oh sweet as anything thailand..how i love thee..even though it is all so random out here...

1) custom officials who sexually harass you are not okay
2) i left australia with the worst smelling laundry ever. i smelled like rotting corpses that lost a fight against batman after he just took a shower in poop.
3) buying countless dvd's including the whole series of sex and the city for less than $50 USD is amazing.
4)Getting new shoes. listen to me. my old shoes smelled like death, not like rotting corpses from number 2, but an old stale death mixed in with cat piss, and baked in a casserole of hell. new shoes feel like luxury. although i went and mailed them to ireland...so i won't have my luxury until october : (
so for now, the rest of asia gets to take me on, shoes of no hope and all.
5) oil massages. enough said. seriously when you're carrying around almost 55 pounds of god knows what on your back, you know you need it, and you deserve it. i realize now the only difference between being homeless and being a backpacker is that we carry out stuff on our backs and not in carts. oh yeah and we get to pick when we eat..so i guess we're not so much alike..
7) getting smoothies for about 0.60 each is an amazing feat. you do own the keys to the kingdom for things like this.
8) i've lived pretty luxuriously since i've been in thailand. a room to myself. massages. hot food at least once a day..man it can't get better than this. the heat and humidity here remind me of what im missing in florida, or not missing rather...but hey..this is just prep now isn't it.
9) tuk tuks. these are motorized carts that you get driven around. it's crazy. they drive up on curbs, into oncoming traffic, everywhere..but well worth the experience. they also will try to take you to random stores to pretend you are intersted in merchandise, so they get comission. it's all a game of cat and mouse here...so either you're a cat, or one hell of a mouse.
10) today i went to a temple where they had a 50 meter buddah and it was very inspiring. i coudln't help but take off my socks and shoes and get down like some other people there and say a little prayer of hope.

11) i know you're supposed to barter for stuff here, like hardcore, but i just can't bring myself to be that kind of person who fights someone for $1 USD. especially when a US dollar to me is so trivial compared to what it means to people here...so i guess we all won. I got some stuff, i didn't rip them off, and they got some money. i still kind of feel like a major jerk though.

i had to pick up my onward air ticket to japan in the red light district of bangkok. things went pretty smoothly if you discount the fact that the cab i was in was in an accident and a semi high-speed chase to persue the hitter..but hey...all ended well. lets hope entering into japan goes as smoothly!

so anyhow, im leaving for japan tonight, and im so excited. I know i love thailand and i'd love to come back here to see the rest of the country. although there was enough to last me a lifetime in the two and a half days i've been here, i can honestly say it's been really amazing. Not to turn to sad ideas, but I don't know how I'm ever supposed to be able to come back to the U.S. and liv the life i had before, knowing what others are living like around the world...and it's quite possible i won't do so, but that's a whole other story...

so now im on my way to japan tonight suckers!!!!