Want to make real Thai food at home? Then you need these Thai cookbooks. Tasty (authentic) recipes, dishes that go beyond phad thai, and gorgeous food photography – these are the best Thai cookbooks around. Pok Pok: Food and Stories from the Streets, Homes, and Roadside Restaurants of Thailand Andy Ricker opened a small restaurant […]

This morning, a Sunday, I woke up in a basic, concrete beach bungalow at a dive shop on the tiny island Koh Lipe in southern Thailand as the friend I’m staying with got up to go take customers out diving. I took my sweet time getting ready then walked a little ways along the beach […]

I’m retiring the ‘Day-to-Day’ series and ending with an updated look at my daily life here in Chiang Mai. You can always go back and take a look through all past posts – snapshots from expats’ daily lives all around the world, from New Orleans to New Zealand – here and thank you to all […]

I’m getting ready to head back to Southeast Asia for a bit and whenever I go back and forth I get asked about what I miss from Thailand or what I miss from the U.S. Of course, I miss my family and friends but really, for the most part, I’m pretty fine being in either place. […]

As someone who had never had a pet before last year, I always thought pet-friendly indoor spaces were sort of strange. Frankly, I still do, but on a lazy Sunday when we wanted to go out for a long lunch I was intrigued about a dog-friendly cafe in Chiang Mai I had read about – […]

Tonight I walked down a street in Chiang Mai I’ve been down a hundred times before. I’ve been down it a hundred times because I’ve now been based here for four years. It’s the longest time I’ve had the same “home” since high school and feels like a lifetime ago that I was working in Seattle and […]

I’ve been back in Thailand for more than two months now (I swear time goes more quickly in Chiang Mai…). I never meant for this site to become a ‘living in Thailand blog’ but then again, I never expected to be staying here so long with. The questions and my answers/experiences below are a follow […]

Even after more than three and a half years based in Thailand, I still learn, discover or see something new every single day. Every time I come back to the country, people will ask me why – haven’t I seen enough? The short answer is, because I love it, and, no. There are still entire […]

“Once in a while it really hits people that they don’t have to experience the world in the way they have been told to.” – Alan Keightley This month marks the 2-year anniversary of Paper Planes – which feels strange to say since, depending on the day, it either seems like I’ve been doing this forever or […]

This past weekend marked my three year anniversary of leaving Seattle and moving to Southeast Asia. Though at the time I didn’t really think of it as ‘moving’, more like I was leaving for an extended trip, I’ve now used Chiang Mai as a home base for longer than anywhere else I’ve lived after high […]