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.
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