Art By Tali Landsman

It is always a bit disorienting to return home after a long trip. It has taken us more than a week to get over the jet-lag and adjust to the new time zone, the dry mountain air and the high altitude. The return of my daily nagging worries and petty obsessions is not something that I like to pick up again after traveling, but it happens. Suddenly I am worried about my weight, about the Greek economy that affects our investments, about all the catastrophes that happen all around the world, away from these quiet vast mountains that I call home. On the positive side, it is summer in the mountains and the sky is impossibly blue. The Aspen Music Festival is about to start, and Jules has already booked for us some lovely classical concerts.  We took out the outdoor furniture that we bought last summer, and placed them on our deck. Despite logic, it feels so careless to put such nice new outdoor living sofas outdoors, where the chipmunks and lizards, the ants and the cicadas, the deer and ...

Yangon, Myanmar - Trip Notes  From Heho airport near Inle lake, we flew on KBZ Airlines to Yangon. Yangon used to be called Rangoon during the British occupation, and "Dagon" before that.  Yangon means "A peaceful place," or a place with no more wars. We stayed for five days in the historic Strand Hotel, housed in one of the many old colonial buildings that still stand in this city. It is a classic luxury boutique hotel, with a butler service on each of its two floors that delivered tea and cookies, fruit and English newspapers to our room at any time of day, and at no extra charge. The waterfront of downtown Yangon is occupied by ugly customs warehouses and shipping buildings, and the waters of the Yangon River are not even visible through the dense and busy port. There are many beautiful buildings from the colonial era that are still standing.   Some have been renovated, but most are in various stages of disintegration. The cost of renovating the block-long coloni...

            Inle Lake, Myanmar- Trip Notes Nestled in the Shan Mountains, Inle Lake (also Inlay lake) is a shallow lake in the middle of Myanmar, south-east of Mandalay.   It took us about eight hair-raising hours to get to the Lake from Bagan, with a driver who made the journey unnecessarily stressful. It could have been a fun drive. When we entered the Shan Mountains, the summer heat dropped to pleasant temperatures and the mountains were green and lush. There are many lovely resorts servicing the many tourists who come to enjoy the Lake. We chose to stay at the Novotel Inle Lake Hotel, which is almost brand new development.   They have done an amazing job in designing luxurious villas on the Lake, surrounded by lotus flowers and water gardens. Our villa was fabulous, with a dreamy bed covered with jasmine flowers and crisp white sheets with a romantic mosquito netting, which we did not need, since the villa had great air conditioning and n...