The gap year is a foreign concept to most Americans — most high school graduates here head straight on to college. But for the British, the gap year is a hallowed institution, the year-long break before Uni (that’s university to you Yanks) where the budding minds of the best and [...]

I can still remember the freezing January mornings when I would run into the local deli before heading to school, salivating at the thought of getting my hands on the only food that would begin my day on a good note. I would run past the line of people waiting [...]

What’s more fun than getting off a plane and immediately being hit up for cash just to step foot outside the airport? (I’ll answer my own question. The answer is: getting the seat next to the lavatory for your 16-hour flight. Oh the stories you’ll tell.) The fact is, visas [...]

I never saw the movie “Indochine.” According to its summary, the flick was released in 1992, and is about a French naval officer and his young Vietnamese lover who are escaping banishment. They seek refuge in the labyrinthine crags erupting from the sea in Ha Long Bay. Those of you [...]

Compassion comes in many forms. You can give away your life savings, some extra change in your pocket, or a bottle of water to a thirsty child. It’s easy to change one person’s life, but much more difficult to change many. In fact, I think it’s probably near impossible to change [...]

Wondering what to do with all that leftover B-roll video from your recent trip to Southeast Asia? Why not try splicing it together into a fun, stylized 70′s-era grindhouse flick, as the cool cat andinh did in his recent “Letters from Thailand” video as seen above. I could be wrong, [...]

So you’re going to Cambodia (actually, I am in about 6 weeks, but more on that later), and once you get there all you really want to do is sunbathe nude while pointing the bottom of your feet at people as they walk by, and sticking you chopsticks upright in [...]

Seven million copies, 170 weeks and counting on the New York Times Best Seller List, and one Julia Roberts-starring movie later, Elizabeth Gilbert’s “Eat, Pray, Love,” may, surprisingly, just be entering the backlash phase that was inevitable from a book with such runaway success. We’ve seen this story before: Peter [...]

As synonymous with Vietnamese food as the country’s signature dish, pho, it turns out banh mi is actually quite a new invention for this very old culture. What, did you think the rice farmers along the Mekong Delta were munching on French baguettes back before the 19th century? As the [...]

By Maria Russo Is it possible to find enlightenment in a bowl of soup? Who knows, but it’s certainly worth a try, don’t you think? During a two-week journey to Thailand, I set out on a quest to prepare my soul for the preliminary stages of enlightenment. I wished to [...]