Hello World!

Welcome to yet another Knaddison Family Report. Since our last report:

We got new jobs (and ditched them (a couple times even)). Greg altered his career path from “telecommunications consultant building websites” to “open source website developer”. Nikki even got a new career: language teacher.

We bought a house and really enjoy gardening. We really settled into our house and love living in Denver -- near to our family and surrounded by tons of great friends. Then, we rented our great house in the city we love and are traveling the world.

We spent a month in Spain, with bonus visits to Paris and London. The users of the software Greg uses for website development met at a conference in Barcelona, so we had an endpoint to our Spanish tour. However, the time before that was wide open to wandering. Nikki's sister Bree and our boyfriend-in-law Dirk are currently in London where Bree is beginning her career in Social Work. We met up with Bree, Dirk, and Nikki's parents Jim and Brenda in Southern Spain. After a quick visit to Tangiers, Morocco we toured the major Andalusian cities and enjoyed the unique mix of Gothic, Moorish, and Catholic influences. We then headed East through agriculture -- olive trees, sunflowers, and vineyards -- to Valencia where we said goodbye to Jim and Brenda.

Then we headed north via train to the tranquil, seaside town of San Sebastian in the Basque Region where we enjoyed delicious food and sites. From San Sebastian we drove south to the Rioja region where we stayed in a combination winery/restaurant/hotel and visited the best museum we've ever seen which also happened to be about wine. The charm of this area is simply amazing and we definitely see ourselves coming back to spend more time in Rioja (drinking wine). After a brief detour to Girona we finally ended our tour of Spain in Barcelona where we took in the usual tourist sites and Greg “geeked out” for a week including presenting on three topics at the conference. We ended up in London and enjoyed a wonderful visit with Bree and Dirk.

After Spain, we headed to Buenos Aires, where we've been for the past month. We started out living in a great apartment in San Telmo, a charming and historic neighborhood whose plaza is famous for its Sunday antique market and tango dancing. This past week we moved to an apartment in the Recoleta neighborhood, known for the cemetery that holds Evita's remains, as well as many other notable Argentines. Nikki is in the middle of taking a Teaching English as a Foreign language certification course, and Greg is paying the bills doing remote website development.

We're here until late May, with the goal of improving our Spanish and taking in as much culture as we can. Nikki hopes to teach some English here and Greg will continue doing website development. As many of you know, Nikki is planning to open a business in Denver with the eventual goal of being a Spanish Language cultural center: a place you can go to learn the Spanish language and about culture of the Spanish-speaking world, with events like Spanish-language movie nights, book clubs, lectures, wine tastings, and soccer games. The center will also provide English classes and conversation exchanges between Spanish and English speakers. So this is all business research, we swear...

We'll be sending out an update every couple of months during our time here, if you want more frequent updates, you can subscribe to an rss feed of all of our blog posts. If you want to change your email address or unsubscribe from these updates you can do so via the links below.

Saludos y un beso de lejos,
Nikki and Greg