Bangkok Diaries: Travel Photos And How Not To Take Them

Ah, my first morning in Bangkok! I got up, stretched, and pulled the curtains of our bedroom aside for a spectacular view of this:



Which brings me to my first big segue of this whole Thailand saga. I know, I know... it's unusual to have a segue before you actually begin the saga in the first place, but it's OK. I am a trained professional.

So what I'd like to talk about now is the strange and weird world of amateur travel photography. Because I don't know about you, but whenever I go on a trip, I take what I think are all these great pictures, but when I actually get home and look at them, I'm shocked to discover that all my great pictures have somehow morphed into totally lame ones.

I call this the "what in heaven's name possessed me to think this picture would be cool?" principle. Or WIHNPMTTTPWBC for short.

Now, I don't like to brag, but I feel compelled to confess that I am an expert in taking WIHNPMTTTPWBC pictures. If you don't believe me, just take a look at this:



That is a picture of the BTS Skytrain train tracks in Bangkok. Why, you ask? The answer is simple: I don't know. I mean, it's not like they look really different from train tracks anywhere else. But apparently I thought they were pretty intriguing, because I went ahead and took another picture of them:



And another:



I'm particularly proud of the psuedo-artistic angling of that last one, which I suppose I imagined would distract viewers from the utter banality of the subject; i.e, yet more train tracks. Talk about cool! And notice how cleverly I avoided getting a photo of the actual train in any of these photos. The train sometimes had advertising on the sides, which might have given an insightful and/or entertaining glimpse into Thai culture. For example, I remember one ad that seemed to be for career advancement courses, and which showed a fortune teller as one of many viable career options available to the eager, bright-eyed generation of tomorrow.

But why would I take a picture of something that people might actually want to see? Come on.

I did try to mix it up a bit with the following pic:



Look! Two people on cell phones! You don't see that in the United States every day! (I'm sure it didn't escape your notice that they are on the Skytrain platform. Which is right next to the Skytrain train tracks.)

But my personal favorite of all the photos I took is this one:



If you're at all conscious at this point, you're probably wondering what that is. Well, that makes two of us.

So yeah, while I was busily recording images of train tracks and an unidentifiable flash of light that, if previous photos are any indicator, is probably a train track in disguise, my colleagues on the team were getting photos of monks in saffron-colored robes, gleaming temples, bustling marketplaces, each other, and so on. You know, stuff that would be of interest to other people. Stuff you're supposed to take pictures of. Cool stuff.

All I can say is, photography is clearly not my life's calling.

So tomorrow we'll get back to the story, in writing, thank you very much. Because I may take boring photos, but at least my writing is... hey, what? Are you asleep?

That is so not cool.

Bangkok Diaries: Prologue

After wracking my poor little brains for a while, trying to figure out how to start telling about my Thailand trip, I had this startlingly innovative idea: begin at the beginning! So here we go...

My flight to Bangkok left on Tuesday, January 20 at about 11 a.m. I was kind of bummed that I'd miss the historic inauguration ceremony, but I needn't have worried—turns out there's this nifty invention called "radio" which we had in the car, so I got to hear a lot of announcers talking mindlessly to fill air time until the actual historic ceremony began. And it seemed they were particularly taken with reporting on how cold it was in D.C. and how many people were suffering from hypothermia and so on. J, who was driving, made the observation that those were probably the people from California who didn't know any better than to wear their flip-flops, as usual. I would have liked to protest, but the truth is, he was probably right. Still, I bet there would have been a lot less cases of hypothermia if people had figured out that another nifty invention called "television" makes it possible to watch historic ceremonies without leaving the (warm) comforts of home.

But I (shockingly, I know) digress.

We arrived at the airport without incident, which is always nice to report after a stint on the 110 freeway. But we hit our first snag at the check-in desk for Korean Air, when it turned out that one of our team had a passport set to expire in just under six months. Apparently this is a big no-no as far as Thai policy goes, so the airline refused to allow her on the plane. We tried to get them to change their minds, but in the end she had no choice but to go get a passport extension, which takes 24 hours to process, as it turned out. But there was nothing else to be done. The Korean Air staff were polite but firm. She would not be joining us on the flight over.

So that was that.

It was a bit of a downer of a way to start the trip off, but our team member had a good attitude about it—much better than I would have. After she left, with assurances that she would get the next available flight once she sorted out the passport situation, we finished checking in and walked up to a restaurant that had TVs broadcasting the inauguration. I was pleased that I didn't have to miss it after all! And I was even more pleased that I didn't get hypothermia.

Eventually it came time to board the plane. Our itinerary was to Seoul, then Bangkok. By my calculations, the Seoul leg of the flight took a whole lot of hours—enough to watch four movies in a row. Which, I might add, was more than the amount of movies I've watched the entire past year. (Yes, I know I need to get out more often.)

One of the movies I watched was Vicky Christina Barcelona. I couldn't get over the fact that Javier Bardem could be so incredibly sexy as a Spanish painter, given his Oscar-winning turn as an incredibly unsexy psychopathic killer in last year's No Country for Old Men. On a more amusing note, the Korean Air flight magazine had a profile on Javier which, due to an unfortunate typo, identified him as "one of the world's sexist men."

Well, maybe it's true. Who knows.

I also watched The Mummy III (couldn't finish it, too lame), The Dark Knight (which I had missed when it came out, and which I thought was way better than Batman Begins, by like a trillion times), and one of my personal favorites, Chariots of Fire, which only gets better every time I see it. (Fav quote: "I believe God made me for a purpose—for China. But he also made me fast. And when I run, I feel his pleasure.")

I could go on and on about the flight, and the food, and blah blah blah, but then this post would be about as long as the flight itself, and you'd probably fall asleep, if you haven't already. So I'll just skip ahead to when we finally arrived in Bangkok, at about 1 a.m. on Thursday, January 22. As we left the airport, I braced myself for the horrific humidity and heat that I remembered from my last visit to Thailand, but was pleasantly surprised. The air was warm, but not unbearable, and only a little muggy.

After a short wait, a van picked us up and we drove to our hotel, located in one of the red-light districts of the city. After checking in, we went up to our rooms. The one I was sharing with C (our team leader) was a great example of the "let's not match" school of interior decorating. It featured a deep-purple carpet, seafoam green walls, at least two different tile patterns in the bathroom, and a bright gold bedspread on the double bed. (That's right, I said "bed," not "beds." There was only one bed in the room, but both C and I were too tired to care at that point.)

As an added classy touch, there was a horizontal mirror on the wall next to the bed, which took up the full length of the wall. The way it was angled, if you wanted to actually see yourself in it, you had to crouch down in front of it or else stretch out on the bed.

Hmm.

I went to sleep that night trying not to take up more than my fair share of space on the bed, and trying even harder not to think about previous occupants of the room and their likely activities. At least, I thought as I drifted into dreamland, I haven't seen any mutant cockroaches yet.

But then, it was only my first night back in Bangkok...

Sawadee Kah!

Boy, I sure hope you pronounced that correctly. You don't even want to know what you just said otherwise.

Anyway, for those of you who don't know, "sawadee kah" means "howdy" in Thai. Although if you're a guy, you should say "sawadee khrup." I'm sure there is an explanation for this, and I'm equally sure that I don't care what it is. The Thai phrasebook might shed some light on the matter, if I wasn't too lazy to flip through it and look. As it is, I guess the answer will remain a mystery.

ANYWAY. I am back from Thailand, after successfully not updating my blog during the entire time I was away. I believe I have officially elevated not-updating-my-blog to an art form. However, I did think about updating my blog while I was gone, so hopefully that counts for something.

The trip was pretty amazing. Frankly, I don't even know where to start in talking about all the things I did and saw. Some of it was upsetting and sad. Some of it was fun. All of it was thought-provoking and educational... to say the least.

I think the best way to go about telling the story may be to do a day-by-day recap.* So check back Wednesday for Day 1. Hopefully I'll have my thoughts in some semblance of an order by then. In the meantime, thanks for your patience! Kahp kuhn kah!!

*Thanks to Abbie for the narrative-method suggestion. Unless it turns out to be lame. In which case, you now know who to blame.**

**Or is it whom? I always get those two mixed up...

It's Not What You Say, But How You Say It

So this evening I went down to the basement and hunted through boxes of books til I found the old Thai phrasebook I bought in preparation for the last trip, so I could take it with me and (most likely) not use it this time, either.

In the introduction to the book, the first sentence informs me that "Thailand's official language is Thai," which is comforting, because that's what I figured. But after that things get a bit more complicated. This is because, as the book points out and as I remember from last time, "Thai has five different tones: level or mid, low, falling, high and rising. The range of all five tones is relative to each speaker's vocal range; there is no fixed musical pitch intrinsic to the language."

Which explains why you can think that you are ordering, say, pad thai at a restaurant, when in fact you've made the cheerful observation that "the fat lady is dead" or something along those lines.

Not that I would know about that from experience or anything.

So yeah, Thai is probably not the easiest language in the world to pick up. But the book urges me to have courage and not be afraid of speaking Thai even though I don't have a clue how to speak it. Well, that's easy for the book to say. It's not going to offend anyone if it gets some word or phrase horribly wrong.

But the real question right now is: why am I still awake?

I have no idea. It's way past my bedtime, considering that I have to be out the door at 6:30a.m. So, on that note, I'm off to bed. Oh and happy Inauguration Day! As excited as I am about hopping on a plane tomorrow, I'm a little sad that I will likely miss the most historic inauguration speech since the first one ever. Oh well. Hopefully I'll be able to catch a bit of it at the airport as we await our flight.

And on THAT note, take care of yourselves and miss me, my darlings. With kisses, as always, from the frogg princess..

Countdown to Thailand!

Only a couple more days...!

I spent today mostly running around, doing some shopping for the trip. Not that I was actually "running", thanks to the fact that I sprained my foot on Tuesday. On the plus side, I guess it doesn't matter, since I probably wouldn't have been able to do much running in Bangkok. On the down side, I can't really walk that well, either, and I'll definitely be doing a lot of walking in Bangkok.

So, yeah. (I'm trying to pretend like I have a point here, but I really don't. And I'm sure that comes as a big surprise.)

In spite of my mobility concerns, I'm very excited about this trip. Definitely about the work that I'll be doing, but also just the chance to go back to Thailand. At a recent planning meeting, our group leader asked those of us who had been to Thailand before if there was any particular food that we were especially looking forward to eating again. She and this other girl started gushing over the fruit that they have over there, but since I'm weird, I don't care for fruit that much and therefore couldn't join in with their rapturous recollections. Instead, the first thing that came to my mind was a Thai omelette. SO good. The second thing that came to mind was a memory of a time when I ordered some pad see ew at this little stand in Bangkok, and when I got it, there was a big dead ant on one of the noodles. Mmmm!

I guess I should have been grateful that it wasn't a (mutant-sized) cockroach, though, because it very easily could have been.

Ah, Thailand. I can't wait...

The Latest Frogg Update

Another Monday. Another reason to hit the bottle.

Just kidding. No really, I am.

That reminds me, though, I was just thinking that a cool drinking game during the past eight years would have been to throw one down every time Bush said "on my watch". Oh well.

I didn't get to hear his press conference today, just the highlights on NPR. But they played one clip where he talked about how the media sometimes "misunderestimated" him.

Classic to the end.

On another, completely unrelated note, I read about an exciting new job Down Under. Basically, you get $100,000 for six months of lounging around on an island and having adventures. I think I could handle that. I'm really really good at lounging around. Like, we're talking SUPER good. And I'm not too bad at the adventure thing, either.

The only bummer is you have to apply via video. I am not what you'd call a filmmaker, unless if by "filmmaker" you mean "someone who doesn't have a clue how to make films." Which would be silly. But anyway, in spite of my lack of cinematographic experience, I feel like I want to give this a shot (ha). The only real requirements they have for the position are that you be enthusiastic, a good communicator, attractive and adventurous. Check, check, check and check.

OK, I totally need to find a video camera. And someone who knows how to work it...

Anyway, so I'll keep you posted on that one.

Speaking of adventures, I'll be heading to Thailand next week, working with a group called NightLight. Should be an interesting, educational, and challenging time. I can't wait. I'll be there from January 20-31, and I hope to make at least a couple blog updates while I'm there, so watch this space. I know you probably don't believe that I'll actually do it, since I haven't been what you'd call good at keeping my blog updated, but hey, I might surprise all of us.

Don't misunderestimate the power of the frogg, kids.

Resolved: [Fill in the Blank]

Well, 2009 is here, folks, and there's nothing that says "Happy New Year" like an(other) offer for a free pre-paid cremation from the generous, if somewhat clueless, people at the Neptune Society.

Oddly enough, the same day that I found the pre-paid cremation offer in my stack of mail, I happened to park my car at a local bookstore in a space right next to a car advertising a related service: selling or creating gravestone monuments. If I were a superstitious person, I'd be a little disturbed. As it is, I was a little disturbed.

So, to get my mind off of the gloomy contemplation of my mortality, let's talk about something more cheerful. Like New Year's Resolutions! Woo-hoo!!

Has anyone actually made resolutions this year? Personally, I thought it would be kind of funny to resolve to break my new year's resolutions, but that would entail actually making some, and that in turn would require me to think about what sort of resolutions I would want to make, and at that point I realized that there was already too much work involved, and gave up. Besides, I've never had to resort to resolving to break my new year's resolutions; I broke them just fine without the added pressure of telling myself I had to it. So I guess it wasn't so much a funny idea as a stupid one, but oh well.

A better idea, given my proclivity for attracting pre-paid cremation offers, might be to resolve not to die. But then I'd sure hate to break that one.