just a quick hop, skip & a jump

Even living in a place that seems like a holiday destination for a lot of people I still feel excited to get away and travel a bit nearly all the time. My visa was set to expire on the 29th of March, so, on the 28th headed on the overnight bus to Vien Tiene, the capital of Laos, to renew it. When buying the bus ticket you can get “VIP”, first class or second class. I am always on the look-out for a deal and have a hard time paying full price for anything anymore…. I asked the lady at the counter if they had a “third class” that maybe they just didn’t tell us farang (foreigners) about. She had a good laugh and told me that the second class was only 400 Baht (about $12 US) for a 12 hour bus ride. To my dismay, the time schedule for the second...

Read more »

it surely looks like rain

Let me preface this with a quote from the book This Is It, by Alan Watts:“cosmic consciousness” – To the individual thus enlightened it appears as a vivid and overwhelming certainty that the universe, precisely as it at this moment, as a whole and in every one of its parts, is so completely right as to need no explanation or justification beyond what it simply is. Existence not only ceases to be a problem; the mind is so wonder-struck at the self-evident and self sufficient fitness of things as they are, including what would ordinarily be thought the very worst, that it cannot find any word strong enough to express the perfection and beauty of the experience. Its clarity sometimes gives the sensation that it is pervaded and ordered by a supreme...

Read more »