Here's the mail that never fails, it makes me wanna wag my tail, when it comes I wanna wail maaaaiil

Thanks for all my letters and packages :) It has been very exciting. Below are a few pictures to share my excitement (sorry it's not all, haven't had my camera around for everything).

Here was my first package! It was a great treat that my parents sent. Inside was filled with napkins (they don't like those over here), movies to keep me entertained (I've already started watching Scruff- the movie on top), and Cindy contributed some delicious snacks to keep me alive (yay easy mac- I've already had 2 of them so far).

Today I received my second package for valentines day from my parents. The hearts on the left say 'e-mail me.' I was amused but a little sad. On the right is me struggling to open said package. I remember talking to my mom after the first mail experience and I shared with her that it was really difficult to open it with all the tape since I don't have any scissors, well apparently that transfers in her mind to "maybe I should make the next one even more ridiculously tougher to open." Thanks. So I thought I would share me with my key working hard. Don't worry, once I finally made it, it was worth it :) Goodies from cookies to a stuffed pink puppy.

I soon realized the puppy was just an organic 'Save Our Planet' trick...

Enjoying some amazing cookies

I also got a card from Erin today! Two things of mail in one day, life can't get much better than that. The cute puppy with the pink boa was in my package, and Erin sent the yellow puppy card.

Thanks a lot to everyone!!

Tanjung Pinang, Indonesia

This weekend the group went to an Indonesian island named Bintan. We have such rough lives here laying by the pool in between classes, so it was nice to sit by the beach and relax.

Welcome to the beach!

We got to stay on a shack on the beach. It was great not traveling anywhere - just wake up and nap in the sand. The picture on the left is part of the hut we stayed in. There were four separate rooms of two. My room is the one over the water :) The picture on the right is the view out of my window. It was great falling asleep at night listening to the water under us.

Here is my roommate for the trip, Stephanie, showing
off our sleeping(left) and shower(right) arrangements. We had a luxury room- most the others didn't even have a shower head, just the bucket and a scoop. It was nice, the water wasn't even too cold.

Here he is :)

Here is my awesome giraffe lamp. And to answer a previous question from a viewer, he is definitely coming back home. Now you will all get to know and love him too. His chord is even a US plug, which I realize just means that he is really only for tourists, but who could resist him? I know Erin will at least appreciate this.

Melaka, Malaysia

This past weekend a group of us headed to Malaysia. It was about a four hour bus ride. We woke up really early Friday morning and came back Sunday morning. It was a good weekend trip, as there isn't too much to do in the city. It is pretty old and interesting, but after a few days you run out of stuff to do. There are beaches nearby but you can't get in the water, so we decided we didn't want to go to a beach where we could lay on the sand and look at the water. There were 8 of us on the trip. We met up with 6 others that we knew but they had to leave a day later than us because they had Saturday classes.

Our hotel is below. We were going to do a hostel but the ones we knew were full, so we found this place and it was a good find. We would highly recommend it if anyone happens to ever go to Melaka. It's in China town, right near a pretty cool night market that they have every night. (I got a giraffe lamp at the night market, pics of him later. He's really cute.) The guy at the hotel desk was really nice and sent us to good local food places. We found that the harder it was to communicate to the waiter, the better the food probably was. It wasn't too expensive either. My room was 148 ringgits for 5 girls, which basically came out to 8 dollars a night.
Here we are wandering through the city. We found some sort of playground rope thing, so we decided we should climb it. It was kindof rough, but at least provided about 15 minutes entertainment.



Somehow someone thought all the tech kids in the group should take this picture :( It wasn't very nice. We found this in the mall. Yes, we went to the mall for part of the day in melaka. We didn't mean to, we just found it. They had interesting stuff and it had air conditioning so that was enough to keep us around. There were tons of shirts with english words on it, and they were all complete nonsense. They were just random words thrown on a shirt.

Found it :)

So here's what they gave me as an address:

Block 17, level#05-29, Room N
37 Prince George's Park
Residence 4
Singapore 118430

Merlion!!

Hello

It seemed that we were off to such a nice start sitting in the airport eating a delicious cinnabun. I finished it and was ready to board so I could start my nap. Well apparently the plane wasn't ready for that. I'm not sure if what the problem was or why the plane wasn't there, but we ended up leaving Atlanta two hours later than scheduled. Unfortunately for me I had about 2 hours from when I was supposed to land in san francisco to when I should be getting on my next flight. I missed my flight by about 10 minutes.



Here is Teddy ready for bed at the hotel. We were given a hotel for the night since the next flight to singapore was the next day. I guess it was nice to sleep, well nap, in a real bed though before the long plane ride started. Teddy was not amused though to wait for bed making calls to Erin to be home informer and Andrew with his excellent email skills. Thanks guys :) I had some e-mailing to do since I was going to be arriving 12 hours later, but didnt want to deal with paying the $15 for it in the hotel room. We did make the flight the next day though :)





This was found in one of our food court areas. I thought Erin would like it.
And yes, if we don't already stick out enough we have no problem being
those people and taking pictures in the middle of the cafeteria.
Me and a random tree on campus.


Me and a random tree on campus.




ps- for all the people who are going to come visit me, we've discovered there are no napkins. I just thought I'd give you a heads up. We haven't found a single one or paper towel anywhere in the country.