Pictures from Thailand

December 26, 2001 - January 8 2002.

If you don't like pictures of me and my friends standing in front of other things, i'm sorry.

this first part is in bangkok. those pictures are not particularly interesting. However, the second part is in cambodia and those are slightly more interesting.

These pictures can be pretty big, and so they take a while to load. I recommend you open another window and do something amusing there and then come back when these have loaded.

matt, adam, mike, wes, rich in a park in bangkok. the day before, i had been in this park, lost, and had asked a cop for directions. he took me and a friend over to his bike, sat us down, and rode us where we wanted to go. it was really fun, my first time on a bike since i was a little kid. cops are pretty interesting in thailand - they are mostly young, and they wear really tight uniforms to show off how skinny they are. this cop in particular had just been hanging out with some other cops under a big canopy in the park. i couldn't make out exactly what they were doing, they seemed to be just passing the time.

this is a building on the side of the main river running through bangkok. i don't know if it was abandoned or still under construction. thailand is a really modern-looking country. although i didn't see much of it, around bangkok and the central areas at least, it looks most like america than japan does. big, wide roads everywhere, in pretty good shape, people can drive faster than 50 mph there. and chain stores everywhere.

adam, doing some kind of gesture. this is near where we ate the food of death - there were huge bowls of it sitting out on the road in a little stand. since there was a big tree overhead, there were leaves and little nuts falling into the food. nevertheless, we ate there anyway. it was really spicy, and made some of us sick the next day as well. i thought mine was pretty good though.

this is my friend kitto, she used to go to rutgers, but now she has gone back to bangkok. we're on khao san road.

this is a park where i saw two young foreigners people making out on a bench. then i heard a whistle, and a cop walked over, shaking his finger "shame, shame". they stopped suddenly, but he kept coming, and i imagine told them something like "no making out in parks". they got the idea. in this park there were lots of cops just hanging around, one of them was fiddling with this sound system in big boxes, playing music. unlike japanese people, if thai people have nothing to do, they don't pretend to be busy. they just hang out waiting for something to happen. no shame in not being busy.

this is a river neighborhood in bangkok, i rode this boat all around it. it was pretty cool, lots of weird sidewalks sticking out of the water with dogs and little kids running along them. also, lots of old ladies in their back yards, doing housework. i had thought they were poor until i got to cambodia.

it's dry season, but it's still pretty lush. this is still inside bangkok.

under this bridge on the river there was a big movable insect looking thing hanging there, with some women on it. they didn't seem to be working, just hanging out up there. they waved at us.

the inside of a tuktuk. they are crazy drivers. i met one who was really crazy as well. when i got in, he started going on about aliens, the moon landing, apollo, the euro conversion, the afghan war, bush, viet nam, kennedy, watergate, etc. i hadn't even realized he was speaking english at first, but he knew all the names of the major events that are thought to have anything to do with conspiracy theories.

this is me riding in the back of a tuktuk. they're pretty fun to ride in. except you always feel like you are about to fall out. the drivers regularly try to create an extra lane where none exists, and rely on their small size to get back into traffic.

ok, so now i imagine you want to see the other, more interesting pictures of cambodia. well, they are here.