Japan by Eight
From trains to shopping, villas to temples, restaurants to karaoke, mountains to skiing and more Japan over Christmas and New Years, with eight of us — what could possibly go wrong? Actually, very little because of some brilliant planning by my husband and my sister-in-law, eight of us managed to have an almost worry free 16 day vacation which included snow […]
The New American Dream
Recently, through my bidding, my book club met and talked about a book called “Bait and Switch, Chasing the American Dream”. The book was slightly dated being published in 2005 but the topic current, a female journalist wrote anecdotally about being an unemployed white-collar worker and using the various employment services: life coaches, resume writers, […]
Words don’t fail me now
If you have the choice between right and kind always choose kind. A value, which I have tried to live by my whole life. I love words – well obviously I write. I also believe that I have a fairly good vocabulary, not excellent or exceptional but perhaps above average. Recently I had an experience […]
Bhutan bliss at great heights
My husband and I decided October 2017 was our year to trek in Bhutan. Mid August my daughter decided she would come to Bangkok sometime in October or November on an extended buying trip for her online homewares business around Southeast Asia. We all decided why not kill two birds (so to speak) with one stone and […]
Oops – visa run to Penang, Malaysia
The story is too long with too many complicated details. Suffice it to say I needed to go somewhere out of Bangkok immediately. I needed to come back on a different visa than the one I had the last time I entered Thailand. We found this out on a Thursday afternoon and had to make […]
Managing holiday stress
The holidays can be a very stressful time for a lot of people. We often have to deal with family that we only see once a year because they cause us so much stress. This time of year is filled with tradition and when you live far from your home country trying to keep some […]
The anatomy of chronic pain – a personal journey through physical pain
Everyone has experienced pain at one time or another be it: physical, emotional or psychological pain, not a pleasant experience. What if you had to live with it day in and day out what would it do to you. There are all kinds of reasons people have to live with chronic pain, diseases like: cancer, […]
A prisoner in Bangkok
I visit a expatriate prisoner in the Lard Yao Women’s Prison here in Thailand. I won’t give her name for reasons of privacy and we will simply call her Miss C. She has no one here in Thailand to visit her except for another foreigner like myself who volunteers to do so. Her family, of which she has little […]
Living in Nichada Thani – a definite choice
We moved to Bangkok two years ago. We were on our way with my husband’s company to Angola; bags packed, by that I mean 20 x 75lbs bags packed ready to go when we found out the move was no longer on. We had been evacuated from Erbil Iraq 10 months earlier because of ISIS takeover of Mosul and so another devastating blow and we wondered […]
Myanmar – a fading culture?
If you live in Asia and have three plus days you can use on vacation head to Myanmar before it is westernised and commercialised beyond recognition. We had the good fortune to recently visit Myanmar for nine days. We developed our itinerary from a friend who lived and worked in the capitol city of Yangon, so we were in […]