introduction

First blog! I want to start by saying that I cannot find the apostrophe on this Thai computer, thus blogs from here may read like that 4th grade report you did on the blue whale (which you copied word for word from Encyclopedia Britannica).

We are thrilled to be able to communicate with all of you in this way during our December 2006 to ~August 2007 world trip! We will not be sending email updates; instead the blog will be a part of our journal and our communication with you, our family and friends. We hope this page is easy to navigate. We will post blogs with stories and picture links fairly often. We will post some pictures right on the site but many more pictures will be viewable via a link on the right of the page (right now the link is "China" and later more groups of photos under different country names will be added). Madhavi is working very hard to make this link work, which is why I am doing all the writing at this point. Please tell us if there are problems with the link so we (she) can correct them. (By the way, the photo at the top is the sun rising behind the mountains of Tiger Leaping Gorge [see story below])

We really encourage all of you to post replies, especially if you are reminded of a similar experience or you have visited a place we are referring to or if you just feel like commenting. If not, email us once in a while. We would love to hear from you!

Final piece of orientation: I've edited the submission time of this posting so that it shows up first on the blog. However, postings are otherwise listed from most recent entry on the top of the page to older ones as you go down. So after you read this one, please scroll all the way down to start from the beginning if you're interested. By the way, as you can see, I figured out the apostrophe issue (the keyboard was set to Swedish format).

We started our travels with a quick trip from S.F. down home to Southern California to see my family. It was a very nice way to start and we did the usual - told funny stories over great Persian food, occasionally speaking very broken Farsi with my grandparents - will improve!. Saw Mom, Dad, Bahar (thanks for coming!), Baba Abbas, Maman Parvin, Maria, and Ben. To the airport on the evening of December 5th for our midnight flight on Air China - off to Beijing!