Haiku(s) For You(s)

Since Kevin insists that we keep the entries on this blog somewhat travel-related (Hi Kevin, I listen to you! I am a good fiancée! Can we have a photo booth at the wedding?), I will start off this post with a list of things we have done lately in terms of the trip.

We calculated the frequent flyer miles we would earn on the AAdvantage (American Airlines) and Asia Miles (Cathay Pacific) programs to figure out which one we should sign up for. Cathay wins. We should be able to buy our one-way tickets back from London at the end of the trip using the miles we earn on our trip. Isn’t that awesome? We bought our RTW tickets for under $3,000 apiece, and while we are gallivanting around the world we’re also going to EARN miles that will pay for a plane ticket home from London. To me this seems dirty somehow. Like cheating.

We bought tickets on Jetstar to fly from Hong Kong to Singapore, and from Singapore to Taiwan (where we will be visiting Tina – hi Tina!) and back. Just remember: next time you try to book airline tickets in a foreign currency, call your credit card company first!

We registered our trip with the embassies of the countries which we will be visiting. I just want to say that the U.S. government makes it much more difficult than it really should be to do this. I signed up to receive alerts on all the countries we’re visiting, and they sent me a SEPARATE EMAIL for EACH country asking me to click on a link to confirm my subscription. After I clicked on the links, they then emailed me a CONFIRMATION OF MY CONFIRMATION for each separate country, and THEN they emailed me a “Welcome to the ____ list!” email as well! The result is over 120 emails in my trash from the U.S. consular website. Please, Barack Obama, I know you have a lot on your plate, what with being pictured topless on the cover of The Washingtonian, and universal health care, and managing a couple of different wars and all, but could you please get a few programmers to take a look at your travel.gov site? Please!

We called American Airlines (three times!) to change the dates for a bunch of our flights. Now that we have added an extra week to Southeast Asia (which I am very very happy about) and gotten rid of Bolivia (which I am very sad about), we had to rearrange all of our flights to make the schedule work. This was also tricky because a couple of our segments had already been booked up on the dates that we wanted, which meant we had to be flexible and rearrange. And guess what? I was totally ok with that. No, really, I was!

We went to REI this past weekend. And every trip to REI ends up with us buying stuff that we “need,” like rainproof covers for our pack, which, ok, I admit those are kind of necessary. But not as necessary as sporks!


It’s the “Perfectly Designed Outdoor Eating Utensil”! It comes in 19 civilized colors! Unfortunately for me, Kevin is not as susceptible to the allure of multifunctional eating utensils as I am. He also isn’t interested in the foldable dinner set, which I think would go great with the sporks. It seems like keeping all of our stuff dry is more important to Kevin than having cool things to eat off of that don’t take up a lot of space. Go figure.

We’ve also been mulling over how connected we want to stay during the trip and have been revisiting the idea of taking a netbook with us. Especially with Verizon and Sprint coming out with plans for Novatel’s MiFi – we’re now thinking about buying one of these bad boys to take with us. Two problems: (1) we’re not sure this will work outside of the U.S., and if it does, we probably have to pay ridiculous amounts of money for the data plan and (2) how can we afford to buy the netbook, the MiFi, AND the data plan when there are so many sporks that still need to be bought?!

…

So now that the travel stuff is out of the way, we can get to the good part of this post, which is subtitled “Haikus on the Things in Zhou’s Life,” or, alternatively, “Why Kevin Should Let Zhou Write Non-Travel-Related Posts Because She is Better at Those Anyway”

“Charlie”
pitter-patter feet
soft, quiet paws on the floor
she leaps into bed!

“Too Many Games on TV That Kevin Must Watch”
oh Houston Rockets
Yao Ming was your worst player
who’d have thought? not me

“No Jalapeno Cream Cheese for My Bagel This Morning”
so I used butter
frozen bagels aren’t as good
fresh ones are better

"Being Better at Limbo Is Little Consolation"
Ultimate Frisbee
a game that favors the tall
unfortunately

“Going to the Dentist to Get a Chipped Tooth Fixed”
this tooth should be fixed
it only hurt a little
seventy dollars!

“My Dream Scrabble Play”
the triple triple
laying down “quixotic” – ha!
will this ever be?

“Working Out at the Gym in My New Gym Pants”
they are soft and black
but I get sweatier than
with the shorts I wear

“Justification for a Shorter Post than Normal”
I am quite busy
taking naps (and watching stuff)
sorry about that

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Puzzles for Postcards (list of winners):

Dan's Belt Better Chargers:

Hog Fat Dug Would
Don Pays On Hummer
Ill Bank End So Bile
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Scrabble Games: 42 (full log)
Zhou WPLB: 24; 368; 364; LOITERS, NAtIONS
Kevin WPLB: 18; 363; 339; LASTInG