After graduating from college in 2007 and spending a few years in the working world, we randomly decided to move across the world and teach English in China. Hmm...foolish, or awesome? It's going to be the year of a lifetime, with adventures we'll never forget. Join us as we cry, laugh, experience life as we never have before, and make new friends while trying to stay in touch with the old ones. We'll be returning to the USA during the summer of 2010, where we'll hopefully move to a new city and begin life yet again anew.

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I had dinner with a friend tonight who expressed the sentiment that she had been hoping for a follow-up "we're home!" sort of blog, and it got me thinking. Why haven't we written anything else? What is there to say? How do we even begin to describe the feelings of coming back to the US after a year away? We returned to Seattle on Tuesday, July 6th. As of today, we've been 'home' for exactly three weeks, though home is a pretty loose term these days. I'm not even sure what it really means after a year of calling a foreign [View Full Entry]

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Our last day here was perfect, in a completely chaotic and weird way. We closed our bank accounts, we ate lunch with Harry and Shaka at the cafeteria, we packed and packed and took a Chinese-style afternoon rest, we went to dinner at our favorite Muslim noodle place, we talked and laughed with students. In the morning, we gave a box of butter cookies to the man who delivers water jugs to our school and has carried countless jugs up the six flights of stairs to our room over this past year. He always greets us with a smile and a [View Full Entry]

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We just returned to Kuala Lumpur after a week on the beautiful island of Bali, in Indonesia, a place both of us have always wanted to visit. On June 21st, we took a late flight from Singapore Changi Airport (rated #1 in the world-- it WAS nice) to Ngurah Rai International Airport in Bali. If you look at a map, you'll barely make out the island of Bali, sitting there tiny and quiet in between the islands of Java and Lombok. Though it's small, it has two distinct features: one, it's probably the biggest tourist destination in all of Indonesia, and [View Full Entry]

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Singapore is HOT. Too hot. Painfully hot. I know I’ve said this about a lot of places, but seriously. It’s the kind of hot where you look around a park and realize that nobody is out…they’re all inside, enjoying the air conditioning. We learned our lesson quickly yesterday. Starting the day out around 10, we headed out to see the Singapore Flyer, a newly built ‘viewing ferris wheel’ that is supposed to be the world’s largest and offer great views of the city. It didn’t disappoint. Definitely recommend it. The ride takes about thirty minutes, and you are in an enclosed [View Full Entry]

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Today was purely a day of lazing around and transport. As Martin wasn’t feeling well (a bad head cold started the night before), we took our time getting up in the morning and opted for the easiest breakfast in Asia- McDonalds. It was already hot at only 10am in Melaka, squelching any desire we might have had to walk around the town some more for exploration. With the heat and Martin’s cold, we spent the morning in our fan-only room, just reading and relaxing until checkout at noon. At that point, we moved downstairs for another hour of reading until a [View Full Entry]

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I'm in love with Malaysia. KL was clean, efficient, diverse and very tourist friendly. Melaka is just plain gorgeous. It took us two hours to get here from KL, on the most comfortable bus I think SE Asia must have to offer. It was luxury! The cost? 5USD. We arrived to Melaka Sentral around 2pm, the bus station just outside of town, and immediately purchased bus tickets for tomorrow to Singapore so that we wouldn't have to deal with it later. Then, a nice taxi driver who spoke English drove us to our hostel, the Kancil Guesthouse. Our hostel is very [View Full Entry]

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Kuala Lumpur, the capital city of Malaysia, has about 2 million people and is also the biggest city in Malaysia. We arrived very early this morning, after a 9pm flight from the Hong Kong Airport. The flight was 3.5 hours long! Luckily, the time flew by...I guess we've become used to long journeys by now. I wonder what driving for a few hours will feel like again in the States. Arriving at our hostel (Red Palm) by taxi at 2:30am meant that all we did was get a room key and immediately fall asleep. Well, tried to. The World Cup was [View Full Entry]

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Since returning from Shanghai on the 8th, things have been sort of a blur. We came back to a school that was slightly frightening- everything was roped off with what looked like (but wasn’t) crime tape and there were extra police everywhere, even at the beginning of our road to only allow certain cars and people through (no public buses). The reason for all this? The Gao Kao, China’s national Senior 3 college entrance exam. It lasts for three days, and each school looks sort of like ours did during this time. Parents swarm the school, only allowed in certain areas, [View Full Entry]

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Just a recent random thought (after all, it is a blog right?) I've (Martin) had..... Never in our lives have we had so little control of our day to day outcomes. Sure, we implore certain measures to increase the chance of successful outcomes, but with no native language ability, and a general unfamiliarity of the ways of this country, we have had to just put our entire TRUST in the process. TRUST. Putting trust in people and things we have never met or experienced before. TRUST. I can't tell you how many times we've been put in a car (not against [View Full Entry]

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Today, we flew to Shanghai from Shenzhen on China Eastern Airlines. Like all the flights we’ve taken out of Shenzhen Airport, our flight was delayed by about an hour, but luckily had no other problems. We were even given a pretty decent meal on board. Take that, airlines in the USA! We landed at Shanghai Pudong International Airport close to 2pm, and immediately made our way towards the metro, as it is newly expanded to reach all the way out to the airport, a good hour journey away from the city. You could tell the metro was brand new- it was [View Full Entry]

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