Have reached DC for the final meeting (I think) of the social studies/history revision committee for the National Board. It feels like I’ve been living on planes these past few days… still, it’s better when you’re accompanied by a good read. How’s this excerpt for some character description? I’ve been reading Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish [...]
Okay, so I just wanted to use the word ‘epilogue.’ There definitely was something I liked, though, about keeping an online journal of sorts over the past month of travel. A digitized rendering as opposed to the last travel journal I wrote during my trip with my old roommate S. through the Canadian Rockies–but still, [...]
Well, pretty much the last meal (not counting that fresh banh mi sandwich that I had made for an early morning breakfast tomorrow)… my last taste of straight good street food in Asia for a little while. I’m not quite going to get a full night’s sleep as I had hoped (I’ll probably get around [...]
As I read in a certain men’s magazine not too long ago, a good man knows how to lose a few hours (or an entire day) doing very little at all. And perhaps it’s fitting then, that there’s not a picture or a visited site to mention, here in my next to last day in [...]
Okay, so I can even forgive the calming elevator music from Titanic (or some other film with a lot of Celine Dion fare) playing in the background of the Pandanus Resort lobby here at 8:15 in the evening. The light is low, the open-air lobby nicely decorated with comfortable seating areas, marble-like floors and tastefully [...]
You have to like this tagline of the local booking travel agency that I went to this morning–I couldn’t have said it any more eloquently. So I’m a little chagrined to say, but I ditched my motorbike driver for my day travels today. I had originally said that I would hire him for two days [...]
Full day in Saigon (as apparently, people around here still prefer to call it, as opposed to the supra-syllabic Ho Chi Minh City). The heat seems to radiate in stiller air here, and I find that I’ve been sweating much more than I did in Thailand–though that could very well be because I was in [...]
Wednesday August 5, 2009 midnight So I guess there’s merit to the idea of getting to the airport early, especially given Bangkok traffic as I’ve heard and seen it. Still, it’s a bit excessive when you get there close to four hours before your flight time and you’re told at the check in counter that [...]
So the trip to Ayuthaya that I had planned for the entire day (booking through one of those small travel agencies that cluster around the backpacker hotels) fell through. I waited for about two hours at the little café at the ground level of my inn and no go—the apologetic travel agent person, once he [...]
A Summer Day and Wrapping up Work with the Social Studies/History Standards Committee
It felt like summer today, having spent my limited time outside in travel from DC back to Boston—first the short walk from the Old Town Alexandria Hilton to the King Street metro stop, and then from Logan airport to home. Maybe that’s the measurement of how warm and humid it is outdoors—an inverse relationship where [...]