I'm sitting in an internet cafe in Ayutthaya, Thailand, which charges 15 baht, the equivalent of $0.50 USD, per hour. My last meal of fried fish noodles, a soft oily sausage on a skewer, and a 0.6 L bottle of Nestle water came out to just over $2.00. It is 8:45 am here, 11 hours ahead of New York, and at noon I will be checking out of a guesthouse room that was $10 for the night.
Outside, markets selling everything you can think of, including top quality hole-in-the-wall Thai cuisine and unethically potent pharmaceuticals, swelter and thrive under tarps and in maze-like corridors of stalls and alleys. Nothing like Bangkok, but something to see all the same.
And streets away are the hauntingly beautiful ruins of a former mighty Southeast Asian capital city, hardly a vestige today of their majesty preceding their destruction by the Burmese two and a half centuries ago.
Making Contact is meant to be a place where I can share some of my collected experiences as I seek out the beautiful, unusual, and incomprehensible in my travels and maybe also in between. It's too easy to take these qualities for granted, but they're the glimmering particles in the dull fabric of every day that always keep us questioning why things are as they are, what our roles are in a world whose mysteries will never be fully unraveled, no matter how sophisticated our advancements in knowledge. Active travel and exploration is a path to understanding just a little bit more, while acknowledging that we'll never get all the way there and embracing our quixotic mission.
In the next posts, I'll give some of the highlights of my past 6 days and 7 nights in Thailand. Hopefully I'll be updating this blog frequently from now on.
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