Circumnavigated

This week saw the end of our round the world travels.  I meant to blog while we were going about our food, the sights we saw, and all of that - oops! Turns out I had neither the time, energy, discipline, or technology to really support that plan.  We travelled lightly, so didn't bother bringing a laptop, and blogging from my iPod turned out to be not that easy - except for the occasional Greyhound trip, where we had plenty of time, not much to do, and free wifi.  Anyways, I'm back now, and I am going to tell you all about our trip, probably more than anyone in the world wants to know!  But I need to make some sense of it myself, so it will come in pieces, I suspect.

Because the things that stick out to me most vividly are fairly random experiences, most of which became inside jokes between Andy and I (and probably annoyed everyone else we spent time with on our travels).

Like our first day in Hong Kong, after a full morning of walking around, we spent the afternoon wandering through the "Ladies' Markets" - a series of laneways tightly packed with stalls selling all varieties of sunglasses, fans, umbrellas, tee shirts, mobile phone cases, and other trinkets.  We were approached by a woman who handed us a flyer for a foot massage and proceeded to give us a sales pitch, in perfect english that was so well rehearsed. We were promised that we could both get foot massages at the same time, that it was relaxing, and most importantly (we could tell it was important because it was repeated so many times), that we would have a good and awesome experience.  We totally should have gotten that foot massage.

Or our last day in Dublin.  We had spent the day on a tour of County Wicklow, just south of Dublin, which is the backdrop for movies such as Braveheart and P.S. I love you, and is full of stunning scenery like peat bogs and mountain lakes.  It was a gorgeous day, but confirmed to Andy and I that we are not really organised tour people.  Too group-y for our liking.  We bought some bread and hummus for dinner in a Dublin park, and then caught the Luas, the local tram, back to our stop.  We decided to take the elevator from the stop down to ground level, and when we got in there was a big puddle on the floor.  Andy joked that it looked like pee, but neither of us really thought it was.  But, moments before the door closed, a Dublin local got in, looked, and said "Ahh, they've pissed in it already!" in an angry tone.  He proceeded to have a conversation with us all the way down about how he takes the elevator every day, and every day there is piss in the elevator.  We made sure to scuff our shoes off on the grass on our walk back to our house.

Luckily, I kept a good travel journal for most of the trip, so I have some basis for thinking back about the things we did, the food we ate, and how energetic or cranky we were at the time.  So I'll get to all of those things, but for now, while I overcome jet lag and get over the mountain of work waiting for me, I leave you with these few snapshots.