Crystal’s Adventures

Thanks for the books, Kate!
Finished my Jane Austen novel and started Branded, a book which exposes brand name culture in teen America and shows why many corporations direct their marketing toward adolescents and what it’s doing to society. Perfect book for Thailand too! I’m afraid that all the Starbucks stores around here can only mean [...]

From the inside of a telephone booth, I surreptitiously photographed a woman slicing what was quite possibly the world’s largest cucumber. (I hid because I didn’t want to alarm her, being that she was holding a knife and didn’t look like the forgiving type.) The cucumber was roughly the size of a football. Maybe it [...]

Last night I had dinner at Inter, a favorite restaurant of mine near my house. I like it because it is cheap like street vendor food (US$ .75-1.50), but it is very clean and air-conditioned too. Inter serves basic one-dish Thai meals, like pad thai, beef with rice, Thai noodle soups and green papaya salads [...]

Sunday was the religious holiday called Visakha Puja, which celebrates Buddha’s birth, enlightenment and death. Kate and I started our day by taking the speedy canal boat from my house to Banglampoo, where the famous backpacker area called Khao San Road is. We had iced coffee at a restaurant called “Lucky Beer” (Thai iced coffee [...]

Kate and I met Hyunjoo at 8 AM yesterday to go directly to the famous Chutachak (”JJ”) weekend market, which might be the biggest in the world — I heard that somewhere. Having mentally prepared ourselves for a morning of crowded commercial chaos, were were very suprised to find a quiet, uncrowded and beautiful open-air [...]

I think I’ve figured out the trick to crossing the street! The key to it involves a purposeful first move into the street, looking toward oncoming traffic (while also checking for people going wrong way down the street) and moving steadily, but slowly forward, never back. It’s like staring down a grizzly bear, but it’s [...]

He’s 33 today, according to The Nation, Bangkok’s English newspaper.
So my new words from the past two days are goodbye: “Lah-GAWN”, with a falling tone.
Spicy: “PRICK”, with a high tone. Hot pepper: “PET”, with a low tone.
It’s been raining so much, all day and night the past two days. Lots of thunder. Bangkok is lush [...]

If anyone would like to write to me, my address until June 11th is:
Room 207
Bed and Breakfast Inn
36/42 Soi Kasem San 1
Rama 1 Road
Pathumwan, BANGKOK 10330
THAILAND
It takes about 5-7 days for letters to go between Thailand and the U.S.
Today at work I ate lunch with a very interesting group of young UNESCO workers at the [...]

Thais probably lead the world in the transportation department. I can’t even count on my hands all the ways to travel around town! Just yesterday I rode the canal boat to the Banglampoo section of town, a “tuk tuk” (kind of like a golf cart on steroids) to the piers, then down the river on [...]

Bangkok is hot, humid and full of interesting sounds (traffic, Mynah birds, Thai chatter) and smells (lemongrass, garlic, roasting chicken). I love the fresh-squeezed orange juice carts and watching people talking on their cel phones from the back of motorcycles taxis. Flowers, koi ponds and beautiful trees are everywhere. Orchids seem to grow right out [...]