Thailand and Cambodia

Winking Monks

I've been home for 2 weeks now and I can't help but reminisce. On our first day in Bangkok I remember being on a very large and busy street, the faces of the buildings were caked in layers of smog, giving that street the illusion that it had once caught fire. As I was standing on the side of this street waiting for any bus going my direction, I observed a public bus, full to the brim and just as dirty as the buildings. The bus passed me slow enough for me to see an older monk in the back of the bus next to the window. He was covering his nose and mouth with a handful of his worn, orange robe. I gave him a huge smile--not really sure why, monks just seem adorable to me--and to my surprise he lowered his grip of robe to smile back at me with a hole-filled Cheshire cat smile. On top of returning my smile generously, he winked at me! It wasn't a sexual wink in the least, it was the kind of wink you give someone after you tell them a funny joke. I turned to my mom to see if she had witnesses this insanely hilarious moment, she hadn't, so I explained and she didn't believe me.
At first I thought that maybe I had seen wrong...that was until we were at the end of our trip. On our last day we passed another monk on the street, this time he was donning a brown set of robes. I'm not going to lie, he looked like a cartoon character, he was amazingly wrinkly and his face looked smooshed vertically, his chin jutted out under his sunken lips. There was something about him though, when I looked at him he looked like he had a funny secret to tell someone, but never would. And, to my surprise again, I tested him to see if he would smile at me. I gave him a cheery smile and guess what he did, Yup, he gave me a huge grin (completely toothless this time save for 1 or 2 tiny teeth) and winked!!!! I was so amused :)

I really don't understand. Winking monks baffle me.

Treking Through Koh Phangan

With a much needed few days of rest and recuperation, my mom and decided to venture out and do a Safari Boat adventure that was set up through a tour company. The tour group was apparently was the largest group they had ever had, which explained why it didn't go as smoothly as expected. The tour was supposed to include elephant trekking through the jungle, snorkeling, visiting a Chinese temple, three different beaches, and lunch. Since the weather here has been pretty overcast and windy (we are thinking because of the full moon and the storm that is blowing in from China) we didn't get to snorkel and we couldn't get to the beaches that were only accessible by boat. It wasn't a big deal that we missed the beaches though because my mom and I were simply tickled pink by the elephant rides.

There were three female elephants, one was a 7 year old baby elephant, and the elephant camp was located up in the hilly part of the island. It was actually run by northern Thai's (you could tell by the design of their huts) who imported the elephants to the island of Koh Phangan. It was an entire family of elephant trainers that have been training elephants for many generations. To my mom's delight there was a shim that lived in the elephant camp as well.

Right when we got there they encouraged us to buy a bushel of bananas to feed to the elephants. As soon as these elephants (who were only chained with a little metal chain wrapped around their ankle) saw the bananas they reached out for them almost grabbing them out of our hands with their trunks. I've never been this close to an elephant ever, except for once when I was little I rode one at seaworld with about 10 other people. The skin of their trunks felt like rough hairy leather and they were kind of snotty. hahah, it was so fun! They even made elephant noises when they wanted more food. My mom and I were the last people to get to ride them through the short jungle trail. We of course wanted to get the biggest one, so we stood on top of the rickety loading platform to wait our turn. The trainers didn't help anyone mount the elephants they just pushed the elephant up against the platform and motioned you to step onto the elephant and sit on the two-seater open bench. For anyone who is wondering what the bench was like, it was about the same as a two-seater chairlift with no safety bar and much less padding. Mmmmhm, really safe... So once the trainer had taken a picture of us on the elephant alone, trying to get the elephant to stand still, he climbed up with a lift assist from the huge creatures leg and trunk and then situated himself on its neck. To our horror, the trainer had a thing that looked like a tiny, fairly blunt icepick that he used on the elephants temple just in case it didn't listen to him.

My mom and I were having a grand time just sitting on the tiny open bench, wobbling back and forth on our hungry elephant as he grabbed branches and uplifted tiny trees for a snack while giving us a ride. Then the trainer jumped off and motioned for me to sit on the neck, no assistance needed, while the elephant was walking I quickly crawled onto its neck and rode it bareback. I felt like a model because the trainer kept telling me to smile as he took pictures of me awkwardly trying to control the animal, my mom was clutching to the back of my shirt to the point of getting white knuckles. Quite amusing. The elephants neck felt very weird, oddly human actually except for the fact that it felt like a wire brush against my thighs, and it was kinda sweaty. Hmmm, we both smelled great afterwards to say the least. My mom turned out to be the expert elephant rider though, she hopped right on its neck after being egged on by me, and tapped the back of its ears with her feet just like the trainer. She even went so far as to imitate the Thai words the trainer would grunt at the elephant, I wish I had captured it on video because of course my mom sounded like a cartoon character with her high pitch squealing and giggling and grunting. My mom was so good at controlling the elephant that the trainer let her ride it all the way back as he strolled along 10 feet in front of us, just taking pictures and relaxing.

The whole thing was so unsafe in so many ways, we were laughing about how this kind of think would never ever be allowed in the United States. It was a very personal experience though and we really loved it. I forgot to mention that while we were waiting, we went over to the resident shim and chatted her up for a while. Right off the bat when we asked her where she was from she told us then added that she was a "lady-boy" my mom smiled and said "I know! You are very pretty", she laughed appreciatively then wanted to show us around the village. We later watched a monkey on a rope climb up the palm trees and spin ripe coconuts off of the tree. Over all a very great animal encounter for us.

The rest of the Safari Boat trip was a bit underwhelming. Many of the people we were touring with were girls that wore dresses and cutsie sandals... apparently they didn't know that they would be getting on a speed boat without a cover to protect them from the soaking sea spray, or that they would have to hike up to a waterfall, or really that they would have to lift a finger. Overall, they really slowed us down. But my mom and I chatted up the guys running the program to keep ourselves entertained. One of the men was Slovenian and he had come here on vacation, being somewhat of a vagabond in his early teen years, he decided that he didn't want to leave. So this was about his 4Th year here and like many of the people we have met at restaurants or tour guides, they can't bring themselves to leave.

After the adventure day, my mom and I spent our last day on Koh Phangan and took a ferry to Koh Tao first thing in the morning. I of course didn't learn my lesson well enough the first time and didn't think of taking a seasickness tablet. Luckily when we were all settled on the top level of the boat, there was a local that was hustling for a Scuba Diving company. He was loaded with plastic bags and Tiger Balm, helping out the majority of people vomiting the whole way there. Lucky for me, the Australian man who was with his seasick wife gave me a tablet and I just sat back and enjoyed the humour in watching all these beautifully tanned tourists vomiting all over. It was just as scary as our first ferry trip, just a newer boat. My mom was alternating between squealing out of the excitement of the ride and panicking. Just another adventurous day!

Full Moon Party

As it turns out we ended up booking one of the nicest hotels in the area, according to a local. It was really beautiful, the entire complex of private bungalows only a meander from the beach were all made of dark wood and had walkways that were all wooden planks. It felt like we were living on some sort of Jungle Cruise pier with tropical vegetation everywhere. There were palm trees that naturally grew around the complex and the dining area was ocean side--literally, the water would sometimes splash up onto the deck. It was quite picturesque and for being the nicest place on that coast of Koh Phangan, 52 bucks a night seemed ridiculously cheap. Gotta love Thailand.

On our first night on Koh Phangan, we attended the Full Moon Party that endured until the next morning. The whole experience was a bit crazy, we reserved a taxi (you ride in the back of a pick-up truck that has a cover and benches in the back) that ended up being for almost all the guests in the bungalow complex. Since there were about 30 people crammed in the back of the two taxis just for our hotel, the ride there was pretty cramped and entertaining. Many of the riders had Singha's for the road, drinking before we even got to the party! As our Taxi truck lunged around the curvy road, we all had to grab onto the bars on the top of the trucks cab roof. When we got to the party at 9:30, people (mostly white Europeans/Australians/Americans) were already in full party mode, drinks in hand and painted with all sorts of fluorescent body paint that glowed in the black lights.

The setting of the party was a flat beach called Haad Rin, the sand was so fine and wet that it felt like they had poured oil on the beach. The stretch of beach was as far as the eye could see, lined with about 8 different DJ's or bars blasting an array of music, anything from trancey- techno music to American pop. To fill the gaps between the different music areas, there were food booths with Thai attempts at American food like burgers and hot dogs and also bucket stations. These buckets that people were drinking out of were about the size of a two cup measuring glass. For 180 Baht (around 9 dollars) you would get a flask of liquor like Thai whiskey, with a can of red bull concentrate and a box of juice or can of soda. Mix together, throw 4 straws in and that was the end of most peoples nights. Most people would share 4 people to one of these child's beach toy sand buckets, my mom and I didn't even try to finish ours. Some people donned children's floaty inner tubesaround their waist as accessories, others had their bodies painted with all sorts of fluorescent designs that looked like tattoos.

The night was great, my mom and I were too nervous about getting taken advantage of or getting pick pocketed, so we didn't go all out. We went to great lengths to protect our money, my mom doubled her underwear and safteypinned a ziploc of cash in between them. LOL. People were actually more respectful and tame than we expected during the hours we were there, we felt quite safe actually. From what some of the other hotel guests told us the next day, after about 2 am things started to get messy, clothes mysteriously vanished, people thought that the sand was their bed, and everyone started to get a whole lot looser on the dance areas of the beach. Apparently there were about 20 thousand people there that night/morning. We left early because we were simply too tired.

As you all could have guessed the taxi drivers taking people back were all scamming us. Everyone but me and my mom that is! HEHE. So, we got in this taxi with a few people thinking it would take us all the way back to our hotel for 400 baht total. They stopped us half way and said we needed to get out and switch taxis, to a taxi with no one in it, in a part of town where we had no idea where we were. Yea right, as if my mom and I would fall for that. We threw a hissy fit and refused, the driver and his wife started yelling as us about how they would only take us half way because it was too far, therefore we would have to wait here while they fill up the empty one we needed to take. We refused. So they took us about 1 mile further to another taxi that was pretty much full, demanded we switch cars and pay them half of the 400. We refused, I got up in the woman's face yelling at her about how she lied to me and did not tell us any of their plans beforehand. It was pretty stupid now that I look back on it but all us tourists ganged up on the taxi drivers in the end and my mom and I saved a lot of people from being conned.

The next day, my mom an I had a recovery day that started with us discussing life over shrimp pad thai and soda water. After lunch and breakfast, we went walking around the tiny town adjacent to our hotel. We walked into a jewelry shop, not something we ever do, the man was a german man accompanied by a thai girlfriend. They were both very sweet and my mom and I spent a lot of time admiring all his unique hand crafted silver jewelry. That night, we walked down the beach in front of our hotel combing the sand for shells. We felt like were were really in paradise with the lazy waves lapping at our toes with a cool breeze. This was the first day that we really didn't do much except for relax, we were glad that we didn't go home after our horrid experience in Phanga Bay.

Island Recovery

Phew. Sorry if it's tiring to read these posts, I have to break up my last post because too many days have gone by since I last had a chance to blog. I recommend reading these in chronological order.

The next morning in Phangna Bay everything looked less intimidating and scary, so we took a boat tour around to the different islands that were promised in the guide books. It was what we needed. One of the islands actually had a village on stilts next to it. It was a Muslim community that survived off of the profits of selling tourist souvenirs. It was terribly fascinating to me. We entered the village on a stilted walkway that was constructed by long branches no thicker than my wrists (which is pretty darn slim if any of you have ever looked at my wrists) that you could see right through, it felt like we could snap them if we lingered too long on any one branch. The people on this stilted village hustled hard, grabbing at your arms to adorn them with the jewelry (real pearls! they would say as they held a flaming lighter to the string of beads). The hustling women--dressed in modest Muslim wear-- were no match for me and my mom, we are seasoned bargainers. We were able to lower their price to a 1/4 of their original asking price. I can't imagine how many tourists get ripped off. On our stroll through this village--that might I add, dumps their sewage straight into the ocean below them, creating a stagnant layer of goop possibly feet thick--we saw all sorts of weird produce and dried seafood, in addition to the merchandise. At one point, a young woman was holding a baby monkey with a diaper on-- I immediately was enraptured. I asked if I could touch its hand which was about as wide as half my palm, but lengthwise, it was exactly the same. Its long, smooth, black fingers wrapped around my one finger warmly, but securely. Then she shoved the monkey into my arms!! Ahhh, I was so overwhelmed, I have no idea how to hold a baby, let alone a monkey baby! Luckily it just wrapped its long arms around my neck and sat on my forearm. The funny thing was that its back was to my chest, I must have looked so awkward. hehe, I was too amused to care. I kept calling for my mom who was now disappearing down the walkway so I handed the monkey back. My step mom would have spent all day with that monkey and tried to buy it from the woman to set free, all I could think of was how taken she would have been by the tiny creature.

After our tour of the islands, which put Hawaii's coast to shame, we drove out of that miserable town down to the western coast of Phuket. We were hesitant to get too excited as you all could guess, but when we arrived, we found that it was so charming and tropical (a bit overrun by European tourists for our taste, but refreshing none the least). We walked around the strip of town that was nestled against the beach, in hopes of finding a bungalow for a night. We were successful. The first one we went to was run by a shim ( woman/man--also knowns as lady-boys here), we made him show us the room before we booked it and realized that it once again didnt have a cover sheet, just a gross comforter. So we tried again, the woman that owned this handful of tiny bungalows was very sweet, mother to a girl my age. It was clean and charming, nothing to get too excited about really, but we felt like kings! Once we checked in, we headed a few steps down the collection of restaurants with thai massage booths on the beach across from them. Yuck, kind of repulsed by the Thai massages, especially the way the women were interacting with the old European men who's bulging stomachs hung over their Speedo's. Regardless, we sat down at a restaurant and ordered fish and chips and Singha's. We watched the sunset, afterwards, unwinding on a stroll down the beach. I don't even need to go into detail on how great the contrast of this small beach town was in comparison to Phangna Bay.

Of course, as the night progressed, as we were sharing the queen bed in the bungalow, I was finding it hard to sleep. We had just watched the news about an earthquake in Indonesia a few days prior. I couldn't stop worrying about a Tsunami. Ok, I'm a worry-wart, but I was truly scared, I was highly considering wearing my hiking sandals while I slept. I settled for sleeping fully clothed and keeping the mosquito net that my dad let me borrow close, just in case I needed to latch onto a tree or something during a Tsunami. My mom and I planned an escape route to calm my nerves, I reminded myself that shes a good swimmer and certified lifeguard, and proceeded to think happy thoughts. We chatted about my childhood, my fascination with books and cartoons, and then fell back asleep.

The next day we moseyed on a secluded cove for a while, had some great vegetarian Pad Thai, then headed to the airport. We checked into our flight from Phuket to Koh Samui. To our utter amusement and shock, the entire line of people to this particular destination had to have all been under 30. As we boarded the flight, we also realized that the entire flight, with the exception of maybe 3 young newlyweds, was entirely filled with overly muscle-y, tan, Australian men. We were the only women besides that. My mom and I were horrified that the plane was a tiny 80-seater propeller plane. AHH! Again, we made plans for "and unexpected water landing", comforted by the knowledge that we had life jackets under our seats... the plane had to exceed the weight limit with all the large men.

I will explain that we specifically traveled to these islands for the Full Moon Beach Party that is held monthly, my cousins that traveled here (not the ones that went to China) said that we HAD to go this party. My mom of course was super excited when she heard this and planned our trip to include it at the end. This party tonight is on the beach, during low season around 7-10 thousand people crowd onto this beach that is lined with bars and DJ's all along it. During high season, which is right now, it is attended by around 30 thousand people. WOW. Yup, so my mom and I are pretty excited, but don't worry we aren't planning on partying hardy like most of the people that are going, we just want to get pictures of it and soak up all the craziness! Sometimes I get the feeling that my mom is more excited about this than me. I of course am a little nervous, but thats just my nature.

Ahh yes, I almost forgot. To get to the island we are currently on, we had to take a Big Buddha Ferry from Koh Samui to Koh Phangnan. I don't think I have ever been so scared for my life. Oh my gosh, it makes me ill to even recall it. The Ferry was a large boat a little smaller than 2 semi trucks stacked on top of each other. The top back half of it was outdoor seating( nothing fancy, the rim was just lined with a single row benches), most of the people just sitting on the floor in the center. The bottom was rows of benches, obviously meant to signify that thats where you should sit. Kay, well the party-people, most of whom had large Singhas in hand, all decided to crunch on the top level of the boat. My mom and I decided to settle with the benches below with the 10 locals that were on the boat. If we've learned anything, it is to do as the locals do. As we gained speed, seemingly way too much speed, the boat started to lift up in the front so that the half part of the boat was sticking out of the water. The boat was lurching over the waves, it felt like we were catching some air at points, and it was also tipping sideways at extreme angles. REALLY extreme. My mom and I had also heard of a boat like this capsizing in Nepal a few days back during our trip, killing 26. Yup, so we decided to look for life jackets when the local "shims" started to panic. My mom, a skinny old Indian man, and I all put life jackets on when the water started splashing into the windows that were a good 15feet above water level when the boat was still. I was paralyzingly motion sick, and scared. Obviously we made it to land safely, but I can't even imagine how sick and scared the people on the top of the boat were. Most definitely regretting the 40 oz of Singha's in their belly's, I'm sure.

Rock Bottom

Thank god for internet, this writing is a much needed release after the past few days...

So my last post was from Ayuthyya which was a few days ago, since then, I have spent 3 nights in Sukothai, one night in Phangna Bay, one night on the coast of Phuket, and now I have spent one night in Koh Phangan (an island in the Gulf of Thailand).

Sukothai was really great, we were staying in a traditional Thai hotel, which comprised of a handful of private suites in the middle of a pretty rural city. Sukothai was basically out in the middle of nowhere and the only reason we went there is because the study abroad program that is offered through my school stops there. The hotel was a little piece of heaven in the center of this rural, technologically undeveloped city. There was a lovely national park there which offered wonderful traditional Thai temple ruins. There was a really cool Bhodi Tree that had engulfed a severed Buddha head with its roots, this elevating it to about waist level. It was quite creepy actually because it had stayed straight up and down and it really looked like the Buddha head had grown out of the tree. The forest was quite serene, my mom and I rode dilapidated bikes through the trails, seeing all of the old structures and Buddhist shrines. I spent the rest of our time in Sukothai relaxing at our hotel, because we really haven't stopped for anything but sleep since we started out trip. Since Sukothai, I have been reading the book The Namesake, which is a lovely page-turner about a young Bengali man and his interactions with his family and America culture. My boyfriend is Bengali so for me the book has really been a reminder of home, an uplifting thought at this point in my trip. I have been clinging to e-mails from family and friends on this trip because I am having quite the time with culture shock.

From Sukothai, we took a plane to Phuket, what was supposed to be the start of our tropical-Thailand experience--also the last week of our trip. Oh boy, I learned my lesson about getting my hopes up about American conceptions of what this country is like.
We arrived in Phuket around 3 in the afternoon, it was a pretty short flight from Sukothai. We had read the travel magazine in the pocket of our seat on the airplane and they had mentioned that while in Koh Samui (which was not where we were heading) it is advisable to rent a car to put around the island in. I mentioned it to my mom simply because I thought it would be fun to drive around Phuket since it's like England, you drive on the left side of the street. I didn't actually think we would need a car. OK, well as it turns out, it was the best decision we could possibly make.

I'm just going to let everyone know that I was a horrible to my mom, yelling at her for getting to close to the left side of the road, basically criticizing her on her every move as we drove around the city. I wanted to drive and she wouldn't let me (understandably since it was a rental car), I was cranky and tired from traveling and was lashing out. Basically the definition of a spoiled cranky teen. Ugh, regrets... When we arrived at the hotel 4 hours later, a trip that should have taken maximum 1 hour, we checked into our hotel room. We were escorted to our room by a man who didn't speak English but was very friendly. We set our stuff down looking around our room at the curiously large open space next to the solitary queen bed (romantic, I know). As we looked closer at the white duvet, we lifted it up to find that there was no top sheet and it was definitely not the kind of comforter that you can machine wash. As my mom looked closer, in her usual obsessive way, she noticed a dull blood stain on the un-washable comforter. She brought me over and we inspected the gross comforter all over, only to find that there were (what looked like) period blood marks all over it along with obvious bodily fluid marks. My mom FLIPPED out, she had to hold her mouth to keep from retching all over the bed and I started questioning the bellboy who didn't understand a word i was saying. We had read in the airport about how men pay extra to take the virginity of Thai prostitutes, and about how rampant and common prostitution is in Phuket. Understandably, we were conjuring all sorts of assumptions about what had gone on in that hotel room. After having such a hard time finding the hotel, our emotions and patience were frayed to say the least. We went down stairs and ripped the hotel manager a new one, refusing to pay for our reservation, demanding a refund. Thank god we had a car to get the heck out of Old Phuket Town.

We were going to stay in that hotel for 2 nights, so we decided that we would trek up to where we were planning to spend the next day, Phanga Bay. We were hopeful that it would be kind of a resort-y city, going off of what the guide books had said about the wonderful scuba diving and the Island that James Bond was filmed on. Again, we let our hopes of American misconceptions of Thailand beaches cloud our minds. Once we had driven an hour and a half to the city, it turned out to be a town not a city, that puts many scary movies depicting ghost towns to shame. It looked like Phangna Bay had been devastated by some invisible force, creating the feeling of dire emptiness in the town. We were horrified, no hotel reservation, no map, the panic set in. I don't even know if the word panic even begins to convey what we went through. The towering mountains with sheer steepness lined the highway road that went through the town. There were no streetlights, there were no lights in any of the towns buildings save for the occasional convenience store/food cart/home decorated with plastic furniture and blue florescent lights that dangled uncovered from the ceilings.
In hopes of finding some sort of lodging that didn't appear to be simply a hole in the wall "guest house" frequented by prostitutes, we followed the side road down to "James Bond Island". All we found there was another stretch of creepy-lonely street that had a large, looming, and quite out of place hotel. Yes it was a hotel with maybe 100 rooms, but it looked so horrifyingly creepy we had to drive by it a couple times, wondering if we had the guts to enter the blue-florescent lit lobby. We had no choice, so we swallowed our fear and parked the car. We booked a room and were escorted once again by a non-English-speaking bellboy. We took an elevator with a girl-i emphasize the word girl (she was around my age, maybe younger)- who was dressed in short shorts and tiny heeled sandals who strangely knew the bellboy. As he walked us down the hall to our room, the girl walked in front of us, behind the bellboy. I knew she was a prostitute, because why else would a young Thai girl, dressed quite inappropriately for her culture, be in a skeezy hotel this late at night. My mom wasn't sure, but we kept exchanging looks communicating our suspicions. The bellboy banged on the door for the girl yelling something that jeering in Thai, and the door opened by a youngish Thai man, fresh out of the shower in just a towel. The girl walked in a manner a bit to provoking for her age, confirming our horrors. The bellboy opened our room for us, the one right next door to the toweled man... A lovely way to end our evening.

As expected, my mom and I fought for about an hour, mostly about how this trip was seeming more and more to be a mistake and about how horribly I treated her that day, the one day we really needed to stick together. I felt like I ruined our trip for good and we considered leaving the hotel and flying home that night. We realized that we had hit rock bottom, wished that Steve was there to be our strength, we were scared. We worked through it though and knew that we needed to stick together in order to overcome, we are stronger than all this. We couldn't resign to quitting, not after all this.
We thought about our cousins who traveled around the world, just two young women, and from what we recalled had no housing reservations in the cities they traveled to. My mom told me a story about them crossing a busy street in China, the beginning of their long trip, and how they really had to overcome their fears and work together. We decided if they could do it, we could do it. And we did thanks to their inspiring ability to stick together and be strong. We owe them.

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!