Scooting

Honeymoon Part 3 - Phuket

This is going to be a really short post - because this stop on our honeymoon was the least exciting. We had been told by a few people not to waste our time in Phuket but on the other hand we really wanted to see what all the fuss was about. I mean, isn't this the place Thailand first became famous for? We decided to find out at the famous Pattong Beach.

In the end I'm glad we were only there a day and a half. We arrived in the evening, much later than planned. Unfortunately the hotel on Phi Phi Island gave us a big scare by temporarily losing my luggage. In the hour we stood on the dock panicking, the last boat left and our hotel rep was running around shouting things on the phone in Thai. He ended up working out a deal with a Chinese tourist boat (yes, like 200 chinese people on this boat) so that they would take us back. This boat is slower than the ferry so it took almost three hours. When we finally arrived in Phuket, our new hotel's shuttle took us through the hour and a half drive on the very windy roads - not good for someone like me who gets car sick. We were happy to finally be at the hotel.

This hotel was pretty cool, much more modern than before and we had a room with direct pool access! We wound down from the day's travels and then decided to head out to find a bite to eat and walk the wild streets of Phuket. We had a couple beers on the main strip, were invited to about 857692 Ping Pong Shows, and decided to check out the world-famous ladyboy show. 

Whats a ladyboy show like? Well its basically a glorified Karaoke show where everyone is lip syncing something that sounds totally different to the original song (songs are in English, I'm sure they have no idea what the songs say!)... oh and there is the very common wardrobe malfunction. It was actually a lot of fun and John left very confused about Thailand; he wasn't sure who was actually a woman anymore! Some of those women are so beautiful that its amazing to think they were born men!

The next day we relaxed by the pool - we didn't dare tackle the crazyness of the beach. Plus, I didn't think that beach was even half as good as the ones in Phi Phi. In the late afternoon we went out for a foot massage and then to find a restaurant. We had an amazing foot massage only to realize we had been missing out on all the other days when we didn't treat ourselves to a $7 hour-long foot massage. Then we had a fantastic lobster curry dinner. We chose not to battle the crazyness and head in - happily knowing that we were headed to Chiang Mai very early the next morning.

To end our time in Phuket, we checked out of the hotel around 4am - just around the time that about 6 drunk young guys came back to the hotel with two women, clearly "women of the night." Ohhhh Phuket... 

Here's John in our hotel room with our honeymoon surprise/welcome:

And here we are on our night out in Pattong:  

And to end the post, here is a little video compilation of a ladyboy show with a fun treat at the end! Enjoy!

 

 

 

Honeymoon Part 2 - Ko Phi Phi Don

After a few days in Ko Samui relaxing at our amazing hotel and watching Muay Thai fights, we packed up and took a short flight to Phuket. From there we took a taxi to the pier and a ferry for two hours to Ko Phi Phi Don. I'm pretty sure Ko means island and Phi Phi is said P P, I have no idea what Don means. Once we arrived at the pier on Phi Phi, at Tonsai village which literally means "tourist village", we took a longtail boat to our hotel on the other side of the island.

Now if you don't know much about Thailand, it may help to know that Phi Phi is where all the iconic beaches are. This is where the movie The Beach was filmed and where all those pictures of those Thai boats with the colorful scarves are taken. And it really is just that beautiful. We were already amazed at the clear water and wider beach (compared to Lamai beach in Ko Samui where there is pretty much no sand).

When we finally arrived at the hotel it was around 4 so we quickly checked in and changed into our bathing suits to begin our search for some food! We ate a spicy curry at the hotel's beach restaurant and then ordered a couple coconut drinks to go (as in the drink is actually in a young coconut) so that we could have them on the beach. We spent the rest of the day relaxing and decided we were ready for some adventure!

On Thursday we signed up for a half-day powerboat excursion. It took us to several beaches and lagoons for snorkeling and sightseeing. You may not know that I am terrified of the ocean and snorkeling but I was determined to get over it and have some fun. It took me some pep talking to get in the water but it was worth it, especially since this was the easiest of expeditions with only little fish and some coral. The beautiful part was all the amazing cliffs and rocks coming out of the water and how crystal clear the water was against the pure white sand. We visited two snorkeling spots, a beach to see monkeys, Viking cave where we could barely see the ancient drawings, and Maya beach where the famous movie The Beach was filmed. It was SO much fun, the only thing that could have made it better were if there were less boats packed with people at each spot. The hotel's tour guide was awesome, our boat only had about 12 people, the fed us fruit and water throughout, and lunch of fried rice on the beach. We both agreed that so far this was the highlight of our trip and headed back to the hotel pool to have some drinks at the swim up bar. I took a nap on a beach hammock with my book and we ended the day with a nice Thai curry dinner on the mountain.

Today we are going to hike over the mountain to see the beautiful view over top and then end our hike in Tonsai village. It should take an hour after which I am sure we will be hungry and ready for our cooking class where we will learn to make 5 traditional meals of our choosing!

Tomorrow we will head out but before we do, I have booked us a couple's massage morning that also includes a coconut scrub! We will head back to Phuket by boat around 1:30pm and then to our hotel in Pattong beach where I will write my Part 3 of this blog journey!

Before I go I should comment on the one down side of staying in a remote jungle island: the mosquitos. It's crazy how many there are and even if you spray yourself down with deet-based bug spray they still find the one tiny spot you missed and at least three will bite you there! I have at least 5 bites on the arch of my right foot... How do they even find that spot?! Ouch!

I've included three pictures of the beautiful islands on our snorkeling trip as well as one of John and me at Maya Bay. The last one is of me getting ready to try our red curry and whole fried snapper in curry! Yum!!

Crickets... Its what's for dinner!

As promised, here is the video John and I took of our excursion to the Lamai walking street in Koh Samui, Thailand where we tried some local street fare... fried crickets. They were pretty crunchy and not too tasty but, when in Rome...

Won't write too much right now as we're off to see a Muai Thai fight! Another post to come, stay tuned!

 

Honeymoon Part 1

I'm back! And this time I'm blogging from the other side of the world... Oh and I'm married now too.

John and I has the most amazing wedding last weekend. Everything was perfect, the church, dress, venue, food, music, and cake were great but the best part was the amount of fun we had with our awesome and supportive family and friends. It was so great to have everyone's support and love!

Fast forward 8 or 9 days (the count depends on what time zone you're in) and we are now relaxing on a beach in Thailand for our honeymoon! It was a long journey to get here, 4 flights over 36 hours, and although we were cranky and exhausted at the end of it,we even had fun on our flight! Let's just say that if you ever need to go to Hong Kong, there's no better way to go than on Cathay Pacificin first class. I had a HUGE seat that was practically its own room with a bed that laid completely flat and amazing meal service. The only strange thing is that you do feel a little like a person on display in a small zoo where the attendants walk around and observe you sleeping in your little pens. I quickly got over it and slept 6 hours in the pajamas they gave us, woke up and had some mushroom soup and wine, watched The Bourne Legacy, a documentation Missy Copeland, and had dim sum and more wine with John.

Quick side note about dim sum: we were so excited for Chinese food that we ate way too much dim sum in a period of12 hours, we can't even look at dim sum right now without getting grossed out. And it's a breakfast food?! How can you eat a steamed dumpling of fish or pork in the morning?!! Yuck.

A few flights later we arrived in Koh Samui to our hotel, Le Meridien. It was a fun drive from the airport through the winding streets of Chaweng while trying to converse with the van driver whom I could barely understand. The hotel was beautiful and they greeted us by name with a couple glasses of roseflower and lemongrass juice (very sweet and not the rose we know). We were anxious to get to our room which had a really cute couple of towel-elephants on the bed with flowers and a nice slice of chocolate cake! Happy Honeymoon... Time to relax!! We took a quick dip in our plunge pool with some wine and crashed for the night.

The next day was an awesome day by the pool and beach (pictures of the pool and beach here along with one of John getting some sun!) Sunday night we went to the Lamai beach walking street which is a market with all sorts of silly things and many stalls of street food. We were a little scared to go with the street food for fear of Asian montezuma revenge so we ate at a cute restaurant (2 curries and rice and 4 beers for $16!!) and convinced ourselves that we had to go back to the street market for the fried crickets...yes crickets, video of that to come soon!

Today we are again by the pool on this gorgeous and hot day. Our plan is to compete in the hotel's Champion of the Day contest at noon, take a canoe out on the ocean, and have a nice dinner.

More blogs to come soon!!

BluePrintCleanse

Last week I was feeling a little sluggish; I hadn't worked out in quite some time and wasn't exactly sticking to my I'm-getting-married-soon-so-lets-finally-lose-some-weight plan. That day, while roaming facebook, I saw a friend of mine post that she was starting a cleanse that day. I'd heard about these mythical cleanses and always thought it was interesting. I did a little "research" (i.e. I visited the website for 10 mintues from my iPad) and decided to do the 5 day beginner's Renovation cleanse for 5 days. I can do this... right?? :-\

Fast forward a week later: Today my first set of juices arrived. I was planning on starting the cleanse tomorrow but since I had only had a small cup of coffee so far today and John promised to take me on a date this weekend, I thought I'd push up the start date as much as possible leaving Sunday now available for the date night.

The first juice is very green and is made from romaine, celery, cucumber, apple, spinach, kale, parsley, and lemon. Its definitely not going on the top of my favorite-food list. The second juice was much better: pineapple, apple, and mint. I'm still feeling OK, just a little hungry.

Wish me luck!

Boxy Little Bag

With the leftover scraps from my Operation Apron project, I made this cute little boxy bag. For now I plan on using it for toiletries when I travel but since I lined it with some waterproof plastic material, it can probably also be used for a wet bikini bag or a little bag to put valuables in at the beach. What do you think?

I originally found the post at this site but modified the dimensions to make a bigger bag. Also, I lined it by basically sewing the plastic right along with the cloth although the site says to make a separate pouch and place it inside (but then how does it integrate with the zipper?). Enjoy!

 
 
 

Schaffhausen Day 2

Hello everyone! Today I'm sending you a short post from Schaffhausen, Switzerland. I'll be here for a couple weeks at our European offices heading up some training classes and doing some process modeling... and relaxing. I definitely plan to enjoy myself while I'm here!!!

We arrived yesterday which was an uneventful day since it was their Labor Day here, so everything was closed, and I was very jet lagged. After my 4 hour nap my coworker and I took a walk around town ending up at a small Italian place for dinner.

Tonight we had more of an authentic German experience, ordering the special from the menu not knowing what it was and a nice pint of beer also not knowing what kind of beer I ordered. The beer was so tasty and dinner was fantastic. It turned out to be veal with a delicious creamy asparagus sauce with a side of white asparagus and a potato, so yummy!

Tomorrow we plan on leaving the office at a decent hour to try to fit in some shopping! In tone of the pictures you can see NE in the "downtown" area of sleepy Schaffhausen just before dinner. Another pic of me with my yummy beer and also some cute Swiss-German architectural details. Enjoy! More updated to come.

A Holga Experiment

Hello again! On our recent trip to San Francisco for John's company's Holiday Party I decided to bring along my new toy: a Holga 120N Casablanco. Its basically a cheap camera that is the original Instagram. It uses 120 size film (which only a photo store will develop, not CVS) and naturally creates a cool vignetting effect. Here are some of the good shots:

A picture of the brunch group. Its always so nice to see friends when we're out there! Unfortunately the sun was behind us and I didn't have a flash to attach. Either way, its still a good looking group!

That afternoon we headed out to Alcatraz. Here's a cool shot of SF:

This is my favorite picture of the day. Its a double exposure (on mistake but it looks so interesting) where I first shot Alcatraz from the boat and then took a picture of John. 

Hope you like the Holga experiment. I can't wait to get more pictures with this camera. And the best part is that we actually get the prints when we develop them!

Boondoggle

I recently learned a new word: Boondoggle. As in, "I attended a boondoggle in California last week because my department had extra budget for the year. We had two days of meetings and one day where we toured San Francisco in an antique car."

And that's exactly what we did. Thankfully John was in SFO that week for his job too (training, not a boondoggle) so we decided to stay with some friends for the weekend and check out the city... again. We have seen it before but its always fun to spend time in a beautiful city with good friends. The only downside was that I was pretty sick for most of the weekend but since I was mostly coherent during the day and it was impossible to fly out early, we made the best of the time we had.

On Friday we went to dinner at a Mexican restaurant that we hadn't originally planned on going to but with a slogan about edibles and elixirs, we easily settled on eating there and trying pitcher, or two, of Margaritas. On Friday we walked around town so that I could take some pictures and ate lunch at Il Cane Rosso, which has since inspired me to try to make my own brisket for a delicious brisket sandwich. While walking around it turns out that I became our impromptu tour guide as I re-told stories I had heard on the professional tour we took at said boondoggle. We ended the day at a great local restaurant where the food was so incredibly fresh. That is my favorite part of San Francisco, the food is all fresh and organic and everything feels so healthy! I also don't think that any trash is generated there, everything is either compostable or recyclable, but I guess that's a different topic all together.

Without further ado, here are our pictures from the trip: 

First off we have the flatiron building that is owned by Francis Ford Coppola. Apparently he had thousands of gallons of horse urine poured on the building to bring out the green color of the copper. Gross but interesting!

Our next stop on your tour is a touristy photo of John and I near the Saturday lunch spot with the bay bridge and a man eating a burrito behind us. Lovely.

We then continued our walk along the embarcadero where we reached Pier 39 for some more tourist fun. After Jenny and I debated whether the perfect memento of SF would come from a store named Lefty's or The Perfect Purse, we checked out the 10 sea lions left on the pier from summer and snapped some pictures of Alcatraz. Did you know that John has never walked down Pier 39 or seen the sea lion hangout even after living there?!

 

We chose to walk back to the house through North Beach (little Italy) where we checked out the church where Joe Dimaggio married Marilyn Monroe (actually they only had their wedding pictures there, they were married at city hall). A wedding was just ending but thankfully we didn't intrude too much on our quick walk inside.    

After feeling like heathens for not going to mass in the last year (or two or three), we decided to check out the little Italian markets that line North Beach. I just love how homey and traditional they feel. It makes me want to go shopping in markets all the time!

And of course, no visit to San Francisco would be right without walking through Chinatown to check out the Peking Ducks and lanterns in the street.

I just love being in San Francisco and I especially love how health conscious the whole city is. After all the walking and recycling I did, it will definitely take a few weeks for the hippie in me to fade back out.

The Best Summer Salad/Taco: Honey-Chile-Ginger Grilled Shrimp and Peach Salad!

The only magazine I have a subscription to is Health magazine. I love how it always makes me feel empowered to be a better version of myself with its health and beauty tips. It also has great recipes and their respective calories per serving. I’ve tried quite a few and while they were all good, I was particularly happy with the salad I made below. The original recipe can be found here; I didn’t follow the recipe exactly so here is my version of the perfect summer salad.

Serving size: 2 people, or double the amount of shrimp, peaches, and corn for four people!

 Ingredients:

• 1/3 Cup Sriracha
• 2 tablespoons canola oil
• 1 inch of fresh ginger, finely chopped
• 2 tablespoons of honey
• Juice of 1 lime
• 14 Large Shrimp, peeled and deveined
• 2 ears of corn chopped into thirds
• 2 fresh peaches, quartered and pit removed
• 2 handfuls of arugula and spinach mix
• 2 Roma tomatoes, sliced
• 6 small flour tortillas
• Kosher Salt to taste

 Steps:

1. Preheat the grill.
2. Mix the Sriracha, canola oil, ginger, honey, and lime juice in a bowl.
3. Using a baster, spread the sauce on the shrimp, corn, and peaches. Sprinkle the shrimp with a little kosher salt. I like the kosher salt because it gives a much better taste to grilled food!
4. Place the corn on the grill so that it begins cooking. Once the corn is about half way done, add the shrimp. I like these to go directly on the grill so instead of using a grilling pan, I skewer them. I’m sure both methods work. Finally, add the peaches. These only need to be grilled about 1 minute per side. I also like to grill the tortillas a little to give them that nice summery and slightly crispy taste.
5. Arrange the arugula and spinach mix on two plates along with one of the diced tomatoes. Add one ear of corn, one peach, and 7 shrimp to each plate. Drizzle a little sauce left over from step 2 to the salad.
6. If you prefer to eat this as a taco, cut the kernels off the corn and chop the peaches into smaller cubes. Mix it all up and place inside the tortilla.

Here’s a picture of our success. It was really the perfect thing to eat after a nice day at the pool in the summer, especially if you want something grilled and like things a little spicy! I served it with cold green tea with slices of lemon. Very refreshing and healthy!

Bon Appetite!