Category: Travel
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From Cairo, part 1
Greetings from Heliopolis, Egypt! J-P and I arrived a few hours ago. It is 130am here…and in Dallas it’s 530pm (behind). We are staying with Debbie Taylor, Justin’s mom, who has lived here for almost five years as an English teacher. Heliopolis is now a northern suburb of Cairo, but in ancient times, it was…
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From Cairo, part 2
You know you’re in the Middle East when, at 6am just as the sun is rising, prayer call startles you awake. From the minaret of the nearby mosque each morning at sunrise (and again four times throughout the day) a chanting voice blares over a loudpseaker, calling the devout to prayer. And in Cairo, you…
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From Cairo, part 3
We are back at Deb’s after an exhausting day in Cairo. Heck, Cairo is so chaotic and impossibly inefficient that just spending the day doing NOTHING is an exhausting day. We are back at Deb’s after an exhausting day in Cairo. Heck, Cairo is so chaotic and impossibly inefficient that just spending the day doing…
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Weird Christmases
Christmas seems to get more and more distant the older I get. Perhaps it’s because I don’t have children. Or perhaps Christmas in America IS, indeed, changing. More frantic. Less time to prepare, but a stronger, unspoken obligation to prepare, and a heavy guilt trip if you don’t. There’s a distinct voice in my head…
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From Cairo, part 4
Wow. So much has happened today that if I had started to write it all down in my journal, I would have been writing nonstop and nothing else would have happened. The unfortunate side to this is that I have lost many little details to oblivion. The wonderful side of this is that if I…
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Australia, part 1
Greetings from Sydney, Australia! I’m sending this on Friday morning at 10:00am, but for most of you it’s 5:00pm on Thursday. J-P and I flew here yesterday after just barely escaping a big ice storm that practically shut down the DFW airport just a few hours after our plane departed. Our flight from Los Angeles…
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Australia, part 2
So we just spent a lovely day in Sydney, doing all the quintessential Sydney things… I stripped naked in front of the opera house and got a fantastic Butt and Scarf photo. We strolled through The Rocks, a collection of the oldest buildings in Australia. We took the ferry to Manley, Sydney’s beach town, and…
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Australia, part 3
I’m sorry I haven’t written in three days. It’s not because I haven’t had access, a connected computer has been sitting next to my bed the entire time. It’s simply because these Aussies live a RIDICULOUSLY hedonistic lifestyle, and we’ve just been caught up in it all. After our long day in Sydney, we wanted…
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Australia, part 4
This one will be short, but I figured I’d better bash off another before we head off to New Zealand, where our time will be short and we probably won’t have time to write… This morning we had coffee at the house of a man named Killer. He’s an automechanic, and I was a bit…
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Australia, part 5
Greetings, all! J-P and I are safely back in Dallas, about a week earlier than expected. Due to a number of reasons, we decided to cut out the New Zealand portion of our trip, and headed straight from Perth to Hong Kong. On the way we flew right over the interior of Borneo/Sarawak, one of…