GUERRILLA YOGA

Last week I had the opportunity to photograph one of Busan’s most intrepid yogis in what could best be described as a guerrilla yoga operation. When Mindy—a yoga instructor and co-founder of the new holistic health center Kaizen Korea—first mentioned a guerrilla yoga shoot, I envisioned her in the middle of Jagalchi Fish Market with rubber-suited ajummahs flinging squid in the background.

Alas, when we arrived at Jagalchi we could barely move in the crush of people shopping for Chuseok (Korea’s Thanksgiving). Luckily we didn’t have to look far to locate empty warehouses, loading docks, and the atmospheric nooks and crannies of Busan’s Old Book Alley. Though yoga is catching on in Korea, Mindy’s out-in-the-open asanas quickly drew crowds of confused onlookers. As she balanced precariously on a crumbling ledge of concrete, one particularly befuddled boy asked, “Why here?”

At least to Mindy, the answer is obvious: Why not?

CHIANG MAI POSTCARD

It's actually been a few weeks since I was in Chiang Mai, but today I remembered a detail about the city that caught my eye. In several neighborhoods, I noticed a thin white string connecting the houses like a giant spiderweb. Were they using an old-fashioned tin can telephone to communicate with their neighbors? Nope. Turns out that monks create this yarn network between the homes of Buddhists to symbolically unify the neighborhood's believers. What a simple but cool way to represent community.

A GIRL'S VALUE

On our visit to a hill tribe village in the mountains surrounding Chiang Mai, one house stood out from the rest. Elaborately carved in teak, with a shiny new pickup truck parked in front, it towered over its muddy, dilapidated neighbors. The owners of this house, the village chief explained, had sold their two daughters to a sex trafficker. The family renovated their home and the girls were never heard from again.

On another outing, we stopped for coffee at a roadside cafe where the proprietor--a gregarious middle-aged man--happened to speak English. Without prompting, he began telling us how he and his wife had tried for years to conceive, and just when they were about to give up, she became pregnant with a baby girl. While his wife finished blending our mochas, he gushed about their daughter as if she were a Fulbright Scholar (she's five). "You should hear her pronunciation," he said, imitating a British accent. "It's better than mine!"

OF HUMAN BONDAGE

My friend Nhu is a normal 20-year old girl: she studies hard, blasts Beyonce from her iPhone, and knows the best place for a cheap pedicure. It's hard to believe that when Nhu was 12 years old, her family sold her to an Australian sex tourist for $300. Nhu was locked in a hotel room with her rapist for three days, and her grandmother used the proceeds to buy food for the family.

Sadly, Nhu's rape and exploitation are "normal" for an estimated 3 million women worldwide, in countries like Cambodia, Thailand, India, and even the U.S. The good news is that Nhu's story doesn't end like so many others--with her permanently enslaved and beaten into submission at a brothel. Instead, Nhu is now the spokeswoman for an organization that prevents young girls from being sold into the sex trade. By providing girls from poor villages an education and a safe community to thrive in, Remember Nhu hopes to protect girls like Nim and Pat (pictured above) from the horrors that Nhu experienced.

KOREAN STREET STYLE #2

Koreans are fantastically photogenic. Whenever a camera is pointed in my direction I invariably look like a doofus, but Koreans seem to have a natural awareness of all their best angles. (One notable exception being the ajummahs, whose positions in the public baths are enough to give me nightmares.) Thus, when I asked some of Joe's students if I could take their photos, I didn't end up with a single bad portrait. Every one produced his or her own unique pose. A result of natural bodily grace or hours of practice in front of the mirror? I couldn't tell.

ON THE MOVE

The summer heat is starting to bear down on Busan, and I for one am ready to get out of Dodge. Luckily our summer plans will be taking us to more tropical climates, where warm temperatures and heavy rain are the ingredients for lush, green landscapes scattered with gold stupas. I'll be leaving for Thailand in mid-July to volunteer with Remember Nhu, an organization that aims to end child sex trafficking by caring for girls at risk of being sold into the sex trade.

A couple weeks later (after he gets done teaching Korean summer camp), Joe and I will meet up in Bangkok and (fingers crossed) get our visas for Myanmar. In case you haven't heard, Myanmar is on everyone's travel radar since democratic elections and the release of Aung San Suu Kyi took place this spring. We're hoping that by visiting for a few weeks during the off-season, we'll beat the hordes of backpackers bound to descend on the country this winter. Hands down, I'm most excited about seeing the monastery of the jumping cats. Yep, it's a real thing: Google it.

INTO THE WOODS

Say that the leaves are harvested
when they have rotted into the mold.
Call that profit. Prophesy such returns.

-Wendell Berry, "Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front"

We haven't found many quiet places in Korea. Granted, we're limited to the spots we can access by subway, bus, or walking (like Beomeo-sa, pictured above). There may very well be a temple in the woods that is just as quiet as it was a few hundred years ago, but the ones we've visited have all been crawling with snack vendors and fashionable hikers. Still, if you fight past the sightseers and step off the path, it's possible to take refuge in "the two inches of humus that will build under the trees every thousand years."