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I'm sort of obsessed with Thai curries, and if it weren't for that I'd be more obsessed with other Thai dishes. I love the balance of bitter, salty, spicy, and sweet, and I'm always trying to guess which ingredient in each dish supplies one of those four elements.

I've never had the budget to attend a Thai cooking school (which are everywhere in Thailand), but I made it a point on my recent two-week trip to the country to allow for one. Since I was spending close to a week on Ko Chang, I chose the class at Blue Lagoon on Khlong Prao, because I'd stayed at the guesthouse on my Lonely Planet research trip last year and loved it. The food was always spot-on, with most of the produce coming from an organic garden, and made even better by the ambiance of small eating pavilions that hover over the lagoon. Friendly staff rounded out the offerings, so I booked a 1200-baht (about $35USD), five-hour class.

We all have food poisoning stories from the road, I'm sure. I have a new one every week here in China. But was there ever a time when you willingly, knowingly, ate something that was bound to make you sick? So sick that you end up delirious in Panjim, India, trying to hitchhike to the hospital at three in the morning? So sick that your hotel owner and random new travel buddy have to arrange transport to said hospital, which has flickering lights and bloody cotton balls lying around?

It was because of the grapes.

A month earlier, just after I arrived in Delhi, I saw a man pushing a large handcart full of wet, dirty grapes. They glistened in the morning sunlight, and looked absolutely like something that would make you sick. I clearly recall turning to my friend Jen and saying, "Do not let me eat grapes while in India."

Flash forward a month later. I'm by myself in Gokarna, a beach town south of Goa. There's a nice hike to some isolated beaches, and I set out alone. On the way, I meet a nice middle-aged Indian man. We leap-frog each other several times over the course of the hike, and make casual conversation. After spending a couple of hours on the beach, I run into him again on the hike back. He is sitting beneath a tree, eating grapes. I am hot and tired and hungry, and he has been very friendly in a non-menacing way throughout my afternoon. He offers me grapes, and out of politeness I don't feel I can refuse. The scene changes to slow motion as he hands a small bunch to me, and I pop them in my mouth, one bacteria-ridden bite at a time.

In mid-November I set up camp in Kunming, China, in order to study Mandarin. I didn't want to live at a hostel for several months, so I perused the classifieds at GoKunming (no Craigslist here) and found a room.

Following is a highlight of all the quirks of my apartment, but I want to stress that this post isn't a complaint -- my apartment is luxurious by Chinese standards and I'm very grateful for it. I simply want to point out the differences in standards between China and the US.

First, I have four doors to get through to get inside. I live inside a gated complex, complete with uniformed guards, and I use a card to open both the gate and the door to my stairwell. I live on the 6th floor (though in the States it would be considered the 7th), and there is no elevator. The lights inside my stairwell operate on a sort of "clapper" system that registers the sounds of footsteps on the cement and turns the lights on. I usually have to stamp a foot at least once on my way up to turn a light on, an act I still take incredible delight in even after nearly two months -- it makes me feel like a little kid. Once at my apartment, there's a large metal door to open and then a regular wooden door to go through. I'm not sure why there is so much security, as I've always felt relatively safe in Kunming, but perhaps I have the four doors and the security guards to thank for that.

Gallery: My Chinese Apartment

On my trip to Xishuangbanna a couple of weeks ago, I was able to time a trip to Xiding with its weekly Thursday market. A vibrant, colorful affair filled with photogenic Hani women, various animal parts, string tobacco, and pretty much everything else under the bright morning sun, the market was an obvious draw to the town. But Xiding is also a great place to hike around the rolling hills, as there are many minority villages in the area.

On the map, Xiding is very close to Menghze, where we stayed the night before. We caught an early-morning bus, bumping along a dusty, flat road in the midst of dormant rice paddies. After a completely straight thirty minutes, our bus hit the mountains and started climbing. I had no idea Xiding was in the mountains, so it was a pleasant surprise to measure our progress by the views we were gaining. The bus twisted up hillsides for another 30 minutes, finally reaching a sunny, thin-aired Xiding.

We saw only one hotel, which cost my friend and me each about $2.50 for a shared room. The bathroom was in a back courtyard, next to the smokehouse. We weren't to have electricity until much later that night, so using the windowless bathroom was an exercise in bravery.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I was traveling with a friend who was researching the relationship between tourism and minority crafts. We decided to follow the dirt road that continued out of Xiding in the hopes that we would come across a minority village, and after two hours of walking along the cultivated hillsides, we found what we were looking for. Shaded by thick growth, a small village full of wood homes with thatched roofs sat quietly, looking at the same view as Xiding.

Gallery: Xiding

Last week I was treated to the kind of experience travelers look for but seldom - at least in my case - come across. An hour up a dirt road outside a small town in western Yunnan province, China, a dozen women from the Wa tribe donned their ceremonial clothing and spent the afternoon dancing for me and my friend. All they asked was that we take photos and video of them, since there's very little recorded of either their clothing or dances.

But let me back up. I spent the past week traveling around Xishuangbanna, an area in southern Yunnan, with My Friend the Fulbright Scholar (MFFS). MFFS is in China on a scholarship to study the relationship between tourism and minority crafts. The majority of the Chinese population is Han, but there are dozens of tribes in China that have their own clothing, language, and customs, and as might be expected, their ways of life are changing.

Though we'd visited several other minority villages during our trip, seeing the Wa was a particular goal for MFFS. Not only is the group somewhat elusive due to its rural locations along the Burmese border, but their mysterious status is amplified by the fact that they were headhunters until the 1970s.

Our luck began with our arrival in Menglian, a small town close to Burma and just north of Xishuangbanna. We planned on buying a ticket for an early morning bus to a Wa village, but read in our trusty Lonely Planet that a helpful cafe owner named Nan Qing was Wa. We sought her out, and she immediately chatted MFFS up, cooked us dinner, gave me the jacket off of her back, and arranged transport to her childhood village the next morning.

Gallery: The Wa Women of Nanya

Whenever I tell people my latest travel plans, I usually get the same response: "Oh, you're so lucky - I wish I could do that." What they don't realize is that they can do that -- I've made travel a priority and set my life up around it. I could have made a nice down payment on a house in my late twenties, but I chose to spend the money on a round-the-world-trip, for example. But despite the perceived glamor (or luckiness) of someone who leads a nomadic life, there are times when never being in one place for long can really suck. Here are five reasons:

1. It can be difficult to make deeper connections with people. When you're just passing through, you're just passing through. The older I get, the more I feel this -- sure, I make friends easily, but the odds of ever meeting up with people again are slim. It makes me sad.

2. People at home go on with their lives, and you become less and less a part of them. With Facebook, I'm privy to all the fun I'm missing at home. I always reconnect easily with my best friends, but seeing the the photos of celebrations and reading the status updates of those having cozy holidays can intensify the loneliness that my solo travel occasionally leads to.

3. Sometimes it feels like your life is standing still. Everyone else is doing age-appropriate things like having babies and advancing their careers. Suddenly, most of my friends have decent salaries and guest rooms - weird. I'm still sleeping in budget hotels and living out of the same backpack I bought six years ago.

With huge distances to cover, long-haul bus travel is a norm in China. The good news is that overnight buses here are set up for long distance travel; rather than seats that recline, these buses have actual beds in them. The bad news is that there tends to be no lines drawn between what I consider "indoor" behavior (sitting quietly, reading, or staring out the window) and "outdoor" behavior (spitting, screaming on your mobile phone, and smoking). However, the journeys aren't anything a seasoned traveler can't handle, especially one used to being in China.

It's hard to photograph the inside of the bus, since three rows of bunk beds run the length of the vehicle. Not surprisingly, the beds are narrow and short, making it difficult for a Westerner to get comfortable but certainly better than sitting upright. Luggage, sacks of rice, and shoes are all tucked under the bottom bunk.

My ride from Menglian to Kunming wasn't my first trip on a Chinese sleeper bus but it was my longest. Eighteen hours is a long time to do any one thing, and riding a Chinese bus is no exception. Before we left, we found out that our rickety vehicle was twenty years old and making its final run. Despite maneuvering massive vehicles, drivers routinely pass slower cars on blind corners, careening around turns with no guardrail. I find it best to just not look out the window, and hope for the best. My traveling companion required pharmaceutical help to deal with her nerves.

Gallery: My Chinese Sleeper Bus