Our Room

We love our room here.  It is spacious and we have plenty of storage.  It's hard to take it in from every angle so I'm sorry about the volume of pictures you are about to see.

The cabinet is for our shoes and we are on the door to the left.

As you enter.(We have our own air conditioner!)

The door opens to the wall on the right.  On the left is Matt's new messenger bag.:)

These chairs are next to the bathroom on the left and the desk on the right.

View from the doorway to the bathroom.

Cute critters!

View from the corner of our bedroom nook.

Our OWN bathroom!!!!

Our shower is open to the rest of the bathroom.  No shower pan or curtain.

I has been so nice to unpack and make ourselves at home.  We had been living out of various suitcases and boxes for several weeks so to be able to settle in and be organized feels amazing.

Last Day of Traveling. For Now.

Saturday the 23rd we slept in and had a lazy morning.  I talked to my family on Skype and then we left for the airport early afternoon.  On the way to the airport we saw something we had never seen before:

We were going highway speeds too!

We gained insight into electronics:

SO cool.  I want one!

 And we said farewell to Tex. 

 Farewell for now anyway.  We had some lunch at the airport, I went to a real ramen noodle place, it was awesome.  Matt had a burger.  Which was not as awesome as my authentic ramen.  Our flight was short and a little bumpy.  But we landed safely and were whisked away to our new home for the next 3 months where we unpacked and got settled in.  Pictures of our room to come! 

Just a Quick Note

We have made it safely to our destination.  We don't have time to write much but we wanted to share a reference with you and we encourage all of you, especially the young ones, to look it up.  If you have the actual bound volumes you could also look at the pictures. w10 12/1 26-29.  Enjoy!

Visa Day

First thing Friday we walked to the main road to hail a cab:

And took a looooooooong cab ride to the Embassy (it was rush hour).  It literally took 2 hours. I'm not even joking.  However, it gave us a chance to take in lots of new sights.

Notice the sign in the lower left corner?

There are 7 Elevens everywhere. Not attached to a gas station, just the convenience store part.

Thai schoolgirls doing an anti-drug march and parade.

I thought this was so pretty.

 We arrived at the Embassy and there was a lovely couple there to meet us from Yangon branch who were there for their visa renewal too.They helped us with our visa paperwork and then they took us around a little bit.  Showed us how to use the rail system and some good malls.  At the first mall which is called the Siam Paragon we ate breakfast at a french restaurant.  Here was what we ate:

Almond Croissant

Quiche, one of the best in my life, if not THE best.

We love french bakeries!

 Then we walked  to a different mall and on the way saw this:

Had to take a picture for my office.

The mall was named MBK which was  like a huge version of one of the malls we went to in Moldova.  Lots of little shops selling everything you can imagine.

I found the Thai version of Sephora:

 Matt bought a messenger bag at a shop here and we were able to get the guy to come down in price by using a trick Kelsey whom we met in the DR showed us.  Tell them your price and if they will not come down, open your wallet and show them that the price you named is all the money you have.  (Hint, only use if it really is all the money you have or else have your spouse have the extra money and the one in charge of haggling only has the amount you are willing to spend on a certain item.)

We went and picked up our Visas and so it's official.  We can get into the country now! Yay!   We took a taxi ride back to the branch which was much shorter than the one in the morning.  One thing we  noticed about cars here is this:

No heat.  Which totally makes sense.  Oh by the way, when I say WE noticed the A/C only thing, I mean Matt noticed.  I'm oblivious to important details like that.  We got back to the branch and crashed in our room.  We didn't even go out for the evening meal we were just too tired and our hunger schedule is all messed up with the time change.  However, we have snacks if we need em:)  We fell asleep watching a movie and that was it for this day!  Well, that's all for this one folks.  Hope you enjoyed!

Arrive Bangkok, Very Hot!

Well we made it to Thailand!  We had some turbulence on the way from Tokyo but otherwise the flight was great.  Asia is where I am meant to be.  I am totally normal sized here, and bet if I went shopping I wouldn't have to hem every item of clothing I might purchase!  Matt however is a giant amongst men. Makes it easy to find him in a crowd.  Speaking of everything being my size, check this out:

Yes, a foot rest in the plane. Totally convenient too because my feet never quite can be comfortable on a plane due to my lack of leg length but here they make things just my size.

The Thailand Airport is beautiful, and fancy too!  Look at this:

Yes, Orchids in the bathroom.. Not plastic ones, actual real and beautiful flowers.  Swoon.  I wanted to take more pictures of the airport but our flight didn't get in til 12:30 am and I was a little over the whole traveling thing.  I'll take more later if I can.  They let us into the country although the first passport control officer turned us down because we didn't know the address of where we would be staying.  So a super friendly tourist helper person told us what to write when we are clueless and sent us to a kinder kiosk.  All our luggage arrived and then we were able to find our picker-upper person sent by the branch.  His name was um...well...anyways he told us his nickname was Tex and that was a lot easier for my travel weary brain than his real name. We tried, honestly.  Anyways we went outside, and boy, it's hot here.  91 degrees with full on humidity in the middle of the night!  Made it safe to the branch where we were greeted by 2 friendly dogs (yes, dogs) and then Tex showed us to our room.

Isn't it pretty?  I thought Tera would like this picture:)

We got about 3.5 hours of sleep because we needed to be up and at the Embassy first thing for our visas. Next post we'll tell you all about it!

My Obsession With The Letter T!

Well we have made it to Tokyo so far.  We are waiting to get on our flight to Thailand.  It is supposed to be 7 hours so that is 5.5 hours shorter than our last one!

It occurred to me today that every airport I will be in on this trip will be absolutely new to me!  I have never been to Asia (obviously) however I have never been to Texas before.  Granted I was only there an hour, but I think it counts.  I could tell from taking the train between terminals that the heat there is intense. So all in one trip I will have been to Texas, Tokyo and Thailand, 3 places that have T in the first letter of the name!

Something that always intrigues me when we travel are the different types of toilets.  Yes, toilets. (Letter T again). I realize that may seem a little, um, gross. However until you  travel out of the country, and those of you that have been out of the country probably get what I'm saying here.  You encounter a WIDE variety of toilet technology.  Here in Tokyo I found 3 different types all in one bathroom.  Yes, I'm bored.  I had to do 3 different recon trips to the bathroom to get my pictures while the bathroom was empty so that all the locals wouldn't think I was creepy.  Please, no comments on that last statement.  You all know me well enough to form your own opinions.

The first one was the boring style from home so I spared you pictures of that one.

The second one was super advanced.  I was scared to use it in case it started talking to me:

The third one is old school, but hey!

They explain on the instruction board how to use it, and they say it's way more sanitary.  I didn't post the instruction board, I figured I was going overboard with the toilet pictures already.  The bathrooms were very clean by the way, in case you were interested.

Ok, well here are a couple pictures of us, check out the amazing desk Matt found to charge the IPad at.

I love the color. And here I am, blogging about toilets.

Notice the authentic Japaneses signage in the back.

Well, that's all for this one folks.  Hope you got a laugh anyway!  We love you all, will keep in touch when we can!

Almost Ready!

Well we are almost ready to leave the country.  Since we decided to leave we moved out of our apartment, moved in with friends, moved out and went to the convention, went to Lazuli's parent's house for awhile and now we are at Matt's parent's house.  Whew!  I (Lazuli) started packing for this trip the day we decided to go, good thing too!  Leaving our apartment was hard because we loved it and the location was so amazing, close proximity to some long-suffering friends ;-).  Who knew that we had so much STUFF!  However Matt is an expert packer and he fit it all into our storage shed, except for all the stuff we needed for the trip and in-between.  All THAT stuff he somehow fit into our car, and let me tell you, the man has skills. Serious car packing skills.  I provided helpful hints and pretty much stayed out of the way.

We want to thank all our friends that have supported us so lovingly during the past month with moving and everything.  Some helped pack, some helped us out with a place to stay and some helped us out with some fabulous meals.  One particular couple, (you know who you are:) helped us out with all of those things and we are so grateful.  Thank you all so much for your love.  We are sorry that we don't have time to send each of you a heartfelt card, but we want you to know that we do appreciate your love and friendship.  More than mere words can express.

Most of you know that we are going to be relying on our new gmail address instead of our yahoo and hotmail ones, so please send any correspondence via gmail while we are away. I am going to send an email to you about this but for those of you that may not receive it the gmail one is the same as our shared yahoo account except @gmail.com instead.  If you want to email us and don't know our email, then feel free to leave comments which we will be checking as often as we are able to blog.  If the blogging doesn't work out for some reason, then we will send email updates instead.

We celebrated our 6th wedding anniversary on June 10th this year.  It fell on Sunday at our District Convention which was a beautiful way to enjoy it.  Matt had a card and rose for me when we got in the car to go to the session.  I had a guilty conscience which I soothed later when I bought him a card and ice cream to make up for my lack of thoughtfulness. We also enjoyed a lovely dinner with friends at Walkers afterward.

6 fun-filled years!