May 25 - Hong Kong to Bangkok to Amman Jordan to Paris to St Pierre de Corps to St. Avertin....a 45 hour journey and that was just travel time!!!Check out at the Mansion was 10 am so I hung around till then, packed my stuff and stored it with Mr. Phillip's wife - a woman apparently with no name. Every time I asked Mr. Philip he said "no - no name" and she just smiled sweetly. When he wasn't around I asked her her name and still, just a shake of the head...

I am in Bangkok now for the last leg of this journey and loving every bit of this city. It is loud and grimy and polluted and the traffic is horrendous but for some reason I love it here. I loved it at the beginning of my trip, right after China, and I love it even more 4 months later. It is like New York on crack. They say NY never sleeps, but remember a few years ago I had the pleasure of working there, night shifts with an undercover NYPD team! What a bla...

Working on the reintegration plan. For those of you who have been here - Pattaya probably seems like an odd choice considering all the other great places in Thailand. For those who haven't - Pattaya is to Thailand what Tijuana is to Mexico. Neither is very representative of their countries. I did spend a fun day into night a few years ago in Tijuana, but was all to happy to walk back across the border into San Diego when it got dark. Pattaya is like that...

Can a week change your life?If that week, or 10 days for me, was spent in Mae Sot, then it absolutely can. I last wrote about my first day at school. learning to drive a motorbike and just getting chucked into a routine that was not mine.In the last few days I have been far too everything to write:  too busy, too amazed, too happy, too sad, too tired and too overwhelmed to do much more than just take it in to process at another time.10 days in Mae Sot include...

I made it to my first day of school intact. The drive, my first on a motorcycle as driver, went through Mae Sot, out onto the freeway then off into the country side. The area we are in is beautiful in a very gentle way. Rolling mountains meet sugar cane and rice paddies, both just in the tilling stage as the heat of summer is at its peak and the rains are expected any day now. It really is stiflingly hot. Most days the heat feels like a full force furnace wh...