A Morning Run

Taking a break from the vacation report this week to take in my 5K run this morning via the KC Marathon... Woke up at the wee hours of 5.15am to get ready for this race. Adrian picked me up at 6, and we met up with Egwin, Rach, Minh & their friend Gabe to start the run at downtown Crown Center

Did a respectable time of 26.24 this time around, a little slower compared to my previous record of 25.57 in 2005. The KC Marathon technology was pretty impressive though, with timing chips provided that hooked up to our shoes. Just a step on a red plate on the ground at the starting point, and a final step on the plate at the finishing line records your time. No worries about making sure the event staff right down your number and time correctly!

Spent the rest of the morning sitting on my butt recovering... BTW, just got emailed some pictures from my finish line shot... here they are!

Spain - Parte Uno - Sevilla

Whew! 10 nights, 11 days of trains, airplanes, subway rides, taxi trips, countless miles of daily walking, and most importantly tons of FUN and bucketloads of photos later... we back!!!! We had an awesome vacation, though we are happy to be able to read menu's without a Spanish dictionary again, and finally able to understand local TV broadcasts!


We'll blog the cities we visited over the next few weeks, starting with Seville or Sevilla as the locals call it! On the right, was our first day of arrival in in Sevilla with the Giralda tower in the background. For those of you guys in KC, you'll probably recognize this from the belltower next to the Cheesecake factory on the Plaza... After all, Sevilla and Kansas City are sister cities!!!


Nothing like being almost late for our train ride to start our hearts pumping for our adventure. Our first stop was in Seville actually came by way of Madrid. After landing in Madrid late at 9am, our Spanish driver drove formula-one style weaving in and out of traffic to make our 10am train ride from Madrid to Sevilla. Kinda reminds us of our Genting to KL taxi driver, except the cursing was in Spanish, and he was dressed WAY better, and his Mercedes was more STYLO. Still, he got us there with 15 minutes to spare, giving me just enough time to to navigate the language barrier and get our tickets validated, jump on the Train, and finally relax.


Speaking of the language barrier, we actually trained a little via Spanish language CDs in preparation for this trip. Nothing too fancy really, just basic travelling Spanish, enough to check into hotels, get transportation, order food, and find the bathroom. Interesting thing to note though for those of you that know Mexican Spanish, it differs slightly from Spanish Spanish. For Example, Cerveza "ser-ve-sa" is Mexican Spanish, while its pronounced "Ther-ve-tha", kind of like saying the word with a lisp. Different huh? Interesting myth stating that the "Spanish Lisp" came from a king that had a speech disability, unable to pronounce "s" properly he Lisp'ed his way through conversations. More on it here.




Nickelback sings "... And a bathroom I can play baseball in. And a king size tub big enough for ten plus me." Well, under the Sevilla Alcazar (Castle), the "Baths of Lady María de Padilla" are really rainwater tanks named after Maria de Padilla. Supposedly, King Pedro fell for María and had her husband killed (Talk about eliminating the competition!). María resisted his advances and in turn poured boiling oil over her face to disfigure herself to stop Pedro's pursuit (ouch). I guess Talk-to-the-hand wasn't invented yet??!!... Later she became a nun and is respected as a symbol of purity in Sevilla. I took this picture as an sweet background for my desktop.

OOOhhhh...Macarena!!! Unbeknown est to the poor church goers at Basillica de la Macarena in Sevilla, a local pop group called Los del Rio launched this greatest one-hit wonder hit song in 1995. Unfortunately, that darn song kept playing in my head as I strolled through this church, which hold Sevilla's most holy image. the Virgin of Hope - "La Macarena". Her claim to fame is her signature glass teardrops across her face, where her procession put her up on a 3-ton float to parade around Seville. Another item of note, she is the Patron of local the bullfighters, where a local bullfighter Joselito spent a fortune buying 4 emeralds for her. Too bad the favor wasn't reciprocated... He was gored to death in the bullring later. BTW, the she kept the emeralds.

And yours truly will be willing to take credit for a most fortunate event that happened on the 27th. As the sign on the left can attest, I timed our trip just perfectly to coincide with the World Day of Tourism. Short story so that we can move along, is entry to the Church and Giralda Tower was Free, aka Gratis!

Next the Giralda Tower (La Giralda), one of the most recognizable landmarks of Sevilla. You can pretty much see it from everywhere in town. The version in KC is pretty much a miniature version of the one at Sevilla. The tower used to be part of an ancient mosque, and when the Christians invaded, instead of tearing it down, they merely added a bell tower at the top. To this day, the bells actually do sound on a regular basis. The climb to the top was pretty tiring but interestingly enough there are actually no steps, just a steep walkway that winds itself around the tower until the top. The history behind it is the the Moors used to ride their horses from the ground floor all the way up to the top for the daily prayers instead of walking. That's what I call being efficient! Here's a pic from the top of the tower!

Finally, last but not least, the Star Wars fans in you guys will definitely appreciate the following fine location that we visited next, Plaza Espana a.ka. "Naboo" in Star Wars II - Attack of the Clones. Its original purpose, before hijacked by George Lucas was for the 1929 Spanish-American Exhibition and is a perfect example of Moorish Revival type architecture.... Personally, I think Naboo sounds more interesting, as we're more of movie buffs than architecture ones! It doesn't even take any imagination to see how this location works out great as the set for the movie!

In next week's Blog... Madrid!

Packing our bags, off to see the sights!

Well, its that time of the year again, where we pack our bags for another long vacation. In usual fashion, we're packing light, with only 2 carry ons each, so that we can hop on and off our transportation with minimum luggage lugging time. This time round, we've set our sights on the fair land of Spain, where it should really rain "mainly on the plain" or maybe it's "plane". Either case, I've got a compact umbrella packed so, we should are covered!

The flight to Madrid is just days away, and we're just waiting for the last pile of laundry to get done so that we can close up the bag and relax for the rest of the week. Our itinerary will take us actually to 3 nights in Seville first after we land in Madrid via a high-speed AVE train ride. Then 4 nights back in Madrid, followed by another 3 more nights in Barcelona to complete out our trip. Looking forward to a great time over in Spain.. Will be blogging again when we get back!

Clean Scan & Light the Night!

So we had my bi-annual Cancer screening results last Friday, and the scan came back clean! :) This time round, instead of the usual PET/CT, which personally I think is really uncomfortable, my oncologist and us decided to go with just a CT instead. So, in place of having to sit perfectly still for more than 1 hour, I only needed to get injected with a CT dye! Still, the contrast dye does have an interesting side effect of having a laxative included with it to make sure that the dye exits the body in a quick manner. So, I think of it as a free colon-cleansing session complimentary with the cancer screening! Eh! other people pay good money for this kind of thing! Anyways, the results were boring medically, which is how we want it to be, and we were in and out of the doctor's office after a brief chit-chat with my onco...

That same night, we went to see the fruits of our labor @ the 2007 Light-The-Night event in Corporate Woods. Weather was a little on the Chilly side (low 60's), but we felt really good seeing the kits that we put together from the previous week going to a good cause! Generally, it was a good party like atmosphere with kids everywhere, and enough pop and sugar to sustain them for most of the night! The Lighting of the balloons was particularly beautiful as the blinking red balloons and white balloons lit up the night sky.... There was a pang of sadness as it reminded us of the tough time that we had a few years ago, and for us, putting our lives now in better perspective. We hung around until the crowd started to make their walk, leaving the event feeling really good that we could do a little to help everyone out that night!

Here's a little video of us that night!

Have you ever seen so many batteries?

We've never seen so many AA batteries in one place before yesterday evening! We stopped by the local Lymphoma and Leukemia society Chapter to pick up a Light the Night volunteer package earlier in the afternoon. Basically the task is to pre-assemble a Light-the-Night balloons in preparation from the local walk on September 14th.

For the unfamiliar Light-the-Night is an annual charity event where people basically take battery lighted balloons and walk relay-style to raise money to fight blood cancers. So anyway, back to the hundreds of batteries.... The batteries go into a little red holder, then the light fixture goes into the balloons stacked up on the picture on the right. How many of these will we work on? Lets see, each battery box has 630 each, and I've got 2 boxes.. So I'm guessing about 600+ depending on how many defects we find in the assembly process.

The final product? This is what it looks like.

Basically the balloons will get inflated during the night's event. So anyway on this Labor Day weekend, we'll probably be busy working on these... Still, its a great feeling to be able to give back after what we've been through a few years ago. Hopefully our work goes to helping more people out!