Before booking our trip to Slovenia, we didn’t actually know too much about it. As it turned out, it was one of our favorite trips. The people were super-friendly and everyone we spoke to was fluent in English (many Slovenes spoke German and Italian as well.) We rented a car, which we did not originally plan to do, but it turned out to be a good decision because the roads were great and we were able to do day trips into Austria and Croatia, and to drive by a few extra castles and other sights along the way. The capital, Ljubljana [View Full Entry]

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On our way to Slovenia, we stopped over for a week in London to hang out with Lindsay’s friends from high school and to see a few sights. Lindsay and I were in London for a week in 2000, so this trip we spent less of our time and energy sightseeing and more of our time and energy eating good Indian, Thai, and Chinese food. This was mostly because there aren’t too many of these restaurants in Portugal (although there are one or two Chinese restaurants in Coimbra that we need to check out.) One sightseeing highlight was the Tate Modern [View Full Entry]

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Saturday night Jason and I went to a free fado performance down the street from our apartment. Fado is a traditional music from Portugal, and there are two different styles, Coimbra fado and Lisbon fado. The fado from Coimbra is considered more academic and only performed by men, while the fado from Lisbon is more popular, and both women and men can sing it. The fado group we saw had three members: one classical guitar player, one Portuguese guitar player, and one vocalist. They played for an hour in a cool spot near the old city wall. There were probably about [View Full Entry]

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Friday was kind of an odd/funny day because it was the first day that we needed to find our own internet access because we couldn’t use the hotel’s wireless network anymore (we checked out on Thursday) and our appointment with Portugal Telecom to set up DSL in our apartment is not until next week. We need internet at least every weekday so Lindsay can do her translation work and so I can write about the mundane details of our lives (and a few interesting things) for this blog. We started our quest for an internet connection by going to the free [View Full Entry]

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I took some pictures of our apartment this morning. We haven’t really moved in yet, we’ll be doing that today, but we’re pretty happy with the layout of the apartment. There are 2 bedrooms, 1 bath, and a living room/kitchen combo room. Yesterday we bought a little TV (we get 1 Portuguese station right now) and a little FM radio/CD player (haven’t had time yet to check for stations.) I’m also uploading a few other pictures we’ve taken around Coimbra so far. - Jason [View Full Entry]

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Well, we officially live in Portugal now! We got an apartment today that we’re really happy with, have already gotten cell phones, and have applied for bank accounts (which required a whole other set of minor administrative tasks that went surprisingly smoothly). We even went to Carrefour today and got stocked up with kitchen supplies and sheets and towels and stuff. Coimbra seems to be a fairly pleasant city, despite being kind of hot right now. We’re told that the heat will soon give way to months and months of cold, rainy weather, which actually sounds pretty nice right [View Full Entry]

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We arrived in Lisbon after taking a 7 hour flight from Detroit to London and a 2 hour flight from London to Lisbon. We were expecting to pay extra money for all our luggage, but we got lucky because only Northwest tacked on a fee (and it was pretty small). We didn’t have too much time in Lisbon. Just enough to grab dinner and walk around the downtown area for a few hours. I’ve posted a few pictures including a kind of blurry one of the old castle overlooking the town. We hope to go there next time we’re in Lisbon. [View Full Entry]

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Lindsay and I went to Cedarville, Michigan for the week of July 4th. Cedarville is just over the Mackinac Bridge and east of St. Ignace in the U.P. (Upper Peninsula for all you non-Michiganders…..but I kept calling it the Northern Peninsula since I’ve been out-of-state for so long) Lindsay’s family has been going up every summer for the past 30+ years! We spent time hanging out on Lake Huron; we went to the 4th of July parade and had pancakes at the local Fireman’s breakfast; and we went to Mackinac Island one day to bike around the island, check out the [View Full Entry]

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For the 2nd weekend of Lindsay’s Spring Break we took a road trip. Vegas was okay. Palm Springs was pretty fun, Joshua Tree National Park was our favorite and we had fun getting stuck in traffic in L.A. (actually, traffic wasn’t too bad except on the 405). - Jason [View Full Entry]

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We went to Lake Tahoe for the first weekend of Lindsay’s spring break in March. There had been a bunch of storms the week before we went, so the snow was great. It was probably the best snow Lindsay and I have been on. Lindsay skied and I snowboarded. We had to use chains on my car (actually 2 sets because the first set broke). It was a fun trip, but we had to work hard to get back because of another big snowstorm. We had good weather on the way up to Tahoe, so the trip from San Jose only [View Full Entry]

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