Not a Wat in Sight

Sawa Dee Ka,

We’re almost to the end of week number two so I thought it was time for an update. First off, we’re flunking as tourist. We haven’t seen one Buddha, Wat, gone to the Grand Palace or any other tourist attraction. So what have we been doing, well, we’ve been busy traveling to Singapore, the Philippines, China, Columbia and are planning on visiting Iran after our massage later today. We’re doing all this thanks to the Bangkok Film Festival. It’s been just great! We’re seeing films we’d never see on Maui (although we’re going to recommend a few to Barry). If you have Netflix see if you can get PVC-1 by Spiros Stathoulopoulos or Rain of the Children by Vincent Ward. Don’t under any circumstances watch Alice in the Land or When I was a Child Outside unless you’ve had a frontal lobotomy first. The Q&A session after the movie is always interesting. For the film made in China there was a Chinese, a Thai and an English interpreter so each time a question was asked or answered it was interpreted into three different languages.

To be truthful we’re not really flunking as tourist because we’ve been getting inexpensive massages (1 hour foot/arm/neck massages for $8, 1 ½ hour full body massages for $30), shopping (a national past time) and eating from street venders. Every sidewalk is covered with carts selling some sort of fried food (in this 90 degree weather…), espresso yen (iced espresso with sweetened condensed milk, yum!) CDs, DVDs (all pirated copies of course), house wares, fruit, watches as well as bras and underwear (just the sort of thing I’d want to buy on the street…not!). The tangerine juice here is worth the cost of the plane ticket. It’s sooo sweet, fresh and cheap.

Being back at Silom Dental has been an 'interesting’ experience. The doctors at the dental clinic, especially the oral surgeon are great. It didn’t take us long to see that the overly optimistic scheduling is common in Thailand and since we’re here for the doctors we can deal with the ever changing schedule. It’s called keeping your eye on the ball while going with the flow. My oral surgery is currently scheduled for Tuesday night (Sept 30) at 5:30 pm. Yup, you read that right, 5:30 PM. Strange time from a westerners prospective but with the film festival over I guess I’ll be available. Since it will be 12:30am in Hawaii, 3:30am in CA and 5:30am in Minnesota I imagine you’ll be asleep when they’re putting me under. Send me some good thought before you go to bed and again when you wake up.

Well it’s time to get our massage, see another film and then out to a Korean BBQ with one of the docs from the clinic.