My Life

Looks like Mel and I will finally venture across that large body of blue H20 in March. Mel is defending on the 4th of March which is only a week away! Its hard to believe, but we will be leaving in just under 3 weeks for Thailand. I just received my VISA back from the Thai embassy.

So for those curious readers out there here is the breakdown of how things are suppose to go:

• Mel defends on March 4th at 9am in the morning. After that there will be a get together somewhere in town until later in the evening where most likely we will make our way to Columbos. After that, specs?
• We fly out of Bozeman on the 15th of March in the morning to Hawaii
• Spend 2 days there getting Mel’s stuff shipped off to Thailand and going to the Dole plantation, shrimp stands and the Battleship Missouri museum
• Fly out of Hawaii to Bangkok on the 18th of March
• We have a Hostel booked for 14 days right now and will be apartment hunting during those 2 weeks. Mel already has some options for apartments, we just need to go see them
• I have a 60 day Tourist VISA right now, which I should be able to extend an additional 30 days. Hopefully by then we will have found me a job over there. I’m hoping to keep working for the University for these 3 months to transition myself out of my current role and get Google Apps in place for Faculty and Staff as well as some other big projects that will aid the university.
• At the end of my Tourist VISA I will most likely come back to the States and figure out my apartment situation as well as what I’m doing with my stuff(there is still stuff for sale by the way. Go here. Do note that there are tabs at the top for movies and games too!)
  • Options that I have for staying in Thailand longer include
    • Getting a job and getting a non-immigrant VISA which is a year long VISA that can be renewed
    • Applying to a Thai language school to learn Thai which should get me a 10 month VISA
    • Applying to teach English which should get me a 10 month VISA

So here is the most important info on the land that we will be exploring

• Spiders
• Its warm

I guess that is pretty much the gist of things to come for now. I will make sure to post pictures and videos here as our journey proceeds.

If you have questions please feel free to ask.

The world must know!

I took a bit of a snooze this afternoon and I had a dream that I remember quite well and I feel that the world must know about this.

Bare with me, this is a dream so things obviously will not make sense and characters and places will change instantaneously without notice.

continue reading…

I didn’t manage to get this video uploaded for the Maui post but here is how they open coconuts when you buy them at the fruit stands next to the road

After Maui we spent the next week back on Oahu with Mel’s family. Tuesday we took as a bit of a rest day and didn’t really go out and do anything really except we walked down to the theater to go see Avatar. That was a pretty fantastic movie.

Wednesday night Mel and I had planned a dinner cruise. One of Mel’s aunties had a hook up for us so we got a really good deal to go on this cruise. FYI, in Hawaii Auntie is pretty much any women older than you that is in good relations or whatever. We got down to Aloha Towers fairly early so we poked around the shops just to see what was down there and then walked over to our boat. The dinner area was all enclosed on both the bottom and top floor with windows on both sides. You could go outside of the dinner area on either the front or back of the boat which was super nice. They even had a way to the roof of the ship so you could look all around you. Mel and I went up there when nobody else was around which was really nice. While we were up on the top of the boat the humpback whales were out, which was very cool. I managed to barely see one jump out of the water. Mel missed it, which is sad because she has never seen that. I didn’t bring my camera this night so I only have pictures from my blackberry that didn’t turn out at all. I guess I’ll keep those images in my head . The views were pretty stunning after dark with Honolulu in the background. Honolulu is a very pretty city at night as it is right on the beach with lots of lights.

Thursday we rented a car and Mel’s mom drove Mel, Julia and I up to the North shore near sunset beach. This was an awesome day. It turned out to be really nice and sunny and I took a ton of pictures of different things, especially when we got to sunset beach. The waves were just huge and loud.

Here is a short video of the waves

This was at one of the shops along the way

Here you can see some of the mountain range on one of the beaches

Fisherman’s Hat

This is one of the many beaches on the East side of the island

The North shore waves

Attempt at being artistic

Another place on the North shore

Sunset behind the mountains. I took it right after we fixed our flat tire so its a bit blurry

At the end of the night we drove to one of the malls to look for some stuff and I ended up doing this

Here is the link to the entire Hawaii pictures album. There are some pictures in there that I have not put into any of the posts so make sure to check that out.
Hawaii Pictures Album

So that is pretty much it. Between these three posts you now know what we did in Hawaii for the most part. Hawaii is pretty much the place that is always nice all the time. If it is raining, it is warm rain. If it is cloudy, it is still warm and nice. The only problem is there are lots of bugs. Ants, Centipedes, wicked spiders, all sorts of stuff, so if you are afraid of bugs, be warned.

So this is basically the same link as the last post, but there are more pictures now. I’m still trying to get around to making the final post of what we did after Maui, but figured I could get the pictures up now.

I will put up the videos we took as well in the next post. There are some good ones.

Hawaii

Well I finally made my way to a coffee house so I could hop online to do a little work and post on the blog and get the pictures uploaded that I have taken. Instead of tossing the pictures in the middle of the post I’m just going to post them at the end.

Our first day we basically crashed at Mel’s parent’s house all day as we were a bit tired from the previous day’s traveling. The day after that was a Saturday and it was absolutely gorgeous out. 85 and sunny with few clouds, so we headed decided to hit up a beach nearby. Just down the road from the house is a Marriott resort and because Hawaii has state laws about private beaches we could go on their really super nice beaches. There are some pictures below from that.

Sunday was a church day so we spent most of the day tootling around with the family. On Monday Julia, Mel and I decided that we were going to make our way down to Pearl Harbor and visit the USS Arizona memorial. When we arrived there we were met with massive fail. First we found out that you have to pay $3 a bag to store bags(you can’t bring in anything that can contain other items like purses and such). Then we found that they were completely out of tickets for the Memorial. Then we found that they were doing renovation on pretty much everything so we couldn’t even buy tickets to go see the USS Missouri either. So we decided that we were going to go to the Koko Marina Shopping center. We had found out a day or so before that the Kona brewery was also down there so we looked for that as well. We eventually found the Brewery and they have some very great beers there. Mel took a fantastic picture of me that you can see below as well. That night we decided that we were going to wake up early and make it back down to Pearl Harbor early enough to get a ticket to see the Arizona at least. They told us that they were giving out 4500 tickets in the first hour that the gates opened!

We got up early and Mel’s dad dropped us off at 6:30 at the gate. The line wasn’t too long but we found out that the bus tours were going in and grabbing hundreds of tickets at a time and then coming back later with bus loads of people and giving them the tickets. Apparently you can grab as many tickets as you want for the memorial. We scored the first tour and managed to weasel our way to the front of the tour so we were the first off the shuttle boat on the memorial which was awesome. After the memorial we headed to the biggest mall in Hawaii to nab some food and do some souvenir shopping and to meet Mel’s older sister. After all of that we took the bus home.

Today we woke up early and decided to head down to Waikiki so we could hit up a coffee shop and do a little work and push some stuff up to the Internet so that is where we are at right now in the trip.

Tomorrow Mel and I take a plane to Maui for the New Year which should be fantasticly awesome. If you are ever curious as to where we are you can check our location using Google Latitude

More pictures and videos to come.

Here are the pictures from today so far

Pictures

Short post as we have to get on the fly-fly and jump the Pacific puddle to the volcanic land