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 Museum of Modern Art. This was fun for the art, but also for the views of the Millennium Bridge and St. Paul’s Cathedral. Supposedly when the Millennium Bridge first opened in 2000 and people started ... read more

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 internet café in the touristy part of town, but there wasn’t any way for Lindsay to connect with her own laptop and there was a 30 minute time limit to use their computers and a ... read more

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 now. The people here have been really nice to us and almost everyone we’ve come across has spoken at least some English. People seem very willing to go out of their way to help the confused foreigners ... read more

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 Grand Hotel, and watch Portugal play in the World Cup semi-finals (too bad they didn’t beat France!) Lindsay hurt her foot hiking around on Mackinac island, but it got better by the next day because ... read more

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 took 5 hours. On the way back, it took us 8 hours!! - Jason ... read more