Now we're excited, scared ... both!

We purchased our tickets for the main flights on Friday! Woohoo!! The trip is now officially real! We leave for Beijing on September 16 at 9:05 a.m.

Our travel agent found a better deal for us: we got one-way tickets to Beijing via Vancouver, and one-way tickets from Bangalore (India) to Ottawa, via London. But the interesting thing is that you can only book flights up to 335 days in advance - which means we could only book the first leg of the return trip on the date that we wanted - April 17, 2009. We will have to change the date of the London-Ottawa leg as we get closer to the date.

Now we have to start looking at flights from Vietnam to Thailand, Thailand to India, and London to Ireland, etc.

NM

Missaghians - unplugged!

We finally got ourselves a laptop! Our main concern about a laptop was the weight - 7 lbs may not seem like much, but try carrying it around for a year! Our initial idea was to get an Asus eee, which is an ultra-portable and very light. But when we played with it at the store, the screen was very small and so was the keyboard.

After some research on line, we decided to get the Dell XPS M1330. It weighs under 5 lbs, has a 13" screen and is quite powerful. We also got a pretty good deal, because the Dell website had a sale and Future Shop had to beat it - so we got $220 off the price. Woohoo! That covered part of the cost of software and anti-virus, etc. Not bad. Yasmin and Roya now want to use the laptop and the desktop to play games at the same time! We'll see about that!

We even have a webcam, speakers, headphones, etc. Now all we have to do is figure out how to use them and Skype together. Then we might be able to talk to people back home while are away.

NM

No more shots! Woohoo!!

We had the last of our shots at the travel clinic, and are pretty excited about no more needles. The last batch that we had to get were the rabies shots. We needed 3 shots at set intervals, and the vaccine was a bright pink colour. So Yasmin and Roya were teasing, saying Daddy is getting a girlie vaccine!



We still have to take malaria pills. We opted for the daily pills rather than the weekly ones because the weekly ones have some nasty side effects. We have heard of people halluciating and having nightmares, scary visions, etc. So we decided against those! The doctor prescribed a test dose that we are going to take for a week to see how our bodies will handle it. If all is okay, we will fill the full prescription and start popping the pills when we get to India.



We also got some doses of Dukorol, which protects against cholera and traveller's diahrrea. That will come in handy when we are in India - reduce the risk of Delhi belly!



So there you have it - no more shots. We are all happy about that.