Saturday, November 3, 2007

Days become nights

Last night I arrived safely in Bangkok and today I've been touring around a bit. It's pretty easy to get around because most everything is in Thai and English. They even have a thing for 7-Eleven's here - I saw one across the street from another. The cars here look fairly new - lots of Toyotas and many Corollas, although they're a bit different because they drive on the other side of the road here. One thing I kind of like is the traffic lights count down - like our cross walks do. So you know there's 20 seconds till it changes to green or yellow.
I thought the long flight from Dulles to Korea (like 14 hrs) was kinda like being in Vegas - you have no idea what time it is. They feed you randomly, it's always dark, and there's no clocks. It kinda helped me reverse my days and nights to get on their schedule here. We were packed in tight in cargo class (aka economy) but it was nice having individual screens to watch movies or pick music to listen to.
Today I saw several Wats - which are Buddist temples. They're all pretty cool and I took lots of photos (no surprise there). I blend in a bit better here, snapping away photos, because the Asian tourists are far worse than I with respect to taking photos. During the changing of the guard this morning at the Grand Palace, I thought one set of Asian tourists were about to join the formation to get a better photo!! The best part is I've found no shortage of people who can take a decent photo for me while wandering the city alone.
And as a note - it's early morning for you but late afternoon for me. So the middle of the night for you is the middle of the day for me. Kinda strange. But I'm surprised how quickly I adjusted to the time zone. It's really not that bad.

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