The Life of Shannon Arielle

6:30am

The first thing I do when I wake up is say good morning and thank the Universe for another day. I then stretch and say at least three things I am grateful for. After this, I usually stay off of the internet until I'm about to eat breakfast, but sometimes I spend thirty minutes to one hour online.

7:30am

The next thing I do is make my bed. I find that a made bed really helps set my day in the right direction. Then it's breakfast time. I make some form of oatmeal almost every morning for breakfast because it's quick, easy to make, and the possibilities for what you can put in it are vast. This particular morning I made a Peanut Butter and Jelly oatmeal, which tasted delicious. I can make a recipe post for this, if that is something anyone would be interested in.

7:50am

I usually watch something on Netflix while eating breakfast. I just finished watching all of Gilmore Girls and the revival, so I'm still trying to figure out which show Im going to watch next. Thailand Netflix has Vikings and Outlander, so I think I'm going to watch one of these next.

9:00am

After breakfast, I sometimes do yoga or some form of meditation. I've been doing yoga every day this month and I'm loving it. I used to do yoga two to three times a week a couple of years ago, but I stopped when I went off to college. After I exercise, I clean my dishes and take a shower. I tried to get a cool picture of my shower, but there isn't really a cool way to get the shot. You can see that Thailand bathrooms are different from Westernized ones. The bathroom is all one big room where as opposed to America where the shower is its own separate room.

10:00am

I put my laundry in the washer after I shower. Then comes kitten time. I usually make a cup of green tea and go sit outside of the balcony while I drink and pet all of the kittens. They are growing up so fast. This picture is of Carla. She is an adventurous little thing, but she loves to take a nap in my lap.

10:45am

Once I've had my morning kitten fix, I read. I just finished Beyond Wirds: What Animals Think and Feel, and I'm working on Thinking As Fast As I Can. I usually read for somewhere around an hour. Sometimes more or less, depending on my mood.

11:30am

I'm starting to get hungry, so I'll put beans or rice in my rice cooker to get those started for lunch. Then I hang up all of my clothes outside on my balcony to dry.

So that's my Thailand morning routine. I'm not sure how great of a post this was, but if you enjoyed hearing about my morning let me know, and I can do a night routine post as well. See ya next time.

Day 3 in Tokyo started out with another delicious breakfast. I had a salad, bread, rice, and other various fruits and vegetables. They did not have miso soup available like on the first day, so I skipped out of the soup.

Vanida wanted to go to a big Buddha Statues somewhere outside of Tokyo (and off the subway map). We asked the hotel staff for subway route directions, and they told us to take the Ginza line down to a certain stop before transferring to a different line. I got us as far as the stop and we asked a worker at the station how we transferred to get to our destination. Somehow we failed to get on the correct line. We later discovered there are two JR lines, but we took the wrong one. By the time we realized we were on the wrong line, we decided to just go back to Ueno and head to Ueno Park. When I look back now, I would have liked it if we had pursued going to the Buddha statue more than we had, but I’ve said before that jetlag is not a joke. We were tired and fancied riding the subway back to Ueno more than pursuing an unknown destination and getting lost.

We managed to make our way to Ueno Park after asking some of the Ueno Station workers how to get there. The park was stunning, even on a hot summer afternoon. There were a few temples and exhibits. Be cautious that the exhibits are temporary and cost money to enter. The exhibits we saw were not crowded while there, but I would recommend buying your tickets ahead of time, just to be on the safe side. The views of the nature inside the park had me hypnotized. I am a lover of mother nature, especially trees. This is a tourist destination, so it is difficult to take pictures without people being in the background. It is possible to get some good shots though.

After the park, we went to a nearby restaurant and ate a Japanese version of a pizza along with a Japanese salad and dessert. I liked that all the restaurants we went to, as well as many others, had menus in English. It made my life easier than just pointing at pictures, like I’ve had to do sometimes since arriving to Thailand.

Our flight was at 6:20PM, so at this point we went back to the hotel to get our luggage and make the 1 ½ hour journey back to Narita Airport. Going back to the airport was a lot easier than going into the city, as I expected it would be. I liked having the opportunity to see more of Japan through the subway windows on the way back to the airport.

We made our way to our gate and still had a couple of hours to kill. Vanida did some shopping in a Japanese candy and sweets store in the airport while I manned our cart. At this point, I was pretty much our of Japanese yen, and I didn’t want to convert anymore of my money, so I didn’t get anything. Once done shopping, we went to our gate and waited to make our journey to Bangkok!

I hope you guys enjoyed this post as much as I enjoyed writing it! Next week I will start to post about my many adventures in Thailand! See you next week!

Shannon

Check out my previous post here.

Check out my other Tokyo posts here, here, and here.

Enough about Thailand though. I have a ton of things from the past month to talk about, including my trip to Japan. I had such a fun time exploring Tokyo for two days with one of my friends. I hope the next time I get to go back I can stay longer.

While in Japan, I noticed many differences between it and the USA.

1. Bikes are ridden everywhere.

When my friend Vanida and I got off the subway and entered the city of Tokyo, I was almost ran over by a bike. That was one of many encounters I had with these deadly contraptions. I’m over exaggerating here, but I was amazed by how many people rode bikes around the city. Right in the middle of the busy sidewalks of the city. If you’ve ever been to New York City, you know how crowded Times Square gets from tourism. Imagine riding a bike through Times Square and you’ve pretty much got Tokyo summed up.

I did like the fact that people were choosing to ride their bikes around the city. It promotes a healthy lifestyle, which I believe we all could benefit from. One of the good things about Tokyo is that most of the larger more heavily trafficked streets have bike lanes available for riders to use. That doesn’t always mean they are used (hence how I almost got ran over), but it is good that they are there.

2. People are more on the go and time oriented than Americans.

On our second day in Tokyo I thought I was going to get knocked over and stomped on. Getting to work on time is no joke in this city. Vanida and I were transferring between subway lines when all of a sudden we were thrown into the fast paced mob of people walking past us or towards us as they hurried to their trains. I consider myself to be a pretty fast walker when I need to be, and I needed to be in this city, but even what I thought was fast didn’t matter here. I’ve dealt with subways in cities like New York, Philadelphia, and Washington D.C. I know what the hustle and bustle is like going to work every morning. But wow, it was a culture shock to see what underground Tokyo is like on a weekday morning.

3. People drive on the left side of the road and walk on the left side of the sidewalk.

The biggest culture shock for me has been seeing cars drive on the left side of the road and having to walk on the left side of the sidewalk. In the USA, we drive on the right side of the road, and when walking, you stay to the right. It is something we are taught to do from a young age. It was quite an adjustment trying to remember that the cars were coming from the opposite direction. But I figured it out by our second night there and was able to successfully walk across the street without waiting for the locals to go first (and without getting run over).

There are many other differences between the USA and Japan that I could talk about, but these are all I am going to share today. If you are interested in seeing more posts on my trip to Tokyo, keep an eye out because they will be up later this week!

I hope you all have had a great month. See you on Wednesday!

Shannon

Check out my previous post here.

I hope everyone is enjoying the new year! Today I want to talk about something I mentioned in my Since We Last Spoke post a couple months ago. My brother has become a Novice Buddhist Monk. I want to break this post into a couple parts. I want to explain what a Buddhist Monk is and my brother's journey so far on his path to becoming a full Buddhist Monk.

Please note that I am not an expert on this subject. I am explaining what I have come to understand about Buddhism and Buddhist Monks through my own personal studies and what my brother has told me. This post does not fully explain Buddhism in any way. If you would like to learn more about Buddhism, I suggest reading books about the religion.

Hello!

I have been sick for the past week, but I wanted to get a post up today, regardless of how I am personally feeling. I read Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert last month and absolutely loved it. Big Magic is essentially about why everyone should live his or her life creatively and gives the encouragement he or she needs to make time for living such a life.

If you'd like a more in depth summary of the book, I will link the Amazon page here.

Do not read any further unless you like spoilers.