Some thoughts.
I have included some extracts from Pico Iyer's Falling off the Map(Italicized prose). The most amazing book I have read in a while. Strongly recommended, most beautiful and witty prose.

There is the loneliness of the sociopath and the loneliness of the only child, the loneliness of the hermit and the loneliness of the widow. And as with people, so with nations. Some are born to isolation, some have isolation thrust upon them.

What dante forgot to include was an additional circle for the met department officials here, who tell us that it is going to be a lovely rainy day and it turns out to be a scorcher of a day. I am quite sure he is revising his circles to include even more vile acts, condemnable in every which way like the idiot who starts honking as soon as the traffic lights are green. Actually, green is probably a tad too far from the truth in a place where signals hardly work. Its the most cruel joke of the century that we are being referred to as emerging superpowers given the nightmare we live in.

"We are now in the province of Jujuy!The capital of Jujuy is Jujuy!". This pronouncement, unremarkable at the best of times, was not made easier by the fact that "Hoo-Hooeee" sounds as if it consists of nothing but vowels"

Tortuous and sinuous are the paths that are before us. I corrected the first and the third word six times before I could find out the proper spelling with the two 'u's. Now I am not sure if the usage of the apostrophe in the last sentence is right. Now I am wondering whether the 'the' used before the apostrophe is necessary at all or is just redundant. Now I am trying to figure out if redundant is actually redundant in the previous statement. I just figured out that if I lived life this way, I would never get anywhere with doing what I originally wanted to get done. So much for introspection and retrospection.

"What would you like", a smiling waitress asks.

"What do you have?"

"Nothing."

"No eggs, no tea, no avocado?"

"Nothing. Only beer."

Apparently one of the planets that has been not so very nice to me for a while is beginning to change its attitude and is going to go easy on me for a bit. But, interestingly, another planet that has been the nicest of the nicest things(like grandmothers) is going to turn against me in the most severe way(like the grandmother-in-law). So, yes, status quo. Or, worse, ratings downgrade. Every time someone tells me that they are going through the seven-point-five planet phase, I immediately do a rating downgrade of their credit-worthiness. Actually, you might as well do a downgrade of every-worthiness. Self-esteem, already teetering on the brink of negative territory is smirking at me. Ah well, such is file. I mean, life.

Perhaps it because it is so otherworldly that Iceland leaves such an impression on the mind, because it feels so little like the planet we know;days spent there are interludes from life, sojourns in some other, nether twilight of  the mind.

We are abnormal, in that we want to feel that we would start off on a new trajectory of life that would turn our lives upside down for good, cause much happiness and abandon all our piled up miseries. Everything in this life is over-rated: happiness, attachment, love and sense of entitlement. We just cannot embrace the cold depths of the meaninglessness surrounding us, and we try to attach tags to organize our emotions, which is quite counter-productive. I don't want to talk about the cliched and done-to-death topic of dualities or other such spiritual topics which are, at best, only superfluous for the non-initiated. 

At dawn, in Thimphu, the mist swaddling the western mountains. In the mornings, the quiet tennis-ball sound of wood being chopped...At lunch, in the hotel, a team of Japanese salarymen lined up in dark suits around a large table muttering gloomily, "Muzukashi desu, ne?"(It's difficult, isn't it), as they bravely did battle with their curries.

A picture: not thinking a thought, not saying a word, not breathing a breath, looking at the never ending snow capped peaks broken only by a stream of water, harboring not a single ill-will towards anything, and this vision frozen in space-time. This is what I want. 

So, Senor Pico.

My surname actually, is Iyer.

So your father's name is Pico.

No, my father's name is Iyer.

But here it says Iyer, Pico.

No, My father's name is Iyer. 

So, your mother's name is...