I have been meaning to post this since I saw it about a month ago…

(click the photo to see the video)

I would like to add my testimony to that of Elder Holland, an apostle for our church, The LDS Church, that the Book of Mormon was brought forth by the power of God. It testifies of Jesus Christ’s divinity and that He visited the people on the American continent after He was resurrected. It is a testament of Him. Kevin and I are reading it together right now, and I am struck each time we read it that it was meant for us.  Living the principles it teaches and heeding its warnings has made our lives better.

We got to Seattle on August 3. Since then Kev started at Microsoft and is really enjoying his work and his team. I started working in the school system as a para educator, which I enjoy so much that I applied to a Masters in Teaching program at UW.

The best news since we arrived is that we found a house, and we’re moving in next week! I will post some pics when we get settled. The house is settled at the end of a culdesac that backs to protected wetlands in Sammamish (for those of you familiar with the area).

Our new ward has been so welcoming. Truly…I have never seen anything like it. Thanks new ward!

We still experiment in the kitchen. Here is a recent dish: Chicken Tikka and Garlic Naan.

We spent the last part of our trip in Thailand. We went to Bangkok and then to an island between Phuket and Krabi called Ko Yao Noi. The highlight of Bangkok was meeting some great new friends at church–The Griffiths and another couple. Much of the rest of our time in Bangkok was spent riding around being scammed by taxi drivers who get 5 liters of gas if they take tourists to gem shops or clothing shops. We did not buy any jewelry but Kev got a new suit (so handsome) and I got a new skirt. Great deals and great service. We also went to the big new mall in Bangkok. There is a great food court in the basement of the mall that houses many different food vendors–much like street vendors except cleaner. We also took a water tour around the city.

The last part of our trip to the island was incredible. We beached it for a good six days (although 1.5 days were rainy…but it was still lovely). Kev did a bunch of fishing. We met some nice families from the UK, Sweden, and Norway. We took an island tour and went exploring with a local guide. The food was awesome. Happy Birthday Kev! On his birthday we had tiger prawns and a fish he caught. Wow!
Our home by the beach.

On the trip I read: Mountains Beyond Mountains, The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, Man’s Search for Meaning, and part of My Name is Red

Our islands tour. (The long boat we rode on)

We took one afternoon and rode around the island.

Look at how great Kev is! Dinner! (He also caught a small shark…which was a bit scary for me). I tried fishing, but preferred being the motor for our boat instead.

Happy Birthday!!

So Cambodia was great. We especially loved the temples at Angkor. Once again we found ourselves busing it–this time from Vietnam. In the beginning of the trip our guide came around to collect money and passports to expedite the border crossing. Kev and I thought it was a little sketchy that he was charging an extra five dollars per person (our guide book told us how much it would cost). So we chanced it and told him we would take care of it ourselves. It was a great moment when Kev saw the guide splitting the five dollar bills between himself and the bus driver (ours $ not included). Our first stop was Phnom Pen where we visited the killing fields. It was shocking and disturbing. I wasn’t the biggest fan of Phnom Pen because we saw so many gross sex tourists there, but go anyway and spend money to support the many legitimate local tourist businesses.

The royal palace in Phnom Pen. It was beautiful.

A gas station.

This bus is so full of people that they had to keep the back door open to fit (or not fit) all of them in. Hold on tight!

This is the monument that houses thousands of skulls at the killing fields. All the grassy holes in the ground were mass graves. Some of the graves are still intact. As we walked around we saw pieces of clothing still partially buried near the graves.

This is at the beginning of Angkor. All of the stone for all of the complexes was brought in by elephants from over 60km away. As you can see all the surfaces are carved. It was truly incredible. And if you can get there, do it soon, because I predict that the park administrators may limit how close you can get in the coming years as its popularity grows. We were able to walk and climb all over everything. It was awesome.

It was sooo hot. We got burned here. There was a picture I thought about posting but decided not to that was a close up of our faces. It was gross. This is a better shot. This is the main temple, Angkor Wat.

Tomb Raider? Yep. Tomb Raider was shot here. There are a couple complexes that have not been restored. They have been left as they were discovered. They were probably our favorites because of these incredible trees that grew up out of the ruins.

It’s time to finish blogging about our trip. From Singapore we flew to Ho Chi Min City, Vietnam. It was the most chaotic place we visited and perhaps the most chaotic place either one of us has ever been. There were thousands and thousands of people on scooters (sometimes entire families on one). We walked around the city, ate more Indian food, went on a tour of the Me Kong Delta, and went to the Vietnam War Museum.

Us on a little boat going through the delta. It was pretty interesting. The whole time I was thinking about the fighting that went on there during the Vietnam War, which the Vietnamese refer to as the War of American Aggression.

This is Kevin cautiously holding the horn of a water buffalo. We saw it after lunch when we toured the Me Kong Delta. I was afraid to go near it. I was also afraid of Kevin going near it. I think I was saying, “Please be careful” as he approached the buffalo.

A nice home on the delta.

Our tour delta guide.

This is one of the wire towers that are all over the city.

Ok, we aren’t actually moving to Singapore, but we’d really like to. We absolutely fell in love with Singapore. We even found a stand-in for our all-time favorite hang-out in Cambridge – Burdick’s Chocolate. Along Roberston Quay in Singapore is an awesome French chocolate cafe where we had the best chocolate cake of our life (Valhrona lava cake) and some hot chocolate (in spite of the hot weather) that doesn’t beat Burdick’s but will do just fine if we find ourselves in Singapore long-term someday.

Other highlights of Singapore included strolling along the Quays (pictured in the night photo below – streets running along the river with supercool cafes and restaurants – they also had an “extreme swing” that Cath tried futily to get me to try) and having breakfast in the colonial-era Raffles Hotel (Mr. Raffles colonized Singapore). Raffles was like taking step back in time. We met a wonderful couple at church who showed us around the ward. They are there serving as public affairs missionaries in Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia. The ward was full of expats and diplomats and had a very cool and homey feel to it. Lots of people greeted us and they were very welcoming.

We also had some more incredible Indian food in Singapore’s Little India, including at this sit-on-the-floor-barefoot restaurant pictured below.

The Quays along the river

From Hong Kong, we took the subway to the Chinese border and boarded a “sleeper bus” for Guilin, China. The sleeper bus consisted of about 15 sets of bunk beds bolted into the ground. I was on the top bunk, which was just barely too short for my 5 feet 10 inches. I tried sleeping on my side, curled up, but the bus jarred in and out of traffic (honking EACH time we passed someone) all night long. This jarring kept rolling me around while I was on my side, so I had to sleep flat on my back, legs bent like a frog in order to avoid the rolling and get some semblance of sleep.

Once we arrived in Guilin, we took the next bus about an hour south to a small town called Yangshuo. The pictures below are all from our 4 days there. We had a relaxing time, enjoyed great food (we must confess that we ate quite a bit of Thai food here), and held a sacrament meeting in our hotel room on Sunday since there’s no church in the area.

The pictures below are from a boat trip we took, floating on a bamboo raft down the Li River.

View from the boat.

Editorial Note: Yes, we’re more than two weeks into our trip. We would have blogged sooner, but Blogger seemed to be blocked while we were in the People’s Republic. We’re in Vietnam now and Blogger works.

After three or so days in Beijing, we made a slight adjustment to the theoretical schedule of our five-week journey. We opted to skip Shanghai in favor of the mountainous Guilin region of southern China. First though, we made like an 18th-century Brit with a spirit of adventure and headed to Hong Kong.

We traveled to Hong Kong via 21-hour train ride to Guangzhou, then 1.75-hour ride across the border into Beijing. The sleeper train wasn’t so bad except for the fact that we were on the top bunks where it’s impossible to sit up because the ceiling is too low. Our car only had a squat toilet, but we walked decisively to the first class car when nature called and the train staff never bothered to hassle us – except once.

Near our hotel in Hong Kong (in Mong Kok in Kowloon). (KFC is HUGE in Asia!)

Hong Kong was wonderful. We stayed in a nice, albeit closet-sized room in a hotel in Kowloon, right across from Hong Kong Island. It was extremely, extremely hot and humid, so we had the added experience of becoming well acquainted with Hong Kong’s many air conditioned malls. The one near the hotel (which also had a Starbucks with free wifi) was part of a $10 billion, 16-year revitalization project intended to rehab this part of town.

A highlight of our time in Hong Kong was going to the LDS temple there, finished and dedicated only months before Hong Kong reverted back to Chinese control. It was beautiful and we were impressed with the way the architecture and decor embraced the cultures of the Asian people who serve and worship there. It was a testament to how global the church is and how, even on the other side of the world, the principles taught and feelings felt are the same.

We also took the furnicular to the top of Victoria Peak, arriving at dusk, just in time to see the clouds disperse, the sky darken and the city light up with its infamous nightly light show.

After Hong Kong, we took the subway to the Chinese border city of Shenzhen where we boarded something billed as a “sleeper bus” bound for the mountains of Guilin and Yangshuo. Too tired to blog about that now; we’re getting up early to head out to the Mekong Delta. Until next time, good night Vietnam.

Above: Us in Tienanmen Square

Beijing is a city of superlatives, as every sign in town is clear to point out. The city itself is an expanse of concrete reflecting into an even greater expanse of smog. For what must be the first time in my life, I received a sunburn having no recollection of seeing the sun (the burn wasn’t bad). We arrived in Beijing after a roughly 6 hour flight from JFK to LAX (on which the “I’m a PC” guy from the Apple commercials sat directly behind us). Then we had about a 10-hour layover at LAX (made shorter by the succulence of a visit to an In-N-Out Burger about 15 mins from the airport). Then we flew 13 hours to Guangzhou, China, had a two-hour layover, and flew around 3 hours north to Beijing. The rest of that day, we rested, took our malaria pills on an empty stomach (apparently you should not do that), then engaged in a race with the medicine in which we tried to get food into our stomach before it induced vomiting. I won the race against my pill; Cath lost her race.

The next day, we hung out around Tienanmen Square and the Forbidden City, taking in the magnitude of it all and some cool scrolls, etc. You’ve probably heard that Chinese food in China is nothing like Chinese food in America. That’s basically true. Essentially, Chinese food is less flavorful, but infinitely more fatty than American Chinese food. The predicament drove me to committing something akin to culinary treason: I suggested we eat at a Pizza Hut in Beijing. They had curry rice there, but we had pizza.

We hit up the Great Wall at a spot about 90km north of Beijing. It wasn’t very crowded at all and we had significant stretches all to ourselves. It was cloudy, green and absolutely beautiful. We rode a cable car up the mountain, then walked around the wall, climbed 500+ steps to a high point, came back down and returned via cable car. The sign on the cable car announced something like “Most Best Wonderful Cable Car in Beijing.” That it was; that it was.

Below: the Great Wall (sans great wife)