Life abroad: As Robert sees it

This hotel is where we will have our wedding on 10 May 2008. It is the Mena House Oberoi in Cairo, Egypt (29° 59′ 3.91″N, 31° 7′ 57.28″E). Since 1869 it has hosted kings, emperors, heads of state, and celebrities; why not also our wedding guests?

This is the dining room where we had the best breakfast in Egypt. We could have stayed there all morning and ate, actually we did.

This is another of the five restaurants in the hotel. This particular one specializes in Indian food.

Here is a picture of the Garden Room with pyramid view. From what we saw, all the rooms were dripping with elegance.

This is the Montgomery Suite, where we will be staying for our wedding night.

It will also be the location of our wedding and reception. We plan to have belly dancers, traditional music, a hookah pipe, and even a shawarma cart.

I do not think it will be that hard to accommodate everyone because the room comes with its very own butler!

We have confirmed the rooms with a rather large deposit for the dates of 08 to 11 May 2008; there will be no more changing plans. Some of you received a formal invite way back in 2005 but this time around, we decided not to send out new invitations. Instead, if you are interested in coming to our wedding or just want to see what our plans are, we want you to go to this webpage (http://robrasa.com/NileNuptials/?page_id=5) and sign up for our Nile Nuptials emails. This blog site is where we will be posting all of our information, answering questions, and most importantly, where you can see our gift wish lists. I will not be sending out anymore updates about the wedding on my main mailing list.

We formally invite anyone who is interested in coming. If you have any questions, please feel free to ask or check on the website to see the latest information. I will try our best to keep it current.

Hello Everyone,

Well, it has been an eventful year and ended as full as it started. For more than a month, this is the first time sleeping in my own bed for three straight nights. This hectic schedule has put me way behind with the blog, sorry. However, the bad/good news is our camera broke and will cost $150 to repair so there are no new pictures to sort. But I will have plenty of time to send out all those missing emails and edit the pictures I have during these next two months.

Yes, Rasa and I decided to stay in Honduras until October. We had an inspiring trip to the jungles of La Mosquitia and felt we had to pursue some opportunities from that. I will explain more about this in a different post. We also wanted to work with our Country Director to strengthen PWW’s policies and promotion. Most importantly though, we need some personal time to get our webpage online and complete our application for the State Department before we leave.

Now this is where our plan gets fuzzy. As of now, we want to spend October in NY with Rasa’s parents to prepare our graduate school and scholarship applications. I have two missing posts explaining the details on how this came about. After NY, we plan to visit our prospective schools, starting in the UK with Ying, our friend from Long Beach. By November we will be in Paris for a joint birthday party with my cousin and then on to The Netherlands for another school visit. We will end the European portion of our tour in Germany with two more weeks visiting family.

By December 2007, we should be flying into Istanbul where (with luck) we will have some more family to visit. From Turkey, the ‘plan’ takes us overland into Syria to study Arabic for six months. At this point, it seemed only logical that since Damascus is so close to the Pyramids, we should finally have our wedding. (Please do not send negative comments, only gifts.) We will book the hotel by the end of this month and set a date for early April 2008. But there is more. After all this (and if we have any money left) we want to tour East Africa until school starts in September.

This is our plan. I hope you are interested enough to keep reading and see how it turns out.