Travelogue - playing catch-up - India Part 1

We've started off the year with a packed schedule thinking the next 7 months would be the last we would spend in Asia before returning to the US. Even though we knew our travel plans would make for a hectic couple of months, the prospect of the adventures we were about to take were too hard to resist.

From Jan 27th to Feb 7th, our family set off for India and Nepal traveling with one of Rob's work colleagues. We decided to explore what is called the Golden Triangle of India, which is in Northern India and consists of the cities New Delhi, Jaipur and Agra (home of the Taj Mahal). The latter part of our trip would consist of a 3-day side trip to Kathmandu and few day stopover in Mumbai (based on avail itineraries to get us from Nepal back to Singapore). Our side trip to Nepal gave us a glimpse of the Himalayas and more understanding of what it means to practice Buddhism.

We saw some truly amazing ancient and historical sites, had fantastic weather, stayed in wonderful hotels with great service, and took in some truly unique cultural experiences. On the flip side, there was a yang with our yin (or yin with our yang?). We all got sick at some point during the trip. With the exception of myself and Sabrina, our party dropped like flies one after the other on one particular afternoon starting with Parrish. However, we were soon to follow. The origins of whatever we consumed or breathed in that made us sick was really hard to know. Was is the breakfast at our hotel? Lunch at the cafe? Was a utensil we ate with washed with bad water? Was it airborn? We navigated each day following trying to rest and still take advantage of the typical tourist sights. After all, this was our trip to India! Most likely our only trip. Unfortunately, it is the norm to get sick in India and we knew this, but despite our precautions, our Delhi belly was apparently inevitable.

Experiencing the poverty conditions in India by being among the massive amounts of people living this way was mind-boggling. The traffic, the begging, and the pushiness of street vendors were all things that we were very happy to leave behind. When you experience this kind of poverty where people are using the road side as a toilet, milk producing cows are eating from the trash dumped on the street, and you see kids clothed in dirt from head to toe. Empathy takes on a deeper meaning.

Here is the beginning of a few pictures to highlight the regions we visited.

Jaipur -

'Tis the season

To our friends all around the globe.........

Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, Happy Kwanzaa, Happy Holidays!

Love, Rob, Heidi, Parrish & Sabrina

Hong Kong Part II

From Hong Kong 4

Hong Kong Disneyland

Thanksgiving Day was celebrated this year in Hong Kong. The kids had a great time, the weather was just right and the food was excellent!

Hong Kong Disneyland

Fun with Malay

Malay word of the week.......

I thought I would let you all in on the fun. I think most of you know that Rob actually works in Malaysia while we are living here over the boarder in Singapore. We are doing this so that the kids can go to a decent school and we can live in a safer/cleaner place. Rob's commute is not pleasant and he has to go through customs everyday and this takes at least an hour. He's had to add pages to his passport 4 times since we've been here. To keep a sense of humor about this, one of the things Rob does is gives me a Malay word of the week. The Malay language uses the alpha-numeric writing and doesn't have another character set (not that we know of anyway). So all the street signs have the English translation, the Malay word, the Chinese Characters and sometimes Indian.

So here's a quiz for you. The following is a list of Malay words that sound very similar to the English translation. See if you can figure them out.....common now!

butik
teksi
tuisyen
kolej
kastam
imigresen
treler
polis
lif
ais
kad

Bonus word:
air (hint: it relates to ais)

Tattling and bickering

Rob just said to me tonight, referring to the bickering and tattling our kids were doing, " I know this is what Todd (his older brother) and I did to my mom and dad. I don't know how we survived."

So, we are sitting here on the couch on a Friday night in a bit of a stupor, thinking "Please go away.....if we ignore this, it will go away.....please!" Maybe if I write about it on the blog it will go away.

No such luck..... Gotta go!

China

For the kids' Fall break we took a week long trip to to China. Planning this trip was a little bit spur of the moment. We never thought we would be able to take a family of 4 to China because of the additional Visa costs on top of all the other expenses ($180 Visa per US passport, Chinese pay the same to come to the US). But when we realized a round trip flight was only 20k miles on a partner airline, and there was availability, our dreams of taking the kids to the Great Wall and Worlds Expo in Shanghai quickly became a reality.

Highlights of the trip, according to Rob and I, were hiking the Great Wall, touring the Forbidden City and Jingshan park, and going to the World Expo in Shanghai. Highlights according to Parrish and Sabrina were the Asian Acrobat show in Beijing, the Blue Zoo aquarium (particularly the turtles) and riding on the passenger tram under the Huangpu river in Shanghai.

You have to be ready for China. Things we packed were our own toilet paper for the public restrooms (hotels, malls and some restaurants were clean and ok). Yes, both girls had to learn how to use the squatters but we tried to find proper toilets when possible. We also packed a sense of humor for the traffic and the crowds, particularly for Beijing. And nobody, let me emphasize, NOBODY queues up for anything.

Packing a winning smile for all the photographs and stares we would get each day. Many Chinese tourists love getting their picture taken with a "Westerner", especially our kids. Mostly our kids. We were well aware that we would gain celebrity status here, but never knew how hard it would be to get through a crowd. Tourist locations where particularly bad. We realized we couldn't stop to take a rest for very long or a crowd would descend around us. Sabrina and I found ourselves surrounded by a bunch of screaming school kids at one point. It was a Beatle moment! But the girls started to tire of it even in the first day. Parrish and Sabrina started to refuse to smile for pictures and actually ran away from a few. The Chinese are so polite and nice about it, but to get anywhere we had to start saying no.

Last thing we packed was a little bit of Mandarin tongue. Rob has been taking classes each week for over a year, I did a 6 month course, Parrish and Sabrina get lessons at school. But Rob was the real hero. Parrish was too shy to speak and it was too long since my last lesson to remember anything of value, other than knowing how to say hi and tell someone how old my children are. However, in both cities, there is English on road signs, in the subways and nearly all the hotels have someone who speaks English, at least the ones we stayed in. When it comes to reading characters, we were all lost, naturally. There was only one restaurant we went into that did not have the English or pinyin translation (English alphabet to express Chinese language). There was a lot of pointing to make our order. Rob knew how to ask a question, but understanding the answer was another story. *grin* Luckily we ended up with something edible, but we didn't always know what we were eating. This actually was part of the fun and mostly worked out for us. We went back to that restaurant for breakfast the next day too.

I've loaded some pictures in these slide shows for sharing:

Beijing_10

Shanghai_10