Well, we’ve been home for over 2 months now and time is flying by.  Our wedding day is quickly approaching and the details are starting to come together! (We think!)  Right now, Kate is in Virginia with her family spending countless hours bringing the wedding together, applying for scholarships, and enjoying time with her family.  I’m here in Kokomo with my parents working on my parts of the wedding, training for a sprint triathlon (eeek), and applying for jobs in Chicago!  It’s an exciting time!

I’m going to forego the usual blogger apology for lack of recent updates and I’m not going to promise anything for the near future because quite frankly we’re both preoccupied with other things that have to take precedence right now.  But Rest assured that once we are settled in Chicago and have a bit more time to devote to this we’ll be uploading many more photos and videos from the end of our travels and the past few months.  We’re on a pretty amazing ride right now and can’t wait to share it with you!  So, please excuse the hiatus…

For now, here are a few pictures from the recent months…

For more detailed descriptions view on flickr – click here!

For those of you who don’t know, Kate and I were stranded in Paris because of the Icelandic Volcano.  We stayed there for 3 extra days then took bus to Barcelona and on to Madrid where we got a flight home.  It was an adventure and it was ridiculous (and annoying).  Now we’re fighting battles with the travel insurance company which is very frustrating but in the end it was a nice bonus to get to see spain a bit!

Enjoy the Pictures,  We’ll be back soon!

We can’t wait to see some of you at the wedding in a few weeks!

-Chad

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Hello all!
After a brief outage, I think the site should be up and running again. Our host was having some issues yesterday. We’re in the middle of our spring trip home and are currently in Shanghai, China. Right now we’re working on an organic farm outside of Shanghai for about 10 days. We work for 6 hours a day doing farm work or administrative help (with their website and art projects) and in exchange we get a place to stay and 3 meals a day! It’s amazing! We’ll post more about that when we have more time but just wanted to update quickly with some pictures from the first 2 weeks of our trip! We’re going to put a hold on posting the rest of our Philippines trip pictures, sorry but we didn’t have a chance to get them uploaded before we sent our computers home. But don’t worry we’ll upload them soon enough.

A quick update of what we’ve been up to…
We frantically left our apartment on the 26th of February after being told we had to leave a day earlier because the new teachers were coming! We stayed with some friends in Samcheok then left for Daegu for a Temple Stay. We stayed at Haeinsa Temple for one night and had a great experience with the monks there. Next we headed to Busan (southern Korea City) to visit two friends from IU who just moved there to start teaching English! After a few days there we headed up to Seoul for a day on the high-speed train then flew to Beijing!

I developed a nasty cold while in Korea so we took it pretty slow the first few days in Beijing and stayed in a great hostel just north of the forbidden City. We visited the Forbidden City, Tiananmen Square, A few parks in Beijing, The Great Wall, and saw a Peking Opera. The last two nights we stayed with some lovely Couch Surfers named Prometheus and Lucy and went out for a great Hot Pot! Beijing was really a lot of fun and we definitely will go back at some point. (Kate found a number of galleries that have great residency programs!)

Next we took the high-speed train to Shanghai where we are now. As I said above, we’re working at the Biofarm in shanghai and having a great time. This morning we transplanted seedlings and now we’re designing some icons for their new website. (What a vacation!) We’re enjoying getting to know the farmers and staff and having a more intimate Chinese experience – and we’re learning a thing or two about organic farming too!

I’ve uploaded a few photos to flickr so take a look at this gallery for a sample of what we’ve been up to! Check back here as we upload more photos.

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Hello Everyone!  Chad has been doing an amazing job arranging all of our pictures.  I thought I could contribute and regale you with the tales of our 36 hours in Manila!

As Chad mentioned in his last post, Molly, Chad and I all left Incheon the same day.  One slight snafue in our planning – Molly took off at 9:30 AM, we took off at 9:30 PM.  Little did Chad and I know that we would fall in love with the Incheon airport.

Once we had our MacDonald’s breakfast we headed upstairs to find a cozy place to catch up on reading/sleep/picture taking.  Incheon has huge bean bags all over upstairs.  We saw one open up and pretty much sprinted to claim it.

Chad took lots of pictures.

I read lots of D.H. Lawerence’s Women in Love.

I love this picture.  Notice there is only one man who is standing still.  Can you find him?  Ill give you one hint – he’s Korean!

Sleepy heads!

Hangin’ with D.H.

So, we landed in Manila at 12:30 AM.  It was beautiful and balmy and the airport made the Indianapolis airport look like the biggest airport in the world!  We got into a cab and had an experience.  The cab driver was appalled at the location of our hostel and spent the entirety of our drive telling us we shouldn’t go there.  This was between wrong turns and police checkpoints!  Wow.

When we finally arrived at the hostel it was very nice and the owner was incredibly welcoming.  It was very clean and we had great roommates.  The location was slightly dodgy but we’re here to tell the tale!

The next morning we walked around Rizal Park.

These kids got super excited when Chad was taking pictures.  They all lined up and jumped around for him!  They are much more active picture takers than our students!  I wish I had my camera out to take picture of Chad taking their pictures – it was pretty cute.

This is me, Ana (German), and Blanca (Columbian living in China).  They were our roommates in Manila and we spent the day with them.  They were quite lovely ladies!

There were ice cream trucks everywhere and they all constantly played the same ding-dong tune!  After about 3 minutes of wandering around the park we all had it stuck in our heads.

A view of Chad at work.

A view of Chad’s work.

After the park and some lunch we headed to a fort commemorating Jose Rizal (every main street in Manila is Rizal Avenue).  Rizal was a huge nationalist/martyr in the Philippines in the late 1800′s.

Below is a view from the top of the fort wall.

The Manila metropolis.  Vastly different from what we left in Seoul.  I had no idea how different it was going to be.

Gazing at . . . . ?

By the end of the day we were very tired.  Instead of fighting to get onto the subway system we decided to hop into a jeepney.  They are bus-jeeps that people jump into for a quick, cheap ride.  Hold on tight!

The next day, right before we headed to the airport, Chad and I decided to check out the Chinese cemetery that was right outside of our hostel.  It vaguely reminded me of the tombs I visited in Cortona 4 years ago.  In the Philippines people really go all out for their deceased loved ones.  Some of the tombs have air conditioning, running water, full fridges, etc.  I think we should have just stayed in one of those!

We wanted to take this little guy home but he was too big for our backpacks.

Manila was a very interesting and educational experience.  We saw a ton of poverty and many people with a much different standard of living then we are used to seeing as the norm.  Chad mentioned some of it in a post he made while we were traveling.  I  felt like a naive voyeur the entire time we were in Manila.  It was very sobering and prompted a lot of discussion for the trip.  Who are we to decide what is comfortable and not comfortable?  Who are we to live in a three bedroom apartment with plumbing?  Do they want that?  How do we help?  Do they want help?  Maybe they are perfectly and happy and just because it wouldn’t make us happy doesn’t mean they aren’t even happier than we are.  There is a fine line and  seeing it is a huge challenge.  I hope that Chad and I remember how that felt and that we manage to do the right thing and not ignore it.  We both want to get back into volunteering when we get home and maybe even while we are traveling.

One a lighter note, we are in the midst of arranging our trip for the spring.  Right now we plan to be in China for about a month then we’ll head through Vietnam to Cambodia.  After that we plan to fly from Bangkok to Paris.  We plan to be home in mid to late April.  We’ll let you know as things firm up!  We are incredibly excited and each time we sit down to plan we just talk about how crazy it is that we get to see all these amazing places!

Well, we only have one computer now and I need to get a few things accomplished before I hand it over to Chad.

I hope everyone is doing well and staying warm!  Anyone buried in the snow?