Checking out for several days - Off to CocoBeach

We're leaving at 0600 hours in the morning (Monday, July 30) for CocoBeach near Puerto Galero. Apparently we should expect no cell phone reception (Mei-Chiang came here not so long ago loaded up with Blackberry and laptop and had to endure a forced withdrawal period from connectivity). Soooo,,,, the phone numbers on the itinerary still stand for emergencies.

Check out the location --> http://www.cocobeach.com/web/index.htm

Will try to send sign of life in the 24 hrs that we are back in Manila before embarking on the long journey home on Friday.
Ciao for now! The Krausteads

p.s. entering week 3 now and beginning to think that we could really get used to this lifestyle.

This crew is ready for a few more days at the beach, don't you think?

Exploring the Old Walled Town in Manila

Went out this afternoon with Hendra, the real photographer amongst us, to explore the old town. (Take a look at Hendra's website, and you'll see what I mean - can't wait to see what he posts from our outing today --> www.hendralauw.com)
With no Starbucks in sight, and the heat rising in non-air conditioned cathedrals and museums, the kids chose to reveal the less graceful side of of their personalities. Haven't seen much of that in a long time, but somehow can remember giving my parents similar grief many years ago. I guess that's what they call "grandparent's revenge".

Purses, Pearls and Shoes in the land of Imelda Marcos

We have truly fulfilled our Asian shopping obligations the past 24 hrs. Bought pearls, handbags, shoes, and even some books that we wouldn't find at our local Borders at home (e.g., Rboert Goddard, a British author). Good thing we are constrained by the size of our luggage, or you could lose your grip on your wallet here. Great quality for amazing prices.

Hanging out with the Cool Crowd at "Fort Boniface" on a Sat night

Enjoyed delicious Vietnamese food and soaked up the "Fort Boniface" scene with Mei-Chiang, Hendra (another colleague from Sea-Stripes days now on the Chevron-Texaco project here too), Rina and their daughter Nina.
Very lively atmosphere, very warm, cozy and friendly feeling. Pinch me,,, are we really half-way around the world, or just down in Mexico for a quick weekend trip. Sure hard to tell the difference some of the time.
Heidi and Daniel are getting a bit weary of all this grown-up talk and socializing. "Can we please go back to Mei-Chiang's and watch the $3 DVDs we picked up at the market"

The Maid-Express is a winner

Arrived in Manila as planned before dawn on Saturday. The maid-express from Singapore was great. The perfect sleeping plane: no one bothered you with drinks, movies, etc. Everyone was sleeping - no annoying business travellers insisting that they have the lights on and clicking away on laptops. My kind of plane. Kip however will tell this story completely differently. His legs did not fit in the allotted space, the seats were very, very narrow, the plane was hot (oh, yeah that translates to perfect temp for Lynn!), no cold drinks, etc. You get the picture.
Anyway, we were delighted to be greeted by Mei-Chiang and her driver upon arrival, and once again thrilled to see all four pieces of luggage show up. That's 7 out of 7 so far on this trip.
Since Manila is on the far Eastern edge of their time zone, the sun was rising as we were driving into town around 5:30am. Even early Sat am we got caught up in traffic. Amazing sights to be seen out of the window. Evokes scenes from Bangkok in the East and Mazatlan in the West. Lots of similarities.
Mei-Chiang has a fabulous (huge) appartment on the 26th floor overlooking the business district of Makati City. The arrangements here provide for a breakfast buffet on the 31st floor everyone morning. So we indulged in yet another feast of Asian fruits, pastries, gracious service and lots of caffeine before letting everyone catch up on some rest in a real bed, before venturing out to see the sites.

Bali Dreaming in the Rice Fields

Spent Tuesday (July 24) visiting Ayu's parent's new villa near Kramask (sp? - Ayu - please correct this for me). In the SE area of the island on the road between Sanur and Candidasa.
What an amazing place they have built up since just February of this year. Three houses, with a visionary Learning Center in the middle of the complex. Agung has a vision to help his childhood village to engage more in Learning, by integrating this into their daily activities, working in the rice paddies.















Would love to share more pics here, but that would take up too much realestate. Have to link over to Kodakgallery, when I can get these loaded back home.

Checking in from Philippine Maid Terminal in Singapore - aka "Budget Terminal"

It's 11:30pm and we have learned about a whole new side of Singapore this evening. If you thought about it, you might guess that it must exist, but, well, who thought about it before?! Anyway, here we are at the Budget Terminal, just a short bus ride away from the Terminal 1 and 2 where the likes of Singapore Airlines and all the other big guns fly in and out of.
Guess who flies out of here? Cebu Pacific and Tiger Airlines. Midnight flights to destinations across Asia that highlight where all the migrant workers come from and go to, to work.
Made it here from Bali earlier in the evening, and the met up with Jenella for a great Thai dinner near the Arrival area. Caught up with Jenella on news from Singapore and adventures in Bali.
Now we're off to a completely new adventure. None of us have ever been to the Philippines before, so we can't even imagine what lies ahead. We don't even know enough, to know what to look forward to, other than it's 6 more days of vacation, and that surely is a great thing.
Mei-Chiang promises to meet us at the airport at 4am inspite of our best efforts to try to pursuade her to please just send the driver and get some sleep herself.

Note to HP readers: I read in the Jakarta Post this morning that the secret of the ending had been released prior to the book. Anyone know about that? Daniel is still slogging his way through it, and Heidi is going back for more,,, grazing through various chapters again. I'm with Mike Robinson, who apparently got stuck on book #4. After the kids learned how to read themselves I was relieved of the out-loud-nightly ritual, phweewww.
OK --- 3 mins left on the "free internet" clock,,, after which I will be automatically logged off.
Bye for now. More from Manila, where I will maybe have access to the same kind of super connections Rhonda is enjoying in Hawaii.
Love from The Krausteads in transit in Singapore... bye

Picture dilemna in Bali - Learnings for Week TWO

We'll be at the airport in Singapore for 5 hours on Friday evening (all part of the super-cheap ticket scheme we have going!), where I will have great internet access but no access to the USB port. So I thought I'd be real clever and bite the bullet here in Bali and load a bunch of pics from my camera, that I could then add text to at the airport. Great idea, hey?
WRONG..... I've just spent the last 20 mins on various failed (presumably timed-out) attempts to get a single picture loaded. Bummer.
I have been thinking a lot about our colleagues in various parts of the world with low band-width access and how this distances them from us and our attempts to increase collaboration.
So here are the learnings for this week:
1) Texting via phones --> figure this out and test this in advance. I know that the information on how to do this is hidden here in the Bahasa interface, but my Euro-centric language abilities prove to be completely useless in Asia
2) When selecting a blog service provider --> find one that is truly international. It seems that I must be trying to connect to servers somewhere on the other side of the Pacific,,,, don't know for sure, but it's very painful.
3) Breakdown and bring some sort of device to capture input offline --> I resisted dragging us down with PC equipment, but I have heard of smaller PDA-type devices that backpacker bloggers use, and that would have been interesting to investigate.
Enough techno-frustrations ... more on the great, great, great experiences from Bali when I get to Singapore in 24 hrs.
Can't wait to read all the comments too. I see that Karen, Rhonda and Betsy are faithful contributors. Somehow I'm not surprised !

Love The Krausteads .... going back out to the beach, where a massive Indian wedding is taking place. The rich and famous are here from around the world.... we are on the pauper sidelines with the Dutch, German and Japanese (no Americans to be seen in these parts)

Flashback to 2400 baud dial-in from Bali

Just took us 20 mins to look at 2 emails in aol... the rest will have to wait until we return to Singapore.
Bali has been fabulous so far. Clear skies, beautiful, pristine beaches, lovely smiles, flowers, on and on ... The weather has been much cooler than expected, so I have used my sweater every evening sitting outside. If we had bothered to check this out a bit better, we would have learned that this is the cooler season. Has not put a damper on any beach activities.
Lots of sleeping, napping, swimming, jogging, volleybal on the beach, reading (Yes, Heidi finished Harry Potter lickety-split), chess (life size pieces), smoothies served under grass huts on the beach.
Today we have a contract with the beach bums (i.e. our kids) to leave this paradise for a one-day site-seeing adventure. We're going to KlungKung palace on the East side, and then over to visit Ayu Pramitassari, a friend of ours from SEA Stripes days, who actually comes from Bali. Her family is here this week staying at their villa, as there is a cremation on one of her older aunts. Kids said no more Balinese creamations, so we'll just visit with Ayu and her husband Yuri. Hopefully we'll also get to see Ayu's parents.
No pics today .... would take we 10 mins to just load one at this rate. Will have to work on that some other day. Probably from Singapore airport, or at Mei-Chiang's in Manila.
Sleeping on the beach until next posting .... Love the Krausteads

The moustache was voted off the island

Not very clear from the pics posted, but Kip has been trying to grow a moustache (am I spelling this right?). Good news for me and Heidi is that he agreed to shave it off this morning. No more Asian bandido persona travelling with us.
We're having a quick bite before leaving for the airport to hop over to Bali ...

More from Bali, Lynn

p.s. Heidi is almost half-way through the HP book, and promises no more spoilers. Robinson girls please advise when you have finished, so you guys can discuss the plot!

Blogger Learnings - Week One

For the "LIFE" team and other passionate Learners back home:
Behaviors: Recommend that you provide instructions on posting comments and how/when you plan to write, to accompany your invitations to read. Most of our invitees are not familiar with blogging and don't always understand how they can interact with the blog. We keep getting lots of great comments coming to us in our email account instead of directly into the blog.
Another learning for me as the writer, is that I don't really have time to learn and experiment on the road. Often don't get more than 5 or 10 mins windows of time to quickly load something.
Process: Recommend that you figure out how the time-zones will impact your posting. Just learned after a week that I can specify the time-zone for the daily time-stamp. The 12 hour delay has actually been a benefit for my daily posting ritual, as I can write the blog for the previous day the next morning and have the automatic time stamp be correct.
Tools: Recommend that you get more practice than I had before I started on this adventure. Need to figure out some tricks and workarounds to such things as a) how to upload multiple pics at the same time b) how to change the language interface if you are presented with something other than English. c) bring a cheat sheet with additional html commands to help with the formatting.

Heidi and Daniel plough into Harry Potter

Heidi is forever grateful for Ade's foresight in reserving the Harry Potter book for her in Jakarta. She got started right away at lunch and they both returned to the room as soon as was politely possible to dig in deep. She told me mid-afternoon that 2 characters had already died .... could be a "downer" kind of a day tomorrow, when she crosses the finishing line!

Hello from the Shangri-La in Jakarta with a Bahasa interface

(seems that Google Blog default here is Bahasa language, so am stumbling around a bit) Well, we made it to Jakarta safe and sound. Everthing worked like a charm. Our hotel driver even met us at passport control - not sure how he managed that, but we definitely paid sufficiently for the priviledge.
When we got out into the Mercedes waiting for us, Ayu popped up out of nowhere. She was concerned that we find our way, so had made the trip out to the airport to greet us personally. So already we felt extremely welcomed here.
I rode in with Ayu, while Kip and the kids took the hotel car. Lots of security getting into the hotel, but once we passed the car gate inspection and the lobby scanning procedure, we were into another small island of paradise in Asia. The Shangri-La is exquisite here.
Within short order we met up with Ade and Debbie and we went on into a lunch buffet to end all buffets known to man. Hate to go on and on with all these superlatives, but it really is above and beyond anything we could ever find back home! The conversation jumped from old friends and colleagues to raising kids, financial planning, Islam and Christianity. We continued on after lunch back in our suite
(yes, s u i t e ... for an extra $45, we coulnd't pass that up). Seeing Ade, Debbie and Kip together is like a meeting between Basis and S&C on SEA Stripes (for insiders only)

Harry Potter Hits Asia 6 hours before Houston

There was a big launch of Harry Potter this morning at 7:01am Singapore time. That's 6 hours before we understand it will be released in Houston at midnight on Friday. Our friend Ade had been texting us earlier in the week to see if she could secure a copy for Heidi in Jakarta when you gets hers this morning.
Message from Ade:
Lynn,
I’ve already reserved and put some money down for the books for Heidi and myself (discounts applied for reserved books). It won’t be a problem at all, I’ll get the books at the store and then meet you at the hotel.
Ade.
Kip & I are amazed by all this .... there is something here that captures the imagination of this planet. How can we bottle this and do some good with it?
More from jakarta.... bye

Last evening in Singapore

G&Ts again - still working on our quinine levels. Then out for eats along the river.
Everyone crashed at the end. Time to move on. Great times in Singapore.

6 degrees of Separation - Wait ,,, less than that!

Wandering around the old condo yesterday Daniel & Heidi were hanging out with VJ, the guard, just like the good old days. When VJ asked them if we were going to visit Teresa too, the kids explained how we had lost track of her. He told them to go to one of the units at Balmoral where Teresa's friend Amy was still working, and hey presto within minutes we had her latest cell phone number and we were talking to her on the phone making arrangements to meet up the next day --- her only day off this week! That was meant to be!!!
So, we met up late morning on Friday and the kids hung out with Teresa all day, eating Chicken Rice at Great World City (again - yes, 4th time, if anyone is counting), getting double-chocolatte-frappa-whatsits at Starbucks and then on to a movie. When they returned to Jenella's they then had to get setup to be Friends on MySpace.
I then spent time with Jenella hanging out a the Chocolate Factory on Clarke Quay. Very strenouous afternoon.... again. Can I keep this up for 2 more weeks?

Visiting Arab Street and the Mosque

Daniel has threatened to do bad things to me, if I publish this picture, but I can't stop myself. Hope I survive. His long baggy shorts were not long enough, even with significant sagging (hidden under the t-shirt, of course), so he was asked to please wear a robe.
Don't you love it.
We were greeted by a lovely lady who gave us a great description of the pillars of the muslim faith. Would love to have engaged in more dialogue, but we were running up against the Noon prayer hour and the mosque was closing.

Then we went on down the street shopping, buying cool shades, arabic perfumes and admiring the beautiful materials. We stopped at an arabic cafe, where we lounged on the carpets, sipped mint tea, and nibbled on pita, hummus and babaganoush.
Great afternoon. Back home on the bus to take in a swim.