Cuz its 3am, and I wanna go to beeedddd

July 6th, 3:50am - Khao San Road

For those of you keeping score, as the line above states, its about 4am as I've started writing this blog entry. For some reason being in Thailand means I'm not as tired, and seemingly do ok each morning too. Quite a nice combination :)

Today was a very international day. Just walking down the street I offered some advice to a random guy that looked lost ( "Don't let that Tuk-Tuk driver take you anywhere, they rip you off" ), and he said thanks and introduced himself and we were off and running. He is a very cool guy, Swiss, and speaks about 4 languages more than me (French, Italian, English, German, Swiss-German). We spent the better part of the day chatting about cultural differences and asking each other questions about how things worked. One odd thing is that they aren't very big on the idea of leftovers from a restaurant, and taking a doggy bag home would get you stared at.

We decided to explore the city a bit, so we took the ferry that runs along the main river from one end to the other. Its dark brown water that you can't see more than an inch or two deep into, very polluted. Just in our time on the water we saw people swimming in it, fishing in it, and so forth. Once we got to the end of the river we hopped on the Bangkok Skytrain, which is an elevated track train that goes around the city. You get a cool view of the buildings and temples (Wats).

After a pizza dinner and fruit filled dessert, we went to the house of a guy i met a few nights ago, one of the Englishmen. His house turned out to be kind of an English ex-pat community, with about 6 or 7 English guys hanging out and chatting with beers. All told by the end of the night, there were a couple latvians, a swiss guy, some thais, some english, another American and me. Everyone went to the local university, including the other American, who has been in Thailand for 6 years and taught most of the other guys around the table chemistry.

The Englishmen got piss drunk and said Wanker and Mate a lot, as well as Bird and Bloke. Everyone smoked various things and drank a lot, and everyone was incredibly friendly. They gave me their cell phone numbers and reassured me that if I needed anything I just had to call. Awesome people. I had a kind of surreal moment when one of the Thais started talking about how the Jews controlled the American economy. I think it became a bit of joke after a moment but you could tell he had the idea in his head for some time. The political discussions about Israel and the states I had with my Swiss friend were also delicate but open as we realized we wouldn't offend each other.

So here I am, sitting at an internet cafe at 4am, eating Pad Thai and reflecting through this blog. What a great idea, a blog. So far I feel very lucky to have a met a lot of friendly, interesting people and had some fun times and good conversations. I don't think i'm going to go North to Laos, and in general i'm not sure what the next day will bring. You'll find out when I do.

For those of you interested in details, I'm probably going to try to go to a weekend market tomorrow/today (in 3-4 hours), which is supposed to be the big one. Then i'll hang around Bangkok for another day or two and head to Ko Tao. A very beautiful island and a place I can just sit on my behind on the beach for a couple days. Then depending on how boring that gets, sooner or later I'm going to go into Cambodia and visit the Angkor Wat, which everyone around here has said I have to do.

Ok, my stomach hurts from how spicy that pad thai was... time to go take a shower in my toilet/shower combination room and lie down for a couple hours. Heres hoping I make it to the weekend market! Night all.