Heppy Valentine's Day...

"Love is everything it's cracked up to be. It really is worth fighting for,
being brave for, risking everything for. And the trouble is, if you don't risk
everything, you risk even more."

- Erica Jong

Nong Khai photos

I still have a hard time when I see these couples. What is a dirty old white guy doing with a pretty young Thai woman? I took this at breakfast today.


Mut Mee Guesthouse (in Nong Khai), where I've been lazing the last 5 days:
It's one of the loveliest, most peaceful spots I've come across in my travels. I also want to copy the simple bathroom when I build my minature home in Montana someday...



Salakaewkoo sculpture park in Nong Khai:


How I spent my days in Khon Kaen (what a fun town!):
(A.k.a. the non-joys of being ill.) After lying on the bed for three days, I decided that I would take a picture so I could remember the good times.

Meditation not necessary

I feel weird, like I could stay here forever. I'm so calm. I don't know if I've ever been at peace like this. Or if I was, I can't recall. Perhaps it was the perfect storm of getting sick again, slowing down, losing my travel companion and finding a quiet guesthouse on the river. I haven't really done anything for five days. It's sinful in most Western cultures to be this lazy. In these Asian cultures, they work every day also, all day. But not at the breakneck pace of the Western world. They have times of leisure. When there is not work, they sit and wait. Maybe that's why the Eastern parts of the world seem more spiritual than us.

I can't help but slip into contemplation. I'm trying to set some plans for the next few months of the year. A week ago, I was so sad to lose Carrie that all I could think of was to return to the States. Now I am so calm, I feel like I could stay away for years more. The options can be paralyzing or freeing. I think I'll choose to think of them as freeing and not cement anything just yet.

Arrival in Nong Khai

I'm sitting in the garden overlooking the Mekong River, which means I am also looking at Laos across the river. Funny thought.

I took a nice fan (versus A/C) bus up here- about 3 hours- they were so sweet. I went to the bus station to ask about a ride to Nong Khai and they told me where sit and when the bus arrived, a little chubby Thai guy came over and got me. Then I got on and they just watch over me when I travel alone... they know where I am going and tell me, "This isn't your stop." Etc. Usually someone who speaks English will come and sit by me. This time it was a girl, probably in her 20s on her way home to see her mom, dad and son. She works in a different province and goes home for three months out of the year. She asked, "Do you mind if I sit here, Madame?" (We get called Madame a lot over here.) After a while on the bus, I was cold and put on my green corduroy coat (proof I have acclimated to Asia heat again) and stared out the window with Radiohead on my IPod. I thought, "I still haven't seen Radiohead in concert." This obsession started in 2001 in a little apartment in Portland with the four optometry guys. (The Radiohead concert is now one of my life goals.)

Thought for you

"Excitement and depression, fortune and misfortune, pleasure and pain, are storms in a tiny, private, shell-bound realm- which we take to be the whole of existence. Yet we can break out of this shell and enter a new world." -Eknath Easwaran