Resurrection II

Okay, so totally disregard the post from January about resurrecting the blog.  That lasted for about a week.  I've realized, I'm much better at writing about the randomness of life in Rural Asia than I am about living in Surburbia.  Somehow being surrounded by houses stifles my creativity (I'm looking out my window at my neighbors nice brick wall as I type).

With that being said, I am resurrecting the blog AGAIN.  This time I'll actually stick with it, since Lindsey and I are heading off to Asia for two and a half weeks.  The game plan is to go back to the town that I lived in for eleven days, then head down south for four days.  We have a basic plan of what we're doing, but all that could go out the window once we get there.  

On a side note: My old Filipino roommate, Joie, is going to meet us over there.  If you don't know Joie, he's full of fortune cookie wisdom and was the brains behind all of our coffee projects when we lived there.  So Lindsey will get to meet him on this trip (maybe a good thing, maybe not...).  Joie going with us is strategic, but more on that later.

Our basic game plan is that for the first half of the trip we're going to help out with the work that is continually going on there.  We'll go out to some villages, probably help with some ag projects, catch up with local friends, and try to share whenever we can (even though my language is very rusty).  This will also be a time where Lindsey gets to check things out and finally get to see what I've been talking about over the past year and a half.

The second half of the trip is going to be a little more business.  We're going to travel down south where some people we know are growing coffee.  We'll meet with them and talk about the possibility of partnering up with them in their work down there.  We'll help them out with some of the coffee that they're growing, and we'll scope out some possible living/working situations for Joie.  The hope is to have Joie living out there sometime in the first half of next year (for more on that see www.undergroundcoffeeintl.org).  We've both been down there before and have friends there, but we've never looked at it as a place to live.  It'll be a busy few days there, but we'll be enjoying some fresh mangos and pineapples, so I'll be just fine.

With that being said, I'll try and update this regularly over the next few weeks (assuming I can find a place with internet).  The posts might be a little few and far between, but I'll try and keep things up to date.  And I promise I won't do the American thing and only post about getting massages every day and taking pictures of the weird things we eat; however I'm expecting there to be quite a bit of both.