Pics!

More pictures!

Quick post before I get eaten alive by the mosquitoes...

Wat Pho temple


Temple of the Jade Buddha


Men playing some form of checkers using...bottle caps?


Oh beautiful, glorious, CHEAP food! (340 baht, about $9)




A wonderful street vendor who provided me lunch


I had a blast trying to speak to her using my pidgin Thai picked up from the back of my LP guide. It's pretty amazing how far you can get by on facial expressions, a map, and lots of smiles. We managed to chat about my photos, what to see and what to what to avoid (Q: what does gun gesture + south of Thailand equal? A: mafia country!), and she taught me how to count to 10 :) Thai is damn hard, I tell ya. Their writing alphabet seem so complicated. Now I understand why people complain Chinese characters are so hard; to the untrained eye it must look like the friggin' Egyptian hieroglyphs!

Now boarding: flight to Hell!


At the Ancient City






I finally decided to get a travel photography book to actually teach myself how to shoot better photos. Prior to this I had always been a trial-and-error photographer, basically getting by just by shooting a large volume of shots and picking the best ones. While digital photography affords one the ability to do so, it obviously doesn't get one very far, and I bit the bullet and splurged on an actual guide. It was 850 baht (~$21), but I think it's totally worth it. Now I can really consciously work on getting better on this trip. I just picked it up yesterday, but I think (hope) my composition is already getting a little better!

Touchdown

We interrupt your regularly scheduled programming for this update --

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I just touched down in Bangkok after a brutal, 24hr flight (thanks to a 2 hr layover in SFO and 6hr layover in Narita). I'm completely beat, since I haven't slept much the previous couple of nights either, thanks to moving craziness. In total it's been about 8hrs in bed out of 3 days...ouch). I'm staying at the Shanti Lodge, which looks to be really awesome so far.

The craziest thing happened in narita though - I ran into Tim Choi, good friend whom I haven't seen in a long time at the airport!! He was on a flight back to sfo and I was waiting to transit to bangkok. I walked into this japanese food court to get some food, and i heard someone call my name. I was like, "wtf? there must be a mistake." I turn around and lo and behold, there's Tim! Crazy huh? We hung out for an hr while I ate some food and caught up, that was really cool. Talk about a small world.

Thus far, I'd have to say I think Thailand's rumored heat is overrated. Nyc was hotter and more humid. The mosquitoes, however, are not. I've only been here a couple hours and the assault has already begun in earnest. I count half a dozen so far. This must be the new guy welcome...