Goodbye from Pai

I'm afraid this will be my last blog post in a while. Perhaps the last of the trip. This blog is one more connection to a world I'm trying to distance myself from. The anxiety of not having constant computer access or having gone days without writing goes against my trip's purpose. I'll have plenty of time for anxiety in New York. I keep a daily journal of my experiences here and will have many stories to tell you when I return to the states. Hope you're all well.

Sukhothai

I apologize for not having updated this blog in over a week. Chiang Mai, my current city, has cast a strange spell on me. I also want to apologize for any poor language use in recent or upcoming posts. My English skills have been deteriorating as I subconsciously revert to broken English while speaking to Thais and continental Europeans. I'll try to keep this post shorter because there isn't too much to report on Sukhothai, a city known almost exclusively for its historical ruins. Also, I have a lot to say about Chiang Mai.

Insomnia plagued me for the first days of my trip while somehow allowing me to rise early. I'd wake up each morning at 5, 6, or 7 am without having to make an effort to do so. Maybe because of Lena's and Vinny's influence, maybe because of Thailand's magic, I've adjusted to a much more leisurely pace of life without worrying about starting my day as soon as possible to not "waste time." With two and a half months in Southeast Asia, it's a bit silly to be running around as if I had two weeks. So, I left Phitsanulok around one in the afternoon and arrived in Sukhothai an hour later. It was too late in the day for it to be worth the 150 baht tuk-tuk ride into the old city, so I lounged around, ate, and wrote until evening.

Despite the peaceful tropical garden feel of 4T guesthouse, New Sukhothai is unremarkable. The main street is ugly and I had little desire to explore the rest. I did, however, venture down the dusty, empty street to find a place that served Sukhothai-style noodles, a dish unique to the city that features rice noodles in a slightly sweet broth with pork, sliced green beans, pork balls (balls of ground pork...), and crushed peanuts. One of the best dishes I'd had in Thailand so far.

4T Guesthouse

Sukhothai noodles

 Wonderful New Sukhothai

The following morning I stupidly headed out for the historical park in the rain, figuring drizzle wouldn't be enough to ruin the experience. Soon after accepting a tuk-tuk ride, I understood I'd been wrong. The tuk-tuk, if that's what it's called, was a reverse tuk-tuk, with the motorbike pushing that passenger cart from behind. I was exposed to the rain. The small raindrops came straight at me for the 20 or so minutes to the old city and accumulated on my skin and clothes until I was shivering. I spend 150 baht for a "big" Western breakfast in a cafe and waited four hours for the weather to clear up. It never did, so I just sucked it up and entered the park. A German guy was heading in the same direction and we wound up exploring the park together and had a few great conversations, like about our respective Big Brother governments monitoring our phone calls and internet search histories. The only thing was that he didn't care much for history, preferring to stroll by the ruins than to learn about their significance.

The day was not wasted though. In addition to my German companion of two hours, I spent time with a Bavarian and a Canadian and learned about their travels and lives. The young German woman I met on the sorng taa ou (truck taxi vehicle with two rows of seats facing each other). She worked marketing Monster energy drinks in German speaking countries: Germany, Switzerland, Austria. We went out to eat at the same restaurant I'd tried to Sukhothai-style noodles and spoke for hours. Heading out for lunch at the corner down the street from my hostel, I met a Serbian-Canadian, who I'd first guessed was Greek. Although she was easy to talk to and pleasant like the others, I found her enthusiasm to find "authentic" culture experiences and--I swear she used this word--"savage" people naive. She was rushing through Thailand, barely spending any time in each city and having at one point traveled thirty hours straight because there was nothing worth seeing compared to what she'd already seen. I couldn't help telling her that she would never find what she was looking for because she was a foreigner. You have to be born in or integrated into a society for years before locals interact with you like they interact with one other, and being a white girl, the latter still wouldn't accomplish much. I didn't say that last bit, but she still became defensive, referencing an experience in Cambodia where she crashed a wedding and had a heart-to-heart with the bride or something. I nodded and decided to push it no further. Maybe crashing weddings is a centuries-old Cambodian tradition.

I did eventually get to enjoy the park in good weather. Once again, I can't the beauty into words, so I'll let my photos speak for me:

Phitsanulok

I'll start this post with a quick recap of the five plus hour train ride to get from Lopburi to the northern Thailand city of Phitsanulok. After a series of delays, the train left the station almost two hours later than scheduled. Vinny and I rolled through scenic rice fields along side rivers and flooded land, taking photos that for the most part failed to capture what our eyes were seeing (Lena had stayed behind to recover from her illness and head straight to Chiang Mai the following day). But all the natural beauty of the landscapes had to be balanced out by nature's not so glamorous creations. As the train passed through the wetter areas and the sun set, hundreds of insects were seemingly sucked into the large open windows. Several crashed into me, especially in the back of my head, and my body and bag became covered with the small creatures. Oddly, a lot of them became disoriented and went into temporary comas or died after entering the train, like this one dragonfly that landed on Vinny's bag and just stayed there while Vinny took pictures of it up close and even when he shook his bag to see if it was alive. Then randomly it woke up and flew away. By the time we got there, I'd had quite enough of being hit with insect crossfire.

Phitsanulok is a lively city compared to Ayuthaya and Lopburi. The streets are ruled by fast moving cars and motorcycles that make crossing them an activity in itself due to the absence of streetlights. A large night bazaar runs along the bank of the Mae Nam Nan river, with several stalls selling mainly clothes but also sunglasses, swords, jewelry, and a number of other accessories. Many of the shirts feature English words that are not exactly used in the right context. These made good subjects for photos. Parallel to the clothing market and closer to the bank run a string of restaurants, live music venues, and rooms with pool tables that change color under the lights of disco balls, where many young hip Thais spend their evening. Romantic Thai music and American pop songs, new and old and including country music, blares from microphones and stereo systems. There's a fun, party feel to the place, although the biggest party apart from the markets may be the internet cafe where I wrote my last post. There, the comfortable red armchairs are filled with young Thais, some of them overweight, battling it out on role-playing, first person shooter, and RTS computer games. If you're 18 or older, the party never ends, because then you can play for 24 hours of the day, as opposed to having a time limit if you're younger.

I understand what the words mean individually...

The culinary experience in Phitsanulok did not disappoint. The night we arrived Vinny and I headed to the night bazaar to experience the last day of the Chinese-influenced vegetarian festival. Although we didn't spot a vegetarian food stall or restaurant, we had a good dinner at a stall on the southern end of the night bazaar, overlooking the river where a few lit candles in a string of blown-out ones made their way down the river. I had seafood with rice or noodles and Vinny had an omelette with shrimp and enjoyed it, despite not being a seafood fan. "The man cooks with love," Vinny said, and I think he might have been right. The following day I had two meals back-to-back. The second of these was fried chicken over rice with a chicken and parsnip (or some other root vegetable) soup I went crazy about. The root's flavor was so strongly infused in the broth and it nicely complemented the chicken's. Vegetables in Thailand aren't bland like they are in the United States, but instead flood the dish with their distinct flavors.

Another special meal I had was at a restaurant called Rim Nan along the river just north of the famous Wat Phra Si Ratana Mahathat temple complex. Rim Nan is a restaurant that serves "hanging noodle." The floor of the restaurant is a wooden platform where you sit down and slide your legs through an opening that runs beneath a stone slab that is the tabletop. Your legs dangle down through the opening as you're seated on the floor eating your noodles. Hence, hanging noodles. The soup was savory and delicious, with pork, pork balls, scallions, noodles, morning glory, and bean sprouts. Like almost all dishes in Thailand, I had three containers of red pepper, spicy-sour liquid, and sugar with which to customize my dish by creating any combination of flavors I desired. This must be one of my favorite dishes consumed on my trip so far. Having told you about that enriching cultural experience, I must now admit to my crime of eating at a restaurant called American Pizza... twice.

I may or may not have bought a jar of these assorted fried insects

Phitsanulok is for the most part not a pretty city. Its streets are lined with ugly Western-styled buildings and advertisements. In 1955, a great fire destroyed much of the city's more historic area. One resident of the city, a sergeant major by the name of Thawee Buranakhet, devoted his life to collecting tools, toys, musical instruments, animal traps and snares, photographs, and other artifacts to preserve the memory of his city before the old ways were gone forever. I visited this folk museum to see how things had been in the past here. A few items of display were unexpectedly poignant for me. Old photographs of the city, especially those of the river houses which used to line the river, were one. For the most part, the river is pretty bare of the structures today. Another thing was the toys that children used to play with before television and video games corrupted them. For example, two children would each take a stick with a double-pointed shard of coconut shell tied onto it. These would represent buffaloes with their horns. Then children would then roll the sticks between their hands, causing the coconut horns to spin back and forth against the opponent's. The player to break or damage his opponent's horns first would be the winner.

I understand that the concept of authenticity is a fabricated Western notion, but still I can't help the sadness that comes with knowing that ways of life practiced for centuries or longer are vanishing, giving way instead to a blander homogeneity. Of course, it's more than unfair to expect my own society to change in an attempt to "progress" while denying others that same aspiration just so that I can enjoy something exotic. Everyone wants to improve their own societies and their standards of living. For that to happen, older less effective methods of doing things have to give way to newer, more efficient ones. Having said that, I'm traveling to find something new, to experience other worlds, and similarities to my own world make the experience somewhat less rich.

Woman working on a Buddha image at the Buddha Casting Foundry down the road from the Folk Museum. The foundry was created by the same man who collected the items in the museum in order to preserve the traditional method of casting Buddha images. Many of the images are replicas of the Phra Buddha Chinnarat explained below.

However unremarkable most of the city may appear today, the second more valued Buddha image in Thailand, the Phra Buddha Chinnarat, is found in Phitsanulok. In addition, I found the Wat Ratburana temple complex to be one of my favorites in Thailand so far. I'm not sure why, because "objectively" it isn't all that aesthetically pleasing compared to many other sites. Something about the place just resonated with me. The main temple has an eclectic if not funky display of various items (offerings?) collected over the years, such as old coins and bills, silverware, and a carnivore's skull. At the moment I'm forgetting the weirder stuff. In the yard is a decorated tree shrine which worshipers ascend and descend nine times, leaving offerings in the tree. There's also a boat in which King Rama V of Thailand visited Phitsanulok. Worshipers walk the length of it nine times. A couple of monks stand around casually watching and chatting with people.

About to release fish into the river for good luck

I must dedicate my final paragraph to introducing a true character I've met in Phitsanulok. The night I arrived with Vinny, we were recommended a decent guesthouse by fellow travelers and decided to go for it. We found the place without a problem, but when we knocked on the office door, no one answered. Inside was a large man sitting like a stone and staring into the glare of a strange Thai show or film on television. After a couple of more knocks the figure budged and came outside. He was a big fat man with a short sleeved shirt tucked into elastic shorts pulled up much too high. His eyes were intimidating, and his teeth were long and narrow where the gums had receded. We asked what kind of rooms there were and if we could see them before paying. He kept repeating himself when he spoke, as if he wasn't listening to what we were saying. He demanded to see our passports and take payment for the rooms right away. When we asked if we could see the rooms, he said, "Ten minute, ten minute." Then he went back into his bedroom/office and stood there for a few minutes staring at the TV screen. He did this a few times. He kept saying "Ten minute, ten minute" each time we asked him for something, but whenever he wanted something of us he'd say "Righ' now." That first night he gave me the creeps. Since Lena arrived because her bus to Chiang Mai was booked, I learned to appreciate the humor of his character. Lena mouthed to me "He's so fat," and this cracked me up. After that I couldn't help grinning or choking with suppressed laughter whenever I saw him. It wasn't necessarily his weight that was funny, but the way he waddled around with seemingly no aim, at random times in the day. It was also how high he kept pulling his shorts up, halfway up his back, creating an unappealing wedgie in his butt. I refer to him as "Big Baby Buddha", but feel bad doing so because it is an insult to the real Buddha.

Lopburi (Attack of the Macaque)

Most travelers probably come to Lopburi for two reasons: to appreciate its important role in Thailand's history by exploring its ruins and museums and to check out the infamous monkeys that live side-by-side with humans there. It's a much smaller city that Ayuthaya with narrower streets, less vehicular traffic and a lazier vibe. Food doesn't seem to be as big a focus; most markets and food stalls close early at night, disappointingly.

I took the train from Ayuthaya to Lopburi with Vinny and Lena, 13 baht (less than $0.50) for the one hour and ten minute ride. I stood for much of the ride because the car was filled, but had a nice conversation with a Thai man bringing medicine north from Bangkok to his sick uncle. He was very friendly, updating us several times about how many stops remained until Lopburi. The train had large open windows punched out in its metal frame through which I watched ripe and flooded rice fields pass by as well as a few farmers at work. On the ceiling metal fans revolved in twitchy circles to keep us cool.

The first thing that caught my attention when I hopped off the train was a seemingly unrestored, crumbling 13th or 14th century ruin. What made it particularly beautiful at my first glance was how casually it stood there, with roads running around it as if it were any ordinary building or monument. That's what I learned to appreciate about the city: it both respects its history and also leaves many structures alone to assume their natural beauty rather than masking it through artificial restoration or reconstruction. Every few streets piles of broken bricks sit covered in moss, interspersed with modern functional buildings. The main historical attraction in Lopburi is the Phra Narai Ratchaniwet, actually an enclosed area that holds the former royal palace of one of Ayuthaya's kings, Narai, and the Lopburi and Central Thailand museums. I spent a bit too much time there, lost in my imagination wondering what life must have been like at different times in Thailand.
 

Phra Narai Ratchaniwet

Soon after walking further into the city from the train station, I met the monkeys. They walk the streets, mount the ruins, climb and claim the rooftops and ledges. I was watching one on the side walk in front of me when I felt the impact of something behind me and turned to find a larger monkey trying to steal my water bottle from my hand. Vinny gave his to a monkey and it opened the cap like a human and raised it to its mouth. I wanted to take a video of this behavior, but the monkey I gave my bottle to wasn't as smart. It tried to puncture holes in the plastic with its teeth to get the water. Lena got frightened and decided to sacrifice me by shoving her bottle in my hand and running away. Two days later I had the honor of visiting the monkeys' capital, Prang Sam Yot, where my "security guard" who walked me around the premises explained the ruins' history and taught me a bit about the primates. 2,000 of Lopburi's 4,000 monkeys live there, and the city has apparently been home to them forever. As we made our way around the ruins, monkeys cowered and flinched in my security guard's presence. I wondered if he'd ever had to use the stick he was carrying around and shaking at them.

Don't get on his bad side.

View from my hotel room first thing in the morning

Good luck, man

Beggars

Although some food stalls and eateries shut down earlier in Lopburi than Ayuthaya and Bangkok, there's always something open if you're hungry and there are some notable aspects of eating in Lopburi that should be mentioned. Along the train tracks on the old city side are a series of food stalls with a variety of cuisine and tables with stools which my friends and I visited a few times during our stay. Fried chicken, as far as I can tell, is the unofficial food of Lopburi. You find it all over the place. Vinny and I came across fried chicken on a skewer from one corner stall and to my delight it wasn't overly breaded, greasy, or dry, but cooked and seasoned perfectly.

Muslims making tasty coconut and veggie-stuffed egg pockets

The morning market in Lopburi has a number of intriguing foods and ingredients arranged in a chaotic maze that not even I could navigate through without getting lost (ha ha). Besides the mundane foods like vegetables, fruits, and conventional meats I came across smiling pig faces, large dead frogs, eels, snails, and turtles clambering over each other to escape their bucket of doom.

Unrelated to food and much less appetizing is the national obsession with becoming white in Thailand. At every pharmacy and 7-Eleven, the shelves are lined with products that contain "whitening" agents. I can't understand the practice of trying to permanently change your skin color, but I can appreciate the humor in the products that Thais waste money buying. Here are two of literally hundreds:

Anti-Soft White Cream and Pink Nipple Cream: To Be Whiter and All Day Confidence. I want to work for this company just to come up with the names. Maybe Anti-Thai Armpit Cream (with vitamin C & E).

I've gotten much closer to Lena and Vinny. I learned more about them and their interests, especially Vinny, who I bonded with a couple of times at the food stalls by the tracks while Lena stayed in the hotel, sick. He taught me some German words, I clarified English words he couldn't summon during conversations. We exchanged lists of movies and television shows we enjoyed. He educated me about psy-trance parties, Stuttgart, traveling in Asia. On our second night, the three of us played a drinking game by the end of which we had to dance, make an animal sound, sing the first verse of our respective national anthems, and I think something else after each time we drank. Before Vinny and I left for Phitsanoluk--Lena would stay behind to recover before heading straight to Chiang Mai--we all went up to the roof. There we found a caged up dog, a depressed solitary monkey with exposed teeth where a chunk of lip was missing, and an assault rifle. We posed with the gun and took pictures, always uneasily pointing the barrel away from each other. There was some rattling inside when we shook it, so hopefully it was an air-soft gun, but it felt frighteningly real in our hands.

In Lopburi I discovered that a sense of calm unlike anything I'd felt before had infiltrated me. The anxiety and loneliness of Bangkok and even before Thailand was gone. I could sit still doing nothing, just look around my room on my bed, and be content, desiring nothing. I don't know what the word for that feeling is, contentment, relaxation, happiness, but it's something I hope lasts.

View from balcony on my floor

Lena, Vinny, and Me - Ayutthaya

Ayuthaya was the capital of Thailand, then known as Siam, for four centuries, and was considered one of the greatest cities in Southeast Asia. It was responsible for laying a basic foundation for the modern country. Ayuthaya's government was shrewd, giving different minority groups and nationalities their own districts of the city and dealing with the European powers in such a way that Thailand avoided being colonized. The Burmese sacked the city twice and wiped out its buildings and people the second time. Today there are just a handful of ruins scattered on and off the island.

I came to Ayuthaya from Bangkok to see this ruined city. At first I was a bit disappointed. I'd imagined walking through an ancient abandoned city of stone like Machu Picchu, destroyed structures still in their original place. I always tend to romanticize places with historical significance, picturing them in an almost dreamlike way as if they hold some elusive mystical quality. Ayuthaya is actually a modern city with few remnants of its past, refreshingly less hectic than Bangkok but nonetheless different than what I'd searched for.

It didn't take long for this sense of mild disappointment to vanish. I met a couple of Germans, Lena and Vinny, in the Good Luck guesthouse immediately after unpacking in my spacious and air-conditioned room with a bathroom (I thought I'd deserved to spend an extra 200 baht for the night after struggling in Bangkok). I was struck by how friendly, laid back, and genuinely good people they were. Lena admitted to having a terrible sense of direction, and I think this similarity helped us become friends pretty quickly.

My first tour of Ayuthaya, after walking through the market searching in vain for a cap to keep my face from burning off, was on a small boat operated by a stout Thai woman. The boat chugged around the island, stopping at two temples to let us disembark and in front of a group of beautiful ruins for a photo op. At one of the temples, I got on my knees like the Thais in front of a giant seated Buddha statue. You're not supposed to point your feet at a Buddha image, so you sit with them underneath you. As I was kneeling, a woman next to me taught me how to pray and I prayed with Buddhists for the first time. The woman told me to ask the higher powers for anything and everything I wanted. Part of the prayer was also requesting a lot of money by quickly slapping your thighs. For some reason I don't associate Buddhism with the desire for a lot of money...

Huge!

That same night, Lena, I, and the Chinese girl who'd toured with us ate at a night market by the river where the boat dropped us off. The variety of food was incredible, and what intrigued me was how the Thai Buddhists and Muslims shared the same space, each offering its distinct cultural cuisine. I opted for a delicious and very spicy soup with everything in it: noodles, crab, shrimp, squid, chicken feet, onions, tomatoes, vegetables, peanuts, and a number of herbs and spices. Yes, I can casually list chicken feet as an ingredient in my meal. Another notable dish I should mention is green papaya salad--crunchy, spicy, a little sweet, "mwah!" as Vinny would say.

The classic attraction in Ayuthaya is the ruins, so Vinny, Lena, and I rented bikes and pedaled the rickety contraptions on traffic light-free streets to the historic park. Actually, it wound up being more of a time traveling trip to childhood. Strolling across bridges, passing by temples receding into oblivion, obliging childlike impulses to examine empty snail shells, a broken skull, giant millipedes, and tree vines, we wandered though the park. Our ultimate goal was to spot one of the massive "water lizards" Vinny had seen in the ponds on his last visit. At one point I made out two decorated elephants walking slowly in the hazy distance like mythological creatures. Besides participating in my German friends' games of curiosity, a highlight (albeit sadistic) was watching Lena and Vinny dance around slapping their legs as ants chomped on them under their clothes.

Millipede on Lena's shoulder

Something mystical after all

A warning for weary travelers in Ayuthaya: beware of Tony's Place. A super-friendly man who works there will ask where you're from and try (and succeed) to impress you with his encyclopedic geography knowledge. Then he'll give you a piece of paper with numbers listed on it and say something like "Ten states with five letters", and you'll have to list all of the U.S. state names spelled with five letters. I've spent a couple of tense hours wracking my brain for his answers as he's sat back watching me suffer like a dark wizard because I can't give up when I've got 1 or 2 left out of 10.

Bangkok

I should start this post by confessing that I have a tragically poor sense of direction. It was made clear to me gradually over the past few years, but my wanderings in Bangkok have eliminated any doubts about it. This has caused a good deal of frustration for me, especially in a city raging with perpetual traffic, smelly pollution, stifling heat and humidity, and hordes of tuk-tuk drivers descending on me anytime I look at a map, take a breather, or just pass by ("Tuk-tuk! Tuk-tuk! Where you going? My friend... I take you to big Buddha, temples, only 30 baht, you have map? Whistle-whistle").

But getting lost is also an opportunity to see something you would have otherwise overlooked. On my first night, the taxi driver from the airport dropped me off in front of a narrow alley in the rain and told me to walk two minutes through it to get to my guesthouse. He couldn't drive in because it was too narrow. Like an idiot, I obliged, paid him, and entered the rainy alley under the weight of my much too large backpack. After a few minutes, I started seeing clotheslines and motorcycles instead of backpackers and guesthouses, and walked back to avoid being murdered. Of course the driver was gone, and I was hopelessly lost. But the first person I asked for directions happened to speak English, had visited New York for a photography field trip, and was headed in the same direction as me. The walk with her was pleasant and the whole experience was unique and, as I'd soon learn, not life-threatening as I'd thought. Thailand is quite safe, with the exception of thieves, a universal phenomenon.

Also from Night 1: checking into a 300 baht ($10) room with a bed, fan, dim light, small table, and towel (electrical outlets and toilet paper sold separately); being approached by two prostitutes just down the street from my guesthouse while going out for a 3-4 AM meal; searching my floor and then the floor below for a bathroom.

A guesthouse room can't feel more like a prison cell (If I'd turned the camera the other way, the lens would be millimeters from the wall.)

Bathroom experiences are often interesting in foreign countries. On my first morning in Bangkok I went downstairs to take a shower to find that the shower head, toilet, and sink were in the same room with no division. The shower head was also on a loose screw, so if I didn't adjust it perfectly it would swing upside down and splash water all over the toilet bowl (which happened). After turning the shower off I noticed that the water hadn't drained much into the hole in the floor and that a spreading lagoon had almost reached my flip flops beneath the sink. The same day I was on the Khao San Road, the extremely touristic street where backpackers stay and hang out and basically Bangkok's Times Square, when a feeling in my stomach indicated that it was time for a Welcome-to-Thailand celebration. I found a 3 baht restroom just in time, but the fun wasn't over yet. There was a normal looking toilet but no toilet paper and what appeared to be a hose hanging from its stand. Luckily, my bowels haven't betrayed me as much on this trip as two years ago in Armenia. Also, stealing a roll of toilet paper from my guesthouse hallway has given me more peace of mind.

Bloodshed: On my second night I was kept awake on my hard bed by the insane yelling and cursing of a young Englishman in the hallway. He was threatening to kill someone. Two other men were shouting as well, one occasionally weeping, and the high pitched shrieks of a female Thai staff member went ignored until some banging sounds made me imagine her small frame being tossed around like a pillow. Eventually I stepped out of my room. My neighbor told me that the insane guy had beaten his father to pulp. This turned out to be quite true: a short plump middle-aged man appeared in the hallway, his nose a red blob and the entire front of his shirt stained dark red. Then a lanky young guy with tensed muscles came out and told his father to give his plane ticket away because he was about to go to Thai prison. The younger brother who'd been the one crying before pleaded with staff members not to call the police. Both warriors apologized several times to us in a calm tone. As if the father's nose wasn't practically gone.

The crazy stuff out of the way, I can express to you about how incredibly beautiful the architecture of the Buddhist temples and shrines are, but photographs will do a better job at that:

Food: Great food is incredibly cheap and plentiful in Bangkok. Food stalls in markets and other locations are  open for seemingly all hours of the day and night. If you're craving noodles or rice with chicken and morning glory at 3 AM, go for it. There are many flavors in Thai cuisine, often combined, which are categories most basically as savory/salty, sweet, spicy, and sour. It's common something salty like beef to be soaked in a sweet sauce, have a sour liquid ladled on, and finally sprinkled with hot red pepper. Several different cultures have influenced the cuisine, such as Laotian, Indian, and Chinese. If you venture down more hidden alleys away from the touristic areas, you'll find an amazing assortment of cooked foods and ingredients sold in markets, such as grilled fish and meats on skewers, various fruits and juices, and some more "exotic" things like roasted frogs.

Food stands near my guesthouse

RIP-bit!

People: Making friends is probably easier when traveling that at any other time. Everyone is there for more or less the same purpose and most are eager to share their experiences with others. Although I found it more difficult to strike up relationships with people as a solo traveler in a one-person room in Bangkok than here in Ayutthaya (more about that later), I did meet a few fun and interesting people. One of these was a German girl whose last night it was in Bangkok. She had quite an adventurous spirit, having even begged her friends to rent motorcycles in Bangkok--if you've been there, you know just how crazy that idea is. Multiple times during our conversation she expressed an interest in taking "crazy mosh-rooms" that night, before leaving Thailand on her flight the next day. I told her that was probably a bad idea. Still, we managed to have fun by frolicking in the rain through Khao San Road, grooving at a club, and searching for the woman who sells insects on a cart. I'd challenged her to try a scorpion with me and we'd shook on it. Although the cart was empty when we got to it because of the rain, a man in the next cart over asked us "How many?" and took out a plastic tub of the fried creatures from a shelf beneath the cart. My German fried shrieked in horror and jumped back, but went for it without too much protest. I also bought a scorpion for the vendor, the Thai incarnation of Tom Hanks, and the three of us crunched on the ash-tasting arachnids together.

Me and Tom Hanks eating scorpions. What a night.