Airports often confound, and 2 in Moscow led us astray

In the previous post, you can see what happened to me in Morocco, France, Suriname and South Africa.  Below, my experiences were. . . different.  A rocky road, sex acts on a temple and an odyssey between two airports in Moscow make clear how travel to foreign countries inevitably delivers surprises.

Part 3

On a trip to Nepal in the late 80s, two of us thought it would be a good idea to hire a car and driver to visit Pokhara, the country’s second largest city 125 miles from Kathmandu.  After the Siddhartha Highway was completed in 1968, the city became a popular tourist destination.

According to Wikipedia, most of the tourists visiting Pokhara trek to the Annapurna Base Camp and Mustang.  A longish walk far short of a trek sounded like fun, though

Remarkable book set in India illuminates deprivation

An engrossing and enlightening book came to my attention a while back.  It was written by Katherine Boo, a longtime New Yorker writer whose prose is elegant and artful.

Honored by a MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant, a National Magazine Award and a Pulitzer Prize, Boo had her book published in 2012.  I cannot recommend too highly Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, death, and hope in a Mumbai undercity.

I have to say its ring of authenticity is a clarion invitation to understanding and empathizing with the poorest of the poor.  So compelling are the book’s descriptions that I felt as though I could smell the smells of a slum, taste the bitterness of injustice and feel the pain of deprivation on which Boo trains her attention.

Stupid me, either when I ordered Behind the Beautiful Forevers or got down my list of reading material, I forgot a key fact about the book until I arrived at Boo’s author’s note at the end.  

WSJ lists 7 things you may not know about expat life

Teaching is a job to which expats tend to gravitate, but pay in Cambodia is low. Source: Khmer440.com

The life of an expat may contain many surprises, the Wall Street Journal noted in an article not so long ago.

It turns out, according to a survey on which the article is based, that Ecuador provides the most happiness to expats and that Europe, unsurprisingly, offers the best education.

But would you imagine that Ireland falls behind Russia, Oman and

India event lures me to Buddhist activity once again

Intricate sand mandala created in exquisite detail at the event. It is described in Asia Life magazine as a “cosmic diagram that represents the dwelling place of a deity.”

It hardly has been my intention to keep writing about Buddhism (or to post so frequently), though an overwhelming proportion of Cambodia’s population practices it and Buddhism is the state religion.

But we coincidentally more or less stumbled upon our second event in three days that focused on Buddha.  I include it here mainly because of the photos.