I'm usually not much of a nature boy, saving the passion of the outdoors for my forester brother. But in the Southern Hemisphere I couldn't help take pictures of trees that are really different from the ones at home. The tree picture above…

Our hotel in Hanoi was in the Old Quarter, a frenzied and chaotic labyrinth of streets that rambled like they had been laid out by a toddler chasing a rabbit. Each street specializes in selling a certain product. Apparently our…

When we walked the streets of Bali we noticed sidewalk vendors selling bottles of Absolut vodka with a yellowish liquid inside. Usually the bottles were stuffed closed with a wad of cloth making them look like a row of Molotov…

We've all fallen for them; food places the guidebooks say you absolutely must try when visiting a certain city.  So we join all the other tourists who've read the same guides and wait on long lines for what turns out to be overrated, mediocre,…

Balinese kids love to play a game we dubbed “tourist tag.” It reminded us of a game American kids play called “punch buggy” when they spy a Volkswagen Beetle and get points. Everywhere we went kids would call out to us, smiling and waving.  We…

Before we left for a year one of our friends asked us what we would do about our laundry. Since our first month was in China we figured finding a laundry wouldn't be a problem. We were wrong. By the time we arrived in Shanghai three weeks into…