Well folks, here it is! (finally) (....well, part of it)

Welcome to our first Thailand-trip-related blog post!!


*trumpet fanfare*


Here's the way it's going to work. I'm going to be posting about general trip stuff, and a few of my favourite highlights, and Becca will be following up with a few of hers. Both will have pictures, and both will be amazing experiences!

So here's mine...

The flight over was good, despite the fact that although we were told when we booked our tickets that it was a direct flight we had a stopover in Hong Kong on the way there and Taipei on the way home. But all that was okay, since the stopovers weren't of the "stressful-yet-hilarious movie-family having to sprint from one side of a city-sized airport to the other just to wait another hour to board a plane where their seats had been rearranged and the main character ends up next to a woman who gives birth on his lap" kind of stopover. They were an easy "get off the plane for 30 minutes then get back on in the same place" kind of stopover, which I personally much prefer.

In the Hong Kong airport I saw one of the most terrifying "toys" I've ever seen in my life. It was actually a series of toys, with two of the scariest on display. One was called Robo-Sapien and was a 3-4foot tall beefy-looking robot that clearly demonstrated that mankind has learned nothing from films like 2001: A Space Odyssey and The Terminator. The other was called a Robo-Raptor and seems to have been designed to fly in the face of all the wisdom not only of the previously mentioned movies, but Jurassic Park as well. I have seen the end of civilization, people. Luckily it's still firmly ensconced in cardboard and cellophane at the moment, but God help us all if someone actually shells out and buys one. It's all over.

ANYWAY!

So we landed in Bangkok at about 4:00pm and could instantly tell that we were in a tropical paradise. It was the kind of muggy that is so starved for attention that it just wants to hug you all the time, and the only thing that can shake it is its arch-nemesis, AIR-CON! Seriously, don't listen to what Aunt Muggy tells you, Air-Con's really a good guy.

We eventually got through the airport, after having chosen the line that somehow managed to accomplish the impressive feat of processing only one passenger for every other employee's three, and set about finding a taxi. You know that part of the airport where family members wait for homecoming loved ones and hotel employees wait with little signs for their incoming VIP guests? That area was where we got our first taste of what was going to be a major part of our trip in what was otherwise a quite lovely and spectacular place. I had happened to ask someone how much a taxi would cost to get to Khaosan Rd (*the* place for travellers to start in Bangkok, a Vegas-like strip of market stalls, street vendors, restaurants and hotels. In fact, I'm going to show you a picture of it)



Incidentally, apart from what those "a picture is worth a thousand words" people would tell you, you can't possibly get the whole idea of Khaosan Rd from any picture, especially not this one. The whole place is alive with bustling activity, over-eager salespeople, the smell of pad thai and banana crepes cooking on street stalls and music oozing from the various restaurants and bars. It's quite the place.

Anyway (we're still actually in the airport at this point of our adventure, remember?) the guy I happened to ask told me that a taxi should cost about 300-350 baht (about $9-10). Great! Good deal for a 40-minute cab ride, I'd say. Anyway, as we leave the arrivals gate a woman in a suit comes up and says "air conditioned taxi, Khaosan Road?" so I say "how much." She responds, with a straight face that seems to deny the possibility that she does her deceptive and off-ripping work for fun, "900 baht."

Seriously. THRICE the price that I had been told about. I promptly turned and walked away without a second glance, went to the official taxi stand area and got in an air conditioned cab bound for Khaosan Rd, costing us 350baht.

This is a major part of visiting Thailand. Get ready for it if you're planning a trip. Everyone who talks to you is the most friendly local money can tempt. They *ALL* want your money. Which, in a way, is fair. But it's better to know full-well going in that generally if someone approaches you and tries to help, they've got a plan, and that plan ends with your money buying them stuff.

Another tidbit for anyone planning on travelling to Thailand. Book nothing in advance. Well, book your flights. Book them well in advance. We had to bump our trip back a month because by the time we got confirmation of our holidays we couldn't get tickets. Other than your flights, however, only book hotels or other things in advance if you want to pay several times more than what you'll pay if you just find a place when you get there. Tourism is the single largest industry in Thailand, and everyone and their mangy dogs have a hand in something that you could use, so there's no shortage of places to stay or eat, or book tours with or anything. Especially tours. On Khaosan Road we saw no fewer than 8 travel agencies booking trips and tours to various parts of Thailand ranging from jungles along the Burmese border to beach/island tours in the far south. To give a next-to-final example of this idea of not booking things, the hotel that we booked online in advance cost us 1800baht, which was still pretty good. You wouldn't get a hotel with air conditioning, a cable TV, a king-sized bed and a rooftop pool for $50 indlucing breakfast buffet in Canada. However, when we got to Kanchanaburi the next day, we stayed literally *on* the River Kwai in a quite nice rafthouse for $4/night.

Anyway, back to Bangkok. Bangkok has some neat things to see, but I wouldn't recommend spending more than a couple days there at most. I would like to have gone to see a Muay Thai match, but we couldn't schedule it. Next time :-). Other than that, we were able to see pretty much everything we wanted to in Bangkok in the 48-odd hours we were there. The coolest and cheapest mode of transportation around the city is by tuk-tuk. Observe:



It's like a motortrike with a tiny version of a gaudy 1970s living room strapped to it. It's quite the experience. Another thing about going anywhere in Thailand is that everyone is being paid commission by someone else to bring people to their place of business. Tuktuk drivers are not only not an exception, but they may actually set the standard for this practice. Anyway, we got a tuktuk driver that was willing to drive us around to four or five different temples for 10baht (about 30 cents) so we took him up on it. I'll mention right now that Becca was against the whole idea. She's much smarter than me. We did see some nifty temples, though:





We also saw a Thai example of a gigantic Buddha statue:



It's pretty big....I guess....

Possibly the most impressive part of these temples was the detail that went into their construction. They have so much incredibly intricate gold work done around the roof and windows and doors. It's amazing they haven't been looted for food money when right down the street from most of these there are entire neighbourhoods of shack-houses.



After the tuktuk ride to the temples, the driver took us to a tailor's shop. I bought pants, partly because I wanted some, but mostly cause I'm a sucker. They're actually nice though. Very light. Shut up.

After we finished with that, we went for a walk around the area surrounding Khaosan Rd. We saw a cool monument in the middle of an enormous roundabout:


as well as a stretch of road where hundreds of people clamoured to buy what turned out to be lottery tickets from stands on the sidewalk.


Also, we found a McDonalds that had a culturally-sensitive Ronald McDonald outside:


After a day and a bit in Bangkok we had had more or less enough so we booked ourselves on a "4:00pm" minibus to a town called Kanchanaburi. Catching that bus we found out that Thai time is even more off-kilter than Korean time. WAY more. Our bus left at about 5:30.

That's all for this post. More in the next exciting installments of...

TANGO IN THAILAND!*



*it should be noted that there was no actual tango-ing involved in the trip, and that this is just a clever pseudo-marketing ploy to make this blog sound enough like a suspsenseful 1940's radio drama that you want to, nay, are compelled to "tune in"* next time.

*it should also be noted that there is no special way that you need to access the next posts. Just show up and they'll be here soon. That is all.

Thailand posts coming soon, I promise...

...but rather than get ever-further behind, I figured I'd throw an update out there regarding more recent events and the band, and then I'll backtrack this week to post a whack of Thailand pics and stories and everything.

This past weekend was a bit of a long/eventful one. Friday night was alright, we played at Pearl Jam again, though it was empty so it was more of a practice, which was something we needed anyway, so it wasn't too big a deal.

Saturday we had loads of plans up in Seoul, and despite various delays and setbacks, we managed to complete most of them. It did, however, make for quite a long day, since we left Cheongju at 2 (after waiting in the bus station for an hour or so) and didn't get to our ultimate destination until about 8:30.

That destination was a club near Honggik University called Slug.er club. We have more or less decided that we won't play at Club Spot again (the place that we played the last Seoul shows) because we're sick of playing in a punk club where the crowd will almost inevitably hate us for not being a punk band, so it was nice to be going somewhere else for a change. We were a little worried when we got there and saw all the dressed up, mohawked people milling around the front.

The club was tiny and incredibly hot. It was a raised stage in a basement, so there wasn't a lot of room on it. I hit my head later in the night walking back to the back room to get my stuff, which sucked. The show, however, actually went pretty well. Even with our bass player having been bitten by some kind of bug making his hand swell up pretty grossly. The crowd actually seemed pretty receptive, and the owner told us he was really impressed. He also owns another club or two in Seoul, as well as a recording studio and a small-name label/publicity company. He told us that he would like to record a CD for us, for free, as well as doing the recording for the one track that we're getting on the compilation CD as a prize for coming third in the Railart competition.

So that's cool, although it means that we're going to be in Seoul a lot more, which generally makes for a tiring weekend, but should be an interesting experience.

That's all for now. Like I said, posts about the Thailand trip are on their way, and I'll finish off this post with a teaser picture, just to prove that we actually went.

Also, the World Cup is on right now. Thought I'd mention it to those of you still back home in one of the two countries in the entire world where nobody cares. Korea's actually doing surprisingly well, having tied against France this morning at 4am (we went to a stadium in town where they were showing the game), although the tying goal was an incredibly lucky one. They still need to at least tie against Switzerland next weekend, but I think they can do it. I'm going up to Seoul Friday night to watch the game at 4am with a crowd that's reportedly going to push a million people outside of Seoul City Hall. Should be good times.

Okay, here's the promised Thailand picture.