Tim and Shelley in Bangkok

Wow!  As of today we’ve been back in the US for one month and a day.  Time is flying.  We visited graduate schools right after we got back and made our decision by April 15th.  We checkout out USC in Los Angeles, ASU in Phoenix, University of Minnesota, and University of Massachusetts in Amherst.  After two days of serious consideration we are proud to announce that we’re moving to the City of Angels.  Yep, we’re headed to USC which, for both of us, seemed the strongest academically and career wise the best fit.  We’re a little nervous about living in a big city but we also figure if we can survive Bangkok, we can survive almost anywhere the US has to offer.

After picking graduate schools we’ve been busy wedding planning (picking out tuxes, hair styles, make-up, etc., etc.), catching up with old friends, Easter, and going to friend’s weddings.

We miss Thailand terribly and wonder how everyone back in Bangkok is doing.  We still have some pictures that we haven’t put up yet from our last month in Thailand.  I just made one public.  These are some of our best pictures yet since Justin, Karthik, and Karina are all such good photographers.  I hope to get the rest of the pictures up soon!

-Tim

Walmarts, cars on the right side of the road, clean air, space, driving a car, cell phones, Mexican food, understanding what everyone is saying, IHOP — it’s a whole new round of culture shock for us.  After 30 hours of planes and airports, 6:00a Thursday found us standing in Houston, Texas where 10 short months ago this whole journey started.  It’s cold!  I think I’ve figured out the secret to getting over jet-lag.  Sleeping for 20 hours straight.  Both Shelley and I feel great and are so pleased that we had no problems on any of our flights and we didn’t seem to pick up an in-flight cold.

So our last few weeks in Bangkok were amazing.  We handed off Beth and Glenn and picked up the Karthik and Justin show.  They were ideal international travelers and crashed on our floor for most of the trip.  After a few days of exploring Bangkok we headed to the beaches of Hua Hin.  There we explored some of the more famous vacation temples of Thai Kings and also stopped off at a wax museum Monk hall of fame.  While we were at the beach we went to the Thai wedding of Supicha and Jeff.  Supicha is an old TAMS classmate of Justin and I.  It was really neat to see such a different wedding ceremony than what we are used to back here in the US.

After the wedding Shelley headed home to pack and Justin, Karthik, and I headed to the Jungle along the Burmese border for some trekking.  We were really lucky and joined a National Park ranger and two individuals from the Wildlife Conservation Foundation (Fund?) who where surveying the number of wild elephants in the park in the dry forest region.  We never actually got to see a wild elephant but did take to the trees once because a protective mother was making incredible growling noises in the area.  The next day we headed deeper into the actual rain forest and observed lots of birds and gibbons and lemurs.  We even saw tiger poop and lepard tracks.  Lots of fun and mosquitoes.  Our guide was really fantastic and seemed to be a kind of Thailand Crocodile Dundee.  He was far superior than any other guide I had during my time in Thailand.

After the jungle we headed back to Bangkok and started to wrap things up.  Shelley did an amazing packing job as usual and we managed to get all of our stuff down to 3 checked bags and four carry-ons.  We were seen to the airport by most of the English department.  It was so touching because they actually stayed with us all the way to customs.  What an amazing send off to an amazing year.

As you can imagine with mine, Justin’s, Karthik’s, and Shelley’s cameras all snapping away we got some of our best pictures yet.  I hope to get them up soon but there’s a lot of wedding planning to be done.  We are spending the first half of April flying all over the US checking out graduate schools for the fall.  We look forward to slowly but surely catching up with everyone soon.

-Tim

Tim & I have been able to wrap up our time here in Bangkok in the best way possible - touring around one last time with friends.  Beth & Glenn took time off to fly half way around the world and visit, and we are SO glad they did.  It was a blast spending time with them and sharing our lives here in Bangkok.  We were able to take them to all of our favorite places and then some.  Beth got fitted and had her bridesmaids dress made   Glenn ordered a custom design, hand made pool cue off of the number 2 snooker player in all of Thailand (who didn’t speak any English and called up his girlfriend, who did, to help with the sale). They visited all of the major temples, ate in all of our favorite restaurants, lounged on beautiful beaches in the south, road motorcycle taxis in Bangkok traffic…  we had an awesome time.  I’ve posted some pictures from their visit under Beth & Glenn - Bangkok.  If you want to see more, Beth & Glenn have posted most of their pictures in Kodak Gallery with captions.  They’re in three different albums:  Bangkok1, Railey Beach, Bangkok2.  If you are not a Kodak Gallery member, you can create an account for free and view them.

They have some amazing pictures of their time at Railey Beach, so check them out if you get the chance.   B&G - thanks again for comming to visit!  It was so good to be with friends from home again.  Can’t wait to see you soon - we’ll be in TX in about a week.

~Shelley       

I just put up the Beijing pictures.  We haven’t really written up a huge post about the experience because we’ve found that we enjoy telling the story through the picture captions better.  There’s about 130 pictures that we screened out of about 700.

-Tim

I’ve just posted pictures from my mother’s visit to Thailand.  She spent a month here and saw a ton!  For the first week or so she was able to to experience our daily routines and toured the city with us after work and on the weekends.  She was here for Chinese New Year’s and braved the narrow streets of China town.  She wore an all red outfit, and the natives loved it!  She got more smiles and thumbs up than I’ve seen in my entire time here.  

She was also here for wedding planning (and wedding planning melt downs).  One Saturday morning I was trying to figure out the wording for our invitations, and I got really stressed out.  I know it seems like a simple thing, but everything involved in wedding invitations is complicated and crazy - believe me!  Luckily (for Tim) my mom knocked on our door and Tim answered it with, "Get in here and deal with your daughter!  She’s losing it!"  Usually Tim is the only one who has to deal with my wedding planning melt downs, so it was good he could dump me on my mom for once :)  The poor man needs a break from all this girly stuff.

About a week and a half into her trip her friends Jet, Gale, and Carl arrived.  Gale, Carl, and Jet have all been to Bangkok before (Gale and Carl come multiple times a year), so my mom was able to run around with them and really explore Bangkok while Tim and I worked.  We met up in the evenings for dinner and the occasional lounge chair luxury movie.  It was so much fun having them here!

For her third week here, my mom headed with her friends to Chaing Mai for some hard core shopping.  Then she flew back into Bangkok and Tim & I met her at the airport and we flew straight to Beijing.  The Beijing pictures we’ve posted give a good feel for some of the spots we were able to visit and the amazing time we had.  I think we all fell in love with Beijing and would go back in a heartbeat if given the chance.

All in all, it was an awesome visit and we loved having her here!

~Shelley 

Things are winding down here so we’ve been able to get caught up a little.  We finally got up our pictures from our January visit to Singapore.  The first weekend of 2006 we headed down to Singapore to meet the newest member of the family, Abigail. Mom (Joyce) was there training up the new parents. Shelley and I were both impressed with how well everyone was adjusted — Mom to the Singapore culture, Kate and Chris to parenthood, Abigail to life outside the womb.  We all had a great time trying out strange Chinese/Singaporean type food and deciding what was good and what wasn’t.  Chris even took Shelley, Mom, and me to the very famous Night Safari.  This is a really neat and modern Zoo that is considered one of the top tourist attractions in Singapore.  You ride around on a tram and get to watch nocturnal animals (pretty much all jungle animals are nocturnal) at work and play under spotlights.  It was fantastic.  Of course the highlight of the trip was meeting Abby.  She was great the whole weekend we were there and hardly fussed at all.

-Tim

It’s hard for us to believe but we are going to be standing back in the good old U S of A on March 23rd.  That is just one month!  Just when we started to figure things out around here too.  Ah well I’m going to miss this place but I’m going to be really excited to get back home too.  Walking down the stairs from one of my last classes I was confused by what I was feeling.  I eventually figured out that I am going to miss some of these kids.  Being a teacher is a bit of being a gardener.  I’ve tried to plant a few seeds.  Most of them never even made it into the ground.  But a precious few show definite signs of sprouting.  I’m incredibly curious to see what they end up growing into, but most likely I will never get to know.  Teaching is simultaneously the most real and artificial job I’ve had yet.  I’ll leave it at that because I don’t think that statement will make sense unless you have been a teacher (of children) before.

-Tim

We really want to hear from you all, so we’ve turned comments on. Now you can write a comment about a post by clicking on the link at the bottom of that post.

Previous grouchy post written at 2:00a edited by Shelley.

We’ve finally posted our long overdue Vietnam pictures, so check them out if you get the chance.  It was really an interesting place.  I’m not sure pictures can do justice to some of the spots we visited, but they’ll at least give you a good feel for the place.

Things have been wild for the last few months, so we’re really behind getting pictures up.  So many exciting things have happened since we’ve been to Vietnam - we’ve been to Singapore to visit Kate, Chris, Joyce, & Abby (who is officially the cutest baby ever!), and my mom spent a month here in Bangkok with us (with a little side trip to Beijing).  Such great stuff, pictures are coming soon - promise

- Shelley

Beijing was a blast . . . of refreshing cold air that is.  Running around Southeast Asia for the past 9 months has made Shelley and I forget that the rest of the world has winter.  Well we found it in China with 0-4 degree C weather.  Brrrrrrrrrrr.  There was even snow on the ground!  Beijing was an incredible experience.  What a modern city it is.  Take every vision you have of China Towns around the world and throw them out the window.  It has wide clean roads and sky-rises.  There are KFCs, Walmarts, McD’s, and even a Papa Johns.  We saw all the ancient sites, learned about the number 9, climbed the Great Wall (actually should be called the Great Staircase), etc.  Shelley’s mom, Debbie, has been a joy to entertain in Thailand and was so fun to have travelling with us in Beijing.  Shelley and I are so grateful for her to have booked the tour for the three of us.  Thanks Debbie! 

-Tim