Most exciting places which you should have visited in 2008

There have been strange things happening to us throughout our honeymoon yearlong trip. First of all it seems that we have chosen the most exciting places on earth to visit:

- it started with Nepal where we arrived to a burned down border town in the middle of the strike
- then Tibet got sealed off - just the second when we wanted to enter it. We never made it there
- right after we got the visa to Myanmar the country got hit by an awful cyclone. Nevertheless we made it there
- once we made it to Buenos Aires the local farmers started burning cars in the middle of the city
- when we were about to visit Bolivia half of the country got blocked by farmers protesting against planned reforms
- in Peru we managed to live through at least two strikes which made Cusco inaccessible
- right now the only modern airport we have encountered in Asia - Bangkok - got totally blocked by protesters
- Mumbai where we started our trip got almost run over by insane terrorists...

Good choice of places wouldn't you say? Not many more places we could have visited where there was trouble this year (actually Kongo, Afganistan and Sudan are some of those places - Rita got job offers from UN to go to each of those places this year :))

I guess it means fun for Warsaw since we are going to spend some time there next year :))) Everyone there get a survival kit handy :)

Secondly, more on the positive note - when we arrived to Peru and started volunteering we both hoped that we won't have to do fund raising. First of all because we had no idea how to do it and secondly because we knew it is going to be damn hard. Of course, we ended up doing it. But guess what - when we started and calculated how much money we needed we both kind of became speechless and very skeptical. We needed USD 4800 - and we were ready to accept the fact that we won't raise even a USD 100.

On the 10th of November we have reached that target so we decided to raise the bar to USD 5800. Well, today we are over USD 6000 !!! Amazing...half of it we raised online and half of it through our activities in Cusco.

Our last event was a big party at one of the dance clubs. We were to receive 50 US cents from each drink during the party. We had to make the publicity, do the decoration including blowing over 300 balloons right before the party and hope that people show up. We did our best and hoped at least that it won't be an embarrassment in terms of how many people would show up. The party turned wild - there were at least 150 people and we raised USD 300!!! We were a bit lucky though. Somebody made us a favor and send the tax authorities to the party. So we really received 50 cents from each drink - they watched over the guys serving the drinks so that they give the bills until 6am and then made them pay us!!! We think it was not a coincidence that they came - we even suspect who was the one that made the tax authorities come but we are not totally sure. One way or the other it has been the most successful fund raising event considering the effort - result ratio and the fact that there were some wild things going on (as you can see on the photos...) We did not plan dancing on the tables but it did help keep the right atmosphere throughout the party.