Chinese people love fireworks like Americans love sedentary lifestyles, remote controls and sitting down. We went to Beijing for Chinese New Year (the Koreans call it Lunar New Year) which I had heard was the largest fireworks display on Earth. I love fireworks but at a certain age they do loose a bit of their wonder so I wasn’t too pumped for this part of the trip. We landed on New Year’s Day and were immediately thrown into complete firework madness. This isn’t a professional firework show, this is every single person in the city setting off thousands dollars of fireworks on every street corner in the city for 48 hours, reaching its mind blowing crescendo at midnight. There’s no way to explain it, no video does it justice* and you have to be there to ... read more

I’ll be honest, while Southeast Asia had always been on my list I always kind of associated Thailand with too much tourism and disgusting sketch balls visiting to indulge in their darkest perversions but I’ll have to admit a misconception as it was fantastic. We spent almost our entire trip on Ko Phi Phi Don, one of the destination islands on Earth (where The Beach was filmed) but during monsoon season there are so few tourists that they shut down 3 of the 5 ferries that go to the island. Lodging prices (which range up to 5 grand a night) drop to more than half off. All of this because it rains torrentially all day everyday and who wants to go on vacation in the torrential rain? We did, against all Lonely Planet advice. If you’ve ... read more

Am I the only one who thinks it's strange that people assume that just because you're home you have clothes on. Wrong. So in the last few weeks I’ve been travelling around a little bit, and more recently saying goodbye to all the people who decided not to sign on for a 2nd year in this paragon of rapid development. I thought moving away from Colombia I was going to get away from people being overly obsessed with their physical appearance but I think that Korea may be worse. Strangely though, this obsession seems to end the day they get married. They instantly begin changing into the standard bearer of all things correct and true in Korea, the elderly mother, the ajumma. Incidentally the universe recently got some revenge for my belligerence with these angry old ... read more

They make you pay to get a cart at the local Walmart type store (Emart). The motivation behind this I’m guessing is that you’ll bother returning the cart where you found it if it gives you your money back. Nine cents ain’t getting that cart pushed back. I’m also more likely to push that bastard home and leave it on the side of my house like Dan Goodrich used to do back in the old neighborhood. Elections suck in the US, tons of commercials on tv and such, but at least they don’t drive up and down your street at eight in the morning on a Sunday with loudspeaker trucks. I wish I was a Korean citizen so I could vote against these devils. Getting fit is easy, ingest less calories than you burn in a ... read more

If you don’t realize how fortunate you are to have food and shelter (much less education and the incredible excesses of western life) while in India, you never will. India possesses a stunning one third of the world’s most abject poverty and walking in its midst makes you own the incredible prodigal sloth of the advantaged life filled with constant complaining. I am, of course, as guilty of this as any, more so than most, evident by the fact that I’m traipsing around India in the first place. I can’t drive home enough the squalor in which people live, the pictures don’t do it justice and words fail in any attempt to describe it. Make no mistake though, India is beautiful. It’s beautiful in its geography but also in its history/culture and its people. India’s the ... read more