Quest to See the World

We haven’t disappeared, it’s just hard to keep up when traveling with others. Since I last updated we’ve bathed elephants, ridden on every class of train and tuk tuk, fed wild monkeys sunflower seeds (stacy even got a monkey scratch!!! yikes!!), fed a baby elephant, gotten trapped in a monsoon storm on the top of a rickety boat while thais were laughing at us from inside, seen 10,000 pictures of the king all around the country, learned how to pray like a buddist, and much more. i tried to update a few days ago, but the connection was really slow. stacy and mom head out tomorrow night and i’ll have time to update then. i’ve decided to scrap cambodia/laos and stay in thailand for another week. i’m going to take an introductory scuba class to see if i want to get full certification later or if i’m too scared. i also haven’t had my fill of monkey spotting so i need to do some more of that in a rainforest in the south. right now we’re on ko si chang, an island off the east coast, but not where the tsunami hit, so don’t worry, we’re all good. thais are really friendly and helpful, and thank goodness for the phrasebook because we’d be in trouble without it. many people speak a little bit of english, but only know the very basics so it gets kind of difficult when you want to find out at what time the train leaves in the afternoon rather than when the next one is leaving.  you wouldn’t believe this place in lopburi (a town between bangkok and chiang mai) where there are hundreds of monkeys living around this temple!!! they run across the street and walk on the electric lines…it’s nuts!!! there were a TON of babies too!!

sorry i haven’t updated with photos, but like i said, outside of major cities like bangkok, the connection is slow, but i’ll definitely get some up tomorrow night after the fam leaves. i may just hit that floating market on my own too, we’ll see?!

oh yeah, i got a palm reading too and it was really freaky because the lady knew about a mole that i have in a spot where she couldn’t see it. after she said that i believed everything she said…tell you all about it tomorrow night.

Hi, all, well we made it. it was a long trip and the plane got really bumpy coming into guatemala city between the volcanoes. we made our way to antigua and to our surprise found out that all of the rooms were sold out because there was going to be a procession the next day, 2 weeks before easter! we didn´t freak out though and stopped in to a travel agency who had a connection to a lady who runs a guesthouse, i think mostly for language school students, and we stayed there the first night, $40 US, out of the budget, but a room. it was in front of a park, san sebastian. the first place that we stopped at said they had rooms for the next night so we switched to there in the morning, 170 Quetzales which is like $22 US, much better.

btw, the keyboard is different here so i don´t know how to use all of the symbols/punctuation that i want/need to.

anyway, the next day [read on]