Have Passport. Will Travel.

My life in 2008 was boring.

I mean, really. Truly. While driving to Ithaca, New York a few weekends ago, I came to the embarrassing and startling realization that it had been a year since I'd left Ohio.

A YEAR.

I am all kinds of shocked and humiliated to say this. I graduated from high school in Malaysia. I spent a semester in Hawaii. I spent a Thanksgiving in London. I traveled to Denver three times my senior year. I filled up my passport by the time I was twenty-one, for goodness sake!

But, no, suddenly I'm little Miss Can't Afford to Travel.

And I really don't WANT to be little Miss Can't Afford to Travel.

I want to go to a million different places. I want to spend money on vacations. I used to dream I'd be Polly from that silly movie, Along Came Polly - moving around from place to place with no boring jobs. I want to experience all the places I visited in the first 22 years of my life all over again as an adult. I want to visit Paris, Thailand, Vancouver, Malaysia, Hawaii, Bali, London, Singapore, and the Philippines again - and this time with Mike!

I always meet the most interesting people when I travel. There was the time a British guy bought me soup to spend the last of his American dollars and showed me his photos from Fiji. The time I spent a whole night in the O'Hare airport ticket area watching Family Guy with some guy on my way to Hawaii. And the time I was seventeen and was hit on by a guy from London at the Kuala Lumpur airport. And several angry divorced ladies. (Oh, those are the fun ones, right?)

With my poverty-level wages (I wish I was exaggerating) and Mike's grad school stealing all of his salary, we just don't have ANY money to speak of. Period. At all.

2009 will be better than 2008, I promise you this.

For one, I applied for a new passport. A married name passport.

For two, I already have tickets to travel to El Paso/Juarez next month, courtesy of work. I'll be going back there in May for ten days.

For three, I'm going to the University of Maryland for a conference next month. (Again, thank you, work!)

And four, my bikini-clad body will be traipsing along the South Carolina beaches come June, courtesy of the in-laws.

That means I'll be out of the office for three - count 'em, THREE - weeks, leaving the US two times, and leaving Ohio four times. All paid for by others.

And until I can visit again, I'll just stare longingly at photos...

Jungle right by my family's townhouse in Malaysia.


Chinese store kitsch.


View from my family's house.


Asian man with bow-tie.


I seriously want to move back here. Seriously.