Tiny Glitches

You know the more I am here on "vacation" the more I realize that it is really nothing like the conventional understanding of the word. I understand that I am so fortunate to be able to travel, to have my parents generously pay for most of the trip, but I can tell you that the chunk of money that I personally invested in this trip (and my parents money) has added more value and insight to my life than I ever would have guessed. This vacation is turning out to not be a walk in the park, we are struggling with getting conned, staying safe, finding edible food, and mostly trying not to get all consumed by the injustice and poverty that consumes the Thai people's daily lives.

For the past few days, my mom and I stayed in a city called Ayutthaya. Since we are trying to travel cheap and stay in inexpensive hotels (and what not), we decided to take a 3 hour train ride 3rd class through the rural, country part of Thailand. We were the only foreigners on this train. The only ones. This train looked like something out of a movie with its rickety wooden benches, filthy ceiling fans and lack of working windows. All of the windows in the train were down thankfully and by the end of the 3 hour ride my hair was wiry and dirty from leaning out to watch the happenings out side of this train. From the moment we left the station we passed houses (they would probably be more like forts that children would make in their backyard in the US) that were crunched together like sardines along the railroad tracks. They were made of tin, wood and tree parts. The people that lived there obviously had no access to a shower or running water. In Thailand there is a huge lack of garbage dumps apparently because people will just pile it up beside their makeshift homes and set it ablaze. Its obvious that these people don't even know that burning plastic bottles and styrofoam is horrible for people. Well, even if they did I'm sure it wouldn't make a difference because they have bigger problems to consider like staying alive and keeping their babies alive. Even though the train was passing at a speedy pace, it was hard to ignore the haunting, hardned faces of locals staring at us in from their ramshackle homes.
The trip really sparked a higher level of conversation from me and my mom. For women like us who are ultra sensitive to our surroundings and people in our lives, being around these kind of living conditions really makes us consider our existance as free women in a country that we have rights in. They say that you never really know what you have untill you don't have it, well we are finding that we really know what we have now that we are aware of what our lives could have been, had we been born a different life.
Our hotel in this city was unsurprisingly seedy. At 32 dollars a night, what could we expect? The neighborhood surrounding our hotel was not the type to stoll around at night, from what we could tell, so we hesitatingly ate at the hotel restaurant. Big mistake. I tried to keep our moods on the lighter side, pointing out that the man "'singing'' in the corner with his symphosized keyboard, and the anything-but-matching decor was quite like being emersed in an SNL skit. I thought it was hilarious, but when our food came, my mom had to keep from bursting into paniced tears. The food tasted like they had sauteed it on the steamy cement behind the building and the outside of my sprite bottle looked like it had been sitting in a pile of burned trash. It was pretty horrific, but I of course had the guts to tell the manager just this. Our room was creepy to say the least but made us lookforward to the hotel we are staying in now.

As I write this I'm giggiling about what a crazy mistake that hotel was, but I'm thankful that our one day stay there was pleasntly filled with ancient temple trotting and gawking at the strange products offered at the market. We even saw people riding elephants. Oh, HAHA almost forgot! My mom and I decided to risk the rumors of bacteria infested ice... we indulged in a thai iced tea. This offered even more humor through out the day with frequent emergency stops at Thai bathrooms. (you have to squat over basically a hole in the ground and ladle water into the ''toilet'' after using it). Just when we thought that more things couldn't go wrong.
But you know us... Laugh in the face of adversity!