Chris & Lina's Travels around the world

A little bit about us

We normally only write about our travels but our web pages wouldn't really be complete without a few words about ourselves.

Chris & Lina live in Reading: the county town of Berkshire. Reading is a large town in the Southeast of England located on the River Thames approximately 40 miles from London, 30 miles from Oxford and 20 miles from Windsor. It has a fast rail connection to London’s Paddington station and the M4 motorway links it with London’s West End. Reading was famous for its Huntley and Palmer biscuit factory, its brewery (now owned by Courage) and for its flower bulbs (we still have a Sutton’s Seeds industrial estate). It is also where Oscar Wilde wrote his “Ballad of Reading Gaol”. In recent years, Reading has become the centre of the computer industry in England. The actress, Kate Winslet, comes from Reading, the comic couple, Lenny Henry and Dawn French, live in Spencers Wood - a village just outside of Reading and the singer George Michael lives in Goring - another village just outside of Reading.

Chris was born in Blackburn in the Northwest of England but he has also lived in various other towns around the country - moving whenever his father changed jobs. Chris studied Computer Science at the University of Reading and has lived in Reading ever since graduating as quite a few computer companies are located in the Reading area.

Lina was born in London and lived there most of her life. Lina studied Computer Science at the University of Newcastle but moved to Reading after graduating when she started working at the same company that Chris was working for (but in a different department).

We both have international blood - Chris’s father is Polish and his mother is English and Lina’s parents are both Chinese.

We met each other in 1985 through a mutual friend at work (thanks Richard!). We quickly became inseparable but we didn’t get married until 1998 (exactly 13 years after we met). We are both now in our late thirties/early forties.

Originally, we started of like most British people just having one holiday each year in the summer visiting somewhere around Britain. This increased to two holidays when we started going skiing in Europe in the winter. Our life changed completely in 1991 when we went to Hong Kong and caught a bad case of the travel bug. Since then, we have been using every available vacation day to see as much of the world as possible. We both get quite a generous vacation allowance from our respective employers which allows us to go away for up to 8 weeks a year which we split between 3 or sometimes 4 trips.

Chris does most of the writing, photography and web design for this web site but he is helped out by Lina who corrects his mistakes and scans in our pictures. She has also helped out with the conversion of the original “Word” trip reports into HTML.

Anyway, that’s enough introduction: click here to go back to our home page to read about our trips.

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