Alan Irwin’s Blog

Admittedly, we are slacker bloggers. Sure, we finished the Thailand/Laos blog from last November, but we still owe you photos and tales from the latter halves of Guatemala, Chile & Easter Island, and Egypt. The tales are a bit foggy now so you’ll have to settle for pictures. Actually, you’ll have to wait for those, [...]

We walk for hours through Chinatown and then blocks and blocks of the flower market. In preparation for Loy Krathong there are orchids, mums, roses, peonies, fragrant tuberoses, and without exaggeration, billions of marigolds. Alan and I decide to make a pilgrimage of sorts to the Erawan shrine. It’s a small, favorite shrine in what [...]

Alan is up early, putting on his SBIR shirt and good shoes, reviewing materials, practicing a few words of Thai, readying his materials. We have “American” breakfasts and then get on the road to work… er.. first to the bakery where our hosts load up on the little cakes and pastries that we never see [...]

We’re still half asleep but it’s a quick, easy ride to the Vientiane airport at 6:00 a.m. There’s a very nice Canadian (of course) guy in front of us at check-in who’s trying to reallocate his books and papers in order not to exceed the weight limit. Later, we have an interesting conversation about the [...]

About this time in our trip, we often start to have a little food craving for something back home. It’s usually a fresh salad or maybe something Mexican. This time, we’re really not craving anything, but we can’t resist the idea of ice cream sundaes on this warm summer night. So we walk up the [...]