Just pictures...

So, I was able to get our pictures onto our portable hard drive, so this entry will be nothing but pictures for your viewing pleasure...

Most, but not all of the pictures are from our most recent trip with our friends Emily and Peter. Also, most of them are in backwards order from the way we actually did our trip.

K, so it's taken waaaaaay longer than I thought it would to upload pictures, so these aren't all of the ones I wanted to put up, but it's the majority. Sorry about the sloppy formatting, I'm tired!

And before you panic, it's henna.

Coming up with a title is more difficult than coming up with an entire blog entry.

Wow I don't know if I remember how to use a keyboard anymore! Sorry about the lackage of updatings. Unfortunately, this blog entry will be picturelesque. When we came back from our trip to the south with our friends, the keyboard on our laptop mysteriously didn't work. Our computer has been having a lot of problems lately, and now we can't even upload pictures onto it. Anyway...

So, where to begin... A couple of our friends from the U.S. came to visit us over here for 10 days. We were able to do and see a lot, and we had nearly perfect weather, which is really unusual for this time of year. We started out in Chiang Mai, seeing the usual sights (elephant camp, old temples, etc.) After a couple days here we went to Chiang Dao. I blogged about it a little while ago, but it's a small town up in the mountains. We stayed in some beautiful bungalows that had an amazing on-site restaurant. It was all western food, but the food was incredible. The restaurant is known throughout Thailand because the owner is an English guy who studied to be a chef in England, and the food is incredible! We had a lot of fun doing some mountain biking through the beautiful mountain rainforest. We even saw a baby tarantula, special huh?

From Chiang Dao we flew to Krabi. We stayed in yet another beautiful bungalow close to the beach on the Tonsai peninsula. It is the low season right now and prices for accomadation are very cheap, so we were able to stay in places we otherwise wouldn't have been able to afford. We had a few great days there doing some kayaking and rock climbing in one of the most beautiful places on Earth. And I caught a baby water monitor, which is a lizard that is related to the Komodo Dragon. It can get up to 8 feet long. This one was about a foot and a half long, and super cute.

From there we took a ferry to one of Thailand's most famous (and arguably most beautiful) islands, Ko Phi Phi. We swam in the ocean and enjoyed the surroundings there for a couple of days, but then it was time for our friends to head back home. Ko Phi Phi was completely devastated by the tsunami in 2004, and it's still very evident today. But they're doing a lot of rebuilding, and it's almost back up to 100%. Oh, and we saw another water monitor. It was 4-5 feet long and I was able to take a ton of pictures... Bloody computer...

We were expecting to go to Vietnam from there, but for some reason, every time we tried to book a flight to Vietnam, our card was declined. So annoying! We thought we'd try to book a flight with a travel agent in Bangkok, but as soon as we arrived in Bangkok, Kathy got an email that said that her grandma had had a bad fall and was in the hospital. So with Vietnam not working out and still two and a half weeks off of work, we thought it would be a good time for Kathy to go see everyone in Germany. So she did! Her grandma got a bad concussion from the fall, but was out of the hospital within a few days.

So this is where I'll blog about what I did for 2 weeks while Kathy was in Germany. I'll let Kathy blog about Germany next blog.

Bored yet? This is why it's better to blog often. It's getting pretty long already...

Anyway, I hung out in Chiang Mai for about a week doing absolutely nothing productive. Then a friend of mine, Steve, asked if I'd be interested in going to Laos for a week. So I did! We first went to a border city called Vientiane. Spent a couple days there checking out the city and eating really good Laotian food. It's right on the Mekong river, which is probably comparable to the Mississippi in size. Ha ha I can still remember how to spell Mississippi. Then we went to another city in Laos called Vang Vieng. Vang Vieng reminded me a lot of southern Thailand, big rocks jutting out the ground everywhere. The big thing to do there is the river tubing. You rent a tube, and they drive you way up the river and drop you off. On one side of the river, you float past huge limestone cliffs. It reminded me a lot of the Zion Narrows hike, but the river was much bigger. Anyway, about halfway down the river it started to rain, which was a little unpleasant cause the sun wasn't out and it got a little cold, but it was so amazing to watch. The rocks were surrounded by this mist, and the cliffs would appear and then disappear behind it. It was so beautiful!! I know I've used that word a lot, but if you don't believe me, come over here for yourself (or ask Karen and Teancum).

Kathy got back Saturday night from Germany, the same day I got back from Laos. We're starting our classes back up and we're back to earning our peanut money so we can eat more Thai food.

Sorry this entry is a little sloppy, just whipped it up in a half hour. Next time we'll have pictures for those of you who still won't come visit us in Thailand because you think it's not as beautiful as Kaua'i. :)

Love.

Yes'm.

Hi again everyone!

We have been really busy lately between work and play, and we haven't been able to do the ol' blog. We're leaving on Tuesday morning for Krabi with some of our friends, Emily and Peter, who are visiting from Utah. After Krabi we hope to go to Vietnam for about 3 weeks, but we've realized that the visa for Vietnam may take a little longer to get than we had thought. So anyway, it will probably be kind of random with the blog updates for the next little while; we apologize to all our fans :)

We love and miss you. Hope everyone is well.

I'm fine, thank you, and you?

Boy oh boy, it’s been a while huh? Well, not a whole lot has happened since Karen and Teancum left. We started back into our jobs and that’s about all that we’ve been doing.

We both started teaching English at a nursing college. The classes are enormous. There are 90 students in each class. We actually have to use a microphone while teaching. It’s been fun and rewarding, but preparing for the classes takes a lot of time. It’s difficult to find good activities and ways to keep the students attentive and motivated for 3 hours straight. We’re also both still teaching a few classes at EFL (the language school where we’ve been since we started teaching). Katharina has an interesting class with a student named Hobby. He’s a super weird and funny kid who has great English, but isn’t very motivated. I’ll let Kat blog about him next time maybe. Other than that, there’s not much else going on. We spend our weekends preparing for our nursing classes. Oh! And I need to write about my first day at the nursing college. Ready kids? Once upon a time, a teacher was supposed to teach the nursing students on Mondays at 1pm. But this teacher got really sick ten minutes before class started (literally, 12:50pm. Literally.) So he decided to call Jeff, who had never taught such a large class before, and had absolutely nothing prepared to teach that day, and had no idea where the college even was! So after the big, mean teacher yelled at Jeff for a while about how Jeff had to take this teacher’s class, because there were no other options, and “sometimes you just get thrown into the deep end”, Jeff agreed to teach the class. So he drove around for almost an hour looking for the college because no one could explain how to find it except for the receptionist at EFL whose English isn’t very good. When he finally got there, an hour late, the school’s director said it was ok that Jeff was late, because the students could stay an hour late that day, so that Jeff could enjoy teaching Mr. Sick’s class for the full three hour block.

Well anyway, I was able to take up about one and a half hours, and then I just let them go early. Duh. That was an interesting day.

So (to change the subject) with the visa that we have as English teachers, we have to cross the Thailand border into another country once every three months. Our first border crossing was a couple weeks ago. We went to Myanmar up in the north. After crossing into Myanmar, I was reminded of Tijuana. Lots and lots of people trying to sell you things and pulling you here and there to look at burned DVDs and cheap cigarettes. Actually the big thing that every single person was trying to sell was Viagra and pornographic DVDs. So next time I need either of those two things, I know where to go.

On the way back from Myanmar we stopped in a nice little city called Chiang Rai. Everyone compares it as a smaller version of Chiang Mai, which was about right. And we had a really nice time. We saw the city’s main attraction, which is a Buddhist temple that’s completely white (most temples are gold). They were also celebrating their annual “Pineapple and Lychee Festival” which meant miles of entire pineapples for 30 cents, and the biggest lychees we’d ever seen. They had a lot of people performing music and dancing. It was really fun! They were also having a Som Tam (spicy papaya salad) “cook-off”, and we were invited to sample each and every one. There were about 15 different participants who were dancing to the music while making their salads. It was awesome, but the only bad thing is that when they make Som Tam for westerners, they tone the spiciness waaaaay down. But the salads they made for the competition were the real thing. Katharina actually had tears running down her cheeks after sampling one of them.


I think it’s safe to say we are officially into the rainy season now. Since we’ve been back from our trip with K-Diddle and Teancum Tenderfoot, it has rained every single day. But it’s been nice because it’s a lot cooler now than it was. The rain is also very predictable. It only rains in the late afternoon/early evening for about thirty minutes to an hour. It’s also helped with cleaning up the air which is normally very smoggy and polluted.

I know this is getting long, but last thing- One of our friends from Utah is coming out here to teach English. His name’s Jeff too. Or Jeff Two, haha…oh… Anyway, I worked with him building swimming pools a while ago and he’ll be here in a week or so to take the TEFL course and start teaching out here. We’re really excited. And a couple of our friends from Utah, Emily and Peter, are coming out to visit in the middle of August. We’re super excited about that too. And then my cousin John is hopefully coming sometime in December. And we can’t wait for that either! I’m just not sure when my parents are coming out here yet…