Let's toast, celebrate and be thankful for the gifts 2015 surprised us with.  The sudden crave for a glass of wine after last minute grocery shopping madness hits me. I glance at my active toddler watching Peppa Pig sitting next to my husband, who's seriously playing Candy Crush.  These are peaceful moments  I'm thankful for. 

Expats and Re-pats will inevitably encounter this experience one way or another. While scanning the grocery aisles while settling down and nesting in your new home, you experience a wave of homesickness, longing for the products that you have grown accustomed to from your home country or from the place you've stayed in for a long time. 

When I came back to the Philippines, having lived abroad for more than a decade, I've realised my palate has changed as well.  Everything that I was used to growing up suddenly tasted too sweet. I never really fancied mayonnaise before leaving my home country, so when I tried the French mayo for the first time, I saw mayonnaise in a new light and fell in love with it. 

Though it took a long time for my husband to convince me which mustard is better since I have been an advocate of the American yellow mustard, while he proudly defended his authentic Dijon,  I eventually caved in and developed the taste buds for Moutarde de Dijon. (Though I still like my yellow mustard in a hotdog sandwich - yum!)

To all Philippine passport holders, are you by any chance planning to renew your passport and change your surname to your foreign husband's?

We have been married for almost 10 years and I have been using my maiden name the entire time in all of my local and international identification cards.  Since I won't be traveling outside the country very soon,  I found it the perfect time to do it.

Living abroad, there wasn't really any urgent need to change my name. Within the span of my expat life, I have changed my passport thrice and the thought of the long bureaucratic procedure made me cringe. Waiting for an online appointment schedule at my country's consulate in Dubai and the whole process of name changing deemed to be a nightmare. My then tight business trip schedules when I was working in the Middle East didn't have any window to accommodate this long wait. Additionally, I wanted to avoid my previous employers paying additional fees to renew my resident visas and to steer clear from all of the administrative hassles of name changing in all of my identification cards such as my driver's license, Emirates ID and etc. 

If I had a choice, I would still keep my maiden name.

As per the civil code, the woman can still continue using her legal name when she was single. It may not be mandatory to use my husband's surname in the Philippines, but in reality, the change makes everything a tad less complicated.