Travels and Travails of a Farang

 VIC@PUREBIRGHT (21 February 2012)

This picture was taken in Juliette, Georgia (7 July 2007).

I am a farang. Farang is a new word I learned from Thailand. It means "foreigner." What a brief but bulls-eye description of myself. Yes, I consider myself a farang, minus the Western connotation of the word. I have been a foreigner to many things, places, peoples, and many others.

I am a farang. I think it’s an apt description of my nature. I always keep moving, traveling—never contended to be placed in just one side of a corner. I love to travel, most especially in areas I am not familiar, in places I do not know. I am always excited to learn new names for new things, places, and persons. I like to live and experience other cultures. It helps me understand people as people.

I am a farang. I like the stance of a foreigner, always not familiar, never contended of what he/she already knows. I am and will continue to search for new meanings, even in most familiar places. For after all, I am a foreigner to myself— a farang to my own space, my own place, my own workplace, and my own community. I am a foreigner to others— a farang to other spaces, other places, other workplaces, and other communities. My life will be devoted to learning myself and others: my space, place, workplace, and community as well as others' spaces, places, workplaces, and communities.

I am a farang. I have accepted the idea that I will forever be a student in this University of Life. I will learn, and re-learn. I will keep learning. My life will be devoted to forever searching and learning new things and new meanings.

I am a farang. I travel, literally and figuratively. I will fill this blog of my travels—past, present, and future prospects. My goal is to travel the whole world. I will cross desserts, fly over continents, scale mountains, sail seas and oceans. And I will record my experiences in this blog.

I am a farang. After all, I am but a traveler on this planet, living a life in a borrowed time and space. Sooner (and I hope not soon), I shall be gone. I hope my journeys have and will be full of meanings and sources of blessings to others. I will not keep to myself what I learned in these travels. I want to share them to others, to the interested public.

I am a farang. This planet is not my permanent home. I only pass once in this life. I don’t intend to come back in a cycle. My permanent home is where my faith tells and will bring me.

I am a farang. My travels were, are, and, as expected, will be, spiced with travails. These travails are the spices of my life. I want to record them too; they make my stories complete. What kind of a story would this life be without complicating actions, climax, and denouement? My travails are marks of my humanity—sinful, temporal, incomplete, weak. I embrace them with full humility. And in honest admission, I say, "I am living under grace. Yes, I am living a borrowed life under grace."

I am a farang. I hope the travels and travails of this farang will give joys, hopes, inspirations, lessons, and insights to many others. I hope. That’s my prayer. Then, I shall be ready to go. After all, I am a farang.