It's raining as it has been for many hours, including the whole trip up here, which was a lot more of an 'experience' than I recalled from my brief 2001 visit - the whole road after Thong Pha Phum being a 70 km series of S-curves and mostly either steep up or down.The fact that the bus driver didn't trust the brakes and had us inching down hills in 1st gear was enough to wake me up after having felt 'dopey' earlier.It also helped make what I was told was a 2...

After having seen very few tourists earlier, I saw lots in Chiang Mai, to the extent that at times most people I saw on the main streets were Westerners. But I got off the main streets as much as possible into normal residential neighborhoods, which also had some interesting ( for me at least ) old Buddhist temples. I stayed at a quiet guest house way down a side lane near the Old City and spent much of every day taking long walks. I also went to the nearby t...

I've been in Thailand for a week now, the first half in Ayuthaya and since then moving north to Lopburi, Phitsanolok, and now Lampang. I'll take a short train ride on to Chiang Mai tomorrow ( July 1 ) and likely spend about a week there before going even further north - to Mai Sai, on the border with Burma, with a side trip to Mae Salong village high in the mountains. It's been a lazy week with no real 'high points' ( I didn't expect or want any - I've been avoi...

Retrospective:My Indonesian ELF Experience 2010-2011 I have just completed a ten-month assignment as an English Language Fellow, assigned to conduct English teacher training and teach other English courses at the Institut Agama Islam Negeri ( IAIN ) in Palembang, Indonesia in south Sumatra, and working under the auspices of the Regional English Language Office (RELO) in Jakarta. In this entry I want to look back on the year and 'take a big picture view' of ...

I'm flying out of Indonesia on June 16, and this likely will be my final blog entry from Indonesia, though I plan to write a long, reflective one when I'm looking back from outside the country. First, I want to explain the title of this blog. It has a double meaning. The more obvious one is that it's the first half of the well-known saying, "No matter where you go, there you are." But the more important one for me is that it's a line from one of m...