Online Time Capsule

Looking back, I used to blog more regularly. I created this blog in 2007, when our life was becoming so full of work travel that it seemed the best way to keep a record of ourselves and have a way for our friends and family to peek into the events in our life at their leisure. The blog proved useful for us when we returned to certain cities, too, as we had written about memorable restaurants and could refer to the blog if we couldn't recall the name. Recently we wanted to know when we did our first cleanse - our own memories were hazy. All we needed to do was to consult the blog! Handy.

But in the last two years my blogging/journal-keeping has dwindled - I suppose in part because most people who would read this blog is on Facebook, and I am aware they can keep abreast of our life through that social networking medium. Sometimes, it felt repetitive to write a whole blog when a simple status update did the trick (lazy or concise?). And of course, as we got busier and busier, always packing, unpacking, and packing again, setting up here, there, getting used to a place and then going home, writing it all up, in an interesting way, seemed too great a task.

I'm hoping to change this for 2010. I know I already missed January. But here's to February.

Going back to read the first few entries of this blog is interesting -- it's like a time capsule. Me and David, knowing we were in for an adventure, deciding to keep a record of ourselves. I know it's less than 3 years ago, but it's a funny thing looking back at ourselves who don't yet know they will become us, in the future.

Not that's we've changed drastically, not in an epic sense. But some things have changed, little things, things for which the new version has become the "norm" for us, that it is funny to be reminded that these things weren't always this way in the very first entries of this blog, before little changes. The blog entries capture bits of us in story and photos, in their moments of time.

I'm hoping to leave more blogged moments for the 2010 component of our Time Capsule

So here goes.

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