maiden voyage of the milky dream

The travel blog becomes a travel blog once again! It's about time. Many things are happening in the near future. But before I talk about those things, I'll first show you some pictures. My brother recently purchased a sailboat, which was a dream of his for some time. Someday he will circumnavigate the globe. But for now, he just sails around the Halifax Harbour. Last week, I had the privilege of being on the boat when it had its maiden voyage. I didn't actually know it was the maiden voyage, and that he and my sister had never attempted to sail it before, or I probably wouldn't have gone. I was tricked. But it was pretty awesome, except that I thought we were going to tip over several times and I screamed. I'm lame. My sister used to be a sailing instructor though, so she probably knew what she was doing.

Random funny story about the boat. When my sister first saw it, it was from a distance. She was struggling to read the name of the boat on the side, which actually is Misty Dawn. But because she's a bit special, she thought it said Milky Dream. Ever since, we've called it the Milky Dream, which is a much better name than Misty Dawn anyway. So, here be photos.

1. I wear the hat. I steer the boat.
2. Brother Adrian hides in the cabin.
3. View from the top with the crew down below.
4. Pretty view from the boat.
5. Cheers to the Milky Dream.
6. Totally unrelated photo of my dog putting his face out the car window.

Okay, so, in travel-related news... I am working seriously on the whole teaching-in-Korea thing. I've applied and have interviewed for a few jobs. The interview process is exhausting because I have to operate on Korean business time, which is 12 hours ahead of my time, meaning I end up having phone interviews at midnight. And since I get up at 4:30am for work most days, this doesn't really put me at my best. But whatever. I've had 2 actual job offers so far. The first one I didn't accept because the pay wasn't great and they deducted a lot more from the pay for stupid reasons. The second job I'm still debating, but I think will likely turn it down. It seems like a decent school and it's in a great area of Seoul, but the contract is pretty sketchy. I tried to discuss the contract with the boss but he wasn't very helpful. I asked him to change a few things (basically I asked him to write in the rates of things deducted from my pay, like taxes, pension, etc.) and he did not. He "revised" the contract and sent it back to me with minimal changes. He also lowered the pay offer without mentioning it. Not cool. And also he wants me to teach kindergarten for a million hours a day, which is a bit too intense for me. Older children would suit me better. So the point of this massive paragraph is that I am still looking for a job in Korea and I am aiming to get there and start work around early November. We'll see what happens.

Now, if you've read this far, it's about to get a bit more interesting. In a sudden burst of last-minuteness, I am going back to India. Very soon. On Friday, actually. As in, about 3 days from now. This doesn't seem quite real to me yet. It all came about sort of suddenly. My friend Erica decided she was going to India, for a number of exciting reasons which I won't babble on about here yet, and she invited me to come with her. Many factors were involved in making this decision, but basically I couldn't pass it up and so I bought a plane ticket. We are meeting up in Newark on Friday and departing for Bombay on Friday night. We'll be there for 3 weeks, and I'll be back home again on Sept. 30th. I'll mostly be in Bombay, Delhi, and Hyderabad. We have tentative plans, but only tentative because the best thing to do in India, really, is just go with the flow once you're there. We'll really be going with the flow because it's still monsoon season over there. Eek. Anyway, I'll maintain the blog as much as possible, and Erica and I have plans to video blog too! So, watch this space. ;)

And, one last exciting thing - I have cut all my hair off! I have been keeping it long for ages, in hopes that it might look like this:

But then I accepted that this would never happen. So I cut it all off and it's a million times better and I love it. Here is a before and after picture.

This blog has been all over the place. More to come very very soon.