many ways. I remember at the end of 2019, we were at a crossroads with our live-in help, and by January 2020, we let her go. Its like the stars aligned because shortly after that, my husband was grounded along with all the planes the company owned, and he was able to do the school drop off and pick up, which eventually went into home-schooling! 

It sounds insane to most people in Europe or the US that someone (an average someone) has hired help, but in Asia, its the only way you can have a double income household because there is no such thing as day care facilities. Sometimes in order to hire someone, you need a double income! Its a bizarre situation. The other thing is, in Hong Kong, its illegal for you to hire someone to work in your house while they live outside of your house, so there isn't much choice but to have enough room for someone to live with your family and in your home. 

Its not an ideal situation by a long shot. You live in a city where living space is so expensive and square footage so tight, but everyone just has to make it work. In our case, after 3 years of working with the woman we hired, we had to let her go when her general attitude changed so drastically after I opened the restaurant and she no longer had my constant support (I cooked all the meals) & we discovered she had been abusive to our children (pinching them was part of this) when they were naughty, and only as recent as this week, my kids mentioned how she would be terribly mean to them but always sunny and smiling to my face, a fact that we were mortified to find out they never mentioned to us earlier but that we understand, as kids, they were simply too scared of her to tell us. We knew when she denied pinching or hitting them that she was lying because despite our youngest child being a possible liar, our middle child is pretty incapable of lying. He's clearly on the spectrum, we have that feeling because my oldest has already been diagnosed as such, and although Asperger's isn't an "acceptable" PC diagnosis any more, we know my eldest was diagnosed at a time when it was still an acceptable definitive diagnosis. Basically, our middle child sucks at telling lies!

We had fired her for more big picture stuff though. She became increasingly angry and sullen, demanding more money, complaining about things she had previously been happy with, demanding more money when we had already raised her salary to considerably higher than the going rate, she wanted to borrow money constantly and she simply stopped caring, the kids also began to behave differently, unhappy to be with her. She'd spend hours on her phone talking while she was with the kids and often would stay in her room with the door closed when she was home and the kids were left up to their own devices when my husband & I were working. 

We knew that if we had no help, our lives would get more difficult, especially for me with the restaurant, but this is why we moved to an apartment directly above the restaurant when we began to come to the realization that cutting out any chance of help would mean that a crazy commute for school drop off and pick up were not an option. Up until the move to the small apartment above the restaurant, we had been living on the Lagoon 450f catamaran we had purchased thanks to Cathay Dragon's generous housing allowance scheme. 

That in itself deserves a mention because Cathay, at the time, gave their staff housing allowance and it depended on your position within the company, but I would say it was a generous package if you were hired prior to them switching newer hires on to a more local package, which truth be told, was not as generous. 

Prior to us buying the boat, we had lived in a rented apartment in an old building where the management company clearly didn't wish to put too much money into ensuring it was perfect. That is how you find a good apartment that is affordable, you aim for one that is old and likely comes with no frills. This was a beautiful place though, with a private pool, small but sufficient, surrounded by lush banana trees and green grass. The story goes that the tenant on the ground floor of this three story treasure tucked away in a more affluent suburb, had been promised the opportunity to buy the whole building and so he had built the pool and even a treehouse for his kids, only to then be told that they had no plans to sell to him! So, despite him having built the pool, this Australian millionaire, now had no legal rights to that pool as it was built on property belonging to the company that owned and managed the building and the land around it. Much to his dismay, all the remaining floors remained rented to other tenants and the pool had to become communally shared!

Beautiful pool, as I remember...mosquitoes were a pest in the rainy season and the summer months, but still, it was a luxury for the price we paid in rent. We lived in that amazing 1600 sqft, beat up old low rise for close to 5 years before we got approved for the Cathay Dragon boat purchase scheme. For a few years the boat purchase scheme was not on the table, but as soon as it was, we leaped at the opportunity as we knew that we couldn't afford an apartment in Hong Kong, a million USD would get you nothing more than 400 sqft in a terrible location, so a family of five was simply not going to make that work. The company offered the same housing allowance for a home purchase scheme (where you buy an apartment and the money they allot you for "rent" is fixed at a certain amount, and that goes towards your mortgage) as they did for a boat purchase scheme, as long as you lived on it, so we were fortunate enough to find a finance company, Hitachi Finance, to give us the boating equivalent of a mortgage, for 100% of the cost of a boat if it happened to be a brand new boat!

That is where our sailing life began. We started with looking at older boats, first a monohull in our price range and then we saw the Lagoon 450! You can't compare the two, really. If you are going to move from a 1600 sqft apartment with 3 kids and hired help, you need to have adequate space to not go stir crazy as you sit on a mooring 365 days a year. The Lagoon 450f we ended up purchasing had three cabins, 2 cabins in the port side hull and 1 master cabin in the starboard side hull. We had wanted the 4 cabin set up but that was unavailable at the time so we went ahead and committed to the one that was. Our plan was to get our helper to live off-site, a not entirely legal arrangement, but one she was open to.

Then the other complications happened at the same time that we committed to buying the boat when my oldest son, who was in his final year of high school, when told that we were going to move from our apartment to a boat, was quite unhappy about the change and insisted he didn't want to live on a boat, citing that he wouldn't have enough room to study or keep his things. He made this choice without having seen the boat nor showing interest to. Prior to this, he's had his own room in our apartment, but he was only with us on weekends, going to school during the week from his fathers apartment which was closer to the school. That whole set up is a complicated story for another day, but lets just say that there was a lot of heartache, rejection, a feeling of betrayal and simmering resentment that gripped our family through that experience, but we all came out of it stronger.

Life is not linear in how it plays out, you have your ups, your downs, your side to side, your complete 180 degree turn around action and sometimes the complete stand stills...my life with my eldest has been anything but easy, but make no mistake, that there has never been a moment that I would wish I could have it any other way. Even when my mother suggested I take him away from his father and have nothing to do with that man ever again, I always stayed committed to ensuring my son had his father in his life. Did that make my life easier? Not one single bit. Did I regret that choice? Yes, many times, especially when time and again I got the short straw when it came to our son, but I no longer dwell on it. My son has grown up to be an incredible force of nature. He's intelligent, kind, resilient, intuitive and incredibly hard working, and I have been very fortunate to have had him working for and with me through three years of running my restaurant. Three years in which his prefrontal cortex developed into full maturity and I was able to see him grow from awkward teenager to a self-assured man. Our relationship went from one of licking wounds from past hurt to fully healing and growing in friendship and mutual respect. Through all of this, love never gave up on us, there was always hope for us to find our way back to where we were all those years of caustic co-parenting with my ex.

I no longer talk to my ex, I have no need to. I was so desperate for my son to grow up so I wouldn't have to have any contact with that man, considering how much I grew to dislike him, but at some point, I just grew out of my hate and distrust enough to let the past go. I credit my husband for being the back that I could stand on, to lift me up, to let me be myself and I can take some credit for taking the time to work on myself enough to know that I was committed to what matters and that I mattered most in how my life plays out. 

Committing to yourself doesn't have to be a selfish gesture, its the kindest thing one can do. 

I grew up with a lot of trauma that to this day I am still unpacking, but I have ceased letting it define who I am....any more. Its taken me this long, I guess. 

My oldest son, Jakob (I will refer to him as Jake from here on in), is now 22 years old. I had him when I was his age. He knows now, how insane it is to consider being a parent himself at the age he is now. I see someone that age, now, and I see an individual just barely dipping their toe into the ocean of their adult life! To consider that my own mother had all three of us before she turned 30, its insane and it makes so much sense for why she was the mother she was to us. My relationship with my mother, now, is great. I love her dearly, but it wasn't always the case. She was the quintessential "Asian Mother" and nothing was ever good enough. You never did anything "just to make you happy", you did something because you planned on making it matter. In some ways, I have had to fight this expectation all my life. I am 44 now, and I am at an age where I can attempt to do both, do something that makes me happy while also doing something that matters...wouldn't that be awesome?

I have two more sons...well, we have two more sons. My husband, Jeroen, has been in my life since Jake was just 8 years old. So Jeroen has been in our lives since 2007. Feels like a lifetime ago. We met through the personal section of an expat website, before the ultra-dodgy Tinder came into peoples consciousness. Back then you posted an ad, you described yourself, you didn't upload your photo, you described what you were looking for in a partner, whether you were looking for love or just fun, that sort of thing. You knew that those looking for a "good time" were all creeps who were cheating on their wives, you kinda just knew! That was back then, I have no idea what its like now, but I do know that its probably pretty scary navigating the "dating" scene these days. Back then I used the internet mainly because I didn't want to date anyone at work, guys in finance didn't have a great reputation as keepers, not unless you were into that kind of guy, which I wasn't! I partied with my colleagues, I knew what they could be like, I didn't want to be coming home to someone like that! I needed someone the exact opposite of that, the exact opposite of me, if you think about it...and I found that in my husband and that is why we are here, still married, 14 years and two (more) kids later. 

Jeroen is my anchor. Not in a "drag me to the bottom" sort of way, more of a "keep me from drifting off to nowhere" sort of way. He's the person who has given me the room to be myself, to make my mistakes and to grow as an individual, and that has in turn afforded me the chance to be a better person, not just for myself, but for him. I love him, more than words can say, and even as we both have aged, I still find him immensely attractive and my heart swells when I get a chance to look deeply in his crystal blue eyes, undistracted by kids punching each other in the background or calling my name while asking where their charger cables are! He's the love of my life, what can I say, anywhere he wants to go, I will go...and that is part of why we are sitting in Amsterdam Marina, on our blue water boat, a Forgus 52 built in 1992, a boat built many years before Jake was even born!

As I sit here typing, Jake continues to attend classes in his final year at Hong Kong University (which I shall refer to as HKU from now on), studying to get a Bachelors degree with History and English as his majors. Thanks to the pandemic, he has chosen to continue on with further education and do a Masters in English right after that, being as the job market is so fraught with uncertainty at this stage. Jake has a girlfriend, so he's prefers to stay in Hong Kong despite our concerns about the changing political tide, with the clamping down on free speech, the shutting down of Apple Daily newspaper and the arrest of all upper management from that publication. Times have changed, Hong Kong is not the same country I grew up in. 

My parents moved us to Hong Kong in 1990, my brother and I, my sister was already attending Sophia University in Tokyo by this point. My sister, Maya is five years older than I am and my brother, Andre, is four years younger than me. I am a middle child, through and through, but that huge chip on my shoulder has slowly disappeared over time. 

I guess what I am trying to say is that my family moved to Hong Kong when the city/country was still a British Colony. By the time the British handover to China happened I was attending University in the US, so I returned to a country that was no longer British but looked no different than when I left it. That change in the political lay of the land and the day to day democratic freedoms was nothing compared to what we are witnessing now in Hong Kong. In some ways I am almost glad my husband lost his job in October 2020, just as the political situation got clear and many international companies began to depart the city. 

We found out about the job (or lack thereof, heck, they shut the entire company down and 6000 people lost their jobs!) in October 2020 and we packed up all our belongings and left by first week of December. It was tough for me because I still had a restaurant that was operating, by this point, at a loss for a considerable amount of time thanks to the protests a year prior (these involved rioting, tear gas, police brutality, hijacking of university campuses, arrests and even deaths) and then thanks to the pandemic and various lockdown measures. I left Hong Kong with my family in December 2020, knowing full well that I would have to return to close it down, to tie up all loose ends and to bid farewell to my beloved team for the final time. My team continued to run the restaurant through my absence, I am proud of them to have done so and I am proud of myself to have trained them as well as trusted them, I couldn't have asked for a better team, ever!

Things were very stressful at the end of 2020. That is when I was diagnosed with Ménière's, it was when the hearing loss in my left year got so pronounced (like constantly feeling like you are under water or have water logged in your ear), the tinnitus so loud (its like a fire alarm going off in your ears), the vertigo so unbearable (I would be so nauseous and puking that the world was spinning even as I lay absolutely still on my bed), that by the time I went to the doctor I was suffering headaches and sharp pain in my ears as well as a basic difficulty to remain standing for long periods of time. That is not a good experience while you work full time in a restaurant kitchen as a chef, manager, accounts manager and all around gofer!

So glad that is all behind me now! I keep my symptoms, for the most part, under control. From time to time when I get careless, they return, but I can't really get too careless, its not worth the suffering.

We purchased our Forgus 52, a blue water boat from Sweden, before we had managed to sell our Lagoon 450f in Hong Kong. We were under a lot of stress to see that sale happen because we were not looking forward to ruining our perfect run when it came to credit. The monthly payments for the catamaran were astronomical without the boat purchase scheme, so there was no way we could realistically pay for the boat going forward, not for any length of time! Hitachi Financing had offered us a 6 month reprieve on the payments, initially, but then still kept sending us bills each month, with late fees. Every time my husband would call them, they'd have conflicting information on how they never agreed to such a pause in payments or that the bills were actually just for show and it was not an issue if all we paid was the interest. Interest was high, that didn't actually comfort us whatsoever! 

If it weren't for the lockdowns and people being unable to leave the country, we may never have been able to sell the catamaran. People became more interested in "staycations" and the charter business was booming. We managed to sell the boat to a group of 4 young men who were creating a company to do boat charters in Hong Kong, and a catamaran can go for as much as HKD18,000 a night (about 1600 Euros or so), but first these guys and the company they created, had to be able to come up with our asking price, which was the market value tag for the boat, at that point we owed less on the boat than it was valued at, not a lot less, but enough for us to feel we had some breathing room. 

Well, we continued to stress as the sale was finalized a month or so after we moved to the Netherlands, and it was tough organizing all that remotely, but Hitachi Finance took those four guys and their company on, financing 50% of their purchase (it was in their best interests, being as they were owed that money by us, but now were simply shifting that debt to the four guys while still getting cold hard cash for 50% of what was owed). In January, we were finally done with the sale of that boat and we made a wee bit extra, enough for us to slap each other on the back and buy ourselves new iPhones as Christmas presents while breathing a sigh of relief!

I headed back to Hong Kong in February, right at the beginning of February 2021, knowing that I had 21 days of government sanctioned mandatory quarantine to contend with, all so I could close up the shop at the end of March 2021. We had been running for exactly 3 years when we closed, and it was the length of the lease we had negotiated. It was tough, but I got through it. I was sad to be closing that chapter on my life, but also relieved that at last, I could stop feeling like a tightly wound guitar string, ready to break.When we started, it was just the most beautiful symphony, but by the time we ended, I was exhausted from the refrain of explaining to every concerned loyal customer that the reason we were closing was purely because the government was no longer going to keep handing out money and we simply didn't see a future in carrying on. The economy had tanked, so many restaurants and bars had closed, and all that aside, my husband no longer had the job that kept my kids in international schools or supported a life in one of the most expensive cities in the world! My job, it simply couldn't make up the difference! People see a restaurant packed and they think you must be swimming in the money, but F&B is a hard life!

I recall someone saying to me, "Its a lifestyle"...like working in F&B was such a thing! I was like, what lifestyle is that? One where your legs become like tree trunks because you are so used to standing 12-16 hours a day? Or maybe its one where your hair always smells like kitchen grease of a deep fryer? Or where you no longer have a social life and all your friends slowly stop calling you or inviting you to any social gatherings you can clearly see they are having thanks to Instagram and Facebook? Yeah, that lifestyle!

I don't regret one single moment of it though...I made new friends, I made new memories, I found purpose in the mundane and I created a family of misfits that anyone would be proud of. I set out to do what others before me had failed to do, and in many ways, I am satisfied with the way it all turned out. Do I wish it could have turned out differently? Sure, but I am glad I had the chance to do it at all, I learned so much about myself and what I am capable of, and I wouldn't have done so if it hadn't been for the insane obstacle course of hardship that was the restaurant that was my baby, Confusion Plant Based Kitchen.

 

This is a video made by a young man, Justin Tang, a talented young man who approached me with a dream of a project he wanted to do, make a video about a restaurant, to tell a story, I think the first time I watched the finished product, I cried. I literally...cried. I cried and I hugged him, this young Hong Konger, no older than my oldest son, and he was overwhelmed that his work had brought me to tears, but yeah, I am just sharing this because it was made at a time before we knew for sure that we would close. We still had a small bit of hope left in us at this stage.

That is all in the past now. Where I sit right now, on the cream leather upholstery that I brought back to life myself, cleaning, polishing, finishing, for days in the last months leading up to this moment, I am at peace with all my choices as an individual and all our choices as a family. 

Am I scared? Sh*t yeah...but I am also full of hope, full of anticipation, hungry for adventure and genuinely looking forward to learning new skills. I am looking forward to learning to become a competent sailor, learning how to free dive, learning how to be a patient teacher to my children as we navigate the course of home schooling (we are signed up for an accredited school program with Wolsey Hall Oxford https://wolseyhalloxford.org.uk/ ), and I am looking forward to being off-grid and showing my children that there is more to life than a dependable Wifi connection!

I am looking forward to life as a nomad. I think, being as my mother is Japanese and my father is Indian, I have never fully felt like I belonged to either country. I was never fully Indian and I was never fully Japanese, and then when I was 13, my parents moved us to Hong Kong where I went to school, where all three of my sons were born, where I spent most of my working life...where I married and divorced and married again...so even after nearly 30 years in Hong Kong, I never fully looked at Hong Kong as home, there was always somewhere out there that needed discovery, somewhere out there that was waiting for me to call "home". 

Over the years, over the decades, I came to understand that to me, my home is where my immediate family is. My home is in my sons, in my husband, in my body...its not a country or a building or a patch of land...so this life...this nomad life of our plan to sail the world for the next decade...this is the life that has been waiting for me and the home that I have been searching for. I am scared nonetheless, because I still don't know what this is. 

It took us months to get ready to pick up the boat, I had to return from Hong Kong for work and then back to Holland after closing up the shop before my husband and his father could travel to Sweden in April to pick up our boat and sail it back to Holland. First we had to wait for winter to pass, and this year the lakes and streams froze over even in February! So it was a hard winter, an unusually long winter and an uncharacteristically cold summer that we continue to experience. Make no mistake, climate change is real, but that is a conversation for another day!

Months to get the boat, months to get the boat ready, and now, I am guessing, it will take a month or more before I actually have everything where it needs to be and that will likely not happen until we are well underway and on the coast of Spain. 

Our plan is to sail The Mediterranean for the next 2 years, get ourselves to a place where we are confident as a team, our sons who are now (Micah) 8 & (Sasha) 9 years old will be 10 & 11 years old by then, and we will make the crossing of an ocean by then, over to the Caribbean. We will winter this year in Croatia after spending Autumn in Greece where Jeroen's mother lives (she lives on the island of Ithaki, ancient Ithaca from the Greek Myths). As we navigate the second year since the Coronavirus Pandemic kicked off, uncertainty still hangs in the air when it comes to how various countries will handle further waves, if there are any. Now that many have been vaccinated, it remains a concern exactly how effective the vaccinations will hold up against various mutations of the virus. Every week we hear of new problems arising, new waves in other countries, new lockdowns in cities...so despite my husband and I both having been vaccinated (we got the Janssen vaccine here in Holland), our kids remain unvaccinated for Covid-19 (not because of choice, it is what the regulations are in Europe), but at this stage, we have lived through the worst of it from right near the epicentre of all of it, our lives in Hong Kong, my husband still flying into Wuhan at the start of the pandemic, me running a restaurant and coming into contact with customers on the daily through the worst of it all (Hong Kong never did a full lockdown, they cut down on how long restaurants could operate, they limited seating set up, but never full lockdown of restaurants...even if they did so with bars and beauty parlours or gyms)...if we survived all that, I am confident we are good to go!

So this is the story of new beginnings, and this journey, should you choose to follow us as we share, will cover our story as we navigate the blue spaces ahead of us in the decade to come, as we bring up our two younger children and shepherd them from precocious little rascals to young men we hope will shepherd the world and its environment for future generations. Our mission is to teach our children about life, how to live a life that is full of love and one that is lived in harmony with the environment. We hope to teach our kids about seeing the world as endless possibilities and that they have a choice in who they want to be for themselves and for others. Most importantly, we hope to live a life that has an impact on others and as little impact as possible on the environment around us. People always talk about "sustainability" but for something to be truly sustainable, you have to be able to keep doing it without any chance of it running out...and honestly, you can't say that, truly, about anything we are sold that has been labelled as such. So this is about eschewing those labels and just living a life that is real, living an authentic life and having some integrity in how we share that story with anyone who wishes to be a part of it.

Follow our journey, myself (Lisa), my husband (Jeroen), my middle child (Sasha) and my last born (Micah), we hope to bring a share with you a new perspective on the world and we hope to hear from you as we share our story. 

Mahalo and here's to new beginnings!