Induction:

For a while now, David and I had talked about beginning a blog to record and capture our travels and experiences as we work on Dirty Dancing. Our journey with the show has been extraordinary (to say the very least), and it is difficult to imagine that we will ever have, exactly, the kind of opportunity we currently have: working on the same massive show (as a married couple), and traveling to and living in various cities around the world with it. So far on our travels, we have eaten some memorably phenomenal foods as well as some hauntingly awful foods; we've marveled at certain cultural differences in a few cities and felt only too ready to leave others. In most of the cities, we successfully found a salsa club to go to (except in Hamburg, but we won't talk about that). All these experiences tend to happen quickly for us, succeeded by others, and we began to think that we must write down some of our stories... if only so that, when we reach a calmer time from our work and our travels, we could look back and truly appreciate -- in a different, perhaps less immediate yet fond way -- what adventures we undertook and shared.

And since we eat out at restaurants predominantly while living abroad -- and pickily, too -- I hope that this blog will naturally grow into a kind of...unofficial Zagat ... for the traveling foodie. We want to use this blog to annotate some of our more noteworthy gourmet endeavors.

I hope, too, that this blog will be a good way to let our friends at home know what we are up to as we travel away from them too often. This blog will not, of course, replace personal emails and phone calls, but I hope that it will give our beloved friends an insight into our more quotidien life.

(And it seems this blogging device may prove useful in reminding us of funny and good stories we have. With all the wine and vodka drinking around the world, at some point, the good stories will merge with each other, lose specificity and, really, we can't risk that, can we?)

TM