Sunday, January 20, 2013

Out of Bangkok

Hey all,

I am currently in a small hostel in a small town called Sukhotai. There are some ancient wat (temple) ruins here, but more on that later...

I left Bangkok a couple of days ago and am pretty glad to be out of that city. It's utter madness. I don't even know where to begin. Its a true hustle and bustle city. The populations around 8.5 million so its about the same population size of New York City. Cars and motor-scooters zip through the streets with no regard for traffic lanes (or laws). Basically if you can fit your vehicle in the space, do it, and the more agressive at driving you are the better. And tuk-tuks, little three-wheeled open aired vehicles are the city's taxi cab. Its pretty cheap to get around if you haggle well, and because they have three wheels, they can maneuver really well and squeeze between cars. It's loads of fun, mostly because you know that if you were to get hit by another car, you would have zero chance of survival... PREMIUM RUSH!!

Here's what it looks like to be in the back of one: (this driver tried to scam us*)




The Bangkok streets are filled with markets upon markets. Vendors are selling everything from food, to t-shirts, to samsung-tablets, to pellet guns, to knock off dvds, etc. The food that is sold on the street is super cheap, about $1 for a pad-thai and its delicious, almost as good as No Thai. And even if you don't eat the food, you can't help but smell it all. Most things are cooked over a little charcoal grill, and the charcoal in thailand has a very distinct bitter taste with a hint of sweetness. You can smell it from a kilometer away (I've switched to metric while I am here. maybe forever. hopefully forever). All types of food are on the carts, chicken, duck, squid, fish, thai meatballs, and its been great just jumping right in and treating my tongue to novel tastes.

Here is a picture of the Bangkok's famous (and very pungent) Chinatown neighborhood.  (Thailand and China and  the other surrounding nations have an intertwined history due to kingdoms ruling over various lands and people. Thus there is a mix of cultures, yet there are undoubtedly distinct).


As I said earlier, and as you can see from the chinatown picture, the city is loud and always moving. But there are plenty of buddhist temples (wats) throughout Bangkok. The wats truly isolate you from the city. Its almost bizzare. Once you enter the wat, you can't even hear a hint of the tuk-tuks horns beeping or ambulance or whatever.It's like a sound forcefield. All you hear is some birds chirping, and its incredibly serene and beautiful and peaceful.

Here is a pic of the outside of a Wat:


And this is the inside:


I'll leave you with that above picture for now. As it is a nice way to end the post.

*And I'll write about the the scamming and city's sex culture, ladyboy, pingpong pussy culture later.. I need to go back through Bangkok eventually, so I will probably write about it then. (Also these pictures are not off the internet, my buddy has a camera)

Tuesday, January 15, 2013

They have internet here!!

Oh shit! I'm actually in a place called Taiwan!?!? which is not the same as Thailand... CRAAAAP!

Just kidding. I made it to Bangkok after the longest travel process of my life. We had problems with our aircraft after departing Chicago, so we had to re-land in Chicago and then re-take-off to San Fransisco. Needless to say we missed our connections, so United hooked us up with a Hampton inn suite (it's even doper than the commercials) and two meal vouchers. Lucky for us, hampton inns has continental breakfasts FOR FREE! And we had that meal voucher so we got two breakfasts that day... suckers!!

The flight from San Fransisco to Beijing, People's Republic of China  was pretty long. It was kind of like Pac-man, we went so far west that we got to the east. And even more surreal, we were "chasing the sun" the whole time (sounds like a lyric from a the Killers song) , so it was daylight outside the airplane during the entire flight. From the plane's window I got to see the mountains of Siberia during the flight, and even cooler, they played the movie PREMIUM RUSH!!!

I know this post is pretty uneventful and probably uneccessary, but I promise the next post will have actual information about my travels and not about my traveling. Now stop reading this and go watch PREMIUM RUSH!

Friday, January 11, 2013

Dorn rap teung korng pom deun tahng blog

Hey everyone!

I am keeping a travel blog to stay in touch with everyone and/or just let people know what I am up to slightly after I was up to it. I'll try my best to update at least once or twice a week, and hopefully can add photos along the way. I don't really have a camera yet, so it might just be stuff from google images... but we can still pretend! In fact, pretending is what this blog is all about. I want you to use this blog so you can imagine that you're on this journey with me, which means that I'll occasionally ask you to eat some spoiled food in order to simulate the effects of traveler's diarrhea. You know, so you can get the whole Thai experience.

Speaking of Thai...

Speaking of the speaking of Thai, the name of this post is in pidgin Thai (compliments of Ms. Grosso's phrasebook). It very literally translates to "welcome to my travel blog." I don't know how to speak thai yet, but by the end of this trip, I hope to be completely fluent be able to ask where the bathroom is. The phrasebook is very thorough. It has translations for time, like month=bai, and year=bee. It also has weather tranlations, such rainy season=nah fon, and dry season=nah laang. But my favorite is that it has sex-words translations, such as sex=phes and condom=thung yang.

So with my pidgin thai I can put together phrases like "korng pom phes bee? nah laang" which literally translates to "my sex year? dry season" INCREDIBLE!! I'm learning to express myself in Thai so quickly.

Well, since I don't know anything else about Thailand except for what I've read in menus, I will end this post. I have 22 hours of airplane traveling ahead of me tomorrow, so if you want to pretend to experience it with me ; ) , sit and fall asleep in uncomfortable chair, eat a couple of microwaveable lean-cuisines, watch half-a-days worth of movies and TV, and try to get drunk and pass out on overpriced alcohol until you wake up in a foreign place... but you guys are seniors in college, so you'll probably do all of that anyway!

Love,

Pad Si Nrew