September 28th 2007
I'm really glad I came up here to Korea. This place is great. After all the chaotic hustle in Bangkok, Seoul is a surprising change. The city is still very crowded, but the people are completely different. Everyone is so polite, there is hardly any crime, and there are far less tourists.
The food here is not really my style - everything is pickled; they don't know what sugar is; everything is some derivative of rice; and the meat needs some help. I've actually come to enjoy their seafood more than anything else, but I haven't been adventurous enough to try some of their more interesting seafood such as live squid.
It's so nice having a tour guide. Eve has been great about showing me around to all the hotspots in Seoul and all the scenery. Hikes, palaces, nightlife, shopping, food, tea - there's so much to do here. We both got a cold the first weekend I got here and we're both still sick, which a has been kind of a drag, but it calls for some well needed downtime which has been very relaxing at Eve's place. I hasn't kept us down completely though. Wednesday we got up early and rode their extensive subway system across town to meet a friend for some intense badminton and awesome hiking. Earlier in the week we took a trip over to Deokjeokdo - an island off the mainland - for a night. The island was almost empty because of the holiday (Cheusok) except for other english teachers. We had an awesome time, you should check the pictures. So much more to talk about, but I think I babble too much.
Back to Bangkok for a night on the 2nd, then Koh Samui the 3rd and Koh Pha-ngan on the 6th till about the 16th - just in time to head over to Phuket for some diving!
I miss home a little, but I'm having so much fun. =D
Jurassic 5 - Freedom
Counting Crows - Holiday in Spain
Thursday, September 27, 2007
Wednesday, September 19, 2007
Wonder What's Next
After nearly a week in Bangkok, I have such mixed feelings about the city.
The view from where I am sitting paints an incredible summary of my idea of this place. I'm in a second floor cafe with a gang of Brits behind me planning their next move in Thailand and a cute little Thai kid next to me playing a game of tiles. This part of the city (Koh San) is packed with tourists and therefore packed with Thai ready to extract as much Baht from them as possible. Just below me I see a teen Thai girl trying to sell some trinket butterfly toys to passersby in this 6ft-wide alleyway. Directly above her hangs corroded sheet metal roofing from shops surrounded by equally dilapidated walls. Draping above the crudely erected shelter are electrical, cable and telephone lines that nearly black out the sky behind them. In the background is some more recent architecture from probably the 70s that is a few stories high. It looks like someone took all the hotels and houses from a Monopoly game and bunched them up randomly and called it good. Everything is so compact and hectic, even in these back alleys.
It's hard for me to trust the locals. I arrived at my hotel in hopes of some good advice or direction in a place where I had no real sense of things. I took a chance and talked to a bellman about things to do and places to see, hoping to be able to trust the hotel staff. The first things he offers are trips to tailors and jewelry stores, which after no more than 1 day you know are 99% scams. The next day I took a tuk tuk ride (see pictures) around the city to see what this place had to offer. We went to a dinky Buddha shrine and set off for some "extra stops" to go "shopping." I leveled with the driver about how the back-scratching circle works and it's like this: he shows me this card that's 5 litres free gas and says that any time he takes a customer to a designated "shopping" area, he gets a gas card. Anytime one of the customers buys something, he gets another card for each purchase. So I tell him - listen, I'll give you 100baht (it was originally 20baht) if you can just skip these places and take me to cool parks and temples. He ponders it and says he really needs these gas cards, and if we go to these places it'll be a free ride and he'll take me for another hour to go view the city - I just gotta go in for 5-10 mins and come back out. So I survive these places and we're ready to go. We drop by my neighborhood and he says he's gotta hang out for 10 mins while his ride cools down, so I go in a travel agency for a few mins and talk to the guys in there (the travel agencies are actually pretty sweet here btw). I come out and he's gone - could be worse, I spent no Baht, but I really did get taken for a ride. Lesson learned.
There are two sides to the coin though. Rachael and Dakota got lucky and found a really cool, honest cab driver the first day they were here who basically became our personal tour guide and did some amazing things for us. He got us a good price on Thai boxing tickets, took us to some fantastic restaurants, amazing Thai massage, floating market that was about an hour outside of town and a ton more. Mickey. Awesome, I'll miss him. The floating market was absolutely awesome - I've posted a few pictures on it.
The nightlife is really crazy here, the food is very hit or miss and the weather is not as bad as I had imagined. I'd take Boulder's fall over this sticky stuff any day though! South Korea will be much cooler I imagine so that will be a nice change of pace. I'm really excited to see Eve and get to experience things in Seoul - I'm definitely done with Bangkok for now, but I'll be back for 1 night when I'm on my way to Koh Samui (can't wait), and hopefully can get some more fun stuff done.
Go Broncos.
Muse - Supermassive Black Hole
Wilco - You Are My Face
Jay-Z - The Prelude
The view from where I am sitting paints an incredible summary of my idea of this place. I'm in a second floor cafe with a gang of Brits behind me planning their next move in Thailand and a cute little Thai kid next to me playing a game of tiles. This part of the city (Koh San) is packed with tourists and therefore packed with Thai ready to extract as much Baht from them as possible. Just below me I see a teen Thai girl trying to sell some trinket butterfly toys to passersby in this 6ft-wide alleyway. Directly above her hangs corroded sheet metal roofing from shops surrounded by equally dilapidated walls. Draping above the crudely erected shelter are electrical, cable and telephone lines that nearly black out the sky behind them. In the background is some more recent architecture from probably the 70s that is a few stories high. It looks like someone took all the hotels and houses from a Monopoly game and bunched them up randomly and called it good. Everything is so compact and hectic, even in these back alleys.
It's hard for me to trust the locals. I arrived at my hotel in hopes of some good advice or direction in a place where I had no real sense of things. I took a chance and talked to a bellman about things to do and places to see, hoping to be able to trust the hotel staff. The first things he offers are trips to tailors and jewelry stores, which after no more than 1 day you know are 99% scams. The next day I took a tuk tuk ride (see pictures) around the city to see what this place had to offer. We went to a dinky Buddha shrine and set off for some "extra stops" to go "shopping." I leveled with the driver about how the back-scratching circle works and it's like this: he shows me this card that's 5 litres free gas and says that any time he takes a customer to a designated "shopping" area, he gets a gas card. Anytime one of the customers buys something, he gets another card for each purchase. So I tell him - listen, I'll give you 100baht (it was originally 20baht) if you can just skip these places and take me to cool parks and temples. He ponders it and says he really needs these gas cards, and if we go to these places it'll be a free ride and he'll take me for another hour to go view the city - I just gotta go in for 5-10 mins and come back out. So I survive these places and we're ready to go. We drop by my neighborhood and he says he's gotta hang out for 10 mins while his ride cools down, so I go in a travel agency for a few mins and talk to the guys in there (the travel agencies are actually pretty sweet here btw). I come out and he's gone - could be worse, I spent no Baht, but I really did get taken for a ride. Lesson learned.
There are two sides to the coin though. Rachael and Dakota got lucky and found a really cool, honest cab driver the first day they were here who basically became our personal tour guide and did some amazing things for us. He got us a good price on Thai boxing tickets, took us to some fantastic restaurants, amazing Thai massage, floating market that was about an hour outside of town and a ton more. Mickey. Awesome, I'll miss him. The floating market was absolutely awesome - I've posted a few pictures on it.
The nightlife is really crazy here, the food is very hit or miss and the weather is not as bad as I had imagined. I'd take Boulder's fall over this sticky stuff any day though! South Korea will be much cooler I imagine so that will be a nice change of pace. I'm really excited to see Eve and get to experience things in Seoul - I'm definitely done with Bangkok for now, but I'll be back for 1 night when I'm on my way to Koh Samui (can't wait), and hopefully can get some more fun stuff done.
Go Broncos.
Muse - Supermassive Black Hole
Wilco - You Are My Face
Jay-Z - The Prelude
Monday, September 17, 2007
Quicky
September 17th, 2007
Hey :D
Wow, lots to talk about... but so little time to type it out. I wish I could type a mile a minute. The cafes here leave much to be desired, but they suffice. I suppose I was just spoiled back home in Boulder. Moreover, I just have had no time to get to one during their business hours. I plan to write much more in the coming days, so sit tight.
We just took some interesting public transit to Khoa San Road, this zoo of a place where people from all over the world congeal in Bangkok. We left Rachael and Dakota's hotel while it was beautiful out after sun bathing and swimming on their extravagant rooftop pool. Hopped a few Skytrain over to the river and took a boat up here. Halfway through the boat ride came the torrential rain. We fled the boat to a small dock market and had the best pad thai we'd ever had for $1 a plate with our Singha beer jugs to wait for the monsoonal rain to pass. So now we're here, and are meeting a friend of Rachael and Dakota's out here in a matter of minutes, so I'm short on time again.
On another note, I'm now flying to Seoul on the 20th and returning to Bangkok on the 2nd, only to stay one night and head to Koh Samui for 3 nights in a beach bungalo, then Koh Ngun (i think that's the right spelling) for another week.
I just heard about the crazy plane crash out here, a flight on 12go airlines aka orient-thai from BKK to Phuket (Poo-Ket) - the same company I'm flying to Seoul on, and the exact same flight that Rachael and Dakota will be on here in 1 week. Crazy. But don't worry, everyone is safe and having an amazing time. ;)
That's all for now, sorry for the brief and unproofread jibberish - I miss you all and hope you are all wonderful, please write! :D
-Chris
Bush - The People That We Love
Radiohead - Paranoid Andriod
Hey :D
Wow, lots to talk about... but so little time to type it out. I wish I could type a mile a minute. The cafes here leave much to be desired, but they suffice. I suppose I was just spoiled back home in Boulder. Moreover, I just have had no time to get to one during their business hours. I plan to write much more in the coming days, so sit tight.
We just took some interesting public transit to Khoa San Road, this zoo of a place where people from all over the world congeal in Bangkok. We left Rachael and Dakota's hotel while it was beautiful out after sun bathing and swimming on their extravagant rooftop pool. Hopped a few Skytrain over to the river and took a boat up here. Halfway through the boat ride came the torrential rain. We fled the boat to a small dock market and had the best pad thai we'd ever had for $1 a plate with our Singha beer jugs to wait for the monsoonal rain to pass. So now we're here, and are meeting a friend of Rachael and Dakota's out here in a matter of minutes, so I'm short on time again.
On another note, I'm now flying to Seoul on the 20th and returning to Bangkok on the 2nd, only to stay one night and head to Koh Samui for 3 nights in a beach bungalo, then Koh Ngun (i think that's the right spelling) for another week.
I just heard about the crazy plane crash out here, a flight on 12go airlines aka orient-thai from BKK to Phuket (Poo-Ket) - the same company I'm flying to Seoul on, and the exact same flight that Rachael and Dakota will be on here in 1 week. Crazy. But don't worry, everyone is safe and having an amazing time. ;)
That's all for now, sorry for the brief and unproofread jibberish - I miss you all and hope you are all wonderful, please write! :D
-Chris
Bush - The People That We Love
Radiohead - Paranoid Andriod
Monday, September 10, 2007
Here we go!!
September 10th, 2007
It's happening. It really is.
This is finally starting to hit me. As much as I thought I could psyche myself up for this trip, I'm realizing all the preparation in the world only goes so far and there's a point where you just have to jump. The funny part is, I've not spent all that much time packing, instead I spend a lot of time thinking of what to pack. Everyone's got a different opinion about travel preparation and even where and how to travel. I love it, and everyone's advice has bee really helpful. Everything seems to be moving along nicely.
So, I scheduled a trip to Seoul, South Korea from Sept 22nd to Oct 2nd! This means I'll have about a week to spend in the Bangkok area before heading up there to see Eve, who's teaching English to little Korean munchkins for a year. Eve has a few extra days off that week thanks to Chuseok, the harvest festival. I'm really excited.
I'm really going to miss everyone, I can already tell. E-mails please! I'd love to hear all about what's going on - buncher@gmail.com
That's all for now!
Chevelle - I Get It
It's happening. It really is.
This is finally starting to hit me. As much as I thought I could psyche myself up for this trip, I'm realizing all the preparation in the world only goes so far and there's a point where you just have to jump. The funny part is, I've not spent all that much time packing, instead I spend a lot of time thinking of what to pack. Everyone's got a different opinion about travel preparation and even where and how to travel. I love it, and everyone's advice has bee really helpful. Everything seems to be moving along nicely.
So, I scheduled a trip to Seoul, South Korea from Sept 22nd to Oct 2nd! This means I'll have about a week to spend in the Bangkok area before heading up there to see Eve, who's teaching English to little Korean munchkins for a year. Eve has a few extra days off that week thanks to Chuseok, the harvest festival. I'm really excited.
I'm really going to miss everyone, I can already tell. E-mails please! I'd love to hear all about what's going on - buncher@gmail.com
That's all for now!
Chevelle - I Get It
Monday, September 3, 2007
Gearing up
September 3rd, 2007
It's come to my attention that instead of mass e-mails, i should just break down and use this phenomenon called a weblog. If you're like me, you've seen a total of two "blogs" ever and are just tired of hearing the stupid buzzword. Alas, it does seem sensible to keep everyone up to date on my travels this way, so join me on a journey into trendy internet blogging, and hopefully you can share a piece of my adventures with me!
Having never set foot out of North America, planning this whole trip, which will tentatively last until sometime in December, is a bit daunting. Making sure I have the perfect gear, medical supplies and vaccinations, certifications, contacts, reservations, and mindset has been fun but exhausting at times. Flights have been the biggest challenge thus far. I've totally taken for granted the fact that flights in the US are easily searched with just a handful of websites. When trying to catch a flight from Bangkok to, say, Mumbai India, not only am I searching tens of sites but I also have to wait on slow and underdeveloped web pages, translate them, and find the correct exchange rates. Good thing I'm not in class or work :).
Thus far, my itinerary is very unset. I fly out of DIA at 8:35pm, Sept 12th on United flight 423 to arrive in San Francisco at 10pm and set off to Taipei, Taiwan at 1:35am on the 13th. I land at 5:30am on the 14th! From there I'll hop over to Bangkok just in time for lunch, 12:20pm on the 14th (local time, which is 13 hours ahead of MST). I have 4 nights in a pretty nice hotel downtown. After that it's still undecided, but things are progressing nicely. The next scheduled stop is in early October in the southern tail of Thailand for some R&R on the beach with Rachael followed by a 3 day liveaboard scuba adventure! 3 dives a day, exploring the beautiful islands on the west coast.
In the words of someone I respect very much:
"Don't spend time bein' worried, get your ass excited"
Heard.
Sometimes I feel a song can represent more than my words can say. I'll try to leave you all with a song at the end of my posts that has significance to me at that particular point in time, for one reason or another. Today's a "Weezer - Island in the Sun" kinda day I think ;)
It's come to my attention that instead of mass e-mails, i should just break down and use this phenomenon called a weblog. If you're like me, you've seen a total of two "blogs" ever and are just tired of hearing the stupid buzzword. Alas, it does seem sensible to keep everyone up to date on my travels this way, so join me on a journey into trendy internet blogging, and hopefully you can share a piece of my adventures with me!
Having never set foot out of North America, planning this whole trip, which will tentatively last until sometime in December, is a bit daunting. Making sure I have the perfect gear, medical supplies and vaccinations, certifications, contacts, reservations, and mindset has been fun but exhausting at times. Flights have been the biggest challenge thus far. I've totally taken for granted the fact that flights in the US are easily searched with just a handful of websites. When trying to catch a flight from Bangkok to, say, Mumbai India, not only am I searching tens of sites but I also have to wait on slow and underdeveloped web pages, translate them, and find the correct exchange rates. Good thing I'm not in class or work :).
Thus far, my itinerary is very unset. I fly out of DIA at 8:35pm, Sept 12th on United flight 423 to arrive in San Francisco at 10pm and set off to Taipei, Taiwan at 1:35am on the 13th. I land at 5:30am on the 14th! From there I'll hop over to Bangkok just in time for lunch, 12:20pm on the 14th (local time, which is 13 hours ahead of MST). I have 4 nights in a pretty nice hotel downtown. After that it's still undecided, but things are progressing nicely. The next scheduled stop is in early October in the southern tail of Thailand for some R&R on the beach with Rachael followed by a 3 day liveaboard scuba adventure! 3 dives a day, exploring the beautiful islands on the west coast.
1st day: approx. 09:30 depart from Tab Lamu
12:30 checkdive at Koh Tachai (south coast)
16:00 2nd dive at Koh Tachai Plateau
19:30 nightdive
2nd day: 08:00 1st dive at Richelieu Rock
11:00 2nd dive at Richelieu Rock
15:00 3rd dive at Richelieu Rock
19:30 nightdive
3rd day: 08:00 1st dive at Koh Bon Pinnacle
11:00 2nd dive at Koh Bon West Ridge
14:00 3rd dive at Koh Bon Coral Garden
approx 15:00 depart from Similan with arrival at Tab Lamu approx. 18:00
In the words of someone I respect very much:
"Don't spend time bein' worried, get your ass excited"
Heard.
Sometimes I feel a song can represent more than my words can say. I'll try to leave you all with a song at the end of my posts that has significance to me at that particular point in time, for one reason or another. Today's a "Weezer - Island in the Sun" kinda day I think ;)
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