Congrats Alf and Laura!

Congratulations to our friends Alf and Laura on their wedding day, held in Santa Barbara at Our Lady of Mt. Carmel on August 25, 2007. It was a great excuse to have a small reunion of old friends, and a great excuse for allowing white people en masse to dance.

Old friends together again...minus a few.

With the lucky man

Laura and Alf

Day at the beach after the wedding

Pictures!

Yay! I put these up on Facebook a bit ago...turns out they had links to share the albums with others! Here are a ton of our pictures! Enjoy!


Hong Kong and A Taste of Delhi

Jeremy and Durba's Wedding 1

Jeremy and Durba's Wedding 2

Jeremy and Durba's Wedding 3

Jeremy and Durba's Wedding 4

Puri, Konark and the Rath Yatra

Finally, a minute to concentrate on this...

Whew...well it's been a good few weeks of going right back to work/moving back in/job searching, and now we finally have the chance to sit and work on this blog a bit. I have to make sure I keep an eye on the rajma curry (think: kidney bean curry) that i'm trying to make, although it seems to have turned into more of a "chili" with all of the tomato paste I added. Oops.

We're looking towards a busy schedule, Garrett and I. We enjoyed a welcome visit from Garrett's Dad during our first weekend back, and last weekend we made a trip out to Tahoe to go camp in Emerald Bay State Park--a trip planned back in May after our day trip to the Rubicon trail. Oh my Tahoe was gorgeous. True the lake was a bit cold, but nonetheless I didn't want to get out of the water, although the orange streaks flying around told me that it was time to warm up.

This next weekend we're off to Santa Barbara for our friends Alf and Laura's wedding. It will also be a small reunion for Sylvia and her old friends (old?) from Davis. In between these fun fulfilled weekends I've been working away in the lab with some enzyme determinations and trips to the field for pear harvesting while Garrett plans out his personal training work. It's starting to look pretty good for him, with all sorts of forms, business cards, referrals, and other "professional" stuff starting to happen.

Hopefully we can get this updated...i'll give myself one more week. At least i'm finally moving our photos onto the computer! step #1!

Back to cow town...

Sadly or Happily, we're safely back in Davis. Sylvia's back to work and Garrett's getting things back into our apartment. We'll be in the process of updating and uploading in the next week or so, it will be nice to have our computer up and running. I suppose we'll go through and add pictures to the blog and update that as well, so check back soon and go through it all again, we know you love it.

At the Wan Chai (i think) MTR...

Hi, we're at the MTR (Mass Transit Railway) in the clubbing ("clubbin") district in Hong Kong. Sylvia is amazed at all of the ladies of the night walking around, and at all of the "hostess" bars up and down the street. It's all very, interesting.

Today we went to the HK Museum of History to see the Hong Kong story, a nice interactive walk through exhibit going from the beginning of time all the way to the modern metropolis. It was interesting learning about the history of the city: Opium wars, the Japenese Occupation, etc. We ate at Genkei Sushi after, got cool Hong Kong haircuts, then wandered down the Mong Kok area to see the bird and flower markets, and ended up having Malaysian food for dinner in Wan Chai. Now we're about to head back to Kowloon, to get a drink at Panorama, the schnazzy hotel restaurant with a 220 degree view of Hong Kong and the bay.

Tomorrow is Lantau to see the big Buddha, we'll hopfully find a beach, eat some Peking duck, re-visit the Peak at night to see the night time views, and head to the more classy area for a night on the town.

Goodbye from a free internet stand in the subway, Hong Kong is awesome.

We're a little behind...

But we're in Hong Kong! Really haven't found many net places, surprisingly, but Sylvia spotted one in an arcade center close to our hotel. We'll update soon, but so far it's very hot, humid, clean, organized, and very nice here, with too much shopping and awesome food (we went out of our way to find AWESOME thai food last night, and Garrett ate some stinky stinky durian and a 1,000 year old egg yesterday). Yay!

We saw the Taj!

Well, we're here. After time spent in Agra (the nasty grubby city that is home of the world famous Taj Mahal), we made it to Delhi. I guess I should backtrack a little though...

Khajuraho. An interesting place. Known for their 10th-12th century massive temples, it is the erotic carvings of the kama sutra that draw many foreigners, domestic and international, to the area. It's located in the state of Madhya Pradesh, towards the north of India, and is a 3 hour ride by taxi from the nearest train junction, Jhansi, which is on the main line towards Agra and Delhi. We were lucky enough to meet a man in Darjeeling who worked at a hotel in Khajuraho, and when we rolled in at 10pm from Hyderabad to Jhansi, we called him up and took the advice that a taxi driven that late at night would get us to our final destination safely. We did indeed take a taxi (pretty costly but we weighed out the options...staying in Jhansi, a bustling city with hotels all booked up for some written examination the next day, or heading to Khajuraho, on a road free of traffic in a vehicle that would take 3 hours instead of 5 to get there). We stayed at Hotel Casa di William, and met our friend Veeru there at about 1am. We ended up spending 3 days in Khajuraho, seeing the temples, eating at the same restaurant that had really good food and catered to mostly Indians, having a few gifts sewn up, and overall chillin and trying to stay cool (hah!). We hung out with Veeru quite a bit, and he was kind enough to take us to a real "Indian" only place to eat...which was pretty delicious. We had spicy fish, mutton, and chicken curry, finished off with the local brew.
Much to Veeru's dismay, we decided to take off to Orchha, another small town in MP outside of Jhansi that has old palaces and temples that are currently under renovation to open up and draw the crowds in the next few years I'm sure. It was a nice quite little little little little town, with these huge old palaces and cenotaphs littered around, and it was quite gorgeous. The big draw was that it was sort of untouched still, although you can see that the tourist trail will blaze through very very very soon. Garrett was a bit ill around this time, so we took it easy in the, oh, 20 hours we had there. We stayed in Hotel Sri Mahant, the one behind the Rama Mandir, which wasn't as good or as friendly as the one in front of the temple was. But it was good, a nice stroll through the village to the main part of town. And i must say, the egg curry at Ram Raja was the best i have ever eaten in my life. It was quite an enjoyable experience that I would love to have again...but i suppose i'll have to go back to have it eh? Tomatoes, onion and garlic paste, methi (fenugreek), oil, some corriander, and boiled eggs...good lord it was so tasty. Poor garrett and his toast and curd and rice.
We took the baller Shatabdi Express from Jhansi to Agra. It was an interesting ride. It was right before dinner, so we were pretty hungry from our day wandering around Orchha, so we thought we'd get some tasty food on the all inclusive AC chair train. It was a sad sad time when everyone else (going past Agra, to Delhi) got 1 liter bottles of water, and the "Agra" peeps got a little cup of water. But some chai and biscuts, and some tomato soup later, we were still hungry and Garrett was a little delirious...probably from his stomach bug. It was all very entertaining.

Agra. i'll have garrett write about that.


Delhi? Well we did get our dinner on the Agra to Delhi leg of the Shatabdi, and we got hooked up with a sweet hotel, Hotel India International Dx (Deluxe?) by Veeru (we got the special "Veeru price"), and went around the city today after a delicious breakfast consisting of South Indian food (upma for me, rava masala dosa and mango juice for the man, and dahi idly shared between us). We saw Connaught Place (baller status shopping circle), Palika Bazaar (where this guy followed Garrett all the way down to Janpath to see if he would purchase a belt), the Delhi Tourism office, then off to Swaminaryan Akshardham (which i feel bad about seeing cause apparently i supported the dislocation of hundreds of destitute people, how the hell am i supposed to know that? guilt guilt guilt, as it also uses up tons of electricity, and is too subjective in it's information about Indian history and Indian Nationalism), and to Dilli Haat, a crafts-cum-shopping center with some pretty good food to pick up some souvenirs and eat. We ran into Durba, the bride (and half the reason we came to India...the other half being Jeremy i guess). Super random running into her, in Delhi, amidst what, any of the 13.7 million people we could have run into during our visit here? I guess it's fate!
Tomorrow we wake up early for a morning tour of the city via the Delhi Tourism Corp. for us lazy souls, then we'll wander over to the Old City in search of fried chicken, recommended to us by a friend we met on our train ride from Bhubaneswar/Puri to Hyderabad, and to see the craziness that is Chandi Chowk. Yay! Oh, also on the list of this to, um, purchase? Pressure cooker, tawa (indian griddle), another duffel bag for all of our crap, and spices galore. maybe a few cookbooks as well?

See you in Hong Kong!