We've been safe and sound back in the United States for almost a month now. With new job and apartment issues, and just basically getting settled into life in Syracuse (and not out of our backpacks), we've stayed busy enough to keep us away from the blog. But finally, we can catch up, and let anybody who may be still reading this about our last days on the trip. It only takes three hours to fly from Auckland, New Zealand to Nadi, Fiji. Luckily, we had set up our plans for Fiji up ahead of time. Once at the airport, we got a transfer to our hotel, the Nadi Bay Hotel. This was only for an overnight before reaching our final destination, the Long Beach Resort on the island of Matacawa Levu. Fiji, rather than ... read more

Greetings wizards, orcs and ents. We are writing from beautiful New Zealand, know for many things: astonishingly beautiful scenery, sheep farming, kiwis (both birds and fruits) sand flies, and (most recently) as the setting for Peter Jackson's "Lord of the Rings" films. Now, we're not really SciFi/Fantasy people, but we did enjoy the movies and can't help getting caught up in our gorgeous surroundings. It really is an otherworldly kind of natural beauty that pervades the outdoors here in New Zealand. Flying in from Sydney to Christchurch and particularly on the connecting flight to Queenstown (our first New Zealand stop) we got our first taste of the splendour of the kiwi landscape: emerald green valleys and expanses of lakes guarded by snowcapped mountains looking like blankets draped over the countryside. Bob Ross could not paint ... read more

We arrived safely in Singapore where we are staying with our friends Vanessa and Tony Trombino. Cosmina and Vanessa have been friends since junior high in Queens, and she was the matron-of-honor at our wedding. Her husband, Tony, was offered a position here in Singapore, and they have been living here for the last eight months. They and their two adorable sons, Matthew and Adam, love living here in Singapore. For us, it was less of a place to sightsee and more of a place to connect with some good friends and enjoy their company. Considering that, aside from each other, Cosmina and I haven't seen any friends or family in the last 2 1/2 months, we looked forward to this visit a lot. We arrived at Singapore Airport on September 25 in the evening and ... read more

It doesn't seem like that long since we were blogging in Beijing, but we've already been here in Japan now for over a week. Part of the reason for the lack of blogging of late is that the internet costs are prohibitively expensive here (at least compared to the $1-1.50 per hour we've grown accustomed to in other countries), not to mention the fact that there are so few internet cafes here. The other reason is that there is so much to do here and we've been trying to take in as much as possible. Japan has been such a beautiful adventure, we can't recommend it enough. We arrived on September 3 at Tokyo's Narita Airport and had an uneventful train and subway ride to our hotel. We were impressed with the mass transit here ... read more

Well, all we have to say is that we're grateful to be in Beijing. Even though both India and China are usually talked about in the same breath when you hear about booming developing foreign economies in the business news, but they are leaps and bound apart. Perhaps it's all the preparations for the Olympics (which ended the day before we arrived), but the chinese are certainly doing something right. Our flight from Delhi to Beijing was pretty uneventful, aside from the fact that we travelled on Ethiopia Air and survived. Actually, Ethiopia Air was not so bad. It was certainly no Etihad, but after the week in India, we would've taken anything with two wings and a working engine. We arrived almost seven hours later in Beijing Aiport. We could immediately tell how spruced ... read more