Four years ago P and I spent a week in Chiang Mai together. I had been there for a few weeks prior, suffering through my first solo international travel experience: I had gotten food poisoning twice, I was volunteering at a woman’s shelter, my home stay experience had gone from unpleasant to sketchy because my host had started hitting on me and I hadn’t succeeded in making any friends. P, meanwhile, had been living the (it seemed, by contrast) fabulously glamorous life of a Eurasian male model in Bangkok.

We spent the week in Chiang Mai eating, seeing a few water falls, hanging out at the women’s shelter and checking out markets. My trip went subtly, slowly, from sucking to being kind of awesome. To see P navigate the world was to realize I had been doing it all wrong. At first, I attributed P’s instant rapport with everyone to the fact that he was a male model, but came to realize it had to do with the fact that he was a more seasoned traveler and consistently more friendly than I was. After he left, I didn’t lose what I learned from him and 4 years and countless trips later, I’m a different kind of traveler. Still not as open or nice as P, perhaps, but definitely not as high strung.

Anyway, since Chiang Mai I’ve seen P a handful of times, but never for any real stretch of time. But then, finally, an opportunity presented itself: he was in LA and I encouraged him to visit SF. I took this picture of P wearing a shirt he designed once upon a time, way back in Mississauga, in my new apartment in Hayes Valley. It seems my friendships are increasingly characterized by memorable moments shared abroad interspersed with months, maybe years of separation.