Featured Sandwich: Meatloaf
Life Is A Slow Harold
Found this at City Sub on Bergen, figured someone might be needing his/her services.
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Music is one of my main inspirations for travel, and Lhasa de Sela is one of my favorite travel inspiring musicians. Whenever I listen to her, I have the strong urge to be out somewhere incredibly foreign to me where I’m forced to learn new behaviors and ways of living. Her voice is unique and rich, and her songs are beautiful and mysterious, a rare combination.
She passed away this New Year’s Day from breast cancer at the age of 37. Before making Montreal her home, she grew up as a nomad out of a school bus in the US and Mexico. Wherever she is now, I’m sure she’s still living a full life.
Lhasa de Sela - Anywhere On This Road
One more day here in CO and I’m not ready to leave. Here’s a little video on what I’ve been up to out here.
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Spent the day in Breckinridge skiing for the first time in 10 years.
We stayed the night on a whim at a slope side lodge. Matt talked them down from $350 to $129 for the night. It’s amazing what he can do.
My Own 2009 Recap
This is the end of the year for us living in the West, so I suppose I should do a recap. It’s been 2066 in Nepal for a while now, I already celebrated Thai New Years in Thailand, and China still has some time to kill in whatever year they are still in. I started this year clean cut, working with hedge funds, wearing khakis and button down shirts. Now I’m bearded with long hair, biking and working on odd projects in coffee houses to pass the time, and wearing jeans and button down western shirts - a return to my days before New York.
When I turned 29 at the end of last year I told myself I needed to do some things that I had always talked about doing before I turned 30. My main goal was the Himalayas, I couldn’t relax until I had seen them. Mid-February I put in my two weeks. Mid-March I did a quick trip to Paris and London, two of my favorite cities in the world, as a celebration. A week later I was in Tokyo. Now I’m a day into my 30s, and living globally feels more like a potential way of life than something to get out of my system before turning into a responsible adult.
I already blogged the whole trip on this site, so I won’t go over all the details again, just a quick list of highlights from the end of March to the end of July:
- the depth and insanity of Tokyo
- the stone in the belly of the Buddha in Kyoto
- cherry blossoms
- getting kicked out of the Tsumago by a Japanese school teacher who spoke no English
- spending Thai new years with Thai kids partying in the streets throwing buckets of water on passersby
- learning Thai kickboxing behind a building in Bangkok from a father of a kid I played with
- watching and listening to Tibetan Buddhism prayers in Rumtek
- monkey stealing my glasses in Simla (for the story)
- Bodhnath
- Buddha’s birthday in Ki Gonpa
- drinking tea in the home of Kashmiri immigrants and Spitian townsfolk
- traveling with my sister for 2 weeks
- dancing with Gorkha separatists in Darjeeling’s main square after the election results
- getting to secretly see an ancient copy of the Tibetan Book of the Dead
- swimming with elephants
- trekking and volunteering in Ladakh
- making friends in Ladakh
- being the first foreigner (according to the head lama) to visit a gonpa in a restricted area of Nubra Valley
- basically everything about Ladakh
- Sikhs in a closed up shop crowded around a computer watching Michael Jackson videos on the day of his death
- the beauty of Sydney
- making music with Tim in Australia
Am I bragging about my travels? Yeah, probably, but I had a pretty fun year. The hard part of the year was the return. Regular life is suddenly duller than before: taxis aren’t speeding through crowds of men and cows, street signs are in English, and I don’t have to boil my water. There were great moments in the second half of the year, most notably all the beautiful weddings: good friends (Anil, Nathanael) and my sister (Emily). Now the challenge is making life less regular with what I do with it back home.
Photos:
In Newport, Oregon, my Grandpa talks about how life in the Navy would take him away from his family for over a year at a time. The waiter interrupts me with some devastating news.
[Flash 10 is required to watch video.]
Finally got to dance to this song while in New York. Will I ever get sick of it?
I was someone who couldn’t wait for Apple’s Tablet or Microsoft’s Surface until I saw this. This turns your hand into a cellphone keypad. It turns a newspaper into the newspaper’s website. It turns the floor of a subway into a video game screen.
Watch this full thing to see the future. Around 6:30 is where it becomes truly mind blowing. It’s odd, it seems to me like a future we never anticipated in science fiction or any other projections of what’s to come.
Another video of driving while listening to Neko Case. There is nothing better than beautiful scenery, a car, and Neko Case all together.
