We’ve been in Pai since Sunday afternoon when we arrived by bus from Chiang Mai. The name of the town is pronounced with a hard “B” sound, as in, “Bye Bye”, not, “American Pie”. The weather is quite different up here in the mountains of Northern Thailand and we wake up to the chilly morning air protected by a couple of blankets and a mosquito net in our cabin. The cabin is the ideal setting for a little morning stretch and exercise, complete with a straw mat and a beautiful view of the gardens.

We decided to skip the included “American Breakfast” as it’s called and cross the street for something a bit more interesting and healthy. We first dropped off our dirty laundry, also across the tiny street, where they wash your clothes for 20 Baht (50 cents) and it’s ready by 6PM the same day. The breakfast cafe was small and charming with statues, flowers and little offerings of food in dishes which the passing dogs seemed to enjoy very much. Tamar had a fruit, yogurt and muesli cup and I enjoyed a mushroom crepe and some very strong and good coffee.
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Less than 12 hours left until our flight is supposed to take off at noon today. We hope the storm that’s coming in tonight won’t delay the flight. We only have a 2 hour layover at the Narita International Airport near Tokyo and the connecting flight only flies once a day. If we miss that, we may need to spend another 24hrs at the airport. Normally that would be an opportunity to get out and see some stuff but, expecting temperatures from the 60′s up to 90′s in SE Asia, we weren’t planning on taking any winter clothing on this trip and Japan’s winter is almost as cold as it is here in New York!
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For the past few days, I’ve been checking the weather forecast in Phu Quoc (dreamy island, pristine beach, sunny destination and my home for a week in about 4 weeks). To make myself feel even better, I open the NY weather forecast in a new tab right next to Phu Quoc weather and smile…

This is my 3rd winter in New York and I am definitely not getting used to it. True, I stopped converting to Celsius (it’s too scary to see those temperatures in Metric system) but that doesn’t mean I stopped complaining. In Israel, there’s only 1 thing you can always count on-gorgeous weather. It’s sunny, it’s warm and winter there feels more like a week long mistake than a real season. As soon as New York winter starts, I am all ready to go away to some tropical destination, I check plane ticket prices daily and have a mental suitcase all ready to go.

Leaving the cold, the rain and the snow in a few days is one of the things I am most looking forward to.

So goodbye coat, goodbye scarf, hat, gloves, socks and hat, I shall not miss you at all.