Law, Partially

Ambitions to write entries in every city have crashed. Entries by region? Failed. As we wind down the first half of the trip and leave Italy for points west, maybe I can succeed in documenting our adventure by country. If India travelled to France, Italy would result. Just like India, Italy is even jammed onto the southside of a continent. And just like in India, we enjoyed our adventure, though some days we were dirty and tired of it, and just like in France, we ate very well and went to museums. In Florence I felt like I was in India, often walking in streets (few practical sidewalks), along with cars driven by the unsympathetic, breathing in exhaust fumes, amidst crumbling old buildings and throngs of people. India is of course more crowded, dirtier, and poorer, but sewer smells often linger in those medieval Italian city centers as they do in India's more crowded neighborhoods. Like in India, sometimes I'm amazed that Italy works at all. But it works, and it is a great ...

Sometimes, changes in a growing child happen in such small increments you hardly notice them. Sometimes, a change is as stark as black and white. And sometimes, along the evolving pathway, you note a benchmark against which a change becomes noticeable, whether gradual or not. The Christmas holiday marked a number of milestones, some we hope we can move past and some that we will cherish. It jolted our London routine, and now, back in London, we're still living in the aftermath. Thank you, Santa, for this bounce house (and for a fun cousin). Flopping face first into the new year like... It's natural and common that we prefer the happy memories. So when someone shows a camera to snap a photo, we all smile and pretend like we're really happy, regardless of how happy we really are at that moment. Social media is now infamous as a tool for us all to present only the happiest aspects of our lives, not to mention spin them so it all seems better than average. As I w...

While our little boy had taken ill on his long weekend in the Cotswolds, a healthy bouncing baby boy across the Atlantic was clamoring to meet him. Three best buddies hanging out at Rachel House. The London Linges have spent a good amount of time in DC over the years, making it our most visited city outside of the ancestral homeland in Cedar Rapids. Our last days in the US before moving to London were spent as guests of Gugu in DC. See last year's blog entry  and  the other . The year before, DC was the last trip of Mum and Baba before Bob was born. August is vacation time in Europe, more so on the Continent than in the UK, but August in a UK office is slow, and many London restaurants close for the month. So fourteen months after our most recent, very enjoyable stay in DC, we were packing up in London for a two week trip to DC. There we expected to find the 2018 Catalina Wine Mixer, with Linges from far and wide coming to adore the new babe, Lincoln Kevin. But ...

I thought this chap summed up pretty well life as a transplant in the developing world. London is not as chaotic as Nairobi, but there is a parallel truth (and although I've never been to Nairobi, I can imagine the chaos as similar to other developing world metropolises). You develop a set of daily expectations in the place you live; when you move to a new place, these expectations are naturally and constantly foiled. You develop a set of new daily expectations based on your new place of abode. Only then does the newness make way for going native. Adventure , after all, is the process of forsaking the usual for something unknown (and hopefully exciting). FT correspondent John Aglionby on his life in Nairobi, Kenya https://www.ft.com/content/61444d46-622b-11e7-8814-0ac7eb84e5f1

The lessons of life abroad are found in the routine interstices of daily life. We’ve encountered challenges in setting up our life here but not because this place is so radically different; it’s because this place is so deceptively similar. There are a few things a middle-class family must do to get up and running in a new place: find a home, fill the apartment with the things needed for life, set up a checking account, get a local cell phone number, subscribe to a broadband Internet service provider. Luckily, we don’t require daycare or schooling for Bobby at the moment. We managed to find an apartment with the help of a real estate agent hired by my employer. Most of the apartments we saw were awkward in some way. In the end, we found one that’s acceptable, but we are surprised at how many fees and taxes accompany a rental property in the U.K. My wallet hurts. Ouch. Very annoying has been the extreme background checks we've had to go through, and the extreme disorganization...

We were out of the U.S. for six weeks, our first international trip with a baby. It was important this experiment succeed because we're planning a much longer adventure starting in May: moving to the U.K. In six weeks, we visited three places (Singapore, Penang, and Tokyo) and took six plane rides (Chicago to Tokyo, Tokyo to Singapore, Singapore to Penang, and the reverse of these). We learned some things along the way and forgot a few others. Bobby doesn't care about Tokyo per se. He's a curious little fellow who likes observing busy scenes, but we can find busy scenes in Chicago -- so why drag him 14 time zones away? We had to bring him to Singapore to visit his grandparents (if you don't like traveling with babies, then you probably should date in your home town, I have learned). Since a trip to Singapore involves a stopover in Tokyo, and since Mom and Dad like visiting Tokyo, and since an extended stopover in Tokyo also breaks the very, very long plane ride into t...

My blog readers have been wont to say they like the photos I post on my blog. I’m sorry, but there won’t be many photos for these blog entries because Christine’s camera, filled with one month’s worth of traveling photos, was stolen on my last evening before I returned to Singapore. I didn’t bring my own camera, so all the photos were on her camera. As the sun was setting during the last evening of my trip, Kata beach in Phuket, Thailand, was nearly deserted of people. We walked down to the water, leaving behind a shoulder bag on a beach chair at the top of the beach. It had been raining, and the chair was under a tree, out of the rain. Compared to other beaches in Phuket, Kata is not seedy at all, and being under a tree, the bag seemed to be out of sight of the few people at the beach. I felt nervous leaving the bag unattended, but being up on the chair, it would be out of the rain and out of the sand. As we were down at the water, I was keeping an eye on the bag up at the chair. A ...