"Travel does what good novelists also do to the life of everyday, placing it like a picture in a frame or a gem in its setting, so that the intrinsic qualities are made more clear. Travel does this with the very stuff that everyday life is made of, giving to it the sharp contour and meaning of art.” – Freya Stark


And so channeling Freya Stark, a woman who knew a little something about travel, I love to go to grocery stores when I travel. The juxtaposition of the familiar with the foreign crystallizes the differences between my everyday(quotidian!!) experience and an everyday (quotidian!!!) experience in the country I am visiting. Going to the movies in a foreign country is another way to experience the dissonance. Although, since most of the movies on offer seem to be American it can be a sharp dissonance to emerge from a movie theater having been watching an American movie and walk out onto the pavement in an African country. I've done it, it's weird. But incredibly memorable.

"It is health that is real wealth and not pieces of gold and silver."
Mohandas Gandhi


Tired and true statement, so often repeated it borders on corny, but today I embrace it wholeheartedly.

"President Karzai has been declared the winner of the Afghan election... So obviously he's the legitimate leader of the country."
Peter Gibbs White House Spokesperson

"Obvious" & "legitimate" are not adjectives that spring to mind when describing the electoral debacle that just took place in Afghanistan.

“People ask me what advice I have for a married couple struggling in their relationship. I always answer:
pray and forgive. And to young people from violent homes, I say: pray and forgive. And again, even to the single mother with no family support: pray and forgive."

– Mother Teresa


And when that doesn't work?