Phuket vegetarian festival

Another interesting tidbit we ran across.  Every year there is a 10-day vegetarian festival in Thailand.  Apparently there are many street-vendors that sell delicious vegetarian food for the duration--sounded good to us!  There is also a religious processesion that visits a series of temples and monks (I believe?) pierce their cheeks with all manor of swords and other sharp objects.  This aspect of the festival I found, to be honest, pretty disturbuing.  Aaaaand here are some pictures!

http://www.phuket-photos.com/frameme.php?page=vegetarian-festival.htm

Right now our plan is to be in Thailand for next year's festival (though we probably won't be in phuket).  Should be interesting.

Environmental recording

Something I'd really like to do is start making environmental recordings--especially once our travels begin (hopefully to be posted here for everyone to hear and enjoy!).  

The sort of thing I have in mind is exemplified by the websites One Minute Vacations and Favorite Chicago Sounds.  They're just high-quality recordings of the ambient sound in a place.

Our friend Josh has a friend who runs a recordings studio and can teach us about different kinds of microphones, etc.  I've made a brief internet search for information (yielding the following), but have yet to sift through it all.  More later once I've had a chance to explore a bit more:

The quiet american diy field recording info.

Special topics in sound class webpage

Binaural recording overview

A few resources we're using

In our first post we mentioned that the main aim of our trip is both to see how others live around the world, and how we live in different places.  Part of this will be the process of getting ourselves oriented in each new place--exploring to see what there is, and finding comfortable patterns of life for ourselves.  Another big part will be interacting with other people.  

To this end we've found two so-far valuable resources for helping us find out about opportunities along these lines.

The first is WWOOF:  World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms

Travellers work for 5-6 hours a day in exchange for room and board on an organic farm in another country.  This is not primarily a work arrangement, however; it is intended more as a cultural exchange.  Farms are typically small, and travellers live and eat with the host families.  Typically the hosts are excited to teach about and their country, regional culture, and farming practices.  Obviously there is some possibility for exploitation (it all depends on how you value the exchange, after all), but it definitely sounds like the kind of opportunity we're interested in.  Our friend Nick did this a few years ago at an olive farm in Italy and had very favorable reports.

To give a concrete sense of the opportunities, here is a preview of the list of hosts for Thailand.  One I particularly like is:  "We are practicing organic farming and permaculture. An unusually enlightened monk, conducts the project. All cooking is vegetarian. Chinnaworn also teaches meditation, wild edibles, cooking, and Thai culture if interested."  I would love to learn about wild edibles, cooking and meditation.

Another resource, recommended to us by metafilter is the Thorntree forum at lonely planet.  This will most likely be of use to us on the road, but we've started reading it now to see what kinds of questions other people (who are currently in the places we're considering) are asking.

That's it for now!

I love Yap's awesome stone money

Ok. While looking at a world map, I suddenly discovered an urgent need to learn more about Micronesia (all those tiny tiny islands in the Pacific); not so much because we thought these would be a good destination for us, but just because I wanted to know what was going on with them.

In the course of poking around different internet sites, we saw lots of pictures of large (8-12 ft in diameter) disks that were identified as the islands currency. I thought this was completely awesome. There's a nice photo and short sumary on the wikipedia page for the Micronesian state of Yap (the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yap).

Carry on!

What is this?

We are Dave (a high school math and computer programming teacher) and Jen (part-time programmer, part-time poker player); we've been living together in the San Francisco Bay Area for the last 5 years. As soon as school ends in June 2009, we're planning to take off on a year-long trip to explore the world some. We'll be including some notes about our planning here for now, and will document our trip here once it starts.

It seems (from our initial internet reading) that people have different things in mind when undertaking this sort of trip; none of which we share, exactly. Some people plan with the aim of making sure they don't "miss" anything. Others seem to follow an "extended vacation" model in which they plan with an eye toward doing the kinds of things people do on vacation: sight-see, go to cultural events, and so forth. Still others are aiming at a sort of low-budget (or sometimes high-budget) exotic world wilderness trek. And, of course, there's the famous bum-around-another-country with a backpack.

We think all of these have something going for them, but also miss something that's important to us. Berkeley is one of my favorite places, but I've often found myself at a loss when charged with showing someone around. My love for Berkeley is more about how it feels to live there than any particular event or destination in it; and this feeling of living in a place is a large part of what we hope to get at in our travel.

Put differently, we're medium-interested in seeing how other people live around the world, and very interested in seeing how we live around the world. Practically, this means that the pace of our trip is likely to be different than the "can't-miss-anything" or "backpack-bumming" models. Our provisional plan is to choose a handful of places where we'll stay for 4-8 week stints, settling in somewhere with a kitchen that might plausibly feel like a potential home. It also means that our destinations may differ from the "world's best things to see and do" and "exotic trek" versions, as well. Basically, we'll choose locations in places we're curious about that seem likely to provide us with an enjoyable living experience. We will pay some attention to the proximity of good hiking, sights, or cultural events; but we want them to be available side-shows rather than the main attractions.

Because of these considerations, we hope to prepare in the spirit of Eisenhower's observation that a plan is useless, but planning is essential. We hope, in the coming months, to become thoroughly versed in all our possible options, but leave most of the specifics of the actual plan to be loosely improvised within the few constraints we're required to fix in advance.

Check back as we investigate the food, weather, political, housing, and transportation considerations for our various destinations!