Clare Elsewhere

One of the stranger things about traveling, or just leaving home in general, is finding your new definition of home. Whether that's the hotel room you use as your orbital hub, the classroom you tend to sleep in, or the cafe that remembers your iced coffee order with no sugar- it holds some sense of belonging, an anchor in your wanderings. Awful (poem?) tag found in the night market In Thailand, I've been looking for that. Trying to find some place that really resonates, allows me to find peace and think, reflect- allows me to just be, rather than constantly looking, observing, experiencing. Trying to find some place that resonates with who I am, and with what I'm looking for. This becomes exponentially harder as I don't really have an image or even a ballpark for either of those inquiries. I've been in Thailand for just over two weeks now, and I'm in the process of picking a region and school for the next few months. I'm in the process of moving a

Tonight, barring major catastrophe, marks my last night in the United States for 137 days. In that time span, I have a lot of expectations, a lot of aspirations, and I'm looking for a lot of inspiration. Thailand lies ahead, months of learning, teaching, exploring and adventuring-- but also months of uncertainty. As my mother would like to remind me, Thailand is not in the most comforting of political states currently. And by that, I mean it's a full-blown coup . We've done a fair amount of research, and that itself is not an extreme detriment to travel- Thailand's had 19 coups in 80 years , so this, if anything, is giving me a realistic experience. King Bhumibol Adulyadej, the world's longest standing monarch. In Thailand he has semi-divine status and criticism against him is met with defamation charges and severe jail time. The part about it all that is actually giving me pause- not the martial law, not the curfew, not the uncertainty about the future go