I am headed to the passport office this AM to get a new passport. I didn't have time to do the expidited renewal after getting back from Japan. So I made an special expiditing appointment with the passport folks in Atlanta. I am glad I only have to drive into Atlanta, not fly up to NY or Washington DC. It seems I have had to do some expiditing everytime I have renewed my passport. Passports are good for 10 years. When you get a new passport it is a time to ponder where you will be and what the passport will look like in 10 years. The pic belows shows the wear on my now cancelled passport. it was a 50 page book (the extra pages version) and 46 pages are fully used. Many countries require 3 empty pages to enter their country. So, I got full use of the larger size passport. If you need more pages, you send the passport in and they will "sew-in" more pages. The thickest passport I ever saw was at the Uzbekistan-Turkmenistan border. A truck driver I saw had a Uzbekistan passpo...
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I haven't blogged in awhile. I guess I am still decompressing from our most excellent, but crazy vacation in SE Asia. Things really went as planned. We first started considering the trip and these counties over a year ago and bought the transpacific flights 6 months prior. We were making reservations up to the day before we left.
We had 10 flight segments in 14 days. For clarification, we made no tight connections. We did have one long connection in Seoul (12 Hours). We didn't need a hotel since we landed at 5:00 AM and left at 6:00 PM. We had breakfast/brunch in the 4-seasons hotel downtown. I used their business center for some personal business. Never stayed in the hotel. Although the Royal Brunei ticket was to/from Brunei, it was not a layover, but still a a single ticket. Also, we had no morning flights. All flights were in the evening, so we could sleep, albeit in economy. Early morning flights were invented by the devil to totally "F" you up. The money you save is easily taken from your soul.
Airlines: Delta/Korean Air, Thai-AirAsia, Laos Airlines, Vietjet, Scoot!, Royal Brunei, and Philippines Airlines.
All the airlines were great for the most part. It was my second experience with AirAsia (first time was Kuala Lumpur to Chennai India a couple years back). We aren't going to use them again. Scoot! was a better than expected experience. They are a Singaporean LLC (Low-cost Carrier). They called us "Scooties!". Funny enough, but you start to see the utopian Scootie persona and motif in Singapore in public service messaging---I am ok with a sub-utopian life.
We are planning the next trip to Egypt (transoceanic). Then Malta and the Balkans (Kosovo, Montenegro, Bosnia, etc.).
A pic we got after we got back from Singapore. Gotta love the "hokiness" of Singapore. Like in Korea, we did not stay in the Sands hotel. We had a great/better hotel a short walk away, actually with nice view of the Sands.
And for something totally different: (The Good Bad and Ugly Danish National Symphony) Ennio Morricone
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"Risk! Risk anything! Care no more for the opinions of others, for those voices. Do the hardest thing on earth for you. Act for yourself. Face the truth." -- Katherine Mansfield
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