Hey C,

I’m glad you’ve enjoyed our blog! My wife, N, writes most of it, so she deserves all of the credit. She was happy to read your letter!

We had a lot of fun on this trip! We went kayaking on both the Adriatic Sea and the Andaman Sea. We saw a play in London. We rode a boat through Venice. We went rock climbing and cave exploring near Kampot, Cambodia. We sang karaoke in Osaka, Japan. There are many very different, fun things to do in the world!

Learning about the people and cultures has been very rewarding. For example, we were surprised to see how easygoing the people of Italy, Cambodia, and Thailand are compared to the US and to the other parts of Europe and Asia that we visited.

It has been interesting but challenging to learn a little bit of so many different languages. On this trip, I have learned (and mostly forgotten) a few words of Danish, Swedish, Polish, Italian, Hungarian, Croatian, Korean, Khmer, Thai, and Japanese. In school, I studied Spanish and that made Italian a little easier. N’s ability to speak Russian made Polish and Croatian easier, too. Even if we forgot a lot of the words, we still learned a lot about what makes languages different—and similar—all over the world. Each country we visited in Asia had its own alphabet!

Thailand was a wonderful country! It has really good food, a diverse landscape, plenty of interesting and fun things to do, and nice people, and it was very affordable compared to most of our trip. We thought that the tree decorations were pretty cool too!

We can’t wait to share more of our trip with you!

All the best,
B

P.S. Your handwriting is very neat, clear, and fun. It reminds me of a comic book or a newspaper cartoon.