Tag: Housing

There’s a Gecko in My Curtains… and Assorted Thoughts on Settling In

by pennypostcard • September 3, 2025 • 0 Comments

Shortly before we arrived in Rangoon, we were a little disappointed to learn we would be in temporary housing for approximately four to six weeks. Although we had known for a long time that the housing board had assigned us a house near the embassy, our short-term home would be an apartment.

Our disappointment stemmed mainly from wanting to settle into this tour as quickly as possible — a feeling tied to the idea of setting up our own home. We had not expected such a lengthy make-ready of our house; the previous occupant departed over three weeks before we arrived. Yet, this isn’t totally uncommon during the busy PCS season when the embassy has many officers moving in and out simultaneously.

Since this is the first time we’ve done a one-year tour, each week represents a surprising 1.92% of our total time in Burma. Spending up to one-tenth of such a short assignment in temporary housing felt less than ideal. But as it turns out, the experience has had its benefits as well.

Foreign Service, Travel, U.S.

Year in Review: 2023 Blog Stats and Recap

by pennypostcard • February 12, 2024 • 0 Comments

In 2023, I met my goal of writing fewer words more often. I published 40 posts, several on Foreign Service-related topics. I wrote a series on bidding for and receiving my fifth assignment. I expanded a popular post about FS Housing into a series. I also wrote two new installments of ‘Your Questions Answered.’ In what turned out to be a very road trip and family-oriented year, I made four trips to the west coast and back – three by car – and my mom and dad each visited us on the east coast. In 2022, I’d received a promotion, meaning I wouldn’t be eligible to be promoted again for two years; I enjoyed the professional sweet spot where I didn’t have to PCS, learn a new job, or compete for promotion. The year ended on a sad note: my family faced the death of my stepmother and learned the hard way about the limitations of the Medicare-funded hospice program in the United States.

Burma, Foreign Service, U.S.

The Land of the Golden Pagodas

by pennypostcard • September 6, 2023 • 3 Comments

Last week I was surprised by a housing questionnaire from my next post, Rangoon, welcoming us to “the land of the golden pagodas.” I think my surprise was because our arrival to said land is a year and 10 months away! I’ve never known a post to send a housing questionnaire so far in advance.

In comparison, I received our housing questionnaires for Tashkent, Canberra, and Ciudad Juárez four months, eight months, and nine months respectively prior to our scheduled arrivals. So our next post is clearly organized and thinking ahead (although when the Department releases the TMONE assignment cable necessary to confirm an officer has been paneled into a job and therefore will need a housing assignment is outside of post’s timing or control)! I immediately started to grin thinking of Burma’s beautiful pagodas that I’m so looking forward to seeing. However, it isn’t a pagoda we will be living in, but a house or apartment.

Foreign Service, Mexico

Foreign Service Housing, Part III

by pennypostcard • July 4, 2023 • 3 Comments

In Foreign Service Housing, I wrote about the embassy homes where we lived during our first two diplomatic tours in Uzbekistan and Australia, respectively. I later wrote about the PCS Lodging apartment where we lived in Arlington while I studied Spanish ahead of our third tour in Mexico in Foreign Service Housing, Part II. Even though we left Mexico a year and a half ago, I want to finally write about the good, the bad, and the ugly of our house in Ciudad Juárez. I probably have avoided this topic at least in part because thinking about everything that happened with the house brings back negative memories for me. Astute readers may have picked up on my ambivalence (at best) the day we left. But in the interest of sharing my honest perspective, I’m going to try.

I had found it difficult in the past to relate to people who I perceived to be… overly critical about their diplomatic housing. After all, it doesn’t cost us anything and is a useful benefit of our employment. Two stints on housing boards over my first four years in the service gave me the impression some people will complain about anything and everything, like the person who demanded the embassy pay for and install a bay window in her kitchen or she would request a move, or another who refused to come to post with her husband because they were assigned a house she said was not possible to fung shui. Whether or not I thought these requests were reasonable was one thing; the fact we had such limited latitude to make people happy was another. I decided to be happy in my homes even though things were not perfect. On balance, there was far more good than bad. But it wasn’t until my tour in Juárez and the nuances of being truly unhappy in a house, that I realized firsthand some circumstances warrant complaining.

Foreign Service, Mexico, U.S.

Foreign Service Housing, Part II

by pennypostcard • June 27, 2023 • 4 Comments

One of the most popular and widely-read posts I’ve ever published to this blog is the prequel to this post, Foreign Service Housing. If you haven’t checked it out, please do! There I shared photos and stories about our housing assignments during our first two diplomatic postings to Tashkent, Uzbekistan (2015-2017) and Canberra, Australia (2017-2019). I published the post over four years ago in May 2019, and it’s already been viewed over 6,100 times. What this tells me is people are very interested to see where FSOs live. I can tell you the fascination and curiosity about housing is the same even after you’re in the Foreign Service, too!

I have been meaning for literally a couple of years now to write a follow-up to that article, because since then, we’ve also been assigned to domestic Permanent Change of Station (PCS) Lodging during long-term Spanish language training in Arlington, Virginia (2019-2020) and to a consulate house for my tour in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico (2020-2022).

We had more issues with each of those housing assignments than we’d ever had in Tashkent or Canberra, so perhaps I’ve delayed writing this post to avoid some of the bad memories. However, I’ve always strived in this blog to be as honest and balanced as possible about my experiences as an FSO, and I think it’s time to talk about housing when things aren’t as awesome. So let’s do it.

Foreign Service, Mexico

2,184 Miles Later…

by pennypostcard • August 12, 2020 • 2 Comments

If you’ve been reading the blog for more than a couple of years, you’ve probably noticed that every time you see a post called “X Miles Later…” it means we just finished a Permanent Change of Station (PCS) move.

Previously, these moves have all been via airplane: my 2015 move to Tashkent for my first tour (6,329 Miles Later); our 2017 departure from Tashkent (6,498 Miles Later) quickly followed by our move to Australia for my second tour (7,572 Miles Later… which, by the way, brought my total airline miles in 2017 to a whopping 37.4K, a personal best); rounded out by our 2019 departure from Australia (5,225 Miles Later…). But of course this PCS was a little bit different, as we drove almost 2,200 miles across the south to our Mexican border post and no planes were involved.

Australia, Foreign Service, Uzbekistan

Foreign Service Housing

by pennypostcard • May 24, 2019 • 21 Comments

Over the years, I have received lots of questions about housing benefits in the Foreign Service (FS) – primarily what my houses have looked like, if I liked them, and whether I got to pick them. Foreign Service Officers are assigned government-owned (or leased) housing to live in during overseas tours as a benefit of our employment. There can be a misconception that diplomats overseas “live like kings,” but where we live is much more about what is available within the applicable regulations – and sometimes that isn’t great – unless you are an ambassador or deputy chief of mission with a representational residence. (For more on housing sacrifices made by FS families, please read this really terrific article by former FS spouse Donna Scaramastra Gorman, “The Reality of Being a Foreign Service Spouse.”)

Whether you feel like your FS housing is an odd temporary space to put up with, or adore it and cherish it as your own home, the topic of housing inspires a lot of discussion – worry and questions, complaints and gratitude, and plenty of laughs. One post in an FS-related Facebook group asking for submissions of the strangest FS housing quirks led to hundreds of comments and hilarious photos that had me in stitches. I had a submission or two of my own, but so far we have been very lucky. Here I share my perspectives, along with never-before seen photos of our official residences from our first two tours in Tashkent, Uzbekistan and Canberra, Australia.

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