18 Sep 2011
Our ten weeks in Nice was the first time in a long while that I was completely happy with what I was doing. I wasn’t helping anyone sell an idea that I didn’t believe in, and I wasn’t occupied with busy work. I was learning—learning how to communicate and how to teach others to communicate. The rest of my time was occupied with new friends, the Mediterranean and living cheaply and simply.
09 Sep 2011
When in Beijing it is of course obligatory to visit the Great Wall of China. We hired a private guide to pick us up at our hotel and take us to a less traveled area of the wall located in the Hebei province. The drive was about an hour and half to the Jinshanling section, which we were told had less tourists. This turned out to be completely true, as we saw maybe a total of ten other travelers during the day we spent there. The Jinshanling section was of particular interest to us because there are sections that are both restored and not restored, so we were able to see what toll the past four hundred years had taken on this massive structure.
07 Sep 2011
We only spent four days in Hong Kong. We found it to be like many large cosmopolitan cities. Some of the highlights were afternoon tea at the Peninsula Hotel, which is Hong Kong’s oldest hotel, and a trip to the nearby Po Lin Monastery to see the Tin Tan Buddha. I think the most memorable site though, was while walking to the Hong Kong Zoological and Botanical Gardens, we came across a black cobra eating a frog on the sidewalk.
04 Sep 2011
Nothing could have prepared me for the scale of Beijing. I feel that usually I can get a fairly good scope of a city I am going to visit by looking at a map. We would pick a destination that we though would be a 15 minute walk and end up trekking for an hour. This wasn’t helped by the Chinese industrious proclivity for wall building.
01 Sep 2011
New Zealand was one of the more bizarre experiences of our lives. Marcy and I moved to Wellington, which is the most Southern city on the North island, as well as the capitol, in January of 2009. We had made a reconnaissance trip a few months earlier in November of 2008, and Marcy was able to secure a job, so with the financial unpleasantness looming at the time in the states, we decided to pack up an head for greener pastures. Over the following two years we discovered that the pastures weren’t that much greener and challenged many of our conceived notions about life and ourselves.
