It’s summer.

It’s hot.

Unfortunately, I am not living anywhere near those magnificent Japanese vending machines, with their insane variety of chilled coffees and other drinks.

The wide availability of Starbucks frappuccinos in any dinky US convenience store is a step in the right direction, but it still isn’t like having a bunch of Georgia coffees to choose from (about every 10 feet in Japan.)

Yes, I know that “Georgia” is an odd name for cans of coffee, but the Japanese don’t seem to know that, or care if they do know it.

Here, feast your eyes: a whole set of Japanese coffee can photos on Flickr, and a photo group called Coffee Cans of the World.

Discoveries like that make my InterWebz world go ’round….:)

Bizarro World was a planet conceived of by DC comics in the 1960s  — it was a cube-shaped planet known as Htrae, or Earth, backwards, and everything there was an opposite, or in some way slanted version of what happened here on our blue marble patrolled by Superman.

I don’t mean any insult when I say that Canada has always struck me as Bizarro World – it feels so familiar, but everything is a few ticks different. Canada and the United States share so much in the way of ingredients – influenced by the British, the French, similar tribes of Native Americans, similar geology, topography, flora and fauna…I suppose this is why some people call it the 51^st state.

But it’s not, of course, and just as can make a number of different dishes from the same set of ingredients, our differences are significant. Cross into Canada, and you immediately notice the trivial changes: the bills have become coins, the coins are called “loonies” and everything is in metric.

The border is more than mere cartography.

The writer Clark Blaise was born in Fargo, North Dakota in 1940, to Canadian parents. He grew up shuttling back and forth across the border, and wrote about that time in an essay called “Memories of Unhousement”, which I just read in The Pushcart Book of Essays.

Blaise tackles what was the primary cultural divide in Canada historically — between the French speakers and the English speakers,  a subject that was particularly inflamed during the Trudeau administration.

“In Toronto, I have heard the familiar retort “Speak White!”.  I’ve seen my (one time) fellow Torontonians demand of young Québec tourists chattering away on the immaculate Toronto subway to please remember where they are; that so much jabbering in French is giving everyone a headache…On Prince Edward Island, in a tourist home modelled on Anne of Green Gables, the landlady, in showing us our rooms and remarking on my Québec license plates (but not on my French name) confided in me, “the white man built this country! What are the French trying to do?”

The great thing about visiting Bizarro World is that it lets your see own world with more clarity. I mean, doesn’t it seem strange, from a modern U.S. perspective, that someone would be considered “non-White” by virtue of language?

It does indeed, because  race is an entirely imaginary and flexible concept. (At various times in US history, many people who would solidly be considered “white” today — Italians, Greeks,  for instance — were considered non-white.)  “Race, as a meaningful criteria within the biological sciences, has long been recognized to be fiction,” writes Henry Louis Gates, Jr. “When we speak of “the white race” or “the black race,” “the Jewish race” or the “Aryan race,” we speak in biological misnomers, and more generally, in metaphors.”

We humans do tend to put great stock in these entirely imaginary differences, with quite real and often sickening consequences. And we, here in the United States, are now in the midst of a defining race by virtue of mother tongue — only we’re talking about people who speak Spanish and who hail from below that other border, to our South.

In all my years of travel, I’ve never had a real travel disaster. Planes have left on time. My luggage has always magically appeared on the airport carousel. Nothing has been stolen. I’ve even managed to avoid injury and illness.

And yet, despite this stellar travel record, I still take out travel insurance for each and every trip.  I like to know that if something happens, someone, somewhere, is there to help bail me out.

And so it was, that when disaster finally did strike, in the form of illness, it was the travel insurance – both my mother’s and mine – that saved the day.  

Here’s what happen.

One day we were happily cruising around the Baltic on the Star Princess, completing the last few days of our epic two and a half month cruise vacation covering half the world.  The next day,  with absolutely no warning,  Mom suffered an acute cardiac event.  Being a sea day, she was admitted to the ship’s medical center where she received immediate and excellent medical attention. 

But although the initial crisis resolved fairly quickly and Mom was soon feeling much better, the ship’s doctor felt she was far from recovered and should be disembarked to hospital at the ship’s next port of call – Olso, Norway. 

Seriously, this was not part of our game plan. We were two days away from Copenhagen where we  were planning to part ways – my mother to start the first of two bus trips around Europe and me to head home to New Zealand via  New York City and Nova Scotia.  

Instead we were stranded in Oslo, Norway -  Mom tucked up in a bed at the huge University Hospital while I alternated between talking with medical staff and talking with the insurance company.  Four days later, Mom was discharged refreshed and ready to go. I, on the other hand, was exhausted.

It was a disaster. But one with a happy ending. Mom is back in good health.  And having travel insurance means that we will will recoup our financial losses.

And there was even a small silver lining – flying home to New Zealand business class!

The Scottish Borders and the Himalayas in India do not at first seem to have much in common. Through the imaginations of the musicians of India Alba, however, the structures of Gaelic song and certain raga gats, or themes from the borders of the Himalayas connected, and formed both a bridge between the musics and a base for exploring connections.

India Alba’s debut recording was called Reels and Ragas, which is a fair description of what’s within. For their recently released second collaboration, The High Beyond, Scottish traditional musicians Ross Ainslie and Nigel Richard and classically trained Indian musicians Sharat Chandra Srivastava and Gyan Singh take things even further, creating a clear and adventurous meeting of sounds, played out in Scottish traditional tunes, original music, and compositions by groundbreaking Scottish piper Gordon Duncan. Border pipes, whistles, citterns, violins, tablas, frame drums, other sorts of percussion and an instrument called the hang are all parts of the sound. Reels, ragas, and a flashing, melodic, and tantalizing structure that comes from the meeting of these minds and sounds are parts of the music. Jog, the extended closing track, moves from raga to reel to blues and back again in music composed and played by the four men. It’s like nothing so much as a walk down a path in the borders that ends up in a villages street in the Himalayas, with a few side trips along the way. It makes a fine end to this journey and suggests roads these musicians might walk next.

Terri Hendrix is a singer and songwriter well acquainted with crossing musical borders as well, though hers are grounded in the many facets that make up Americana, folk, and Texas music. Her latest album, Cry Till You Laugh, actually started out to be a jazz recording, but in the course of researching and writing that material, she realized that the songs were calling her a a different direction.

The resulting music is a fresh mix of genres which Hendrix has often loved and visited before on record and in live performance. The jazz flavor is there, and there are blues, New Orleans music, folk narrative that, though the stories are varied, seems to draw from the life of her native Texas, songs that’d fit a country playlist, and through it all energy, hope, and a clear eyed and sometimes wry look at life’s ups and downs and what’s nexts. “When I do a show, I want people to feel like ‘Man, we just went on a ride,’ “ Hendrix says. “I love it when people cry, and when they laugh. As a performer, as a songwriter, I feel like it’s my job to get them to do both.” The fifteen tracks on Cry Till You Laugh offer a generous helping of music, emotion and idea, opening with a dark bluesy vision and closing with an uptempo affirmation of hope, possibility, and the unknown. The trip between, light to dark, laughter to tears, courage and hope, swing to jazz, to folk to country, is worth the taking.

This was my bedroom on the 18th floor of the Platinum Fashion Mall Condominiums in Bangkok, Thailand, where I lived and worked for 8 months in 2008-09.

To the left is the end of my long, glass-top working desk, where I spent weekday mornings and afternoons dutifully pounding away on that laptop, sitting in that wobbly, backache-inducing chair I bought from the Big C located around the corner on Thanon Ratchadamri. I lined that desk with a row of postcards from weekend trips to Ko Chang, Sukhothai, and Krabi, with a few greeting cards bearing the unmistakable image of King Rama mixed in for good measure.

In the bottom left corner is one of the plastic cups we saved from the unforgettable New Year’s Eve party at the Chang beer garden in front of Central World, which was tragically burned down during the protestor-government clashes earlier this year. (It’s being rebuilt to be even bigger and better, however.)

There’s the firm queen-sized bed that’s somehow made my twin bed here in Brooklyn seem even more cramped than it used to. The blinds are pulled up, and outside those sliding glass doors is our balcony, where we spent countless nights lounging on those plastic chairs, feet up on the railing, cold bottles of Chang beer in our laps, or maybe a bottle of 100 Pipers whiskey, watching and listening to the wonderful chaos below us on Thanon Petchaburi.

Tuk-tuk drivers racing each other after traffic briefly clears up at around 10pm, traffic cops relentlessly blowing their whistles from 7am – 8pm as if their lives depended on it, the occasional slow waltz of jazz music from an outdoor wedding reception at the Amari Watergate Hotel across the street. The green marquee lights on the amazing, fading relic-of-a-hotel Indra Regent, the nighttime twinkle lights around the Amari’s pool, the construction site where workers started early and ended late, but never seemed to make much more progress than moving piles of dirt from one end of the lot to the other, and back again.

There’s our washer and dryer, a day-to-day luxury enjoyed just as much as the ping-pong room and outdoor swimming pool down on the 12th floor; speaking of the pool, that looks like our bathing suits air-drying on the rack to the left. There’s one of our air conditioners, right above the glass doors, my coffee cup, the bedside lamp I rarely used. My girlfriend took perverse joy in hosing down that tiled balcony floor and driving the city’s dirt and grime into the washer drain. That red towel folded up on top of our chairs didn’t sop up water as much as it spread it; to the left, parallel to the clothes rack, you can just make out the base of the Baiyoke Tower.

I miss all of it.

It’s been over a year now since we moved back to Brooklyn. Nice to be back in the Williamsburg apartment I’ve called home for almost 7 years, to see my cat, go out with friends, be closer to family, enjoy cool fall and winter weather, run outdoors instead of on a treadmill, and to not deal with subletters. But, there’s been something gnawing at me lately… and I think it’s Bangkok.