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Our guest house in the Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan So I’m with friends hiking in the Himalayas, and we run into a Buddhist monk who is climbing up to a monastery where he will spend the next eight years in silent meditation . As our guide explains this, Rich grabs some of the monk’s stuff,…

Parents have a hard time enforcing clothing standards when local girls are wearing outfits like this to church. “So what do you think?” a rookie expat asked me this morning. “Should I let my two daughters, aged fourteen and seventeen, go off on their own, taking the bus from Seville to Granada?” Parents bringing teens…

“Edgy” and “outrageous” aren’t words I usually use to describe religious-themed holiday figurines, but a few days ago, strolling around a street market in Seville, I was gobsmacked by some of the latest offerings. If you don’t happen to live in a Mediterranean country, you may not know that here, an event as important as…

I had no idea what they were plotting… “I don’t want to make a big deal out of it,” I said to Rich and two friends some years ago en route to Nantucket. “In fact, let’s just pretend I’m not even having a fortieth birthday this weekend.” “Fine, great, no problem,” they all said. “No…

“You can’t buy happiness,” an American woman once told me. “But you can put a down payment on it.” If you’re looking for ways to invest in your own happiness, you’ll find it pays to focus on experiences, rather than things, according to San Francisco State University researchers. “The study,” reported Science Daily , “demonstrates…

Great road stories often make me want to grab the author by the lapels and exclaim, “Are you insane ?” But in a good way. Take George Mahood, a perfectly normal chap who decides to set off on a 1000-mile journey penniless, without luggage, and naked except for a pair of boxer shorts emblazoned with…

“I could never live abroad, it just plain costs too much,” announced one retiree, blithely ignoring the fact her home was in an area of California where the cost of living was more than twice the national average, and the median cost of a house was upwards of $900,000. A lot of my US friends…

“I spent a weekend here last spring,” a newbie expat told me, “and I loved Seville so much that I just flew right home to San Francisco, sold everything, and moved here!” Six months later, deeply disappointed that Seville didn’t match her glorious, sun-drenched, wine-soaked memories, she was gone. The antidote to Syndrome de Paris…

There’s nothing like a little brush with the forces of evil to cheer people up. Apparently we all need to let ourselves be terrified occasionally, if only to prove to ourselves that we are strong enough to handle it. That’s why we embrace horror movies, ghost stories, Ouija boards, and Halloween. In America, we spend…

Normally when I meet a friend for drinks after work, I don’t need to go through two security checkpoints, have my picture taken, and sign a non-disclosure agreement. But this was one of the Bay Area’s hottest high-tech superstars and it was just a wee bit twitchy about its privacy. “Don’t even think about taking…