Hi Gram,
Today was a good day. I woke with my alarm (reluctantly) and headed out on my walk. I’m finding that just listening to a podcast and walking on my own is more enjoyable than walking with the group and trying to come up with conversation. It’s probably lazier, and I should work on my conversational skills, but for now I’m going to focus on enjoying the walk for fitness instead of expending the energy on multiple fronts. The weather was unusually cool with a breeze and low humidity so I was stepping a little quicker and enjoying myself.

I decided to go walk a raised concrete path that leads through a nature preserve with trees on either side. Right after a rain, this path is full of mosquitoes and miserable. Luckily, it hasn’t rained in the past few days. With the cool breeze, I knew this was the time to take advantage of this path. The path just leads in a circle, but there’s a set of stairs at a branch about halfway around. I follow those stairs up to a rocky incline, then walk up that stone slope for a while until it levels out a little with small temples and houses on either side. Climbing all those stairs and rocky slope provides a great view over the city, then leads back to a different set of stairs down to the start of the concrete path. The route is a great walk through nature, with some incline to get the quads and lungs burning. From there, it’s just back down the same street every walk starts from.

Back at the hotel, I made my breakfast and took a shower, then got a few things done on the computer. Patty texted me and told me she was headed to Village Market, where I needed to go to top off my cell phone plan. I caught the bus over there and headed upstairs to add another month to my plan before meeting Patty near the front of the mall. We spent the next couple of hours alternating between walking around or sitting on a bench talking with the aid of Google Translate. I’ll be honest, speaking through Google Translate can be tiresome at times. Some context gets lost, some translations are imperfect, subtlety can tend to drown. Something that I’m finding, though, is that it forces me to think about what I want to say. I need to clarify my analogies and turns of phrase to give the translator a better chance of success. It also slows down the verbal firehose, the feeling like we have to fill the silence with conversation or distraction. I’ve been able to just sit with my own thoughts, comforted with the company of another person. I’ve had slow conversations, where I think about what I want to say, the clearest way that I can communicate it, then speak that into the phone. She then waits for the app to convert my thoughts, takes the time to read, then repeats the process of considering and speaking into the translator. We get to laugh along the way, look into each other’s eyes, share the humor and joy of the moment, really experience the moment, rather than firing phrases and ideas back and forth with the immediacy of the social media era. Anyway, after a joyful afternoon together, she headed to meet with some friends while I headed to the hotel.

I got back to the hotel and cleaned up a little, then met my friend Thip for dinner. I’ve eaten lots of street food here, but haven’t had the chance to sit down at many nice restaurants. It was nice to sit in a fancy-ish restaurant wearing nice clothes, awash in ambience, with a waiter tending to our every request. I had a mushroom risotto while Thip had the steamed Tasmanian Salmon, both delicious and well prepared. After dinner, we walked through the Cicada market, getting our fill of people watching and window shopping while a man danced his fingers across the piano and sang cover songs for some nice background music. I really enjoy the open air markets here. There’s always at least one musician providing some background music, the vendors aren’t pushy but have a variety of trinkets, clothes, art, and other wares to peruse, and if you’re hungry, there’s something to satiate your cravings, from healthy to gluttonous. In a world of social media and connectivity, it’s nice to just keep the phone in my pocket, engage with other tourists and locals, and have something to enjoy.

With time, the piano man took a break and we’d circled the market a couple times, so we decided to call it a night. I thanked Thip for the enjoyable evening, waited while she called a car to pick her up, and headed back to the hotel where I straightened up a little then headed straight to bed.