CEBandBA
Claire and Brian Joined: March 17th 2008
Logged in: October 25th 2011
Logged in: October 25th 2011
Anyways, we have been living abroad and teaching English for about fourteen months now (as of June 09). We started in Thailand. Now we are in Taiwan. Read about it if you'd like. We've been lucky with our jobs and the great people we have met along the way. We've had some opportunities to travel. We usually get a blog or two up about our travels. We'll be in Taiwan for another year or so. We're learning Chinese and saving our pennies. After that...we're thinking of saving the world. Maybe we'll just move somewhere else and get back to the blossoming careers we left behind. Who knows. Who cares (except for me...and my family and some friends).
Travel Blog Posts
Claire and a fish
And Only 37 To Go!! This blog is a large conglomeration of photos we never got around to posting this past year. Read the photo titles and captions for the entertaining saga known as Claire and Brian's Stupendously Spectacular Taiwanese Travel Adventure Extravaganza. We did a lot of things in Taiwan-including work!! We came here as ESL teachers, but by the beginning of 2010, we had figured out a new direction for our lives. By the end of January 2010, we had pointed ourselves in that new direction and set off running. Well...we couldn't exactly run because we had a contract...and, we still needed to save some more money...and, we really weren't as good at Chinese as we wanted to be. But we did have a plan and it was in motion! Claire and I started ... read more
pagoda
The Final Installment! The cool, rainy weather forced us to change our east coast surfing plans. We decided to go north from Taitung to the city of Hualian and the Taroko Gorge. The Taroko Gorge is impressive. It's a 19-mile long canyon near the east coast coast of Taiwan. It features a dramatic elevation gain from the coast to around 3000 meters in about 60 horizontal kilometers. It's also crumbling. We rented scooters and toured the park for the day. The weather was decent with only a slight drizzle hitting us here and there. It was a pleasant alternative to spending a few days surfing. From there, Marvis caught a train back to Chiayi, while the rest of us hopped a train north to Taipei. In Taipei we met up with one of Steve's friends who ... read more
Southern tip of Taiwan
Once Chinese New Year's Eve was over, it was time to head to the beach. We spent three days there. The plan was to surf and hike. The weather wasn't too great, but we did get a day of surfing in on Claire's birthday. Other than that, it was cool - literally and figuratively. Wednesday was Claire's birthday. It was cool. Hey...?...it's late July 2010, and I'm just getting around to posting this. We've been busy. Really busy. We'll be finished with Taiwan on September 1st. From here we'll head to Kuala Lumpur for a few days of R&R and hopefully to meet up with a few friends (Rob included!) and then we'll head to Shillong, India for some volunteer work with Impulse NGO Network. We'll be putting our amazing business skills to use (and we'll ... read more
Lookin' Good ChiaYi
Our first chance to travel since the trip to the Philippines in June came at Chinese New Year. Many get a week off during this time of year. Luckily for us, Rob, our good friend from the Thailand days, came to the island, and a week later, his brother joined us. We did some stuff. It was fun. The weather was lame, but the silver lining was that it ended up forcing us to some places we wouldn't have gone otherwise. We ended up with a great day at the Taroko Gorge and we all drank like cats at Claire's command in Taitung. We're splitting this blog into three or four parts because there are a lot of pictures. Also, we haven't been very active in posting, so this will make it really seem like we're ... read more
Claire, Brian and Tia Maria
Brian and I were given the amazing opportunity to stay with a family for a week in small town Philippines. Our friend and co-worker here in Taiwan, Kristina is a Filipina Canadian who hadn’t been back to her home country for seventeen years. So when we were given a week off from school, her and her husband decided it was time to go back to the homeland. And in some very fortunate circumstances, they deemed Brian and me worthy to spend that week with them. We stayed in the Bataan peninsula, infamous for the WWII Bataan Death March. The peninsula is on the Philippines’ big island, which has very few tourist attractions and the peninsula itself has nearly none. In fact, when I tried looking for a one night getaway hotel at a beach in the ... read more
The Front of LeMeridian
It's taken several months to post this blog because Claire and I moved to Taiwan the day after my parents left Thailand. It's not easy to move countries and start work the next day. I also have a ton of pictures from several cameras documenting the trip. I think this entry will be mostly pictures with captions. Anyways, my parents came to visit us during the last two weeks of our time in Thailand. It was a great trip. We did a ton of stuff. Claire and I also managed to wrap up our lives in Chiang Mai and pack our bags for Taiwan. The trip started in Chiang Mai. We were all there for about ten days. Then we went to Bangkok for about three days. My parents did really well with the travel and ... read more
Taiwans Southeast Coast
Hey Everybody! We're still in Taiwan and doing well. We finally got to take a little trip at the end of May. The Taiwanese work a lot, so we won't have many opportunities like this. We had a four day holiday and decided to head to the East coast. Taiwan's east coast is the less developed side of the island due to the large, steep mountains (several peaks over 12,000 feet) and the typhoons experienced each year. There's also a large indigenous population of various tribes. The trip was great. The city of Taitung was our base. We spent a good amount of time at the beach. There's only a few swimable beaches on the east coast, so we were lucky to be near one. The water and currents can be rather violent and in many ... read more
Bye Thailand
Taiwan…wow, you are not Thailand! Our time in Thailand has come and gone already! Claire and I had a great time exploring, learning to teach, making new friends, learning Thai (barely) and learning to live in a very different culture from ours. We learned more than we can explain. Most importantly we made a lot of great friends we hope to see many more times before China takes over the world. And speaking of that part of the world, we’re now in Taiwan! But let’s backtrack for a moment. My parents just came to Thailand to visit. It was great. We hung out in Chiang Mai for a while and then hit Bangkok for a few days. There will be a blog about it in the near future. Claire’s dad also visited in October and her ... read more
Outside Mae Salong
Well hello everybody. We have neglected our blog for too long, so I'm going to throw up some pictures that are a hodgepodge of things we've done in the past six months. As of now, Claire and I are in are final two months of our time in Thailand (at least this time). As I write, we have not confirmed exactly what is next, although it's looking to be a year in Taiwan. This next year will not only be for adventure but also for making and saving money. It's time that we got rid of the credit card debt we've been carrying and put a lil' somethin' in the bank so we don't have to live in my car when we go back to America. The first few photos are of a little city near ... read more
First Chiang Mai outing at Kafe
(Again my apologies for being so lazy... These blogs were both written more than 6 months ago...) My mom and sister made it out a few weeks after my father had left (November of 08). Unfortunately, I could not greet them in Bangkok when they first arrived but I did remain in the loop with phone calls from my mother all throughout there 30-some-odd hours in Bangkok. An arrival phone call and questioning about local transport, a phone call to let me know they had been swindled into a tuk-tuk tour of two attractions accompanied by a few tailor shops, jewelry stores and other souvenir shops and I think there was one more dropped call to tell me about how they were drinking beers and talking politics at some unknown location in Bangkok. My sister suspected ... read more
