Try everything once - my time in the monastery

This is a long one.  You've been warned.

So I wasn't actually going to write this post until tomorrow, but there are two things right now I can be doing, and I don't feel like packing.  Procrastination, it followed me out of university, it seems.  I've got the room to myself tonight, so the AC is cranked, the dubstep is playing, and I'm just chilling out after dinner. 

This might be a little discombobulated, I purposefully didn't write anything about my stay here until the end, because we do the same thing every day, and I hate being redundant and monotonous.  It just wouldn't do to tell you I've done the same routine everyday. 

My schedule was thus:

• Wake up at 04:30.  Chanting from 05:30-06:00
• Breakfast at 07:15.
• Ch'i Kong at 08:30 --> Ch'i Kong is a type of slow moving exercise that is supposed to harness your Chi ...if you believe in that kind of thing.
• Lecture: 09:00-11:00
• Lunch 11:15
• Lecture 14:00-16:00
• Community time 17:00 --> we work in the garden raking leaves, or digging compost ditches, etc.
• Dinner 17:30 for those only following 5 precepts (us)
• Chanting from 19:00-20:00

Most nights, I was asleep by 9pm.

Now that I've started this, I'm not really sure what to write.  Venerable Dhammananda has an international newsletter that she publishes quarterly, about women's buddhist issues, and she asked Anne and I (my australian roommate for the week) to write articles that she wishes to publish in her newsletter.  In Thailand two weeks, and already a (potentially) published author.  Not bad, eh?  Here, I'll share my article with you, and perhaps that will inspire me to add things.  I had so much to say earlier, but now that I'm sitting down and doing it, my brain is kaput.  It's been a long week.

We start the morning with chanting. 

Sitting before the Buddha on the second floor of the temple, the sun not yet raised above the horizon, we chant in an ancient language called Pali, the language during the time of the Buddha.  We praise the Buddha, and give the offering of flowers, incense, and candles.  I admire the bhikkhunis and the laypeople that have discipline: sitting in the respected position, unmoving and rigid, their straight backs towering towards the sky.  My knees ache, the small space between my shoulders burns, and my mind wanders.  I’ve never mastered the ability to sit still.  We meditate for a short amount of time only; even this, I cannot do. 

Breakfast and lunch, at first, were very strange to me.  Coming from Canada, the concept of serving another human being food (outside of a low-paying, minimum wage job) is hardly heard of.  Shoes off, we serve the bhikkhunis, starting with rice.  My comfort level with this has increased over my week here – I even look forward to it.  The very last in the line of seated bhikkhunis, Samaneri  Dhammapunni always says “Good luck to you”, and this gladdens my heart to hear.  

We serve ourselves, and I try to take a little of everything, everyday – relishing the different flavours and textures on my tongue.  Food in Thailand is so different from food at home, the flavours delight me – spicy and sweet and bitter, fruits and soups, noodles, and always rice.  Very quickly, I got sick of the rice – try as I might, I’ll never get the hang of rice as a breakfast food.  The fruit is my favourite: so many of them I’ll never find at home, and those that I can taste so much better here, in this tropical clime.   

For four hours a day, we are subjected to outstanding lectures.  Venerable Dhammananda is a strong public speaker, and while I did come here with a spiritual interest in Buddhism, I confess the majority of it was academic.  Some of the topics we’ve discussed have included the life of the Buddha, the history of Thailand as it relates to Buddhism, and the lineage of the bhikkhunis.  I have to plead some ignorance at this point:  until my time here, in Songdhammakalyani Monastery, I knew very little about the Theravada school of Buddhism, and nothing at all of the struggle the bhikkhunis have had over the centuries.  It never occurred to me to question why there were not many female monks in Thailand. 

It brings me fierce pleasure and pride (two un-Buddhist things, I know) to see these women fight for their ability to practice the Dhamma and to be on an equal level with the male monks, bhikkhus.  Against adversity, this temple has risen, and each step these women have taken has been a fight.  But I think this fight is a necessary one; women are just as entitled as men to follow their spiritual calling, to follow the Buddha and practice Buddhism as decreed by him, and to be bhikkhuni.

The bhikkhunis here, the women here, continue to surprise and delight me.  I admire their constant kindness, their warmth, strength, and intelligence.  I will be honest and exclaim that I had very little idea what to expect coming to a monastery.  Traveling Thailand, I knew it was something I wanted to do, and I am very glad that I did.  Nothing about staying here has disappointed me and the entire experience of Living Buddhism has been a delight.  From the early morning chanting, to Noi and her thrice daily exclamation of “let’s eat”, my time here has been nourishing for the soul.

The grounds are brilliant; from the new guesthouse to the gorgeous Medicine Buddha temple, it is apparent that many years of care and love have gone into this monastery.  From the perspective of a Westerner, if you can get past the fire ants in the garden, the cold showers, and the hard beds, this is an almost-idyllic place to be.

I feel at peace here, and it is my sincere hope that the lineage of the bhikkhunis continues over the years, growing in numbers until every person, from layperson to monk, accepts them.

Sadhu.    

 I really can't stress the food enough.  Anne would laugh at me because every meal, I had comments on each food.  "What is this?  This is weird.  What's this weird thing?  This thing tastes odd" ...I've tried so many new things, things I don't know the names of, some that I do.  Things that look like foods we have at home, and things that are nothing even remotely similar to foods we have at home.  Some delicious, and some atrocious.  Many sweets, and many spices. 

 This is Anne.

The pineapple here is divine - and I learned how to carve them!  I don't have any photos, but I found this one on Google, and I need to show each and every one of you at home how to do it. 

It seriously makes eating pineapples way more fun.  After you cut the pineapple like this, you rub sea salt on your hands, and then rub the pineapple and cut it into chunks.  It's just a thing Thai's do.  Fruit carving is amazing...pineapple is the only one I learned though.  Speaking of, I've eaten SO much pineapple.

 We had a half-day off on Friday, and went to the market.  Those are giant piles of pineapples.  

Other fruits are amazing - there's one called jackfruit, which is spongy and yellow, and another called palmello, which is like a giant grapefruit, and then there's mangoes, papayas, bananas, guavas (they are huge and taste different than the little ones from home) ...and I've eaten tofu, and rice for breakfast (gross), and a soup called tom yam, which was amazing.  I eat something spicy at least once a day, and I had this soup/dessert once that was taro (like a yam) in a juice of coconut milk and palm sugar - it was sickenly sweet, but amazing.  The monastics here are strict vegetarian, and so I haven't had the slightest issue with trying new things.  Out on the streets, I'm much more conservative.  Everything has bloody fish in it. 

The chanting was enjoyable at first; by yesterday, I was beginning to hate it.  My knees are killing me from being cross-legged so much each day.  30 minutes in the morning, 30 minutes in the evening, plus one hour today for meditation, plus an hour on Wan Pra for offering to Buddha, and today for offering to Buddha (on alms days).  Now, the second I sit with my knees bend, my left knee twinges and hurts and then gets swollen.  I think I'll be fine in a day or two - I wore my brace yesterday.

When I came here, I was really ill, but I'm better now.  I just finished my anti-biotics today, and I'm going to go find some pro-biotics at the mall in Bangkok tomorrow.  No more bronchitis, yay! 

 

One thing we've done which I didn't mention in that article (oh, and I'll explain the whole women's issue thing in a second) ...we went on the alms route, twice.  Once for Wan Pra, which is a Buddhist holiday that they have every full moon, half waning, half waxing, and new moon.  Once because they go every Sunday.  Some other monasteries go everyday, and that's how they get their food, but the Venerable Mother (Dhammananda) realizes that this is a poor area, and if they offer all their food, they will have no food themselves.  So we only take from them once a week, and once every half moon. 

The alms were really beautiful - women are never allowed to go with a monk on this, but because ours are bhikkhuni (and therefore female) ...we were allowed to go, and it was really special to be a part of that.  We walk single file, in relative silence - I think it is supposed to be total silence, but this is me we're talking about.  We'd walk, and when we stopped by a person, or a family, to do the offering, the person would offer rice, and other foods, which we'd put into a cart, and then the bhikkhunis would chant in pali and bless them, and we'd go onto the next person.  Then, when we get back to the monastery, that serves as our breakfast and lunch for the day.

I've really learned a lot while I've been here - the history of the Buddha and of Buddhism fascinated me.  And I learned so much about the issue with the bhikkhunis that I didn't even know existed.  Like I said in my article (I hope I get mailed a copy of that issue!), it never occurred to me to question why there aren't really any female monks.  The very first female monk was in Buddha's time, but they died out fairly quickly because nobody wanted them, and today, there are only 35 fully ordained female monks (bhikkhunis) in Thailand.  Venerable Dhammananda's mother was the very first Thai woman to be ordained, and she had to go to Taiwan to do it.  In 2015, Ven. Dhammananda will be able to GIVE ordination to women (you must be a monk for 12 years to give precepts to someone else) ...and she will be the first woman in Thailand able to do this.  Both Anne and myself want to come back here in 2015 to witness it, because it's a huge thing for women's rights in Thailand.

 

I'm not much of a feminist myself, being too apathetic about any one thing to bother protesting, but it's a good thing, I think, for other women to be out there, fighting for their rights, even if that is a poor wording of the concept.  The Buddha allowed women to be ordained as well as men, and it is men that took that away.  Either way, good for them.

All the women here are brilliant - they're so much more than I ever thought I would find from a monk.  I was expecting them to be neutral and modest, and yes, to an extent - but each one of them is filled with love and laughter, and those things that make humans so beautiful.  I have two favourites, even though I know I shouldn't:  Venerable Subhoda and Samaneri Dhammapunni.  Ven. Subhoda is fighting cancer right now and going through chemo treatments, and she's very small and frail looking, but only in body - she's very sharp, and intelligent and used to be an electrical engineer, and I love having conversations with her.  Dhammapunni is 72 years old, and won't be fully ordained until 2015, and she's small (everyone is small in Thailand) and covered in freckles, and whenever we're done serving food at meal times, she says "good luck to you" in her little cute voice.  She's adorable.

One little creature I'm going to be sad to say goodbye to (if I even get the chance - I leave so early tomorrow morning) is Naboon, Dhammananda's granddaughter.  She's eight, and in grade two, and she lives at the monastery, and she is super super shy and just learning English, and I have been trying all week to make friends with her, and the other day, I did that thing I do where I bend my back and bend down to the floor and come back up again, and later in the day, she came up to me and in English exclaimed "you are very good and beautiful" ...and from then on, she sits with me at meal times, and she even says hi, and thank you, and good morning to me now.  I was trying to learn thai just so I could say hi to her.  I gave her a canadian dollar this morning, and very slowly tried to explain that I wanted her to have this coin from Canada to remember me, and to use it as a good luck coin ...but I don't know if she understood everything.  I am going to write a small letter before bed and ask Dhammananda to translate it to her for me.  I'm going to miss her.

I'm going to miss the fat little dalmation dog called "dotcom" ...she's short and fat, and gets excited when I walk by.  There's lots of dogs here, in the monastery and in Thailand, and they are all really mangy, and some are really mean, but this one is nice, and likes me, and she's just a cute little fat thing.

I leave tomorrow morning at 6, and catch the train into Bangkok (in third class because it's free during rush hour) ...and then hopefully I can find a storage locker for my stuff at the train station, because I can't check into my hotel until 3PM.  I don't really have any plans for tomorrow during the day - will likely hang out with Sarom and Savann (two cambodians who were here with us) before they catch their train back to Cambodia, and I'd like to find some pro-biotics and some alcohol.  It's my birthday tomorrow, though in a discussion to Tim today, I couldn't decide if it counts because I was born at 10PM Pacific time on the 28th, and that's 1PM my time here in Bangkok, on the 29th.  So...I'm not sure if I can technically celebrate my birthday until the 29th...

Either way, wine will be consumed, a hot shower will be had, and then close to midnight, I meet Tim and the airport!  So excited, you have no idea.

Happy Birthday to me.  A full quarter century. 

 

MONKEYS!

TODAY I SAW MONKEYS.

My time in the monastery has been going well, but that is to be saved for another blog post.  At the end of my time, more than likely while I'm in the hotel room before I go to pick up Tim from the airport, I will tell you of my week in the monastery.  This post, however, is for something else.

Today after lunch, we went on a "field trip".  After 4 straight days inside the monastery, in two cars, with three bhikkhunis and the four of us foreigners, as well as Venerable Dhammananda's granddaughter, and a few drivers, and the lady who works in the kitchen, we went on an excursion to another temple in Ratchaburi, called Wat Nong Hoi.  And it was gorgeous.  After spending a week in Bangkok, and then having my very sick self secluded in a monastery, I had a rather poor image of what Thailand looked like, but today we made it out into rural Thailand, with rice paddies, and mountainous peaks in the distance, and a giant Buddha looming over the city.  And it was spectacular.  Gorgeous...beyond words, even. 

The temple we went to was very beautiful, though very much a tourist exploitation trap, as there was gift shop after gift shop selling gaudy, kitsch, cheap Buddhist things.  Giant golden Buddhas, and fake jade (and real jade for a much more expensive price) ...and that I consider to be a serious downside.  As a proper tourist, I of course checked to see if there was anything worth buying, but in the end, I decided there wasn't.

I have to admit, the entire day was just a tourist photo-op for me, although after we went to the temple, and to the giant Buddha across the way, we went to a place called the Water Cave, where we walked through a hole in the wall into a giant limestone cavern.  There was a staircase leading up what appeared to be a fault in the rock, and there was a clear stream running through it with massive catfish swimming in it.  We climbed the staircase to the top where a shrine to Buddha was placed, and we gave offerings of flowers, incense, and candles.  I took a bunch more photos.

Outside the water cave, there were monkeys.  MONKEYS.  Everywhere.  And I fed them bananas!  I think Ven. Dhammananda took us there because I saw one monkey at the temple and got really excited, but was sad because we couldn't stay to see the monkeys...and then she let us stay at the water cave long enough to feed them.  There were DOZENS, all shapes and sizes, and I even took a video (or three).

I apologize for the sideways-ness of the video towards the end.  I thought the iPhone would fix itself, and when I loaded the video to PowerDirector, I couldn't figure out how to rotate only HALF the video in the proper direction.  I managed, but then it was upsidedown.  So...this is what you get.  Welcome to Thailand, sideways.

 

I don't even have words for how excited I was.  Those of you who've seen me in bouts of extreme excitement can probably deduct for yourself how I behaved - my first helicopter ride, seeing frogs on the road during the biking trip, etc.  I was beside myself.  ...MONKEYS.  

It was a very fun day.

In other news, I visited the hospital yesterday with Dhammananda (who was kind enough to accompany me and translate for me) and I do indeed have bronchitis.  They gave me so much medicine!  I paid 740 baht for 5 days of anti-biotics, cough losenges, anti-histamines (for a runny nose), something else for nausea, something else for coughing...I only asked for anti-biotics.  I kinda wish I was asked before I was prescribed so many things, but such is life, and I have travel insurance.  So yes.  I have bronchitis and as of yesterday in the hospital, a mild fever (which is better than it was Sunday - I thought I was going to die on Sunday) ...and they are helping and I'm finally starting to feel better.  So, in summary,  Bangkok, you asshole: You gave me bronchitis.

I've got 5 more nights here, and then it's time to hit the beaches with Tim!     

I give you video. Long time.

I have the hostel room to myself for the first time since I've been here (the only other person in the room right now is out) ...and it's spectacular.  I'm celebrating by listening to my phone on shuffle as loud as it will go.  I didn't realize how much my music selection has transmorphed into electronica, indie, and hiphop until I did this.  Where did all the hard rock go?

Last night and today were good.  Basically, as soon as I finished emailing Tim and telling him about how I've given up on going out for a night in Bangkok (usually too beat at the end of the day), an aussie came into the dorm room and unpacked, and after we chatted for a bit, we decided to go out.  He only had one night in Bangkok, and wanted to make the most of it - as I've already been around a bit, I showed him how to get to the skytrain, and then we took it downtown to get something to eat. 

It was a lot of fun - I wish I had snagged a photo of him, but I was so busy enjoying myself that I forgot.  We didn't even introduce our names until we were out for a drink AFTER dinner.  We got off at Siam, and wandered around and found a little place to get some thai food.  Not what I call 'proper' thai food, but it was tasty, at least.  I got spicy tofu with fried basil leaves (it was a bit odd; the basil leaves were crunchy) and some cashew nut rice.  I'm sure it had fish sauce in it, but so long as I can't taste it, and I don't know it's there, I'm content to think my food is vegetarian.  Actually, finding veggie food has proved MUCH more difficult than I thought.  Apparently vegetarian here means "with seafood" ...eating has been a huge struggle, and I will fully admit I barely eat.  In the heat though, I can't even tell.  I just drink water all day.  In fact, I think I'm consuming upwards of 3L a day, and I'm still so dehydrated I get dizzy.  I just physically can't consume enough. 

After dinner, we walked around some more, and found the Hard Rock Café, Bangkok.  I've never been in one ever, so we went in and grabbed a drink at the bar.  My throat has been obscenely sore since I've been here (there will be a whole segment on how Bangkok is making me sick in a minute) and so naturally, I fixed it with a glass of Glenmorangie.  I'll fully admit - it was expensive, but the company was fantastic, and we exchanged email addresses before bed, so as far as I'm concerned, the money doesn't matter.  After that, not really knowing where to go, we hopped on a tuk-tuk (little motorized taxi) and sped through traffic at an alarming speed on our way to Chinatown, where the driver kept offering to take us to muay thai (which I'd LOVE to do, just not scam style) and "ping pong shows"  ...I have an idea, and I do not want to know if my idea is founded.  

I came up with a new game, too.  "Count the ladyboys" ...I'm at 8 so far, but I haven't really been trying.  Rad and I (That's his name.  I know, right?  Rad.) walked around Chinatown for a bit, and I spent most of it dodging cockroaches on the ground.  I don't care - they are GROSS.  I jumped and squealed every time I saw one.  They creep the shit out of me.  We were going to go into a seedy bar in Chinatown, but even the aussie thought it was too seedy, so we slowly made our way back.  I think we got in at midnight last night.  He had to catch an early flight this morning, so we didn't want to stay out too much later. 

I had a poor sleep again, due to the fact that I sneeze every hour, and my throat is so raw it hurts to breathe.  The pollution here is really making me sick - I've been really ill the entire time I've been in Bangkok.  Like usual, I ignore it completely, though I did cave today and buy some cough losenges at Boots today (they have a Boots in Thailand!) ...I'm a bit worried it will turn into bronchitis, but my lungs are still clear, so here's hoping.  I leave Bangkok tomorrow, and except for the one night I need to be back here to meet Tim, I haven't any intention of coming back.  There's still more to see - but the pollution is killing me. 

I spent the day today out with an English bloke who came in at 4am last night.  I bumped into him as I was getting ready to go out, and he only had one day in Bangkok and asked what he should see, and I told him what my tentative plans were for the day, and invited him along.  It was great.  We went to ChatuChak Market, which is a weekend market that would make certain grandmothers of mine burn with envy.  It was enormous.  Gigantic.  Take the Cloverdale Flea Market and add 500 more shops, condensed down into a seedy building.  There's actually SIGNS warning you of pick-pocketers.  Mark and I wandered around there for ages, looking at all the different shops and practicing our haggling skills (or I did, rather - he is quite good at it, having just spent a month in China and a month in Thailand) ...I bought some hairsticks, and a shirt which is quite hippie/bohemian.  I wanted thai pants, and I found thai pants, but the lady wouldn't drop the price, so I walked away, and then I was going to return later when I realized it wasn't really all that expensive, but the place was so congested and disorganized that I couldn't find the shop again.  Oh well - there'll be others.

I also have one of my twenty-two prospective Buddhas. 

We sampled some of the...local, cuisine.  Mark got donuts on a stick, and I drank coconut water from a coconut.  It tasted terrible, but I needed the liquid anyhow, so I drank it. 

After that, we hopped the BTS (skytrain - it feels too weird calling something a skytrain outside of Vancouver) and headed down to the last station, Hua Lamphong.  From there, we took a tuk-tuk to the Grand Palace, as there is currently no way to get over there easily with the water taxi's not running.  As a special treat, I took a video!   Peruse at your leisure. 

The Grand Palace was 400 baht, and closed for an hour over lunch, so we wandered about and ended up going to Wat Pho instead (for considerably cheaper).  The architecture was spectacular...I took so many photos!  Though, I took them in .RAW, so I'm going to have to batch process them before I link them to this blog.  Don't worry; it'll get done before I even press post.  I've already processed the video.  Wat Pho is home to the Reclining Buddha, which was nothing sort of spectacularly unnecessary.  WHY does Buddha need to be that large.  Why? 

After that, we took another tuk-tuk back to Siam Paragon (that giant shopping centre I mentioned yesterday - by the way, there are apparently actually FOUR shopping centres, all attached to each other on that street corner.  If you can call it a street corner.  Imagine Metrotown, but magnified by 10,000.  That's Siam Square.)  The shopping centre in Bangkok is so opulent that even I want to buy needlessly expensive things.  It's truly jaw-dropping.  And I hate shopping.  We ate lunch there, and grabbed dessert (Mm, more imitation French baked goods) ...now I'm just chillin' in the hostel, doing some laundry.  You know, boring stuff.  I feel quite shit right now, and I'm content to stay in for the night.  I'd worry about dinner, but let's face it - I'm not going to be hungry before morning anyhow.

Oh, and somewhat important news, I suppose:  This will almost definitely be the last time you hear from me
for a week.  Tomorrow, I leave Bangkok (thank goodness) and head off to Songdhammakalayani Monastery, for a week long Living Buddhism international meditation retreat.  I sincerely doubt I'll have internet, so if you're burning to say something to me in the next week, send it to me prior to tomorrow morning (my time) ...I'm going to check my messages one more time before I check out, and that likely won't be until around noon anyhow, but yeah.  If there's internet, I'd be amazed.  

Here's to 7 days of not eating past noon, waking up at 5:30 to meditate, and sitting on my ass a lot being spiritual!  

And the best part - I leave on the 27th, and Tim arrives in Bangkok on the 28th.  Travel partner: best birthday present in the history of forever, no matter how unintentional it actually was.  Ahh yeah.   

One night in Bangkok makes a hard man humble...

I feel like I'm going to fill this whole post up with the very repetitive sentence:  "Oh!  Oh my god, I saw *insert item here*"

So instead, here's some pretty neat things I've seen in the last couple days in point form:
- a truck full of freshly picked pineapples
- coconut trees
- little lizards, and now VERY big lizards!
- Pigeons (they truly are everywhere)
- a bird with blue wings
- and I finally found cats.  They're not very friendly.

There, now that THAT'S out of the way...

Bangkok is overwhelming.  Polluted, and noisy, and some street corners smell so badly that it's all I can do not to cover my face with my hand and avoid the gag reflex.  I've dry heaved a few times, I'm ashamed to admit. Nobody smiles when you smile at them.  But when the people are genuinely nice, they really do shine.  So far, I've got bad things and good things to say about Bangkok, which is really where I was hoping to end up.  If I had bothered to write a post yesterday, you would have gotten a different outlook from me. 

The pollution is making me sick.  My throat and lungs hurt, and it hurts to breathe.  I sneeze a lot.  The noise and the overwhelming number of people and cars gets to me - by midafternoon, I'm ready to call it a day and not talk to a single soul for the remainder of the evening.  The temperature is so hot and humid, I think it enters a realm where numbers have no meaning.  I imagine it's around 35-40C during the peak of the day, but really, after 25C, temperature has no meaning.  Hot is hot.  At 3AM this morning, it was warm enough to break a sweat.  And I see people walking around in business suits, socks, and jackets here!  Acclimization is a wonderful thing, and I certainly don't possess it. 

Unlike those of you who were baffled by my lack of shorts on this trip, I am glad for the pants, even though I swelter.  My skin would burn.  Even so, clothed in flip flops, pants, and a t-shirt, every iota of my skin is covered in sunscreen, and two days in, my feet look dirty they're so tanned.  That's with sunscreen, folks. 

Bangkok is hot.

My journey yesterday from the hotel into town was...eventful.  I took the shuttle from the hotel back to the airport (it seemed easiest) and at the behest of an australian gentleman I bumped into, I decided to take a taxi into town to find my hostel (which I had booked not an hour before online) ...after squirming out of a scam from the taxi driver (I made him use the meter), we headed off into traffic.  Actually, traffic is what more mundane people would call it.  Coming from Canada, the cars on the road here are not traffic.  They are chaos.  Five lane roads with six lanes of traffic, passing on the inside, outside, and ANYside of cars, motorbikes ignore the rules of the road entirely, and crosswalks are a quaint feature, which frankly, I have yet to see being used properly.  I don't like to jaywalk if there are any cars on the road, and I'm slightly terrified of regular traffic, let alone this - the only way to cross the road is to run weaving in and out of traffic, and hope you don't get hit.  It's...fun.  Yeah, we'll call it that.

Anyhow, the taxi driver then decided, since he was completely out of fuel, to let me sit in a 30 minute line-up to get gasoline, with constant reassurances that "I happy, you happy" ...and his description of traffic as "car, car, car, car, car" - I did make him shut the meter off for most of this, mind you, he sneakily turned it back on when I wasn't looking.  I wasn't about to argue for the sake of 10 baht.  That's like...1/3 of a dollar.  Then, our experience with 'traffic' ...I finally made it into my hostel.  He was very rude to me, because I paid him 240 baht instead of 241 (I didn't have a single baht - actually, are they pennies?  I don't even know how thai call their coins) ...though he originally told me he'd take me for 400 (a price which I simply refused.)

The hostel isn't bad - it has two nice terraces that I spent all of my time while I'm here, on.  A small man-made pond with goldfish of varying sizes, a little kitchen to heat up basic food items (let's face it; I haven't eaten much since I arrived) ...a rooftop garden with a few chairs.  The rooms are supposed to have AC, but last night sure didn't feel like it.  I can get 1.5L of water for 20 baht, which is the cheapest I've seen it so far, and that's nice.  I'm in a mixed dorm of 8 people, because I wanted to be cheap.  Who pays for accommodation these days, anyhow?  If it wasn't for the flooding, I'd be couchsurfing right now. 

Actually, speaking of - the city definitely looks like it just went through a flood, but with the exception of some low-lying areas near the airport, and a few roads, I haven't really seen anything.  Many of the shops have cement or sandbag barriers up that you have to walk over in order to get into the store. 

I'm learning that I don't actually like thai food, at least in the form of street vendor.  Most of it smells putrid, and involves meat and a stick, and I'll be damned if I know what the meat is.  The streets are hot, too - which compounds the smell.  The SOLE exception to this so far that I've tried is a little thing wrapped in a banana leaf, which looks quite gross, but I think is bean wrapped in rice, in either coconut, or banana, or something...it's sweet, and delicious.  I don't know precisely what it is, and I don't want to, but it's tasty, and I buy one every time I walk past the corner it's on. 

There are tons of fruits I've never seen before, and I've been trying them left, right, and centre.  Yesterday, I had an orange, a pale white pomegranate (I didn't know they came in other colours!) and a fresh pineapple.  Not, from the supermarket fresh, but FRESH.  Off the tree, fresh.  It was delicious.  Today, I bought a dragonfruit, a custard apple (it looks really weird...I hope it tastes good) and a mango that looks different than other mangoes I've had at home. 

I've also found cats (cat radar) and leave it to me to find Bangkok's organic store.  I may or may not have been in there a while. 

Due to general not-feeling-well-ness, I fell asleep at 7PM last night, and stayed asleep until 3 (when I woke up feeling really sick and couldn't fall back to sleep) ...so I've been up since 3AM.  I went on the rooftop and took some night photos for about an hour, then tried to sleep again and couldn't, and gave up at 6AM, ate breakfast with some swiss folks who gave me impeccable directions on how to get to stuff - by the way, little tiny bananas are super rich in flavour!  Way better than regular bananas.  By 7AM I was on the streets and wandering around. 

Tried to go to the Royal Palace (I took the Skytrain and the Metro) ...but the water ferries aren't running yet because of the flooding, so I just aimlessly wandered in the heat until my feet were blistered and my head was spinning.  I don't handle heat well. 

 (He followed me, and so when I turned around to take his photo, he sat down and posed)

To spar myself the worst of the smog, I went to Lumphini Park, which is this palm-treed, coconut sprouting paradise in the middle of metropolitan Bangkok.  But at 11 hectares, or whatever it is, it was nice to escape the worst of the noise and pollution.  And the craziest - it has GIANT LIZARDS.  One does not expect to nearly step on a 4 foot lizard when walking around a park.  Then again, one doesn't often walk around parks with coconut trees, either.  I took a few photos of them, but being so large, I was a bit wary - especially when one of them starting being all agressive at me.  It was kinda scary.  I thought they were komodo dragons, but it turns out I'm wrong.  Thanks to Google, they're Monitor Lizards, a slightly smaller, slightly less deadly relative to the komodo dragon.  Yep.  Monitor Lizards, people. 

Later on, I met an Englishman (I do this often, it seems) and spent an hour walking around with him until our paths diverged - I never even learned his name - and I went and saw the Golden Buddha.  3.5 tons of gold, in Buddha form!  I haggled for the first time too.  I bought a wooden/paper sun parasol, and I talked the woman down 20 baht!  I was so proud of me, until the realization hit that I probably could have gotten it for less.  I don't know what I'm going to do with it, but I've always wanted one, so I imagine I'll keep it until Tim shows up (I forsee photo opportunities!) and then post it home.  I found some ginger tea, too.

I feel like I'm forgetting a million things, but things are just so overwhelming here that there's no way I'm going to remember to retell it all.  All I know is, if, or when I come back, I'm bringing a TON of money.  The shopping centres here are spectacular.  And Air-Conditioned.