Happy Holidays! The big event of our year was moving from Egypt to India. We’ve been enjoying settling into our new school and home. We’re teaching at the American Embassy School of New Delhi, where the children are mostly expat children of diplomats or business people. Work is great- teachers, parents and kids all love the school. We live right on campus, which is convenient for Zoe and her busy play date schedule. We try to get off campus every weekend to go and explore the ‘real’ India, often taking walks in old or otherwise lively parts of Delhi.

Other than exploring Delhi, we’ve been using our free time to take advantage of the school gym, swimming pool, yoga, ultimate frisbee, softball (really!), running, bicycling and book clubs. I’ll leave it to you to determine which of us does which (hint- book clubs are for sissies). The running here is surprisingly good, despite the very polluted air (in the winter).

We’ve had a number of small holidays over the last few months, which we’ve used to explore a bit of India. We spent the Indian holiday of Diwali in Rishikesh (foothills of the Himalayas), Thanksgiving in the city of Jaipur, a long weekend at the Camel Market in Pushkar and Christmas in other parts of Rajasthan (a state in India). In January, we are looking forward to celebrating our 14th anniversary (yikes!) on the beaches of Goa.

About four months ago, someone abducted our child and replaced her with a speaking clone who now gives us her opinion about everything. The speed of her vocabulary development boggles our minds. It’s fun to watch her sense of humor develop. Sometimes it’s hard to anticipate what’s going to be funny to a two year old, but anyways we get a lot of mileage out of hide and seek!

Last Christmas we biked from Chaing Mai to Bangkok, pulling Zoe along the way. Over the summer we did about three weeks of bicycle camping in Wisconsin. This summer we hope to do about 6 weeks of bicycle camping, perhaps from Madison to NYC. We’ll see if that’s too ambitious! We’re finding bicycle camping to be a good way to travel as a family, though we’re not sure how much longer Zoe will be happy in her bicycle trailer.

Last spring break we had a fantastic 4 wheel drive desert trip in Egypt. This spring break we plan to travel in Uzbekistan, which is now only 2.5 hours away by air. If the country is anything like their embassy in New Delhi, it’s going to be bizarre.

Our 2008 blog is posted here.

Stay in touch, and please visit.

Love,
Keir, Robyn and Zoe