Wrapping Up
Hello friends, my trip is coming to a close. Let me be cliche and say, "what a long, strange trip it's been."
I had a good last led class today. My back is feeling much better.
There's a lawyer that opened an outsourced entertainment and intellectual property law office here in Mysore. Apparently, they are Borat's lawyers. I got his email from one of the ladies that serves breakfast to yoga students. I emailed him yesterday to tell him I'm here studying yoga, going to law school, examining some options for internships next summer and to ask if they take summer interns. He emailed me back right away and told me he thought it could be good for both of us and to let him know if I'm serious about it. I'm excited that I may be able to grow professionally and spiritually all in Mysore! We'll see. I'm just glad to know it's an option. A lot could change between now and then.
I decided to make my blog today interactive! How, you ask???
I compiled a list of bests and worsts from my trip. I invite you to email/comment on your own categories.
Oh, and by the way, I'll probably continue to blog even when I'm home. So, George, don't think you're off the hook as my "blog pal."
On to the main event:
-Countries Visited: Vietnam, Cambodia, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, Laos, Nepal, India (Airports: Hong Kong on the way here, London on the way home) My passport is nearly full.
-Nastiest Hotel Room: Kuala Lipis, Malaysia--reeked of smoke, bathroom was unusable
-Craziest Travel Companion: Vasec, hailing from the Czech Republic--one wild and crazy guy
-Least Favorite Country: Vietnam
-Best Outdoor Experience: Too many to name!
-Vietnam: Kayaking Ha Long Bay
-Cambodia: Scaling temples overgrown with jungle
-Malaysia: Sleeping in a cave, while covered in bat poo and leeches
-Singapore: None of Singapore is outdoors. It's just one big shopping mall.
-Thailand: Diving, of course!
-Laos: Zip-lining through the jungle and sleeping in tree houses
-Nepal: Pretty much all of it
-India: too polluted/hot to enjoy the outdoors
-Coolest Building: Taj Mahal and Angkor Wat (I couldn't decide between the two!)
-Best Museum: Museum of Islamic Art, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
-Favorite Previously Untried Fruit: Tamarind
-Favorite Cuisine: Thai (duh)
-Least Favorite Cuisine: Nepali--not sure if even qualifies as "cuisine"
-Food I miss: good cheese
-Favorite National Dish: Nasi Lemak, Malaysia
-Most shocking moment: In Vietnam, when I realized the bathroom and the kitchen were essentially the same
-Favorite City: Georgetown
-Biggest splurge that was worth the $: Live aboard dive trip
-Best last-minute impulse purchase before leaving home: tiny travel hairbrush
-Grossest Toilet: 5,000 meters (about 15.400 feet) at Thorong Phedi High Camp in Nepal--imagine no running water, people missing the hole in the ground and then all of that freezing in the cold
-Country I most love to hate: India
-Dirtiest Moment: Every moment of my 4 days in Taman Negara, Malaysia
-Best Travel Companion in India: earplugs
-Max Height Reached: 5500 meters --Thorong La Pass, Nepal
-Max Depth Reached: 28.3 meters (about 79 feet)under the sea, Thailand
-Best advice from an astrologer: I must wear a 6-carat rose-colored diamond
-Lowest moment: Uncontrollable, lonely weeping in a hotel room in Da Lat, Vietnam ("What am I doing here? What was I thinking? Etc...")
-Biggest "it's a small world" moment: running into a friend from high school on the streets of Chiang Mai
-Travel Lust fueled for: Brazil and Africa
-Best Lessons Learned:
-Don't have expectations. Period.
-It's not me, it's you.
-I met people from: England, Ireland, New Zealand, Australia, Brazil, Chile, Mexico, Taiwan, Canada, Czech Republic, Estonia, Spain, France, Norway, Finland, Denmark, Turkmenistan, Israel, Germany, Portugal, Italy, Scotland, Poland, Russia, Switzerland, Costa Rica, Colombia, Denmark, Hong Kong, and people from the countries I visited, obviously.
Books read since I quit my job:
-Vanity Fair, William Mackpeace Thackery (the novel, not the magazine)
-Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
-Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy
-In Cold Blood, Truman Capote
-A Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgess
-Persuasion, Jane Austen
-The Count of Monte Cristo, Alexandre Dumas
-American Psycho, Bret Easton Ellis
-First They Killed My Father, Loung Ung
-The Inscrutable Americans, Anurag Mathur
-In Retrospect, Robert McNamara
-Les Miserables, Victor Hugo
-The Corrections, Jonathan Franzen
-Bangkok 8, John Burdett
-The Beach, Alex Garland
-War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy
-Me Talk Pretty One Day, David Sedaris
-The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde
-Into Thin Air, John Krakauer
-Middlemarch, George Eliot
-Love in the Time of Cholera, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
-Living with the Himilayan Masters, Swami Rama
-The Alcehmist, Paolo Coelho
-Middlesex, Jefferey Eugenides
-Kim, Rudyard Kipling
-Journey to Ithaca, Anita Desai
-The Mapmaker's Opera, Bea Gonzalez
-The Namesake, Jhumpa Lahiri
-So Long, See You Tomorrow, William Maxwell
-The Death of Vishnu, Manil Suri
-Holy Cow!, Sara MacDonald
-Naked, David Sedaris
-Barney's Version, Moredechai Richler
-The Handmaid's Tale, Margaret Atwood
-East, West, Salman Rushdie
-Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert
-Life and Times of Michael K, JM Coetzee
-Plainsong, Kent Haruf
-The Kite Runner, Khaled Hosseini
-The Angry Tide, Amitav Ghosh
-Paradise, Toni Morrison
-The Bookseller of Kabul, Asne Seierstad
-Tess of the D'Urbervilles, Thomas Hardy
-Journey to the Center of the Earth, Jules Verne
-Cloud Atlas, David Mitchell
-It's a Long Way to the Floor, David Byck
-The Russian Debutante's Handbook, Gary Shteyngart
Now it's your turn to come up with categories! I will blog in response tomorrow. Remember, the quality of the response depends on the quality of your participation!
Enjoy your day, friends!
Hugs,
Lauren
posted by Lauren at 11:20 PM
2 Comments:
Hey Lauren,
Great idea for a wrap-up post.
Some categories...
Things most/least missed about MN/the US:
Favorite yoga saying:
Number of phone calls made to family/friends:
Biggest surprises:
Thing you most wish you had a picture of that you don't already:
That's all I can think of now... maybe more later.
10:48 AM
Hi Lauren;
I thought I might have "blogged" my last comment to you while in a foreign land but your invitation to the interactivity blog has piqued my interest one final time.
But first, might I inquire how you ever had time to read all those classics? By my count, there were 47, which works out to 1.567 books per week, on the average.......but who's counting? A couple of years ago I read Shelby Foote's 6 volume history of the Civil War in just under 6 weeks and I thought that I did pretty well. When you start giving reading lessons, I want to sign up!
But back to the topic at hand. When I visit a new destination, my primary interest is usually photograpy and so......
Which locale was the most photographically interesting? (Nepal??)
In which country were the local folks most likely to be willing to have their photos taken?
Which country least likely?
On the average, which country afforded the best accommodations?
Where did you find the native peoples to be the most friendly and helpful and least likely to "rip you off"?
Which area did you find to be the most "tourist friendly" in transportation?
Most expensive location?
Least?
If YOU had to choose just one place to return to and had only one week to spend there as a tourist, which would it be?
If you were going to recommend just one place to the AVERAGE TOURIST for a week, would it be the same location?
Although you obviously traveled "lightly" what did you take along that you could have done without?
What an experience you've had! I'm sure that a lot of folks would give their "eye teeth" to have done what you've accomplished these last 7 months and others, including me, are content to just read your accounts of your travels, with some exceptions. I sure wouldn't mind spending a few evenings in that beach bungalow at Ko something or other, and seeing the sights that you experienced in Nepal will forever remain a vision of mine.
Welcome back to Minnesota!
George
1:18 PM
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