Quest to See the World

Well today we started the day off with some Muesli w/ yogurt and fruit for a buck, a huge bowl, and then headed for the public transport boat again. We took it down to the skytrain which is like, well you can imagine, a subway on a line up above the street. It’s very new and modern and kind of expensive. We paid around $1.30 to go 3 stops at one point. Nothing really exciting happened today. we just checked out other areas of town like Siam Square where there are a lot of stores for teenagers, so we were told, and a whole lot of people around. It pretty much reminded me of NYC. Some lady just started talking to us on the street and asked where we were going, where we had visited, how long we were going to be in town… and then this guy joined in and told us where to go to get cheap gems such as sapphires and rubies, even though we were nicely trying to tell him that we weren’t in the market for any. these people were just nice too, not looking for anything, not gem sellers themselves, just friendly people, although the guy did tell us that the area we were in had stores for teenagers, not for people our age. gee, thanks mister.

We did a lot of walking, went into some mall that was super fancy with Gucci, Dior, Cartier… Starbucks, and got a coffee. We then went to eat at a place called Cabbages and Condoms. It’s a restaurant that uses all the proceeds to pay for HIV and sex education programs in rural areas as well as other health programs. They have all these mannequins dressed in clothes made out of packets of birth control pills and condoms. It was quite interesting and instead of mints after dinner, we each got a condom.

After the restaurant we went to a night market around 6pm, but it wasn’t anything exciting either. Like I said, i was just going with the flow today. Tomorrow we’re headed to Utaitani to visit Dale’s dad. that should be quite interesting because we’ll get shown around by a local and can ask all of the questions we have about the monks and buddism, and i can also work on my thai language skills. it’s a very, very difficult language! a waiter yesterday taught me an alternative way to ask for the check, something different from what was in the book. today when i used it the waiter asked if i spoke thai and i was quite excited because not only did he understand me the first time, he actually thought that i knew what i was doing for a second

ok, well, it’s off to bed soon. Thanks for posting comments Romina and Kara.

It’s 7:49 and they are still sleeping, but it’s the perfect time to get some blogging in. I didn’t think that the time change has been that difficult to adjust to until it got to be around 8pm and all of a sudden I felt sooooo tired and I wasn’t able to write last night because I just wanted to crash.

So I’m going to back up a little bit… We’re staying at the New  Siam Hotel which is around $17 per night for a/c, private bath, flat screen tv, clean, but we had to get 2 rooms because they didn’t have a triple. It’s okay, the walls are just white and there aren’t any decorations.  Before I go to sleep I watch TVE from Spain because the other options are either in a language I don’t understand or from the states…hey, might as well keep up on my Spanish while I’m here There’s a cheap open air restaurant here and internet service too. I’m in my own room and they are sharing. I wasn’t going to get  A/c, but that room was on the fifth floor and they’re on the 1st and it would’ve been a pain.

The craziest thing happened, but i forgot to mention it last time…The first night we were here stacy’s phone rang at 3:30am with caller ID showing a Massachusetts phone number!!! She didn’t answer it though because it would probably be like $4 per minute.

Ok, back to the first day…we got to the hotel around 2pm and decided to check the place out a little, but had no idea of anything because none of us have read too much before coming here (I know, what were we thinking?!?!?!). We checked out the map and decided to walk to the river and hop on one of the boats that runs up and down as public transportation. They stop at each pier along the way and you can get off at any stop, it’s around $.50  each. Ok, so we found the pier, bought the ticket and [read on]

So, on Saturday my mom and I got dropped off at the Pittsburgh airport at 8:30am & i took off at 9:30 to Phili where I met up with my mom when her flight got in an hour after mine. ... [Continue reading this entry]