Thinking Travel

photo by Dee Q8

Let’s see, in 2008 I…

• traveled to Costa Rica, Turkey, Venezuela, Jamaica, and Spain.
• traveled with Aaron twice (Costa Rica & Spain) and Shannon once (Turkey).
• developed and delivered several new intercultural workshops and a plenary to fantastic audiences.
• visited all of my families this year over the Christmas holiday.
• reconnected with old friends on Facebook.
• stopped lurking so much online, actually reached out to some people, started Twittering.
• went to SIIC and IDI training.
• celebrated our 8th wedding anniversary with Aaron.
• worked on our house.
• coached Otto into being a lap cat.
• saw the Cure and REM in concert.
• started CulturallyTeaching.com, a blog project exploring culture and education around the world.

I could go on. But you get the idea. Sure, there were some really sucky things that happened in 2008. But mostly, it was a really great year.

Now, onward to 2009. Even better things are ahead.

All of the blogs I’ve recently discovered have turned out to have Portland, OR-residing authors. Or they’re originally from PDX. Or they’re moving to PDX.

And it’s happened several times that I’m looking at some random photo online and something in the photo makes me say to Aaron, “I bet these people are from Oregon” and 90% of the time I find out I’m correct.

Usually it’s the trees or the lighting that tips me off but sometimes it’s something about the people, even though I don’t quite know that it is.

Is the universe trying to tell me something?

In honor of our 8th wedding anniversary, which was actually last Tuesday, I thought I’d post this photo, the only digital wedding photo we have. Can you believe it, when we got married people were still using film! So don’t think this photo is actually a digital photo, I think we scanned it.

Anyway, here’s a photo of me, Aaron, and Poldy (whose name is actually Reinhard, who was my “man” of honor, who lives in Berlin) at Mason Sabika, the Spanish Tapas restaurant that’s in a beautiful old mansion.