I met this fellow earlier today just before my Tai Chi class on the beach. Not sure if he was on his way from a late party or on his way to work and just needed a brief workout before the day began. This weekend, which, incidentally, is our last in Vietnam, I’ve been participating in a workshop called the Happiness Program. It’s designed by a local Vietnamese chapter of the global organization The Art of Living and is primarily focused on breathing exercises, including ancient Pranayama and the So Hum mantra.

The premise behind the proclaimed benefits of So Hum meditation I find very interesting. When practiced with “So” on inhale and “Hum” on exhale, both at various intensities and intervals, the combination not only regulates our breathing pattern temporarily, it’s also supposed to make it easier to take considerably deeper breaths and thereby achieve a level of calmness that can have all kinds of physiological and psychological benefits.

While the benefits might sound like hyperbole, at its core, the effects of these breathing exercises seem perfectly logical to me. Basically, rapid breathing, if not too shallow, will naturally oxygenize the entire body – without demanding much physical exertion. And as our brain is preoccupied with maintaining and adjusting to the breathing mantra’s variable rate, once the session is over, you can’t help but feel really, really relaxed.

An equal measure of theory on how to pair the breathing methods along with a “Happiness mindset” is also part of the workshop’s curriculum. Some of it I’ve heard before, but all of it makes good sense.

Tomorrow we’ll be provided with a version of the breathing technique recommended to practice for 30-40 days in order to see tangible and lasting results.

We met this beautiful cat in the hat while having dinner at a great little food court near our apartment here in Da Nang.

I don’t remember anyone reading Cat In The Hat or any other children’s books when I was a kid. I’m sure that it happened, I just don’t have any memories of who, when or what. Curiously, I do recall owning several of the Dr. Seus books and that they were among a bunch of other things I had in my room, including a windup Evil Knievel motorcycle, a bunch of busted-up Hot Wheel cars and possibly even a Raggedy Ann doll – all collected in a huge, brown wicker basket stored in a closet. My four year younger brother Tyko and I shared that room, so I’m sure the basket was emptied regularly on the floor.

When Elle was about 4 or 5, I ordered the entire Dr. Seus series and we’d read them together on nights when we didn’t make up short stories about a girl named Isabel and the adventurous life she led.

For those of you unfamiliar with The Cat in the Hat…it’s a children’s book written and illustrated by Theodor Geisel under the pen name Dr. Seus.

I don’t remember exactly when I shot this photo of the Öresund Bridge, which connects Sweden and Denmark. It’s a late autumn or early winter scene, for sure. Infrequent reports from friends and news outlets in southern Sweden keep me aware of how shitty the weather is there now. Yes, I feel thankful for not being part of that scene. No, there is no Schadenfreude involved here. It just feels like I’ve filled my quota of “bad weather living” for a spell.

The last time we had a fall without a fall was back in 2013-2014 when we lived in Santa Monica, California for 8 months. I tend to romanticize about those intense months in that small, crummy apartment, perfectly located about a block from the ocean. Most of my days there were spent either surfing in the Pacific or photographing life on and off the beach. After some Kakfka-esque beauracratic wrestling with the state department to get Charlotte’s Green Card processed in due time (apparently, she can now pick it up whenever she wants at the embassy in Stockholm), we shortened our stay and left the apartment on Idaho Avenue and 2nd Street mid-February 2014.

After a short and freezing stint in Vejbystrand, the Raboffs ended up living for about four months in a comfy corporate apartment smack in the middle of sweltering Bangkok.

Creatively, both 2013 and 2014 were unusually productive years for me. And maybe I’m ascribing too much here, but I really want to believe that the reprieve from the cold and dark Swedish fall and winter that year had such a significant positive effect on me, that the benefits spilled over onto several of the following years, even though we, for the most part, stayed put and endured the six, seven months of DDR season in Sweden.

Meanwhile, here in Da Nang, the sun is slowly but steadily returning. The chilly weather Is also finally on the retreat. Not a day too soon, either. We’ve had a surprising number of cold and dreary weeks here. It’s like a blanket of drab, sunless weather that isn’t dissimilar to what in Southern California is referred to as “June Gloom”. Only here, this can also mean that a giant cloud of smog from somewhere in China sails in and hovers above us for a few days, sounding off alarms about severely poor air quality.

Now with the climate improving, my morning Qigong/Tai Chi practice with Garry and Niayn on the beach is a more consistent happening. Yet every time I see someone walking past us with a longboard under their arm, the urge to join in on some daybreak surfing is almost irresistible.

Regretfully, I didn’t bring a board with me (it’s neatly tucked away on top of a load of stuff somewhere in our storage room in Malmö) and the rental places here don’t open until 8:00 am-ish.

Want to catch at least a couple of more waves before we leave South East Asia in a few weeks. Worse case, I’ll have to wait until we get to Malaga and venture on an excursion to the beaches of Tarifa.

This is the young Tai Chi student Ms. Huong during today’s filming. Her teacher Garry supervised the fan form routine she performed and I shot at what turned out to be a most formidable location – one of many, many construction sites here in Da Nnag – somewhere in an alley a few blocks from our favorite breakfast place, Puna Coffee.

We’ve now moved to new dwellings. It’s our ninth move since arriving here in Asia more than two months ago. Which I know to some sounds absolutely mad. But when you consider we’ve traveled to three different cities, two of which were visited twice, it’s really not all that weird. Unlike many, Charlotte and I find that how and where we live is incredibly important to our ability to function emotionally and creatively.

We’ll be installed at this new place, a so-called “aparthotel”, for the remainder of our stay in the country. Instead of a partial ocean view (which we had at the old place and admittedly miss), we now have this really strange view of a driving school’s driving course.

The view got me thinking. At the beginning of the year, I was in Singapore at the behest of Terranet, a long-time Swedish client within the automotive safety space. They had sent me to meet with a representative for Nanyang Technical University and the fellow I met there guided me around the university’s test track for autonomous vehicles. And guess what? It looked similar to the driving course directly behind our new digs, which I time-lapsed this morning.

Shot this at 05:55 today – a few minutes before and not at all far from where Garry and I practiced Tai Chi and Qigong. It feels much colder here right now and it took me quite a few laps in the gym’s unheated pool before I warmed up and could complete the morning’s 1000m.