HERE!

Listen, I'm sorry about everything in this blog so far. It hasn't been very entertaining or savory, and it certainly wasn't written in Thailand. If you're just starting here, just start here, here in Bangkok, where we are and I am and which already is and has been very entertaining. Just like I promised.

We saw a lady-nun monk, buzz-headed but in a white rather than burnt orange robe, trying to feed a wide eyed and patchy little kitten to a dying pigeon. Or maybe she wanted the kitten to attack, or play with the pigeon. Either way, neither of the creatures were into her plan. And all this at the bottom of the steps of the holy Wat of Victory, just off Khansao Road, which is a mecca of white half-naked vagabonds, having false dreadlocks woven into their clean short hair.

There are primarily three kinds of solicitors in this bustling tourist district: old women with meat on sticks, young women offering the false dreadlock service, and men in handsome suits beckoning you into their glass walled shops with Armani catalogs spread open centerfold style. They beg most persistently of all the vendors, Please, please, a suit, nice suit! They want me to be fitted for a beautiful silk suit, measured and made in less than 18 hours! Needless to say, Kyle and I will be picking up our suits tomorrow afternoon, just in time for our three-day elephant-ride nature voyage.

And my dreads look really good. I paid thirty cents extra because the scalp my vendor harvested from was a virgin's. I wouldn't have it any other way.

Last, it is early evening to bedtime prospect is weighing on my mind. Our hostel seems clean enough, not as good as the first place we looked but we hadn't figured out our trick for the best savings yet. Anyway, scratched into the wall above the bed are two words whose combined meaning could not be any clearer. They read, "warning" and below that "bugs." Next to the second word there is even a childlike rendering of a bug, circle, six lines jutting. We shouldn't have listened to that American Life about bed-bugs on the road to Seattle.

Needless to say, I'm going to douse the bedposts with the vinegar solution I made and brought along for cleaning fruit. It's sure to work.


We are tourists of course but how much worse it seems when we're among so many others of the same! We gotta get out of here!


All of Thailand's love,
is mine,
Kanny