Law, Partially

Yuanyang is a rural district in southwest China famous for the terraces built on hillsides to farm rice. While in Yuanyang, we took many great photos of these terraces, sadly all on a camera that would be stolen before the images were downloaded. To show you how remarkable the landscape is, however, I will publish the below photo from Google Images.

My blog readers have been wont to say they like the photos I post on my blog. I’m sorry, but there won’t be many photos for these blog entries because Christine’s camera, filled with one month’s worth of traveling photos, was stolen on my last evening before I returned to Singapore. I didn’t bring my own camera, so all the photos were on her camera. As the sun was setting during the last evening of my trip, Kata beach in Phuket, Thailand, was nearly deserted of people. We walked down to the water, leaving behind a shoulder bag on a beach chair at the top of the beach. It had been raining, and the chair was under a tree, out of the rain. Compared to other beaches in Phuket, Kata is not seedy at all, and being under a tree, the bag seemed to be out of sight of the few people at the beach. I felt nervous leaving the bag unattended, but being up on the chair, it would be out of the rain and out of the sand. As we were down at the water, I was keeping an eye on the bag up at the chair. A

Several hours after my last exam at NUS, I boarded a plane to Macau to begin a 4 weeks of travel. While in Phuket, I learned that I passed all of my courses and would be graduating with my masters of law degree. This was in no way guaranteed because studying foreign law in a foreign country is harder than it sounds... On the globe below you can see the major stops we made on our trip. Christine was with me for most of the trip, and my college friends, Adam and Noah, joined me for the Thai segment. Forgive the haphazard recounting herein. Maybe it would have been better to write as I traveled. Keep in mind that all of this, even the flights, was very cheap. Except in Macau and Hong Kong, lodging was usually around US$10+ every night. That’s actually less than a day of rent in Singapore. Food and beer are very cheap too – except in Phuket, where each plate of food is about US$4 and each large bottle of beer is about US$2.50. Sometimes we splurged, on accident or by force (like at th

Let me add, if I may, another justification for living abroad. I’m not positive if this is considered fair use of this article, but this below is an article from the Economist, published May 14, 2009. All rights to this work, I’m sure, are owned by the author and the Economist magazine, not me. Travel and creativity Expats at work May 14th 2009
 From The Economist print edition Living abroad gives you a creative edge ANECDOTAL evidence has long held that creativity in artists and writers can be associated with living in foreign parts. Rudyard Kipling, Pablo Picasso, Ernest Hemingway, Paul Gauguin, Samuel Beckett and others spent years dwelling abroad. Now a pair of psychologists has proved that there is indeed a link. As they report in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, William Maddux of INSEAD, a business school in Fontainebleau, France, and Adam Galinsky, of the Kellogg School of Management in Chicago, presented 155 American business students and 55 foreign

With all my trips and my time spent living, studying, and working abroad, you, dear reader, may think that I really like travelling. Actually, not really. Travelling is annoying as hell, especially on a tight budget and through less-developed countries. Some people love travelling so much they will devote their lives to it. I met a European girl who had been traveling through Asia for 11 months. I met an American man who was at the beginning of a 7 month trip. And I met a Dutch man who was a few weeks out of the Netherlands, and he had no return ticket but a list of places in Asia and Africa that he was planning to visit before going home. I think most travelers will tell you that they enjoy the challenge of traveling or even that traveling does more good for the world than harm. Both of these reasons I have read in Lonely Planet, the most popular series of travelers’ guidebooks. LP are also the books I have always used for traveling, even around the United States. I myself am not so

I’ve spent the past three summers living and working in different foreign cities: Mumbai, India, in 2007; Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, in 2008; and now the summer of 2009 will be passed in Singapore, which is a city-state on an island, and the island, the city, and the country, are all called just Singapore. I don’t really consider these summers spent abroad as “trips.” I was working and living. The longest trip I’d ever been on was 7 weeks in Europe in the summer of 2000. The second longest trip I’ve ever been on was for 4 weeks this year. I returned to Singapore from this trip last week. My last final exam at NUS (National University of Singapore) was during the morning of May 7, and in the afternoon of May 7, after a rushed and haphazard packing job, in which I forgot deodorant, socks, and my camera, I was on a flight to Macau, China, with Christine. On June 2, I boarded a plane in Phuket, Thailand, bound for Singapore, and now, five days later, I begin recounting the tale.