I'm back from vacation - a month in South East Asia. People who know me know that I travel there often. Bangkok is the site of my research, but since my intellectual attention has turned (about 50% of it, at least) to happiness in the US, I didn't go to gather data.
Instead, I caught up with old friends, and did some actual touristing, something anthropologists are pretty ambivalent about.
It also gave me the chance to think about the meaning of travel in our culture, and how we make sense of the world when it doesn't feel like our own.
I took the picture above at dawn in Ha Long Bay, in northern Vietnam - this was a place I'd never heard of until it came time to plan the trip, but found otherworldly, and interesting in a bunch of ways.
I've been thinking about the nature of time lately, and how it relates to our ideas about happiness. I've posted an article on the difference between being in the moment and being in the present in Ha Long Bay. As always, I hope you find it interesting.
