The last two years in 6 paragraphs

It's been a while since we've posted, but a lot has happened in the past two years. D and I bought a house in the suburbs and started new jobs shortly after arriving in the Boston area. More importantly, in October 2009 we had our first child, a girl! Here she is a few days ago, looking thoughtful. Isn't she adorable?!?!

Yes, it's been a great two years.

I thought it was time to post again as I'm at the tail-end of my first major trip since our US cross-country tour of '08. For the past seventeen months, I've been a student of Boston University's Executive MBA program (EMBA). Earning an MBA has been on my to-do list for the last few years, but it took a while to find the right time and the right program. Upon arriving in Boston in the summer of '08, I started looking around and wound-up choosing BU for a few reasons. I applied and was accepted and have spent the last year and a half attending class every other Friday and Saturday as well as spending a few solid weeks on campus.

For the final project in EMBA, known as the "Capstone" project, EMBA students research an economy in the "developing" world and build a business plan intended to take advantage of some aspect of that country's economy - for manufacturing, marketing, selling services in-country, export, etc. Finally, after presenting our plans to local venture capital and angel investors in the Boston area, we travel to the country we researched to see how well our observations match our previous research and assumptions. Previous EMBA classes have gone to Eastern Europe, China, etc. We went to Vietnam.

Since May 14th, I have been traveling around Vietnam (specifically Hanoi, the capital, and Ho Chi Minh City), and tonight I'll start the long trip home along with about half of my 37 classmates (some classmates are staying on in the area -either in Vietnam or Hong Kong, Singapore, or China - often with their spouses). In the meantime, I've spent the last week writing blog posts on each day's activities for the "official" BU EMBA blog. For posterity's sake -- since I don't have login/editing/posting rights to the EMBA account directly -- I am going to re-post all of my Vietnam trip entries on this blog, too. Some of them are a bit dry -- for the sake of the class, I wanted to make sure I described each day in some detail -- but my own observations are sprinkled throughout.

Anyway, I hope you enjoy reading about my trip. I've backdated the Blogspot entries, starting today, in order to make them match the actual event's date. I hope it's not too confusing.