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Another Chiang Mai Winter
After a lot of fast-paced traveling over the last five months, I was craving some time to slow down and be productive with all my backlogs before starting the next adventure. Ayu is going through yoga teacher training this month, so this was a perfect chance for me to go back to Chiang Mai; it’s familiar and very livable, it’s cheap even for Thailand, it has coworking spaces, and the weather this time of year is absolutely perfect. Jeans and a t-shirt for days. It’s really no surprise that Chiang Mai is perpetually at the top of Nomad List. Since…
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Against Football?
With a week to go until the Super Bowl and news headlines filled with stories of saggy balls, this seems like a good time to take a departure from my normal travel blogging and write about an excellent football-related book I read recently. If you don’t live in Boston or Seattle, you probably don’t care about this year’s matchup, so you might as well read this instead. Against Football: One Fan’s Reluctant Manifesto by Steve Almond was recommended to me by, coincidentally, a Seattle friend when I saw him and his wife over the summer on my west coast tour.…
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More Bangkok, More Islands
Bangkok A few days after seeing Becca off, I linked up with a different group of friends (all from the States) in Bangkok for a few weeks through Thailand. Several had never been to Bangkok before, so they had the usual touristy days while I busied myself with some errands and much-needed clothes shopping. (My personal recommendations are Platinum Fashion Mall and MBK Center.) Nightlife included another beautiful trip to Moon Bar and another meh trip to Khao San Road (though without the stomach illness this time). One of my favorite memories from this time around in Bangkok was an…
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Bangkok, Cambodia, and Thai Islands
Bangkok Becca, Michael, and I flew into BKK on a pleasant Friday afternoon and the two of them were immediately introduced to the urban jungle of Bangkok as we suffered through the first of many hour-long taxi rides through the massive city with its dense, standstill traffic. After finally reaching our hotel, checking in, and getting some food, we decided to go to the Chatuchak weekend market. Friday night at the market was very different from Saturday or Sunday; only a subset of the clothes shops were open and all the non-clothes shops were closed, there was very little food…
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Chiang Mai: Halloween, Lantern Festivals, and the Bruggmans
The last two months have been filled with lots of fun times with friends, some relatively quick traveling, and many a poor Internet connection, resulting in zero blog updates. Now that I have time and a normal Internet connection, I can finally catch up. Here’s my best attempt at transcribing what’s happened since the end of October. After Australia, I flew to Chiang Mai so I could attend the lantern festivals again this year and to await the arrival of Becca and her brother Michael. You may remember Becca from our fun adventures through Chile last year. Becca had allotted…
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Bali, Gili, and Brisbane
After the conclusion of the bloody (and delicious!) chaos that was the Vegetarian Festival, I stuck around Phuket Town for the weekend to go through all my photos and write up the story for the blog. My original plan was to finish all that work in Phuket Town, then travel to the western side of the island for a couple weeks of relaxation on the beach. And then the rain started. The day after the last day of the festival was not one of my favorite memories from this trip. During the 24 hours of constant precipitation, I had to…
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Phuket Vegetarian Festival (a.k.a. HOLY FUCKING SHIT)
Where to start with this one? The story of my attendance at this festival actually goes back almost a year. During my last trip through Southeast Asia, I had read about the vegetarian festival, but after it had already happened. Once I learned more about what happened there and saw some photos from it, I immediately put it on my list of things to see if I was back in Thailand at the right time. Conveniently, my last wedding obligation of the summer was only a couple weeks before the start of the festival, so I took it as a…
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HK ‘N BKK
It’s not lost on me that the two cities I visited initially are currently epicenters of political friction. Admittedly, Thailand has been quiet lately since the junta has oppressed the country into mostly silence, but not long ago there were large, loud, and violent protests all over Bangkok. And as I write this, Hong Kong is under siege by “Occupy Central” protesters looking to send a pro-democracy message to China by stalling business downtown. Luckily for me, the timing of my trip avoided all of this, so I was able to enjoy both places without any logistical headaches caused by…
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Southeast Asia Part II
Before transitioning into a brief discussion of my return to Southeast Asia, I think a summer debriefing is in order. Total travel stats for my Murrikan summer: 19 cities in 14 states/provinces in 2 countries, 10 flights, 9 train trips, one high-speed ferry, and one seaplane. Add to that many new friends, a nebulous number of craft IPAs, three weddings, and dozens of reunions with high school friends, college friends, SF friends, Thailand friends, and almost my entire extended family. In fact, all the quality time with people I care about has set a frighteningly high bar; traveling solo in…
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A Murrikan Summer: Midwest
This post is going to be a short and dull one since it seems like ancient history (now that I’ve already been back in Southeast Asia for over a week) and because it’s probably not that interesting to most people. I spent about a week at an Airbnb in suburban Minneapolis, followed by my cousin Kelsey’s wedding weekend, then flew to Chicago for a few days to visit some friends, then flew to Asheville for another wedding (a good friend from college) before flying back to the bay area. The vast majority of my time in all these places was…
