There are two vastly different ways to buy a sari, probably more, but as foreigners in Singapore, there are two: In a posh store where the silk is diaphanous and the dollars solid, opaque and several hundred; or at the covered market where the selection is vast and the prices less voracious.

My daughter and I know exactly where we have to go. We take a short cab ride from our hotel in downtown and jump out at a recently rained on street corner dotted with steamed up bus shelters and general market stalls. The hot, heavy Singapore air is…

An almost full moon is rising over Hoan Kiem Lake this steamy Wednesday evening in Hanoi. I’m feeling a little forlorn, it’s nothing specific, nor too extreme, more a lostness, a kind of ennui.

Most travelers have it some time or another. You’re watching the passing show, enchanted, transported, when you suddenly realize you’re not in it. That’s just what it is, a profound feeling of not belonging. Here is this exotic world, but you’re passing through. It’s someone else’s, and not your own.

I had been walking for hours, up and down the crazed labyrinth of the Old Quarter…