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 […]

It’s amazing how a simple uniform can change your impression of someone. Sure the slum school in Jaipur that I visited with Yogamour Global was small and dingy, a (barely)two-room structure housing nearly 50 students, but all the kids were clean, seemingly happy though a little shy, and dressed in button up shirts, slacks and skirts. […]

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 […]

Christmas in Thailand is always a little strange. It’s the nicest time of the year meaning, instead of clouds, cold temperatures and depressing darkness – like I’m used to in Seattle – every day is clear, sunny and, well, pretty much perfect. The weather combined with the fact that Thailand is a Buddhist country and […]

Normally I only half heartedly make some New Year resolutions. I’ll spend a few minutes thinking about what I want to work on or toward, write them down, then…forget about them. Last year I couldn’t think of any. Sure, there were plenty of things I could work on, but I didn’t feel any desire or […]

This week’s guest post for the ‘Day-to-Day’ series comes from Katrinka, an American expat who’s currently working and living in Istanbul.  Two and a half years ago, my desire to live abroad and travel brought me to Istanbul without much of a plan. I’d visited the city three times and the initial rush of love gave way to […]

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 […]

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 […]

There’s no right or wrong way to travel…but there are a few things everyone should keep in mind while on the road. 1. Be patient Things will go wrong, planes will be delayed, the weather won’t cooperate and you’ll forget to charge your camera battery. In the end, it probably won’t matter too much. Just relax […]

When I first left home and moved to Thailand two years ago I wasn’t really stressed, anxious or worried before I left. People would ask me if I was scared to go, and I wasn’t at all. I wasn’t really excited either, or didn’t feel as enthusiastic about it as I thought I should. Instead […]