Beyond the Sky and the Earth: A Journey Into Bhutan by Jamie Zeppa

Beyond the Sky and the Earth: A Journey Into Bhutan by Jamie Zeppa

Jamie Zeppa was 24 when she left a stagnant life at home and signed a contract to teach for two years in the Buddhist hermit kingdom of Bhutan. Much more than just a travel memoir, Beyond the Sky and the Earth is the story of her time in a Himalayan village, immersed in Bhutanese culture and the wonders of new and lasting love. Whether you're travelling to Bhutan, looking for the best travel writing around, or wishing to be transported to a culture, mindset, and spiritual ethos wonderfully different from your own, Beyond the Sky and the Earth is a joyous and lush memoir that will transform the way you think of faith, Western life, and love.

I'm really glad things turned out the way they did. There were countless opportunities for me to turn around... I was always given the option of turning around, and I'm glad I didn't. Jamie Zeppa was raised by her second-generation Polish grandparents after her parents divorced in the Northern Ontario town of Sault-Ste-Marie. She was well on her way achieving her family's goal of a solid education, a good job, and a family, with her master's degree in English literature from York University and applications to graduate school in hand, and she was engaged to be married to a fellow academic.

Nevertheless, as she writes in the book, I wasn't sure I had learnt anything in all my years of study. Well, I had acquired academic abilities and tools, but what did I really know? He was unhappy about it till he died, Zeppa believes. He also couldn't comprehend why she chose to live so far away from home.

When the United Nations named Canada the best place to live, he would give me newspaper articles. Bhutan had dropped to roughly 168. Beyond the Sky and the Earth, like Paul Theroux's or Bruce Chatwin's outstanding travel novels, allows us to experience a remote and lovely region of the earth firsthand. Many of the stories in the long tradition of travel narratives include some form of pilgrimage, a quest for knowledge and self-awareness.

Katherine Govier discovered in her anthology of contemporary women's travel tales, Without a Guide, that many women, like Zeppa, want a connection with people when they travel. Some expose their own personal journey, while extreme adventurers like Jon Krakauer (Into Thin Air) write about nature's most appealing difficulties. For personal reasons, Jonathan Raban's most recent work, A Passage to Juneau, became an adventure into the wilderness of the human heart. On his little sailboat on the Pacific Ocean, Kevin Patterson began to question his motivations for traveling halfway around the world in The Water in Between.

Are You Experienced? narrator William Sutcliffe's humorous novel Our desire for travel books increases as we travel more. Such publications rekindle memories and provide motivation for those who have the travel itch. There is a fascination with learning about another world and an alternate way of life for armchair travelers, as well as the power of such novels to provide a viewpoint on the world that is missing in the daily media, and the surprise stories with colorful characters that may whisk us away from the ordinary.

Zeppa's story is a fantastic, multi-layered one, delivered eloquently and honestly, and her depictions of characters and geography leave an indelible impression on us. Some people chastised her for finishing the story where she did, rather than diving deeper into the period when her marriage began to fall apart. But maybe that's for another book. She was already planning a novel based on her experience getting married in Bhutan when Beyond the Sky and the Ground was published.

After overcoming the hardships of being in a forbidden relationship with Tshewang, she discovered that once they were married, she was treated with suspicion. For a Westerner accustomed to space and privacy, living conditions were quite difficult. We were housed in a dreadful small flat. It was a ghetto, to be honest.

The water was only turned on at 6 a.m. I'd have to get up and wash diapers between 7 a.m. and 7 a.m. Tshewang couldn't understand her dissatisfaction with the Bhutanese norm of having family stay with them all of the time, and thought her desire for a larger residence was unnecessary. After the couple divorced, word of their marital difficulties quickly traveled across the oppressively small city of Thimpu, where they lived.

The Globe and Mail emphasized this line from the book in their review: You may admire this scenery since your life does not depend on it. It's just a setting for the other life you'll be free to return to at any time. She now calls both Canada and Bhutan home, but, like everyone who has left their natal country for another for any period of time, she is completely at ease in neither. While she was relieved to be free of kerosene heaters, leeches, and disease in Bhutan, she found the abundance of choice, information, and materialism in Canada overwhelming.

She missed the view of the mountains from the window of her Thimpu house when she returned to an apartment in Toronto. I had a strong sense of bereavement. She tried to keep part of her prior life's simplicity, but as her kid grew older, he wanted to be like his classmates. Relocating was difficult for him: he thought it would be nice at first...

After six weeks, though, it dawned on him that he was here, far away from his father and friends. While Jamie is enviously eyeing adverts for instructors in Korea and Taiwan, yearning to get away and immerse herself in Asian culture once more, she will have to wait until Pema is ready as well. Still, if we regret only the things we haven't done, Jamie Zeppa should have few regrets in her life, according to the National Post.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780385259422
ISBN 10	0385259425
Title	Beyond the Sky and the Earth: A Journey Into Bhutan
Author	Jamie Zeppa
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Doubleday Canada, Limited
Year published	2000-04-01
Number of pages	320
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.