What Is An Expat?

Well, we’ve made it back and are enjoying being at work again. If it wasn’t for being able to come back to work, vacation could go on forever! I took approximately 1419 pictures before the “why do you exist?” deletions started occurring. I haven’t had the chance to get through too many of them yet, but the upside is that most of my notes were actually written out instead of being notes, so a possibility exists that I may actually generate a trip report out of this. (We’ll see. )

We had a great time but should have taken a few more days. Several places cropped up where we thought “hey, we’d really like to see that” but were unable to due to lack of time. We ran in to several old friends and Uzbeks, some of whom were both. We made several new friends as well, which is always nice. Japan was very polite and friendly overall and quite a nice trip, which I highly recommend to anyone who can make it. It was much easier to get around than we had expected, though there were a few small snags here and there, but none were very bad.

We’re lucky enough to have a pretty good vacation benefit, and every 3 months we get a couple weeks to go somewhere and visit, in addition to a time or two per year where holidays can be shoved together long enough to go somewhere short. It was a little slower when living on the camps, and maybe now it is going to slow back down a bit, but we are still amazingly lucky with the amount of travel that we are able to do.

Yes, there are currently some gaps. I haven’t imported all of the trip reports from the old forum where I posted them originally. That’s slightly dull work.