It’s easy to pay lip-service to a word like gratitude, isn’t it? To find a hundred reasons every day to be grateful isn’t a difficult or time-consuming task. It merely requires us to look around at where we live and notice the comforts, the roof over our heads, the people in our lives that love... Continue Reading →
Domesticated Cockroaches and Other Fascinations in This Darling City
Have you ever noticed that as you’re about to leave a place, really good things happen? As I near the end of my stay in Chiang Mai again, and feeling ready for a change of scenery, I begin to notice, once again, everything awesome about this place. I LOVE Chiang Mai. I have since the... Continue Reading →
The Underside
I used to think life was a chaotic and complicated mess of events and emotions that both fascinated and bewildered me. It’s kind of like being on a roller coaster ride and having no idea when that next loop or fall is coming and feeling somewhat out of control. Or like a beautiful piece of... Continue Reading →
Still
After being alive four decades we expect to know something. We expect ourselves to be something definitive, easily identified by the world we live in and something that perhaps, has a nice label attached to it. I strived for this for a long time. Even when I thought I wasn't. Even when I renounced my... Continue Reading →
How Travelling Can Make You a More Grateful Person
It’s been five years since I experienced a Canadian fall. If not for a certain special somebody I would have been long gone, back to Asia, before autumn equinox. Before the temperature dropped, the leaves started to change, and proper close-toed shoes and jackets became necessary. I usually dread the idea of staying past August... Continue Reading →
“The world begins where the road ends”: Realizations after a travelling for a year
Travelling abroad is an exciting venture into the unknown. It has exquisite appeal for the adventure junkies, the global philanderers, the foodies, the culture curious, those who just want to check out what’s happening on the other side of the world, those who wish to take a long hiatus from what’s happening on their familiar... Continue Reading →
These are my stories
So, I wrote I book, which is actually a collection of blogs–my musings and stories of a two-year-long life now passed. If you're interested in reading some amusing, crass, heartfelt stories, check it out on Amazon.com, and please leave a review! Here I share the preface/introduction to my book, A Single White Female in a Foreign... Continue Reading →
Incredible India: Mangoes, Ganja, and Intuition
“Leen, Leen!” He yelled my name from across the street, this tiny, frail man dressed in worn, yellowed office clothes a couple sizes too big. His belt was pulled tightly around his thin waist. He was sweet-looking. Not desperate or hungry or tired, just simple and curious, asking for stamps. I saw him the first... Continue Reading →
“Soil or soul”? Where is home on the road?
I’ve experienced many relationships whilst travelling. I’ve created them, forged them, negotiated them, deconstructed them, unravelled them, fought them, dissected them, systematically destroyed them, sewn them back together, acquiesced to them. Relationships with food, nature, people, myself, money, security, fear, pain, loss, and grief–dear sweet grief. That’s what travelling does. It gathers up all those... Continue Reading →
Why do we travel? Part Three
There’s an idea out there that long term travellers are constantly on holiday. I understand why it appears that way. One minute I’m in Vietnam motorbiking through the mountains and in the next moment I am in Thailand swimming in lagoons far too magical to be real and writing blogs about places I never knew... Continue Reading →