Law, Partially

In the year before Christine started school, we passed several long and (usually) enjoyable weekends in various European cities. The list of desired destinations was, and still is, long. Moscow didn't make the first cut. But a Russian made us an offer we couldn't refuse. I was excited to return to Moscow, having visited once before, in January 2004. While the president is the same, I'd heard that a lot else has changed. Namely, the Russian state became a lot wealthier after 2004 with the price of exported Russian oil reaching a long-sustained higher average price. We found that the Moscow mayor has invested a lot to enhance the city's livability. When I visited before, I stayed in a gigantic hotel next to the Kremlin designed to house thousands of partisans for the erstwhile party conferences of the 20th century. That brutal concrete hulk met the wrecking ball since then and is now a park with paths through planted native fauna up a hill that offers views of St. Basil...

You may expect these London residents to take vacations in Europe. Some of us have not explored much of Colorado before, and we were going there anyway for Molly's Keystone wedding extravaganza. Molly had three days of festivities planned, and the FD Linges turned the trip into an eight day road trip from the southwest of Colorado to the center. There will be plenty of time for -- and there will be many -- European vacations. But, first, Colorado. We flew from London to Dallas to Durango (Bobby's tenth and eleventh flights). Going through immigration in Dallas was a surprisingly painless experience. In Chicago we wait in much longer lines and always get harassed because Christine's immigration documents are out of date because the US government can't be bothered to update them (so we have government agents mad at us for suffering from government inefficiency -- pretty much sums up federal government logic). Durango is an old mining town on a plateau in southwestern ...

Saturday was full of Singapore wedding activities -- lunch and tea ceremony in the afternoon, wedding dinner and marriage registration in the evening. The tea ceremony and lunch were held at the Chen's house. The registration and the dinner were held at a Chinese restaurant on the thirty-third floor of a skyscraper downtown. In from Penang were Eileen's parents and sisters, brothers-in-law, nieces, and nephews. Mr. Chen's sister came from Ipoh, and Mr. Chen's brother and his family from Kuala Lumpur. The rest of the Chen's are living in Singapore. As for Mrs. Chen's family, I didn't get to meet any of them. I had already met Mr. Chen's brothers and sisters several times before, and I'm friends with some of them. Everyone was excited to meet the first born of the new generation. Bobby doesn't have any cousins yet on the Chen side of the family. I've been to several Chinese weddings now, and I've got a routine for meeting extended friends...

The timing of our Asian trip was meant to correspond with the wedding of Wei Hao, Christine's brother. He is marrying a girl from Penang, Malaysia, who now lives in Singapore. Her family remains in Penang. Hence, last weekend we went to Penang for a wedding, and this weekend there will be another wedding in Singapore. This also means Bobby, not yet 6 months old, now has his third set of passport stamps (entering/exiting Singapore, entering/exiting Malaysia, entering Singapore again). Quick history of Penang Penang, you may recall from when Christine and I visited in 2011, is an island off the west coast of Malaysia, with a city, Georgetown, founded by the British. The early history of Georgetown is similar to that of Singapore: port cities from the English empire, distinctive Straits colonial architecture, majority Chinese, prosperous and modern due their being entrepôts. After Singapore's independence from Malaysia in 1965, however, their trajectories began to diverge. S...