Indonesia

Greetings everyone! Welcome to our blog.  We are happy to be writing from the lovely island of Gili Air in Indonesia.  It seems like it took quite a long time to finally get here and like we've already been living out of our bags for awhile.  After spending a wonderful week with the Wamplers in New York, we journeyed down to NYC for New Years, enjoyed a few days with the Stern-Crowley-Gottfrieds and Mica in Philly and then it was about time time leave the USA.  Following some debate by our Manhattan friends about which train would get us to JFK faster, we boarded the A train headed Uptown.  or was it the E train headed downtown?  well, whichever it was, it won the award for being the slowest train because there were a ridiculous amount of stops due to "track work."  Then the shuttle train to the airport seemed impossibly slow.  our pre-planned 3 hour window of time to arrive before our flight dwindled into 1.5 hours and we tried not to freak out.  Luckily, there was no line at the ticket counter and the woman helping us was angelic.  we had just enough time before the flight left for Kira to: try to call her mom with our new i-pod touch (which we refer to as, "i-pood"), which didn't work;  try to use a payphone (we did not bring our cell phones with us), what a joke that was, although I was not laughing; buy one trash magazine when i got change for the stupid kaputt phone (thank goodness for that garbage, which kept me occupied for a whole 45 minutes of the 16 hour flight).   Once on the plane, i tried, unsuccessfully, to borrow my neighbor's cell phone.  She said that her phone was from Singapore, so she didn't think i'd be able to use it.  Mom, i really wanted to call you one last time!  Trying not to get too desperate before we started to hear the flight attendants tell us to sit our butts down, I scanned the passengers for someone who might have an American cell phone.  A very easy task when 95% of the passengers have straight, black hair.  i quickly found a blond and finally got to make the call. 
We landed in Hong Kong 2 movies, 2 Simpsons, 2 Sex in the City's, 2 meals,and too much sitting in those awful chairs later. Got to hang out with two awesome couples who live there that Pete knows ( and now me too).  Really enjoyed our 15 hour layover thanks to Bryce, Nikki, Jesse and Abigail!
We are schwitzing like crazy in this internet cafe and will write all about our Indonesian adventures very soon.