I just realized that it’s been almost 5 months since I wrote here. Oh! Time does fly. I’ve been busy with a number of things, and honestly can not believe how fast 2008 is going by.

I started a new job in March. I now work for Qantas Airways as a business analyst in remuneration and recognition division which is a part of Qantas People group. I still think it is a miracle that I got this job and am grateful because I’ve been enjoying it a lot. My team and my boss are really nice and hard working people, and always seem to be happy to teach me different things, which is great as I am in a junior sort of role there.

Dave and I have taken time to evaluate our marriage and things that we want to improve, change, work on. It’s been a great journey so far and I am looking forward to the next few months. We will be celebrating 6^th wedding anniversary later this year. Again, time does fly. I feel grateful for the time we had together and I hope our relationship will continue to grow.

We are off to Europe for couple of weeks at the end of June. Dave is going to a conference in Copenhagen. The plan is to spend couple of days in Copenhagen, then I will fly to Latvia for just 4 days (while Dave is attending the conference), then meet up in Vienna (my mom is going to come along), spend few days there, make our way to Prague, then Berlin and then fly home. It will be a very rushed trip, but it should be good. I am excited about my mom travelling with us.

I’ve been struggling with church, relationships and lack of challenges. I finally feel that I can not be blocking it anymore, but need to deal with it. We might be changing churches to find a more challenging place. Please pray that God would show His will. It will be hard to leave as we lead a home group and Dave does preaching few times a year. On the other hand we have to pay more attention to our Spiritual growth. I must say that both of us miss UPC a lot (despite the fact that we moved almost 3 years ago!) It was a great place to be a part of, if only we could move back

Dave is off to Papua New Guinea next week. It will be an interesting trip. He’ll be meeting with few government people regarding HIV in PNG and educating people about the disease, and establishing prevention strategies.

It's been getting cold so I decided to knitt myself a big scarf. I haven't done knitting for close to 10 years now and was very surprised I could still remember how to do it. Well, a week later and it is ready. Nice and warm

I will try to visit this site more often. It changes heaps! I do not enjoy the new set up as much, as I find it harder to read people’s blogs. I probably just need time to adjust

I finally get to share my observations about our trip to Thailand. When we first arrived to Bangkok I was quite impressed. Their airport is new and very modern and has this unusual design, which I really liked. We got into taxi and off we were into the city. I was amazed at how huge their highways are! In a way it reminded me Los Angeles (lots of light grey looking highways), but Bangkok has more and everywhere you look there are new highways being built.

By highways and under them there were lots of little houses, looking more like cardboard boxes than anything else, with people living in them. That was a little strange. I was surprised to see how polluted the place is and was glad our taxi windows were closed and was grateful for air-conditioning.

We got to the hotel and went off to discover the city. I was amazed to see hundreds and hundreds of stalls and people selling fake Ralph Lauren, Gucci and other brands. You can find anything there, movies, clothes, handbags, watch and everything fake, amazing! People could clearly tell that we are tourists (because we are Caucasian) and tried to sell us things every step we took! First it was sort of fun, but then it really got at me! Do I look like I want to buy tons of stuff? All I wanted was for people to leave me alone and let me look around and enjoy the city.

Bangkok was great at night, so lovely and busy and bright and loud. Of course they have different Buddhist worship things all over the city and it was strange to see people being so dedicated and worshiping different type of statues.

The following day we took a day long tour outside of Bangkok. We went South-East for about 2.5h and had an experience of floating markets, WWII sites close to Burma, Tiger Temple (which I learnt about on Discovery channel and really wanted to visit) and elephant riding which was an absolute blast! They turned out to be so big and cute and friendly!

We spent next couple of day discovering Bangkok, saw some temples, palace and just enjoyed the life of this busy city. A night before our departure I went to bed and Dave went outside to get me some tiger balm. He came back 10 mins later all shocked. I asked what happened and he said that 3 prostitutes tried to pick him up! So he ended up running from them! Bangkok is famous for that sort of stuff but we did not expect anything like that to happen to us.

After Bangkok we flue to Phuket. Many Australians go there for holidays, but half of our plane was full with Russian people. Wee heard so many good things about the place and were looking forward to spend a week there. When we arrived to our resort we realised it was fancier than we have expected. It was a part of a huge laguna resort village that had 5 different resorts and included golf courses, islands, beaches, restaurants, shopping etc. We got even a bigger shock when we saw our tandard room??it was a five storey villa that included a huge living room, balcony, kitchen, couple of bedrooms, a massive jacuzzi and on the top level an outdoor relaxation area overlooking the laguna. We had a bit of a shock!!! The staff around were so kind and attentive to us. They treated us like we were royalty, which we actually didn like, but we then realized that is one of the reasons why a lot of Western people go there ?they get treated like royalty for very little money.

The resort was like a paradise, such a beautiful place, which turned out to be very expensive too! I did not expect for a simple Thai dinner to cost $80 in a third world country (for the same meal in Australia we would pay around $20). Couple of days of observations and it became pretty clear that the whole show in owned by Westerns and is created for Westerns, but they use poor local people to serve us for nothing.

We went into the main village and just as we expected all houses were very ran down and looked awful among huge holiday resorts full of Aussies, British and American. Crazy! We were surrounded by locals once again trying to sell things. Finally we saw the reality of this place, which was very strange. It looked like the place had more or less recovered from a huge tsunami that took place two years ago. Even the beach and water looked clean again.

The beautiful beach actually looked a lot like Sydney beaches. The water was nice and bright and clean, a little warmer than Sydney ocean, but sand wasn as smooth as Sydney sand...in other word, I do like Sydney beaches better

We went on a tour to visit Phi Phi island and other islands around. I couldn get over the fact how beautiful the nature was. We were sad though to see that Thai people are definitely not practicing sustainable tourism! It all seemed to be about making money really quickly without thinking of consequences.

We went snorkelling and of course it could not be compared to the Great Barrier Reef, which we both really love. The variety of fish wasn that great, and there were too many tourists in the water trying to pick on coral which already looked pretty damaged. How sad!

In general we had a really amazing Asia experience, a different type of travel wee done before, which has definitely broadened our world view. We did feel uncomfortable with the fact that locals treated us like we were somebody fancy and royal or something. I felt sad to see how hard and how much locals have to work to earn so little. It was also our first experience of seeing Westerners taking advantage of a poor country, but from what I gather it seems to be a very common thing these days.