Change in Thai

Here are some facts about Thailand which you may or may not have heard in The Hangover Part II. The king of Thailand, Bhumibol Adulyadej, has reigned since 1946, making him the the world's longest-serving head of state. Posters of the King can been seen throughout the country. Thailand is a deeply spiritual country with 95% of its population belonging to the Theravada branch of Buddhism, hence there are temples everywhere. Thai people also love elephants and energy drinks. Their main sport is Muai Thai Boxing, a martial art style of fighting in which fighters attack with their knees and elbows. For a better understanding of this and Thai culture I strongly recommend watching the movie “Ong-Bak.” 

Thailand is also very accepting of trans-sexuals, commonly referred to as lady boys. The lady boys can be seen all over town and have established themselves as part of Bangkok’s culture. The currency used in Thailand is called Baht. Roughly 30 Baht equals 1 dollar. Switching from Yuan to Baht was a rough CHANGE because the Baht uses so many coins. Using the metro would be particularly aggravating because you got all your change back in coins. Perhaps the largest perk of being a lady boy, is having a purse.  

The next day in Bangkok, we transferred hostels to one located more downtown. There was heavy traffic, so our 25 miles of travel turned into an hour and a half long roaster in the back seats. After dropping our bags off in the hostel, we hoped on the metro to go check out the weekend market. The market was enormous, crammed with about 1,500 stalls. The bargaining wasn’t quite what it was in Xi’an, but I left happy with a pair of Thai boxing shorts.

That night John called it a day due to his jet leg, while Kassy, Thomas, and I decided to check out a place called Polo’s chicken that Thomas had read about in his travel manual. The manual said the restaurant was only a 30 minute walk from where we were, but a little difficult to find. The chicken run became a goose chase. Finally, we gave up and started walking back to our hostel. We made it halfway when we decided to double check the restaurant’s location with the staff outside of a Muai Thai stadium. They said we had turned back a minute too soon, and that Polo’s was just a little bit further on the right. It was 9:30 and the restaurant was only open until 10:00. With a wave of new energy, we ran with the taste of fried chicken almost palpable in our mouths. About 20 minutes later we arrive outside the front doors to watch them flip the open sign to close. Woe is me, missing out on Polo’s.

The next day, we hoped a casino shuttle bus to Poi Pet, the Cambodian border.

PENalty Card

     Kassy and I had the Chengdu and Xi'an trip pretty well planned with rough itineraries and hostel bookings for each day. As for our other trip, well we had the first night of 32 nights booked. John informed us that we needed passport photos which we managed to get (with a little help from our friend) a day before leaving. We decided to go to Bei Bei the night before we departed so we'd be closer to the airport. Luckily, Keegan a teacher from Bei Bei informed us that we would not be landing at the main Airport in Bangkok, but rather one about an hour outside of the city.

-Bangkok-

     On the flight to Thailand Kassy and I experienced a "Seinfeld" like moment. Being the amateur travelers we were, we did not have a pen to fill out our arrival card. Kassy asked if she can borrow a pen from the Chinese man sitting next to her. After filling out the card he hands it to her, then she hands it to me. The Chinese girl to my left asks if she can use it too. I figured it would be a safe bet to allow her to use it. Right about then the captain comes on and says we will be landing in about a half an hour while the Chinese man to Kassy's right realized that he had made an error on his card and wants his pen back to fill out another one. The card is all in English so it's a bit of a process that takes about 15 minutes. The girl I mistakenly handed the pen to happened to be a trip leader and had 6 cards to fill out. The man asks Kassy for his pen back, she then points across the aisle to me, and I signal at the girl to my left. There is a rapid exchange of words but the pen stays in the possession of the girl as she moves to her second card. For the next 25 minutes, the man does a complete abdominal work out, leaning back and forth while shooting glares as this girl as well as a few at and kassy and I.

     The last night in China, I would have put my feet in a microwave had I known how to turn it on. I stepped out of the airport and greeted the 98 degree ("I do cherish you") weather with a hallelujah . For the next three hours Kassy and I shuttled, bused, and taxied around Bangkok trying to get to our hostel. After the third hour, I realized two critically important things while traveling. One is that is that it's always in one’s best interest to have the name and/or phone number of the place where you are trying to go written down. Two is to pack light. I was still pleased with Bangkok's heat but much less pleased by the burning of my shoulders. With my new bag, I had packed five pairs of pants simply because I had room to pack five pairs of pants.

     Kassy and I finally found our way with the luck of a very helpful taxi driver (the driver went to a hotel to look up the address.) The "airport" hostel, that advertised the cities best view of the takeoff and landing for airplane lovers  was supposed to be an easy hop skip and a jump from the airport, which it was if the jump was over a croc infested river. While eating dinner on the balcony, Kassy let out a shriek, as a gigantic six foot lizard scampered up the opposite bank of the river. I'm no reptologist, but I'm pretty sure it was a komodo dragon. 

     The original plan was to meet our traveling buddies John and Thomas at the hostel. We decided that our back alley residential neighborhood hostel might be a bit tough for them to find at 1:00 in the morning after a 13 hour flight, so we decided to be good Samaritans and meet them at the airport. Now as the crow flies, our residential neighborhood hostel was only roughly 500 meters from the airport, as Kassy and Sean walk, about an hour and a half walk. On the way we stopped to get a little taste of Bangkok's famous street food. We do our habitual routine of walking up and pointing at someone else’s food then giving two thumbs up. The food was delicious, but uncomfortably spicy by the end.

     We got to the airport around 11:15 and had no idea which flights John and Thomas are on, or exactly what time they we actually supposed to be arriving. There were two different gates that they could have entered through so Kassy and I split up to play the waiting game and some people watching. After an hour, I was doing the Pontius Pilate thing saying we've done everything we could, we must have missed them. Kassy said she wanted to wait until 12:30 before we left. At about 12:27, John and Thomas come marching out the gate. There was a joyous celebration in the airport that continued well into the night. If it wasn't for Kassy's persistence we still would have been trying to find each other.

 

The Free Marketeers

-Xi'an-

     From Chengdu, we took a train to Xi’an, one of the four oldest cities in the world. Kassy and I tried to cut a few corners fiscally and phiscally paid for it. Instead of paying the extra 14 dollars to get a sleeper, we spent the 15 hour overnight trip sitting in 90 degree angle hard seats. Now the first 4 hours were really fun, not too many meiguoren (Americans) elect to travel in the cheap seats so all the laobaixing (average Joes) in car 9 were pretty flabbergasted by our presence. I spoke all the Chinese I could to the crowd gathered around us which provided a minute of entertainment. Then someone started asking if anyone on the train spoke any English (this was down in the manner of someone asking if there's a doctor on the plane because a mother is about to give birth.) I happily answered questions for a couple of hours then less happily answered sporadic questions for another hour. Luckily, we had a deck of cards and a basic understanding of a popular three person game called fight the land lord. People were shocked that we knew how to play, and the excitement of playing it with Americans was enough to substitute for the fact we weren't gambling on it. At around 4 a.m., long after the cards had been put away I realized that the only part of me that was going to fall asleep were my legs.

     We arrived red eyed into the ancient town at around Ohhh 11 hundred. After taking a much needed nap we decided to go check out a water fountain show, supposedly the longest one in China. Now, like I said, I am not the best with maps. I did a pretty decent job of navigating us there, however I failed to check the scale. I apparently had the Google map of Xi'an when it's zoomed all the way out. After a tiring hour and a half walk, we arrived 5 minutes before the show started. The fountains went on forever, and were really beautiful for the first 10 minutes until people started walking through the center aisles where the water didn't land. Xi'an is an awesome city with two major downsides. One is that it is miserably cold in the winter time and two is that it is impossible to get a taxi. We walked the whole way back shivering with our thumbs out and made it back around 11:40, just 20 minutes before the solar New Year. We walked down Xi'an's bar street where we were greeted a hundred times over with “Happy New Year, come celebrate with us!” China really wants to get in on the New Year’s Day celebration, but hasn’t quite got the customs figured out. Everyone knew it was a day that was to be celebrated and all the bars were plastered with New Year decorations but as the clock rolled from 11:59 to 12:00 there was no countdown, no happy new year shouting, no balloons, in fact nobody noticed. The karaoke singer just continued his song as Dusty, Kassy, and I cheersed in the New Year by ourselves. Later that night, to rein in the New Year, we lit Chinese sky lanterns in the street.

     The next day was beautifully warm so we decided to rent bicycles and ride along the wall that surrounds the heart of Xi'an. Kassy and I got a tandem, and I did some social loathing. The wall is about thirty feet high and allows you to look down into the city. Kassy did a nifty job circumventing the pot holes, but after two hours of riding on the uneven bricks I had to ride the last quarter standing to alleviate the pain in my butt. That night we had a dinner consisting of 26 different types of dumplings and saw a magnificent Tang Dynasty show. The dumplings were more quantity than quality and nothing to write a blog about but the show left a real lasting impression.

     On our third day we went to see the terra-cotta warriors, which share the same title as Andre the Giant as being one of the eighth wonders of the world. The warriors were pretty amazing, and I am currently growing out my mustache and my hair to replicate their style. The most memorable part of the tour was our energetic guide, Jaja. A very nice woman that had a severe phobia of losing one of us. To get into the exhibit one had to present a photo ID, instead of allowing me to use my passport she ran away five minutes to get me someone else’s driver's license from France. 

    

 

 

 

The best part of Xi'an is the Muslim Quarter. An endless haven for hagglers. Here's how it works. You look at something you want or don't want, sweatshirt, beats headphones, Rosetta stones, backpacker's back packs, anything. Then the store keeper runs over  and tells you a price, you laugh and say you will pay almost nothing, the keeper offers you the price cut in half, you say your same price, they say absolutely not you must be joking. Then you walk away and after 10 steps they say okay okay okay to whatever price you said. Lots of the store keepers like to throw a pair of boxers in with the deal (like Pikey's giving you a dog when you buy a caravan.)  I'm no Nana Scullin when it comes to shopping; I find it about as appealing as signing Christmas cards. However, I got a big kick out of the two times we went as well as some awesome merchandise. One particular steal, a $25 dollar giant North Face backpacking bag, proved to be a blessing as well as a curse in my later travels. The market also had a wonderful aroma created from the hundreds of different food carts (some of which had three foot open flames shooting out the sides of them). We sampled from a variety of them and were blown away by the flavors.

      We returned by train to Chongqing, this time in sleeper cars, with three days to get ready for our next  ad venture.

Panda Expressed

Hao jou bu jian (long time no see.) It's been a while since I've posted anything and am overwhelmed by the task of trying to document our spectacular trip to Thailand, Cambodia, Malayasia, and Hong Kong. Not to mention our travels with Kassy's father in China to Chengdu and Xian. For the next week I'll try to do one blog post about each of the cities we visited in our 40-some day excursion.

-Chengdu-

Before going to Chengdu, I'll admit I was pretty nervous, if not down right terrified. This would be our first experience of traveling alone (without a friend that speaks chinese) in China. To say I have a cognitive mapping deficiency would be a drastic understatement. To paint a picture, I didn't know the route to my high school until I was a junior. If some one told me to go south, I would look for a man hole to go down. That being said, I was planning on navigating my way through a city of 12 million Chinese speakers, what could go wrong?

Luckily, Chengdu is one of the most international friendly cities in China and it isn't too difficult to figure out. The first day we arrived we decided to check out a Sichuan Opera which in my opinion was amazing. The performance consisted of a plethora of different talents such as shadow puppetry, dancing, Chinese acrobatics, music from the Chinese two stringed instrument "erhuo", and the famous face change. Some of these performances would have absolutely annihilated the competition in America's got talent. I strongly recommend everyone reading this to look up a face changing video online, had I known that it existed, I would have had a much different answer to the "What do you want to be when you grow up?" question.

The next day we had to get up early after a bit of a late night on bar street. That morning we went to a Panda bear habitat. Now I was a little mad when the World Wrestling Federation (WWF) had to change its acronym because of World Wildlife Foundation on the account of the endangered species. Now I will do anything to support the continued existence of Pandas. They are easily the most lovable creatures on the planet. I will post a couple of videos of them on facebook or you could watch the movie kung fu panda, they pretty much show the same thing.

One of my favorite spots in the limited time I was in Chengdu, was a place called the people's park. There's a tea drinking patio where all the chairs and tables are made of bamboo. Men with head lamps come around and ask to clean your ears holding fistfuls of utensils that look strikingly similar to those that you would see while seated in a dentist chair. Kassy and I declined, but took delight in watching the process being done to a patron next to us. Another real cool spot was the night market on Jinli street. The road is decorated with thousands of Chinese lanterns and looks like the town in the movie "Spirited Away."

An added bonus of going to Chengdu was we didn't have to have another welcome feast for Kassy's father. After four nights in a row of ceaseless gorging and gan bei-ing, a simple meal felt really luxurious, especially when it came with real coffee.