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.

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.