Today I am in Thailand

My sister Amy has a life that is far more exotic than mine. Her home has a tile roof and tile floors and tropical flowers dripping into her yard from the tree next door.

She lives in Thailand, teaching English at a hole-in-the-wall university at the edge of Chiang Mai.

The lush garden of the house across from Amy’s.

Since travel for me takes a back seat to getting through college debt free, I had never experienced zipping through a foreign city on a motorbike or eating cheap stir-fry at an outdoor restaurant while stray cats twined around my feet–things Amy did every day.

But then things began to fall into place for me. I finally got college financial aid (yay for being 24!) and I got a harvest job that provided me with work up until about a month before school was to start.

I emailed Amy. “Hey, can I come visit you? Like, this September?”

“Sure!” she said.

So I did.

A thick layer of cloud covered the Willamette Valley as I left.

I brought Mom’s camera along specifically so that I could take pictures specifically for my blog. Unfortunately…

A. I feel stupid taking pictures

B. I’m not very good at taking pictures, and

C. I don’t like carrying stuff around with me.

So you’ll just have to make due with the random conglomeration I have.

Amy gets gas for her bike. How cute she looks in her helmet!

Someone’s bike cover. I like the little cartoon characters.

Friday Amy dropped me off at an old Mall while she went to her Thai class. “Go exploring!” she said. “It’s really cool. Parts of it are abandoned.”

The mall’s entrance.

How come America doesn’t have lush mall courtyards?

I got sufficiently lost in the place, but it was a good sort of lost. Lots of stores were jammed together at odd angles, and then suddenly I’d round a corner and see empty halls and rooms.

I tried to take pictures of funny signs and t-shirts.

I asked them what they sold here, but they were a little vague.

I found this shirt slightly disturbing.

The picture on this shirt was of fashion model-ey ladies, covered in these words…

After I found my way out of the labyrinth that was the mall, Amy and I went to a coffee shop and took pictures of people we saw out the windows.

This lady twisted the faucet around so she could wash her giant pot outside the window.

This man bought cardboard to recycle. The ladies weighed it, and then he tossed it onto the back of his truck.

People keep saying, “so how do you like Thailand so far?”

I like it very much. I don’t know why I wouldn’t, or how I couldn’t.