Me and my furry friend

Way back in 2002 I did something crazy. I quit my job, sold my car and most of my stuff, put what was left in my mom’s house, and bought tickets to New Zealand, Australia, and Singapore. I thought I would go around the world, but after traveling independently, but never alone, to those countries as well as Thailand, Burma, and Nepal, I became frustrated with the experience. Sure, I was visiting interesting places and taking nice pictures of tourist attractions, but I still didn’t know the first thing about the places I was passing through.

I probably would have went on like this, a perpetual tourist, but China had closed its border with Nepal, forcing me to reevaluate. What was my priority? To fully experience and understand a culture, and learn its language. So I bought a one way ticket back to Bangkok, where I worked for two years as a management science teacher at Bangkok University, and learned the true meaning of “culture shock.”

I never really came close to understanding Thailand, the inscrutable Thai people, or their language, so I cut my losses and took one last trek across China before coming home, three years and two months after I left.

These are my journals, raw and unedited. There’s way too much to read in one sitting, so in an attempt to make them more organized, I’ve put the entries into chapters, since my writing and thinking evolved over time. More...