Thailand

Thailand is a mixture of the very lowest extremes...



And the very highest.












The streets of Bangkok are full of people selling anything from vegetables and fruits on their hanging baskets, to clothes that are knockoffs from the most popular fashions of the western world.












You find serene moments there...





And moments that you thought you might only glimpse in the pages of a National Geographic or your social studies textbooks from high school or university...at least, that's how I felt growing up, that I'd never see anything like two Buddhist monk/ students anywhere but in a book...



Or fruits and vegetables I can't identify on sight...







And then I find myself in places I thought I'd always have to imagine, that I'd always have to be a mental traveler, and it's better than my imaginings, even though it's completely different at the same time.


And you find yourself in a city where even the lowliest gateway to a city street is decorated with scenes like this...







Where in the daytime the alley where the entrance to your hostel looks like this...




And at night like this.













It's a place where the Reclining Buddha of Wat Pho can be found inside it's temple ...



and a vagrant can be found out back, sleeping.





Where the animals of the city sleep wherever they please, whether it be a busy stairwell...



or amongst the temple offering grounds...












And then there's the islands in the gulf of Thailand, where it really does feel like paradise...












And in the North of Bangkok, where you can find floating markets like the one at Damnoesuduak.

It all feels like another world, and it is...










...another world where suddenly while you ride in your longboat to the market an elephant and its rider appear over the crest of a hill, as ordinary as the sun rising...




and where statues of demons hold up temples in the grounds of the Grand Palace.






I don't have much to say about Thailand. The pictures will have to speak for me at this point, until I've got my own thoughts processed, but it was a wonderful trip, full of discovery and a welcome period of streets full of German, Italian, Spanish, English, French, Japanese, Thai, Chinese, and many many other languages, all in one place. I ate Israeli, Italian, Thai, American, and Indian during the time I was there, and drank lots of good beer, as well as a bucket, a notorios "get drunk and get stupid" cocktail which comes, literally, in a bucket, to your table. A much needed vacation, though being there made my time in Japan feel dreamlike and my life in America even more like a dream than it had been after moving to Japan.

Next, New Year's pictures. After that, back to school in a few days.