One nice constant on my month-long trip has been the availability of american power plugs. They’re not always grounded plugs, but there are always plugs. The ones that aren’t grounded sometimes make your gear sting you with a tiny flow of stray electrons.

I’m in Laos at the Douang Deuane hotel in Vientiane. This was the 4th place I had to try before I found an open room. My room wraps in an L around the elevator shaft, but it’s quiet so far. I’m on the 4th floor which is second to the top. You can find me in room 404.

I have yet to check into a hotel that has 4 digit room numbers, let alone get lucky with room 2046.

Room 410 would’ve been mildly amusing too, and if I had Tien here we might have had to play charades.

It took me 5 modes of transportation to get here: taxi, motorbike, train, car, and airplane. I was somewhat hoping for a sixth being a tuk tuk, but you can’t win them all. I suppose the sixth could be my feet since I had to wander around in the dark of night looking for a place to sleep.

Yesterday was Tuesday and My had school. We caught a taxi to the Sky Train in Bangkok and she went off to class leaving me to do what I wished in Bangkok. I took some photos and soon got lost inside of an enormous mall next to six or seven other enormous malls located in Siam Square. I basically wandered around and took some photos and gawked at all the different things. I tried to find some photography gear that was decently priced but everything was just slightly more expensive than in America. I wonder if photographers in Thailand are inherently better because of the higher cost of entry.

That night Mint and I sat up watching The Usual Suspects on Thai TV. They blurred out guns pointed at people at point blank. They blurred out people smoking. They blurred out people’s lips when they said certain thing. They let you hear every cuss word.

Today I looked at my schedule and decided that I better get a move on and get out of Thailand. I was enjoying the company of My and her family, but I was longing for the freedom and the lifestyle that comes with it. I also only have a few days left until I need to be back in Saigon and I have a whole country to see. With that in mind I logged onto ye handy internette and bought a plane ticket to Laos, surprising My and spoiling her day at school. She called her friend to answer her name and fill out her homework for her, then spent the day with me. We once again performed our taxi and sky train maneuver to get downtown, then got coffee and headed off for the backpacker district, Khaosan Road.

Khaosan Road is just about everything I hate about backpacker culture, all wrapped into a very long block. We were only there for 90 minutes, but that was plenty time to see what there was to see. I could go on and on about how much BS there is there, and I plan to do so over at Dream Not of Today where I post photos and from time to time write logical criticisms of culture, other assorted diatribes and whatever else fits the edgy dynamic of that site rather than the personal angle of this site.

Long story short, we hit the road in a taxi that went so slow we both fell asleep and woke up 1 block later. My paid the 45 minute 100 baht fee that took us around 2 sides of a single city block, and we walked. We had to do something, I was now 45 minutes late for my projected timeframe of going to the airport.

A block or so later she found us some motorbike taxis. This was not only a fantastic way to kill the 5km of gridlocked traffic between us and the sky train, but it was reminiscent of Vietnam, the country where four days from now I will return into the arms of my fiancé.

took the two us through gridlocked traffic on that motorbike the way I’d handle just myself on a bicycle, which is more aggressive than most, passing between cars and taxis and busses like he was navigating a maze and knew the way through. We used the oncoming lane to pass hundreds of cars. We ran gridlocked red lights with police sitting right there or doing the same thing on their motorbikes in the opposite direction. We passed a traffic cop stopping cars that would otherwise have a clear shot and hit 50km on the open 5 lane road and were passed only by a CBR 150 before diving back into the gridlock. We passed through more maze like traffic, turned down and alley and went through a parking structure and ended up right at the stairwell for the sky train. Why did we ever get into that stationary air conditioned automobile?

I thought about how there are never any traffic jams in Vietnam unless there are automobiles involved. I shared this thought with My. Later on that night her dad would share the same thoughts with me.

We got off the sky train, got into a taxi and got stuck in traffic again and I loathed the automobile. I wondered how on earth so many cars could contain so many drivers that were so fucking stupid as to sit there in the street burning up and smoking dead dinosaurs when they ought to be going somewhere at a very rapid pace. I thought back to when I first bought a motorcycle in San Jose in order to cut through traffic and give up the sitting and dinosaur smoking lifestyle.

We eventually got home, I packed as fast as I could, which gets harder every time I buy a bamboo flute or a man purse or a pair of broken swimming shorts, piled into her dads car and headed off to the airport. I arrived at the airport 45 minutes before the plane left. I got my ticket 30 minutes before the plane left. I got through passport control and security 15 minutes before my plane left. I got to my seat on the plane 10 minutes before my plane left. I didn’t know things could go so well after going so badly.

The flight was nice, I was nearly asleep when they gave me a delicious meal and a small pour of wine. I listened to Halcyon + On + On and One Perfect Sunrise. Orbital is always great traveling music.

When I got off the plane I still hadn’t filled out my arrival card, which is standard procedure on the plane in order to make passport control quicker. There were no pens, so I just went to the line and stood there. The man turned me away to go fill it out at the desk where there were no pens, so I went. There were about 7 people standing around sharing a single pen. It belonged to an Asian man of a descent I couldn’t discern, but he gave it to me when everybody was done with it and walked away with his wife and child. I filled out my stuff and left the pen there as goodwill, but then thought I should’ve done differently when I ended up next to him in line. He didn’t care, he just smiled and waved it off. It was late and we were tired, who cared about a pen? It’s always good to have smiles and laughs from strangers, and there’s something extra when there’s no other communication beyond the rudimentary.

I changed my remaining Baht to Kip. Kip is another currency with 4 or 5 trailing zeros. My taxi ride to the hotel was 52,000. I got dropped off by the waterfront of the river that separates Thailand and Laos, so basically I was only a few hundred meters into the fourth country on my journey. The hotel I had found in the guidebook was full. The place next door was full. I had predicted this and had scoped out a few places on the way in. They were also full, including the one that had wifi. I had picked the right neighborhood though and the 5th or 6th place I went had a room open, and that is where I am now.

I like Beerlao. I’m not sure if the beer here is great just because I haven’t been drinking as frequently, of if it’s just better, but beer here in Asia is nice. Maybe it’s the property of ones being applied to a heat factor that is well above what I’m used to. Anyhow, I’m safe and sound in Laos. I have 4 days here, then it’s back to Saigon to be with my fiancé and handle visa stuff for her trip to America with me. Beyond that, I’m not sure how my trip is going to go, but I think I will only be able to see Malaysia and not Singapore. Perhaps I can shift in a different sixth country to make up for it…

Today we first went to Bang Pa In. This was a collection of historical buildings. There were many buildings called mansions that were as small as a large apartment. Like many important buildings, you had to take your shoes off. And you weren’t supposed to use your cell phone. And you couldn’t take pictures. All I could think of was “no fun allowed”, and that may have been the case since it wasn’t really a fun place, but just an ornate and awe inspiring place with a rich history.

We had lunch at a restaurant above a river where big collections of plants were floating by. Afterwards we went to a few more temples, then drove home in the rain with a beautiful sunset beyond the scattered towers of Bangkok.

I saw somebody living under a bridge in a makeshift tent with laundry hung out to dry and pictures hung from the laundry wires and posted on the wall of the underpass.

The next morning My and I got up and caught a taxi to the Sky Train and headed downtown to Siam Square. This was a big departure from what I’ve been used to as it involved things that weren’t hundreds of years old. It was a modern train and modern buildings with modern fashion and chain restaurants. There were people going to work in suits and hundreds of school kids dressed in uniforms. There were big theaters with laser lights in the lobby playing techno.

There was a collection of malls, not just a single mall. It was like six malls, all over 6 stories tall. There was so much fashion to shop for I don’t know if some of the girls back home would’ve come out alive. At one point we found ourselves in a market area on one floor filled entirely of mobile phones. I’d never seen so many mobile phones in my life. Literally there were thousands and thousands of mobile phones being sold at hundreds of little shops that were all exactly the same. I thought I was in tech purgatory.

At one store I saw what I thought was an iPhone for a really cheap price, so I asked to see it. It was a fake. It looked almost exactly like an iPhone, but it had a micro USB slot instead of a dock slot. And it took two SIM cards. And it had a replaceable battery. And the OS sucked. And it required a stylus. And you had to go into the ugly preferences to configure things like UART. It made me wonder why on earth people would go to such lengths to copy merely the physical style of the iPhone yet miss all of the functionality in the user experience, which is where the money is. But then I looked at those oceans of Nokia, Ericsson and Samsung phones and thought “Apple has no market here anyway…” Then I thought “an app store for something like Nokia would be a huge boon for the Asian market.”

I saw a guy with a shirt that said “I fantasize about the ups man.”

I saw a girl with a shirt that said “I look good when turned upside down.”

I saw a man on the street with no shirt wearing ripped up shorts and gold high heels.

On the way home in the Sky Train I told My about the Bart Swing 2009. The Sky Train is too crowded to actually do something like that, but that didn’t stop us from dreaming up the next iteration on the idea… Sky Cradle 2009™, the best way to catch up on your sleep while commuting home.

We were going to go see Wat Arun, the Emerald Buddha and The Reclining Buddha. It was My, Max, Ratana, Ratana’s sister Jit and I. We got breakfast at the usual and then headed off down the tollway.

The tollway reminded me of the new I-25 through Denver. Wide tarmac, smooth, and the scattered tall buildings were similar to those by the DTC. The city is also very sprawled out like Denver is but more so. What’s different is that the skyscrapers are scattered around as far as you can see instead of mostly grouped together. Traffic was different too. Everywhere I go in Asia it seems like the lines on the street are just suggestions of one way to do things. When traffic got heavy on the tollway people turned the shoulder into a lane.

There were a lot of tall buildings near the tollway, but there were also a lot of shacks cobbled together, some with tin roofs and no glass in the windows. Igor had mentioned that there were a lot of run down, poor areas like this and I hadn’t seen many yet, but here they were next to the highway on the way to downtown. This was more like the SE Asia I knew for the first few weeks I was here.

We passed through the edge of downtown and I got a quick glance at it. It seemed like a normal big city with people playing sports in lots underneath the highway, people waiting for busses, people doing this and that in public places. I thought about how I’d go crazy here with a camera between the people and the expansive urban landscape.

Traffic surrounding downtown was terrible in some places and I thought it was normal until Ratana said that it was because the Red Shirts were protesting today near The Palace, which is where we were headed. We would be taking a boat though and would miss the streets where they were protesting.

We got lost and I instinctually pulled out my iPhone to look at the map, and for the first time since leaving San Francisco it actually worked. The GPS function in my iPhone found us in Bangkok. This further validated my suspicion that it was at least somewhat dependent on the mobile network and not entirely dependent on the actual global positioning system run by the US government as most GPS units are. I used it to find geocaches nearby, one of which was exactly where My and I had gotten lost near the King’s museum the other evening.

We found our way to Wat Arun. We had a look around the complex and went up as high as you could go on the temple. This provided great views of the surrounding complex, the river, the temples across the river where the Emerald Buddha and Reclining Buddha were, and far off sights like downtown and other skyscrapers scattered around the city.

Afterwards we went down to the river and caught a boat to the other side of the river. River taxis are common here like busses are in some cities. We went through a little market area and walked along next to the palace complex until we got to the front where all of the rest of the tourists were. We went in and saw our way through the sites. I’d love to have something to say here, but most of what was inside were historically significant things specifically related to Buddhism, and I’ve never been good at history and Buddhist history seems really complex. It was all very beautiful though and I took many photos that I’m happy with.

Ratana bought a book for me about the history of the Emerald Buddha. It was discovered when lightning struck a building. It is made out of Jade, emerald is just the translated word for the color of jade. It’s been moved around a lot. It’s been owned by several different SE Asian countries.

We left and went to a mall to get some dinner and so some shopping. The parking lot was really full. So full that aside from the normal american H style parking where cars park end to end two at a time, there was a third row of cars perpendicular to those cars, boxing in the middle cars. I wondered how the hell the boxed in cars would get out.

Here’s how. The perpendicular cars are left in neutral. People who need to get to their cars find a parking lot attendant to help them or by their self roll the car out of the way. This is what we did to get to a parking spot.

We went inside and found a sukiyaki restaurant. Mint joined us and we had dinner, then went shopping. The mall was great, the stores were a lot different than American malls. There were market areas similar to the market I saw in Hanoi. There was a Dell shop, a Fujitsu shop, camera boutiques, phone boutiques, and then the usual things like clothes and shoes.

I looked for a replacement GPS for my camera, which was still mostly dysfunctional, but found nothing. I got a messenger bag that I should’ve got a month ago, some swimming trunks that I also should’ve gotten several weeks ago, and was unable to find a hat that fit. My head is just too big…

Home again. Geeking out again. Slept.

Michael Jackson had died while I was asleep.

Everybody was gone from the house except Max. I had coffee and a muffin and caught up with an old friend, Aimee Rich, who I hadn’t talked to since high school. It’s interesting to get the summary of somebody’s life and to summarize my own. “I went to college for a semester, dropped out, worked in tech hardware manufacturing for a few years, was a video editor for about 6 months, then started my career in computer technology which took me from Colorado to California. I recently quit my job to travel around SE Asia and am about to marry a Vietnamese girl and take her back to America with me.”

We went for breakfast and had a typical Asian breakfast in that it was no different from any other meal. Thai iced coffee is delicious. The menu was in English, as are many many things in Bangkok. My had said that almost everybody here speaks English.

I asked Max about his career and he said he had been in IT, mainly Oracle, and retired at 48. He’s 54 now and plays stock market.

We were on our way to The Ancient City and drove for a while. Bangkok is a very spread out city. I’ve noticed that there are many five story apartment buildings, some with pillars and balconies. These building are like an entire San Francisco block as a single building.

I wondered what it would take for Saigon or Long Xuyen to become a city like Bangkok. Hanoi is already halfway there. Bangkok has very little litter and I’ve seen people cleaning up on the side of the road. There are several driving ranges nearby. There are many carson the road and a stellar tollway system. Traffic in Bangkok is still a little crazy, just in cars rather than on scooters. There is graffiti done by locals rather than foreigners. I saw men in a water tanker watering plants in the median of a boulevard. It’s not that I want Saigon or Long Xuyen to be Bangkok, it’s just interesting to consider the steps between.

We arrived at The Ancient City, or Ancient Siam, which is a collection of large scale replicas of famous sites in Thailand. They are smaller than the originals, but still large enough to walk into. We got two bicycles to ride around. They both had baskets on the front which turned out to be a great setup for easy camera use. The sights were cool and it was an easy way to get a feel for what Thailand had to offer. Many of the temples were familiar as I’d already been tromping around Angkor. I took a lot of photos.

I saw a turtle running across the street and would’ve missed seeing it had it not been for the sounds his feet were making as they scraped the street.

We returned to the car and headed off. I saw a sign that said simply “Modify Dog” and thought of Repet.

We went to a local mall to figure out some issues with my phone’s data plan. When I got my SIM card it came with a data plan, which I was unaware of, and my automatic e-mail drained most of the balance in my account. I turned off the auto e-mail check but still needed to fix the balance and the data plan. I gave them 100 baht more, which is about $3, and got 6 hours of data with 50 baht more for calling. This way of doing things makes so much sense it’s a shame that it’s not more prominent in America.

We also stopped off at a few shops to look at camera gear. The D700 is just as expensive here as it is in America, and the LX3 is just as hard to find.

We headed home. I decided to try out Skype on my data plan and was incredibly disappointed to find that the Skype app on my iPhone was preventing me from making phone calls “due to contractual agreements” that did not apply to my circumstances. Damn poorly programmed software, damn AT&T.

Shortly after we arrived home My came walking tiredly in and showed us her fresh new driver’s license. 20 years old and finally able to drive. Max had told me earlier that she would probably get the nice 2006 Toyota SUV we’ve been cruising around town in.

Mint also came home soon and we all went to dinner at the same restaurant we had dinner at last night and breakfast this morning. The food is great, the drinks are good. At the back of the restaurant one of the employees was changing her baby’s diaper. On TV there were elephants dressed up like panda bears, then they were lifting a yak out of an oil change pit at a gas station that it had fallen into, then a yak gave birth to a baby yak, then they were testing cell phones for lightning attraction.

Yak birth is not appropriate dinner media, and cell phones do not attract lightning.

The TVs here support multiple audio channels and some shows broadcast in both Thai and English. You can switch between them just like a DVD.

They have pizza delivery motorbikes. I’m going to take this idea back to San Francisco and make a million dollars.

I saw a girl at a bus stop with a t-shirt that said “I <3 6/9″. That date has no significance in Thailand so I assumed it was a sexual engrish t-shirt.

We went to a nearby park where there are waterways, big grass lawns and the Kings museum where you can read blurbs about the king and see what kind of things he’s into. As we approached the museum a man blew a whistle and everybody in the park stood up. “National song.” We all stood there, most with their hands at their sides as the custom goes, until the song was over, then we all returned to what we were doing.

We saw the museum. The King seems like a great man, great leader and a great role model for a well rounded lifestyle. My and I went for a walk around the park as the sun was setting. We found a Chinese garden and inside of the garden I found a very large weird animal which I thoguht was a baby crocodile but ended up being an ant eater. We saw several more ant eaters swimming around and got lost in the park while we were looking at them and talking about animals. We found our way home, found her sister and father and went home for the night.

I thought about the next few weeks and about what I’ll do with my time. The dynamic change between backpacking solo and being a hosted guest is pretty significant. As a backpacker you can go where you want when you want and do what you want, but as a hosted guest there is a shift towards group outings and to the lifestyle of those hosting you. It’s an interesting shift and it’s easy to lose sight of the fact that you are in fact traveling. I don’t want to outstay my welcome or expire the hospitality of my hosts, and I want to continue my travels to northern Thailand and Laos. I have 9 days until I need to be back in Saigon to meet Tien. I really need to figure out a tentative schedule…

In the end I had chat and e-mail worthy and nearly web surf worthy wireless access in my room, and a jailbroken and unlocked iPhone 3g. With that completed, I headed out to get dinner and to find a SIM card to test out the network unlock. I was already to select from a list of about 10 carriers, but my AT&T card wasn’t working on any of them so they were no more use than information on what was available.

I got dinner at a chain restaurant I’ve seen around here called NYDC which serves east coast American food and offers free wifi to its patrons. I had pizza and my first glass of wine in nearly a month as I played with Cydia, which was somewhere between the glory of my first jailbreak experience and the horror of my second. Some of the things I wanted weren’t immediately available, like iPhysics and Trism.

After dinner I walked around looking for SIM cards and ended up at the Siem Reap night market, which was just like the day market but more cozy and warm and quiet, but with still the same “hello sir, can i help you sir, you buy a t-shirt sir” people. I was offered about 50 tuk tuk rides that I didn’t need, motorbike rides which was maybe a first for Cambodia but was frequent in Vietnam, weed and cocaine among countless trinkets and novelties. I was really just out to see it though, just to verify that there wasn’t anything worth seeing beyond the experience of having visited the night markets in Cambodia. Many people were having fun bartering and buying, but progressive minimalists like myself had no business in a place like that. With that in mind I went to a market, bought a bottle of Singha and an international SIM card and headed home.

I stayed up late chatting with Tien and friends who were waking up on the other side of the planet. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to open the tray that held my AT&T SIM card, so I wasn’t able to try it out. That was OK though, in time I’d figure it out. It was more of an educational experience anyway, I didn’t really need it.

In the morning I woke and chatted, listened to music, which had surprisingly been missing in my entire Siem Reap experience, showered and headed out for the much needed coffee and breakfast. I found a restaurant I wished I’d have found a few days earlier. It was a little hole in the wall stall across the street from the more ritzy western restaurants, and they had bread, eggs and white coffee for $2. I was delighted. I also managed to find a cool trick to get the SIM tray on an iPhone open without using a paperclip. Just shove a round toothpick into the hole snugly, then pull the tray out. There is enough grip to open the tray, and so I was able to swap my SIM and being trying out this Asian mobile scene.

I couldn’t figure it out. I forgot which provider was mine, and the girl at the restaurant didn’t know the logo.

I was getting tired of Siem Reap and wanted to leave, so I wandered a block and found a travel agency to check out what options I had for leaving. It turned out I could leave to Bangkok in 3 hours for $145. I went back to my hotel, grabbed my passport and three $50′s, checked the SIM card provider info I’d gotten, headed back to the travel agency to buy my ticket and on the way saw a man at a fruit stand showing a tiny ~.22 caliber pistol to a local boy of about 13. What followed was a hurried series of events which involved me paying for my ticket and handing over my passport, hiring a tuk tuk driver to take me back to the hotel and wait, packing my bags as fast as I could because it was exactly check out time and I had to be at the airport in 30 minutes, checking out, going back to the travel agency to pick up my ticket and passport and then heading straight to the airport. To top it off, my tuk tuk driver barely spoke english and drove a slow tuk tuk which was passed by more than one on the way to the airport.

I was happy though. The rush was a little bit of excitement in my very lazy Cambodian experience, and I was finally leaving Siem Reap. It was a western town with lounges and western restaurants and expensive drinks and meals. I was tired of not being able to look people in the eye, trying to avoid contact with people for fear of being hounded instead of smiling and greeting and talking with people.

On the way out of town I saw a kid with a Che Guevara t-shirt on, which was more interesting in Cambodia since he was a communist who murdered hundreds of innocent people senselessly, just like the Khmer Rouge.

On the way out of down town I set my iPhones cellular network to the one correlating to the SIM card I had and it soon began working. I had a phone for the first time since leaving SF almost 4 weeks ago.

We passed many large hotels, bigger hotels than any downtown, five star resort style hotels. I felt like I was driving through Aspen until I saw a guy on a scooter with about 20 dead chickens hanging by their legs. I then saw a Nikon D200 advertisement and wondered if it had really been there for years.

We arrived just after noon which gave me slightly less than the suggestion of checking in two hours before departure. That was ok though because checking in at the airport, passing through security and passing through Cambodian passport control was easy. There were few people there, it was a tiny airport with only 4 gates and only one was in service. There were 3 flights scheduled within the hour. Prices were astronomical, $3 for a small bottle of water, $3.50 for a can of soda. I bought a bottle of Japanese “wine” and found out it was 20% alcoholic soju after I poured a glass. I didn’t bother finishing the bottle since it tasted like vodka and I had no intention of getting wasted. Plus there were ants crawling on the marble bar.

I decided to use my international minutes while I still had the chance and called My, my friend in Bangkok, and told her I was pretty much on my way there. It was short notice, way shorter than I’d planned on giving her, but it was notice all the same and if she couldn’t pick me up I was planning on finding my own way. Luckily she had nothing going on and said she’d see me soon.

I walked around a bit and looked at the airport. It was a nice building with decent tropical landscaping outside. It felt like the kind of airport you’d see in a tropical resort, and then I remembered that’s pretty much what it was. A sign in the bathroom instructing men not to wash in the urinals reminded me that I was still in a 3rd world country.

I walked around the shops in the airport and as happy that I could actually look people in the eyes without the fear of them aggressively hawking their goods. It was nice. I was tired of having to pass through a crowd as if I saw nobody, it felt alienating and I was the alienator. I took some photos of the airport and as I passed the bar the bartenders teased me about being drunk, but I wasn’t since I hadn’t finished even half of the bottle. It was funny and we laughed about it. I played around with the networks and stuff on my phone, trying to figure out the details of this SIM swapping thing that is so different from the US. At one point two Japanese girls came running by, quickly passed through the gate and ran for an airplane that was out on the tarmac.

I boarded the plane and the flight attendant gave the usual speech about disabling communications devices and I thought about that annoying sound that the iPhone puts into some speaker systems. There was no safety demo and we were quickly in the air. I was sitting underneath the wing with a prop engine outside my window. We had a meal and I ate my first muffin since leaving SF where muffins were a pretty usual breakfast with coffee. I had coffee with my meal and it was the worst coffee I’ve had in years. It reminded me of the hot black tar we’d drink at Actiontec.

As we flew I looked out at the beautiful clouds and remembered my flight from Hanoi. I looked down at the earth and thought about all of the beautiful places that were hidden in those green polygons. I saw the reflection of the sun passing from rice paddy to rice paddy and then the earth disappeared behind a turbulent cloud.

On our descent I noticed that the land surrounding Bangkok was back to the familiar Vietnamese landscape of rice paddies for miles. The next thing I noticed was that people were driving on the left side of the road. I only had time to listen to two orbital songs before I had been told to take my headphones off for landing, the entire flight was less than an hour and at 2:50 I was in Thailand. The new airport in Bangkok is eye catching and modern. Entering the country was very easy and no visa was required.

After passing through passport control I went and found a new SIM card with a phone number that people could call me on. In Thailand, inbound minutes are free. With Skype, you can have an inbound number in any country that they support, and any state in America. I have a California Skype number. I also have an unlimited world calling plan. Those three things together allow people to call my Skype number in California and ring my cell phone in Thailand without incurring any additional fees for international calling. My SIM card also provided data access, which is actually a little irritating since any network activity on my phone will drain my phone balance, and I can’t disable only data. I had a working phone though and I was again thankful that the iPhone cracking team got the 3.0 unlock out just in time for my arrival in Thailand.

I called My on the phone and told her that I was several hours earlier than I had expected and she said she’d be at the airport in 15 minutes. In the time between I walked around and took in the crowd. There were many beautiful girls, many fashionable people, many people who looked like transvestites, and many girls who looked manly kinda scary and made me wonder about this sex change capital of the world.

My was there in the 15 minutes she said and her father whisked us away in a luxury Toyota sedan. I hadn’t been in a car that wasn’t a Saigon taxi in a long time. The highway system was very modern, the airport surroundings were very modern, the landscape was clean. This was very 1st world and it was odd. There wasn’t a single scooter around, which made sense since we were going over 120km/h. When we got off the highway though things started to look more familiar. I saw some bicycles and scooters and cement apartment buildings that weren’t painted and it felt like the SE Asia I know.

My’s family’s place was more modern though, more like what I’d expect to find in Korea given the Korean movies I’ve seen. It was a three story building with air conditioning, several laptops set around on desks, wifi, and a Wii. There was a book called “Engineering Mechanics Dynamics 11th Edition” that was full of complex mathematical algorithms with diagrams applying the principles to real world things like cranes and roller coasters. There was a piece of paper inside with a hand sketched on it and delicate decorations around the word “sleep” and I could tell what My’s classes for her automotive design major were probably like.

We played on her hacked Wii for a bit, did a round of golf and a round of bowling and played Wario something else that was really crazy, then she, her father Max and her sister Mint went to dinner. I hadn’t had a Thai meal in about a month. I quit eating Asian food a week before leaving San Francisco in order to get my fill of American foods so that I wouldn’t crave them, but I love Thai food and had been anticipating eating here. It was delicious. I got a desert and it was also delicious. It was heavenly. I can’t wait to eat again.

We talked about school and America mostly. Mint is My’s younger sister and she will be going to the USA in a few years for a foreign exchange program. This is the same program that introduced My to Alaska and my aunt Wendy, which is how I met her. My said that she travels 2 hours one way to get to school, which I think is ridiculous.

After dinner we walked around a little sidewalk market and then went home to do what any wired, high tech group of people does; we geeked out. They have a room that they keep air conditioned where most everything happens. There’s a TV, refrigerator, a few computers, cups, a sound system, a few couches, a few guitars, a bunch of desk toys, etc.. Basically a really playfully packed office living room kitchen. The cool room reminded me of my grandmother’s sitting room in Texas where she would sit and cross-stitch while watching the discovery channel or the movie channel.

My friend George helped me test out the inbound calling setup that I had rigged with Skype and it worked great. We talked for about 30 minutes about life and what we’ve both been up to and it was good to catch up with an old friend one-on-one, essentially off the grid. It was also great to have at least the inbound function of my phone working again. It is also good to be in Thailand. I wasn’t really sure what to expect since I’d heard so much about it and it has so many different reputations. I’m still not entirely sure what to expect, or even what I’ll do tomorrow since My is going to be busy all day, but I’m sure I’ll figure something out. There are certainly more options here than in Siem Reap.