After finishing our trip around Thailand, Laos, Vietnam and Cambodia (about a month and a half in all), Dave left for New York, and I continued onto Chiang Mai - one of the many ancient capitals of Thailand. I've been here for about three weeks now, staying in the Ben Guest House - which is across the Ping River from the Old City. The Old City is surrounded by the remaining sections of the city wall and the moat, and although all maps show the Old City to be a large square, I believe this to be an impressive joke on [View Full Entry]

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This morning disaster struck. But the story begins last night when I left Bangkok and Dave. He was catching a red-eye to JFK via Beijing, just as I’ll be doing in a bit more than a month from now. It was emotional to say the least, leaving him after a month and a half of not only constant contact, but continuous excitement and novelty. I packed as I usually did for the next adventure, but probably more haphazardly, being overconfident from the lack of incident on the trip, and distracted by it being the last night with Dave. I must not [View Full Entry]

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It is the first night of the trip, and Dave and I are resting in the lobby/café in our hostel. The first day has passed by both slowly and quickly. A quick hour of card-playing during lunch, and drink-sipping while planning the rest of the day, and painfully slow minutes of balancing our enormous backpacks and dragging unwieldy suitcases through the streets of Kao San neighborhood. Thankfully, with only a few snags, we’ve managed to find a hostel with wifi (though it is 30 Baht - .95 c - an hour), munch on authentic street pad thai, take the sky train [View Full Entry]

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Right now I am sitting on the second story porch of my hostel (SpicyLaos Backpackers) in Luang Prabang. It is my first morning here. Last night Dave and I, along with our new friend Phil, pulled our huge backpacks and supplementary bags off the “slow boat.” We had traveled down the Mekong, starting on the morning of August 18th , slept one night at a tiny village called Pakbeng, and traveled ten more hours yesterday on more tightly cramped boat to where we are now. Before this river trip, we traveled from Chiang Mai to Sukhothai (should have reversed the order [View Full Entry]

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Mostly just pictures for now. [View Full Entry]

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Enjoy:) [View Full Entry]

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After standing around at our pier near Khao San Road (the huge touristy hostel area of Bangkok with DELICIOUS STREET FOOD!) at around 7:00 AM, we decided that the express boat, or ANY boat for that matter does not come to our pier that early. Meh. So, we hopped into a tuk tuk, headed to the train station, and spent the day in Ayutthaya. There's the basic account. Now for the detailed emotional account: as always, author advises reader to stick to scanning photos :) Our day started beautifully early at 6:00 AM. The sun was not quite out yet, [View Full Entry]

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It is the first night of the trip, and Dave and I are resting in the lobby/café in our hostel. The first day has passed by both slowly and quickly. A quick hour of card-playing during lunch, and drink-sipping while planning the rest of the day, and painfully slow minutes of balancing our enormous backpacks and dragging unwieldy suitcases through the streets of Kao San neighborhood. Thankfully, with only a few snags, we’ve managed to find a hostel with wifi (though it is 30 Baht - .95 c - an hour), munch on authentic street pad thai, take the sky train [View Full Entry]

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"Because I have traveled, I can see other universes in the eyes of strangers. Because I have traveled, I know what parts of me I cannot deny and what parts of me are simply the choices I make. I know the blessings of my own table and the warmth of my own bed. I know how much of life is pure chance, and how great a gift I have been given simply to be who I am. ... "If we don't offer ourselves to the unknown, our senses dull. Our world becomes small and we lose our sense of wonder. [View Full Entry]

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My coworker, Jason Hwang, was married in the Daegu Airport Hotel Wedding Hall in February. This was the second Korean wedding I've attended - the first being Yong Hoon, a member of the MoonKkang (my company) reinforcement team - a group of guys who help out the foreigners with medical issues, apartment problems and Visa/resident concerns. The two weddings were very similar, and, as people have told me, typical accounts of Korean weddings. The wedding hall was made up of two or three large rooms reserved for different weddings and two other huge eateries with Korean buffets. In [View Full Entry]

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