Jared

Hello, First, I would like to thank everyone who has emailed / messaged / called to check in on me. I'm fine, as far as terrorist activity goes. I'm in Bangalore which is in South India (about where home plate would be if you made a diamond between Bangalore, Calcutta, Delhi, and Bombay. Nothing has happened in Bangalore since late summer and I'm sure they will be locking down; before we've had major increase in visible police force / road blocks on the streets when attacks happen. I am trying to respond individually to everyone but thought this would be a more efficient way to do things at least to start with. Thanks again for checking on me, and happy thanksgiving!... read more

*Note: This is being written posted about a month later as I've been without internet/electricity some times and just busy other times. I'm not posting much in the way of story to go along with the pictures because more interesting pictures/stories are waiting to be told and I can't skip ahead. I'll do my best to catch up now though! I arrived into the main train station in Kuala Lumpur on Sunday morning. I'm in need of a shower after the overnight train trip but figure everything is alright because the station at KL has pay showers, right? Wrong! They were closed on Sunday (no one needs to shower then apparently) even though the rest of the station was open. It is a very nice train station, modern with connections to the city's public transit and ... read more

I arrived in Singapore from Tokyo at about 11:30 pm local time. The airport is pretty modern even if it does use the teal green and pinkish color theme (not unlike the Miami airport, except you don't feel trapped in the 80s). There are tropical palm trees everywhere on the road out from the airport though this shouldn't be a surprise as Singapore is located very close to the Equator. In fact, this is the closest to the southern hemisphere I've ever been... yay. I made it through immigration and customs without any trouble, got some cool Singapore Dollars (SGD) from the ATM, called my mother (yes, she wants me to call her to be sure I made it safely :-) . . . ), and headed for the taxi line. There I was given a ... read more

One of the excursions from CEA was to the Normandy and Brittany regions to visit Rennes (the capital of Brittany), St. Malo and Mont St. Michel. Rennes is a nice-enough town. It has a beautiful parliament building that was recently rebuilt after a fire for a gigantic amount of money (I can’t remember exactly how much). Another interesting thing here is that signs appear in French and Breton (see the picture). St. Malo is on the coast of the English Channel. It used to be an important wealthy area, mostly because of the profiteers (a nice French name for pirates) who were based there. They were famous for being fierce and taking things from ships around the area. The people there don’t like them to be called pirates; apparently there’s a difference if you board a ... read more

This weekend I got to visit Barcelona. I was pretty excited because this is the first time I had gotten to use my rail pass and travel outside of France. It was a real adventure, as I have never taken a train anywhere before. One tip about trains: you have to watch those train ticket salesman . . . they are kind of like airline people, and will sell you a more expensive ticket than you need. They told me it would cost like 60 euros each way for an overnight train from Paris to Barcelona (on top of the mega bucks I paid for the pass). I figured out that I really only had to pay 20 euros for a slower and (not direct) train. Once I got that taken care of, it went much ... read more