Travel Memories 3
“Memories were a welcome reprieve from the worries of my day.” unknown
Santiago, Chile
Maktesh Ramón, Israel
Easter Island
Wroclaw, Poland
Bilbao, Spain
Hendaye, France
Pingvillar, Iceland
Mafra, Portugal
Pantanal, Brazil
Punta Del Este, Uruguay
Fly safe,
JAZ
Corona Days
“She refused to be bored chiefly because she wasn’t boring.” Zelda Fitzgerald
It is twenty something days in. I often lose track of what day of the week it is as every day is the same. I’ve developed a bit of a corona schedule for my day. They are not always in this order and sometimes I mix it up – nor do I always get up at 8.
8:00 Breakfast and internet time. I try to work on my blog for a bit but not traveling makes it more difficult. Play some scrabble.
9:30 ZOOM Yoga every Friday with Michelle Azar Aron or her face book yoga on other days. I haven’t done yoga in a year and a half and I can feel it. I try to switch off every other day with Pilates so it doesn’t hurt so much.
https://us04web.zoom.us/j/351065504?pwd=SnV3UzIxd2xVNS9ieUp0aGtHNkJWQT09
Meeting ID: 351 065 504 Password: 914811
11:00 Tai Chi / Qi Gong with Olivia Rosewood. Olivia is doing a 15 minute Qi Gong Tai Chi warm up which is a great way to start the day.
https://www.facebook.com/oliviarosewood
11:30 if I can get it to work, I do another twenty minutes of QI Gong breathing with Samuel Barnes on his face book page .
12:00 Spend time brushing my dogs hair because he is starting to get matted and dreadlocks are forming. After, we go out on the deck and run around. Today i spoke to a nice man at Mobile Groomers who told me what tools and shampoo to buy to detangle my dog and taught me what to do. This should be interesting. He felt that cutting the nails and expressing the anal glands was above my skill level. He was right. Soon I will learn how to color my own hair.
12:30 Lunch is whatever we have in the house. It usually involves peanut butter.
1:00 I am taking this Yale class online.. It is an interesting time to be taking it but when do you have this kind of time? It is called The Science Of Well Being and I’m really enjoying it. I spend one to two hours a day on it.
https://www.businessinsider.com/coursera-yale-science-of-wellbeing-free-course-review-overview
2:00 This is a good time to get dressed or at least change into a different pair of sweat pants, clean up the house and make the bed.
3:00 We go for a walk with the dog on the beach or the Speedway. The Speedway is less windy but more crowded with bikers and skateboarders. It is easier to navigate the six feet thing there than on our less crowded but very narrow streets. Everyday we have more and more quarantine gear. Almost everyone is wearing masks now. The bikers freak me out because they come so close. It feels good to get out of the house.
4:30 Meditate for half an hour.
5:30 Treadmill and some TV for half an hour. We don’t walk so fast because I have a little dog who likes to stop a lot. I’m binge watching the Gilmore Girls- anything light and mindless to avoid the constant corona virus news coverage.
6:00 Check in on family and friends – some I haven’t seen in a long time but I find myself thinking about people and wondering how they are doing.
7:00 Dinner. The BF has taken on the quarantine cooking challenge and our dinners are always creative and delicious. We have made it more interesting by comparing dinners with a couple of friends. It is not supposed to be a competition but…… We are also trying to support our favorite restaurants that are still open by doing some take out.
9:00 TV and Reading. Three seasons of Silicon Valley and Unorthodox. Now we are watching Top Chef. I have read Angle Of Repose and currently Americanah.
We have started Corona Catering for our respective kids. It is nice to do something for someone else during this time. There is a lot of me time. But instead of hair, skin and nails it is more about calming my brain, being grateful and being in the present. I wonder what changes I will make in my life and what new habits I will take with me when this is over.
Stay Safe,
JAZ
“The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.” L.P. Hartley,
Corona Quarantine Day 22. When you are lucky enough to have a lot off travel memories, it is good to have the time to stop and remember them.
Perriera, Colombia
Angor Wat, Siem Reap, Cambodia
Mekong Delta, Viet Nam
Lisbon, Portugal
Tel Aviv, Israel
Zaanse Schans, Netherlands
Amazon, Marajo, Brazil
Petra, Jordan
Abel Tasman National Park, New Zealand
Londelozi, South Africa
Fly Safe,
JAZ
Fifty Favorite Books That I Have Read On Trips, On The Beach Or At Home
i thought i would reblog this one- since we suddenly have all this time now.
“Never trust anyone who has not brought a book with them.” Lemony Snicket
How does a book make the favorites list? I remember it. I have a really bad memory and if it stays with me, it stays forever. I want a book to take me somewhere I haven’t been before, another time, another place, another pair of eyes. There are books that have taught me something and changed how I see the world. Some of them I have read more than once – under the covers with a flashlight. I identify with certain characters. There is this wonderful moment in reading where you think “You feel that way too? I thought that I was the only one.”
It was very hard to pick only fifty. My favorite books from many different stages of my life are here and in no particular order. If you missed reading any…..they are good.
The Master And The Margarita Mikhail Bulgakov (Russian)
On The Road Jack Kerouac (American)
Purge Sofi Oksanen (Finnish)
The Chosen Chaim Potok (American)
Love In the Time Of Cholera Gabriel Garcia Marquez (Colombian)
Gone With the Wind Margaret Mitchell (American)
Swann’s Way (In Search Of Lost Time) Marcel Proust (French)
To Kill A Mockingbird Harper Lee (American)
One Hundred Years Of Solitude Gabriel Garcia Marquez (Colombian)
All Over But The Shoutin’ Rick Bragg (American)
Snow Orhan Pamuk (Turkish)
The Fountainhead Ayn Rand (American)
The Prophet Kahlil Gibran (Lebanese American)
Atlas Shrugged Ayn Rand (American)
Don Quixote Miguel de Cervantes (Spanish)
The Great Gatsby F. Scott Fitzgerald (American)
The Stranger Albert Camus (French)
The Giving Tree Shel Silverstein (American)
Diary Of A Young Girl Anne Frank (Dutch)
The Old Man And The Sea Ernest Hemingway (American)
The Kite Runner Khalid Hosseini (Afghan American)
For Whom The Bell Tolls Ernest Hemingway (American)
The Unbearable Lightness Of Being Milan Kundera (Czech)
Middlesex Jeffrey Eugenides (American)
Siddhartha Herman Hesse (German)
The Things They Carried Tim O Brian (American)
Life Of Pi Yann Martel (Canadian)
The Sun Also Rises Ernest Hemingway (American)
Zorba The Greek Nikos Kazantzakis (Greek)
A Heart Breaking Work Of Staggering Genius Dave Eggars (American)
The House of The Spirits Isabel Allende (Chilean)
Catcher In The Rye J.D. Salinger (American)
The Gulag Archipelago Alexandr Solzhenitsyn (Russian)
Good Night Moon Margaret Wise Brown (American)
Wild Swans Jung Chang (Chinese)
Tuesdays With Morrie Mitch Albom (American)
The Painted Bird Jerzy Kosinski (Polish American)
The Prince Of Tides Pat Conroy (American)
Man’s Search For Meaning Viktor Frankl (Austrian)
Slaughterhouse Five Kurt Vonnegut (American)
War And Peace Leo Tolstoy (Russian)
Metropolitan Life Fran Liebowitz (American)
Fly safe,
JAZ
Travel Memories Part 1
“What I like about photographs is that they capture a moment that’s gone forever, impossible to reproduce.”
As I was sitting home and feeling sorry for myself and my cancelled trips, my friend said to me “you are so lucky that you traveled the world before all this.” I went through my photos and realized that she was right.
Poros, Greece
Dubrovnik, Croatia
Budapest, Hungary
Venice, Italy
Train to Iso Nagaoka, Japan (bird flu)
Ephesus, Izmir, Turkey
Sacred Valley, Urubumba, Peru
Ayuthetta, Thailand
Salt fields, Salta, Argentina
Uluru Rock,Australia
Fly and stay safe,
JAZ
“This morning when I was at the post office two people with masks entered and there was TOTAL PANIC! Then they said:”This is a robbery and we all calmed down….” unknown
Fly safe,
JAZ
Travel In The Time Of Corona
“Please let me know if there is anything I can do to help you from getting me sick” unknown
Eventually all those people stocking up on supplies at Costco are going to have to leave their houses and the Corona Virus will still be here. It will lighten up in the spring and summer as viruses do, and come back in the winter. It is something we will learn to live with like Aids and Airport Security. If you have not been addicted before, hand sanitizer is the new normal. Someone you know or maybe you will get it and next year there will be a vaccine and things will calm down.
The decision to travel or not is a tough one. I just had to cancel my month long trip to Germany and France in mid April. The first part was a tour with the Jewish Heritage Museum though the Alsace region. I was particularly excited to go to the baths in Baden Baden – a bucket list thing for me. Afterward, I was meeting the BF In Lyon and we were traveling to Marseille, Cassis, Aix and later staying in a beautiful winery in the region. We would have ended up in Paris for a few days. It was a lot of planning and involved planes, trains and cars. I have not cancelled part two yet.
I know it is the right thing to do at this time but when it comes to travel-all reasoning disappears. I have terrible travel envy and the cure for me is planning a trip. I always have something to look forward to and now I don’t – other than maybe not getting sick and dying – which is big.
At the moment it feels like I am sitting at home thinking about traveling a lot more than I am actually traveling.
I’ve always had anxiety and lived my life in fear so this collective fear doesn’t feel strange to me. The best we can do is to wash our hands and avoid people who are coughing. I’m germaphobic so I do this anyway. I was way ahead of my time with social distancing. I am no longer weird and can proudly touch things with my elbow and not hug hello.
Life is tough and unpredictable .No matter how well-thought-out your plans might be, they’re bound to be disrupted at some point. Don’t take it personally, it’s just life and like everything else this will pass.
And by the way, thanks for freaking out and buying all the toilet paper.
Fly safe,
JAZ
“Wash your hands like you just got done slicing jalapeños for a batch of nachos and you need to take your contacts out.”Unknown
As the Corona Virus spreads around the world, health officials are saying washing your hands a minimum of twenty seconds with soap is helpful to prevent infection.
Here are some things you can do in your head for twenty seconds while washing your hands.
Sing Happy Birthday twice.
Sing the chorus of Jolene. Dolly Parton.
Recite as much of the Jabberwocky by Lewis Carroll as you can remember or any other poem you had to memorize in school.
Sing the first verse of God Save the Queen, the British National Anthem.
Hum Grieg’s In The Hall Of Mountain King.
Sing the chorus of Africa. ToTo.
Recite the first paragraph of the Declaration of Independence or any speech you had to memorize in High School.
Hum Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata.
Sing Mambo Number Five. Lou Bega.
Sing the chorus of Raspberry Beret. Prince.
Hum Ravel’s Bolero.
Sing the chorus of Truth Hurts. Lizzo.
Hum the March Of The Toreadors from Bizet’s Carmen.
Sing the chorus of Owner Of A Lonely Heart. Yes.
Say the famous Star Trek speech. “Space: the final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise. Its continuing mission: to explore strange new worlds. To seek out new life and new civilizations. To boldly go where no one has gone before.”
Fly safe,
JAZ
Planning A Destination Spa Vacation
‘Almost everything will work again if you unplug it for a few minutes, including you.”Anne Lamott
If you haven’t done a spa vacation, (especially if you are a guy), you need to drop those prejudices. It is not just rose scented facials, Swedish massage and regimented activities.
These days the options for activities are so varied. There are so many different kinds of destination spas. The focus can be on life style, de-stressing, trying new forms of exercise, and there is nothing wrong with having a great massage every day.
The minute I walk into a spa, my body and brain relaxes. When your skin looks better in a mirror after a facial, you do feel better. It’s all about pampering and unwinding.
It is best to plan as much as you can in advance so when you get there, you don’t have to think. If you are a person who wants a lot of relaxation time, schedule less activities. If you are a person like me, who wants to try everything, your day will be full. Go with the flow of the spa you are at and try those signature activities that you can’t do anywhere else. Remember to leave your cell phone in the room and stay in the present moment.
I don’t always have to be lost in an airport or navigating a foreign city to have a good time. I’m privileged to be able to travel any way that I can. Luxury travel to one place involves the choice of a cheaper trip next time. Curative travel is good too. It helps to incorporate wellness travel into your world.
I’m about to educate/brainwash the BF as to why he needs to do this for his birthday. He is skeptical and pretending that it sounds great. Self care is incredibly important. He will come back rejuvenated and ready to take on the world again – but he does not know that yet.
Fly safe,
JAZ
LA Loves Kobe
“If you’re afraid to fail, then you’re probably going to fail. It’s the one thing you can control. You are responsible for how people remember you—or don’t. So don’t take it lightly.”Kobe Bryant
Fly safe,
JAZ
Travel Well, Fly Safe 
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