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!

A New Assignment

Hello all!  We are very excited about our next adventure.  We will be traveling to Myanmar, which is in Southeast Asia.  There is a gadget on the sidebar that will tell you the local time there. 12.5 hours difference from Wyoming! There are still many details yet to be worked out, but we know that it will all come together.  Please enjoy our blog and feel free to leave comments, because we will miss you all and this will be our farthest away adventure yet!