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| "Welcome Thailand!" |
| 06.23.04 (9:24 pm) [edit] |
I was recently in an Advertisment in Bangkok to promote sports competitiveness... something like that... I was an extra of about 500 others. we had to sit in a soccer (football) stadium and cheer everytime we were cued with "Welcome Thailand!" they even gave us props, cameras, hats, flags etc... I saw an arab guy wearing an American flag on his head and an Indian women waving the Confederate flag... hmmmmmm?
we were taken to the stadium about an hour outside of Bangkok in a luxary double decker bus... where I sat next to an Indian guy... who asked me about getting green cards in America and if I was married... hmmmmmm. it was ironic too because we were given these green cards with a number on it so that we would get paid... we actually got paid!
THe whole thing lasted about 7 hours... we were fed some extremely spicy chicken and given us free water... wow! They continually rearranged the foreigners in visible positons... first I noticed they moved all the blonds in the front ( the ideal foreigner look)... while the brunettes and raven haired sat on the sidelines...
I was seperated from my friend Kila who was put into the "black section" next to the African men. while I was still be tossed around trying to fill up space... I ended up sitting in the Aisle next to some Czec guy who wouldn't tell me where he was from... he said... " I am from the earth... I am not from any country" oh god! I thought... one of those people who try so desperatly hard to be different... so I told him I was from my motha!
we were paid on the bus heading back to Bangkok... Kila sat next to an American from salt Lake city who peed in a bottle... lovely.. oh what a day!
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| I hate Bangkok! |
| 06.21.04 (8:20 pm) [edit] |
I've been in Bangkok for the past few days and I really hate this place! well it could also be Koh San road...
I've been trying to figure out my next plan of action.Do i leave Thailand or do I go to the Full moon Party...which I know I will hate... but I am quite curious to see one while in THailand... what to do? I have to go back to Korea to get my things... really don't want to do that either . although it will be cool to see some friends there... wish I could keep on going... but there comes a time when you've got to make some money agian... and then there are thoughts of home... in Bangkok everyone seems to be coming or going... and screwing Thai girls (and ladyboys)... aughhhhhhhhhh!!!!! Koh San Road is shit!
okay okay...as stated in a comment from someone... yeah I know not all of Bangkok is shit... but Koh San road is. i know i know go see cultural things while here... nuff said.
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| The greatness of Angkor Wat! |
| 06.19.04 (2:58 am) [edit] |
rose in the early morning gray to see the amazing Angkor Wat.
I felt like a kid ready to marvel at the wonderous architecture... truly unreal!!
Kila and I arrived at 5am when the sky is that glowing blue just before the morning lightness comes... "Harry POtter" Kila whispers... and there it is. the silhoutte of Angkor wat and loads of Japanese tourist snapping photos on their digital cameras.
the ligthness comes... gray no colors... dreary and not as impressive as the glowing blue color. it begins to rain and we run back to out tuk tuk to our guesthouse for a few zzzzz's and some breakfast before heading back to see the other marvels of the surrounding area including the temple in "Tomb Raider" an exhasting day indeed.
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| pick up |
| 06.19.04 (2:51 am) [edit] |
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The journey back to Phnom Penn took 8 hours in the back of a pick up truck. 6 of us with our backpacks. the time was passed by playing the "name game", "would you rather" and various other of the sorts.
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| wild wild world |
| 06.13.04 (4:56 am) [edit] |
I've seen bad roads but I've neve seen a road quite like the one to the biggest waterfall in Cambodia, in one of the most heavly land mined parts of the country. along the way the fields where dotted with signs reading "Danger Landminds" be careful where you pee!
Upon our desitnation, we walked around the small village to hire bikes. a man with a crooked head wearing a fishermans hat with words "I love you" handwritten, ran over to us. he looked a bit dodgey actually he looked a bit like sloth from the "Goonies".
"motorbikes!?" he yelled at us and laughed in a count dracula kind of way. there were 6 of us in total and we were once again a spectacle in the small town. His POsse quickly surrounded us not giving us much of a choice... this was a small country town... what else where we going to do? We agreed on a price of US$8 dollars for the day... cheaper then the $10 they suggested.
We set out like a gang on the motorbikes. I sat on the back of the "pink shirt boys'" bike. I think it was his first or second trip to the waterfall and he was excited to take me. here we go! a two hour journey to the falls on the worst road in Cambodia.
I think my driver had the worst bike of the bunch. along the way we got a flat tire. I slid off the bike 4 times in the mud and puddles... he tried to keep up with the othere's but the bike wouldn't allow it.
There were a few instances where I got off the bike and walked it throught the mud puddles and up the hills because we were sliding around so much. and Kila's driver thought he would marry her! but in all good fun, it was an interesting ride.
we caught up with the rest of the bunch in a tiny vilalge were everyone laughed at us including the drivers in a kind of hysterical giddiness. they're all crazy in these parts!!
as we grew closer to the waterfall a few of the drivers suddenly jumped off their bikes and smaked the ground with rocks and sticks.... "SNAKE!" one of them shouted! and continued to smake his stick. SUcess. the guy with the crooked head came out of the jungle with a long green poisonous snake. dead of course. eeeeeee!!! I'v got the pictures to prove it if you want to see!
2 hours after the start of our trip we made it to the falls. they were quite impressive, considering the great lengths we took to get here. it was worth it. we all triumphantly stood in front of the falls with a sense of accomplishment. and jumped in feeling alive and exhillerated! shouting at the top of our lungs. the drivers laughing madly at us again.
Then the rain came... quicky turning the dirt road into mudslides... ah the great journey's we take. rain always seems to make everything more memorable!
I changed drivers and was now with the crooked head man...with the Count Dracula laugh... his bike was bit more stable but I'm not to sure about him... he was good fun though...made me laugh whistling and singing any song I new about rain and the sun to calm my nerves. soaked from the waterfall and the Cambodian rain... rain rain and more rain... goosebumps where actually visible and we all shivered in our wet clothing.
the road improved on the way back, wide smooth and we air dried. and the sun even appeared breaking through the clouds shedding light on the green pastures below... almost reminding me of what Ireland would look like... emerald green glistening from the fresh rain... while we were brown from the mud caked on our skin and shoes... it took a few days to get all the mud off my shoes and out of my fingernails...
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| river Dolphins making LOVE! |
| 06.12.04 (2:57 am) [edit] |
or as our guide tells us...
"fäacking"
"what ohhhhhh fucking!
People come to the town of Kratie to catch a glimpse of the rare river dolphins found in the Mekong river...
4 of us rode alongside the river past stilt homes and waving children to the Mighty Mekong...
we did see the dolphins just as the rain was hanging over us... they were swimming in front of us... fins and tail were visible and the tops of thier heads.. but they're shy creatures and didn't jump out of the water like salt water dolphins do...
I was happy to have caught a glimpse :lol:
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| it's not the destination... |
| 06.12.04 (2:49 am) [edit] |
My body is aching today from dancing last night in Phnom Penn and the from the exhasting and exhillerating motorbike ride to the biggest waterfall in Cambodia.
Went into the wilderness and felt alive again! ... but what a trip that was just to get to the far northeast... a 2 day journey through some of the roughest roads in the country and then down the worst in the country!!!
WE took an ac bus from Phnom Penn the 6 of us and it turned into an ordeal. we rode to another town before we got into a minibus packed with Cambodian locals after we discovered there were no more boats leaving today down the Mekong to the town of KRatie.
SO we were off.............. with a stoned driver with a lazy eye... 2 of our friends rode on the top of the bus along with the backpacks and strummed away on the guitar comfortably lying on the top... meanwhile down below inside we were crammed to the max by a mean angry Cambodain women who like to yell at everyone... who know's what she was saying.
about 12km away from Kratie our bus breaks down... the axel broke and it took 2 hours to fix. as always The foreigners became a specatacle in these more remote parts... they stared at us with curiosity. the children all lined up on a fence like birds and watched as we played cards and ravenously ate dried noodles... we were starving and not sure when we would be moving again.
we managed to speak in cambodian thanks to our handy dandy guide book and were able to find out the distance to our destination...
finally another minibus drove by and we stood in the middle of the road to wave it down... they pulled over nd we climbed in. the angry lady was supposed to give th new driver money but didn;t give enough so there was a bit of an arguement... but in no time we were off... 3 of us on the roof now... with metal rods adnd backpacks on on the top... I was soo happy not to have my big pack with me and was enjoying the freedom that comes with a small day pack...
we arrived in the town just as it began to rain... this is the rainy season!
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| The Killing fields... |
| 06.05.04 (9:00 pm) [edit] |
THere are no words I can say to truly understand the atrocities of events that happened in Cambodia during the late 1970's.
i visited the Killing fields yesterday about 40k outside of the city of phnom Penn, the capital of Cambodia. we rode motorbikes to the field. a hell of a ride I'll say i kept thinking that at any given moment i could die. how easy it is without a helmet and traffic coming from every direction and the roads get progressively worse the closer you get to the field. it turns into dirt and your bumping around on the back of the bike and your bum is getting numb, and your hands are sweating but you don't want to loose your grip. and then you see a dead green poisonioud snake on the ground. and other motorbikes zoom past you and giant trucks barral down the rode kicking up dust, and you can;t breath or see cause there is so much dust. plus your a bit scared to look ahead, and the trip never seems to end. but I don't say anything i just sit back and let the driver take control cause there isn't much i can do but think of it as part of the expierence. I've been on the back of numerous motorbikes thoughout my SE journey but this was the longest and most uncomfortable... exception of the small crash in Hoi An.
The three of us arrived at the site at the hottest part of the day and were greeted by the memorial of skulls piled high. skulls which were all cracked from the blows of bamboo sticks upside the head and neck to kill inoccent people and even children by the Khmer Rouge. they wanted to save by not using bullets so instead brutally beat them in a a more severe painful death. THis was all led by the inhuman leader Pol Pot (short for Political Potential). we later learned most Communist leaders change thier names and he wanted to be known as Pol Pot. He believed these people were politcal spies or enemies of the Khmer Rouge and Communist party. And even quoted that it was better to "kill an innocent person then to let a possible enemy go free."
The ground we walked was scattered with torn clotihng and pits where they threw naked dead bodies into. You could even see bones sticking up through the earth and there was a strange thick smell in the air.
The air seemed thicker and hot as hell. this place was a hell. to think that these people knew they were going to die and this was the last place they saw. And i was standign here looking around and walking over thier bones. it was suffocating. you could feel the presence of the dead, unspoken words not able to plea for their innocense... makes your heart beat a bit faster and a horrible undescribable feeling in your gut, and gasp in disabelief at the capacity a human has for such horrible acts... what a tragic place, and you can't even begin to understand the reasoning behind mass genocide. the killing of humans for the reason of politcal beliefs and power and paranioa. How disgusting. even writing this now i feel a bit sick at how sick human can be. makes it hard to believe that i'm from the same species... yet the people here are beautiful and their spirit is strong. they still smile at al this hardship and tragedy that wasn't long ago... I was one when this happened!
I met a man who was 4 and remembers everything. he fled to the country when it was announced that the American's would be bombing Phnom Penn( a ploy for everyone to leave the city and destroy all material pocessions of excess, cars, telelphones, anything modern) everyone was to become an equal and not own more then there neighboor. and all the city people were forced into labor camps to produce rice and create and agriculture society. it became a slave state and the cambodian's bacame slaves in thier own country. meanwhile Pol Pot still rode aroundin cars!!!!! It makes me wonder what really goes on in North Korea under the Crazy Kim Jong Il dictatorship. sick people! makes me feel ill!!
Phnom Penn and other cities in cambodia became ghost towns for 45 months while city dwellers became slave farmers , trying t increase the cultivation of rice... only allowed to sleep for an houR! in fact the opposite happend, production decreased! Imagine if the American government told everyone in New York City to leave cause Irag was going to bomb the city and everyone had to flee to the country and beacome farmers. unimaginable!
the City of phomn Penn was abandoned by everyone and trees and weeds grew in the street where once the hustle and bustle of city traffic passed by... I saw pictures of it, collapsed buildngs and overgrowth... strange...
what a day. i was exhasted and i haven't even written about the prison for intellectuals in the city of Phnom Penn. once a school then turned into a prison hell of torture for people who knew too much about the brutality of the rulers and the policies... or not even just smart people or people who had studied overseas... and the Khemer Rouge stilll has power in Cambodia. they people can't even vote in their own election. The Vietnamese people do, cause they are "from the smae race!" what the fuck... I've got to read up on this cause the poltics behind this are quite compilcated and i couldn't catch all the information our guide had told us during the tour of the prison grounds.
Our guide was a beautiful women who was about 14 at the time. She left for the country and worked as a farmer. She was beaten by the guards and showedus here scars. living proof! all 10 members of her family were killed. she was teh only one to survive. she returned to Phnom Penn in 1983, young and not sure of what she would do... she can't sleep at night and taked medication so she can. she takes medicine for her anxiety and for depression... can you even imagine., there are no words we could even say to her... what can you say?????
whew... sorry jut had a lot to process in the last day. I went back to the comforts of our guesthouse and felt numb... wanted not to think about anything for a bit. cant even begin to imagine the pschology behind such a horrible atrocity!
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| Waving hello like the Pope! |
| 06.02.04 (10:20 pm) [edit] |
Hey everyone! I think Im addicted to writing now. the interenet connection is fast in the place were staying at in Cambodia. so Im enjoying the luxary! plus the green stuff here is extra nice.
So now another stamp goes in the pastport! Cambodia! Im almost out of pages! one more left! but then again the American passport doesn;t have as many pages as others do cause we dont travel as much.
Anyways... we arrived in Cambodia yesterday cruizing down through the flat Meking Delta in Southern Vietnam on Tuesday ... hungover... but the boat ride up the river was relaxing. Children who seemed to know whenever the foreign boats cruized by ran out to jump in the river and say ""hello!!!"" and scream after we went by. I felt like the pope waving at everyone around me.
It was sunset and everyone seemed to be washing their hair. and I wanted to capture it all in photos but my camera battery died.
The following day we arrived in Cambodia. I was a day over my visa but didnt have to pay. There was a mini bus waiting for us on the other side. The Cambodian side was sparsely populated with homes. only with watts.
The ride into Phnom Penn was a bit exciting. I thought for sure we would have an accident the way our driver kept slamming on the brakes.
As we entered the city the driver turned on the radio and played some hip hop music with a Cambodian speaking in Ghetto Englsih. Strange! We passed Japanese restaruants, MDs which resembled a Mc Donalds. Pizza restauruants and thai food.where am I... as the dr DRe Song CALIFONIA came on the radio.
The Guesthouse were staying on is in the tradiotnal backpacker quarter situatited on a lake. when we arrived it began to rain. the coming rainy season is moving in on Asia. We sat on the second floor deck and watched the rain move over the lake and the floating green plants move along the water. i felt like we were still on a boat. all the guesthouse here are built over the water with long narrow halls like the sleeping quarters on a ship.
The air temp cooled down and I tried some Luc LAc, traditonal Cambodian food. good beef with tomatoes and rice. then we sampled some more of the green stuff. good stuff. watched the rain and lighting storm and went to bed early eating strawberry wafers which tasted like paper...
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| Rock Stars in Vietnam! good bye... |
| 06.02.04 (7:14 am) [edit] |
I just left Vietnam in perhaps the funniest and strangest way. still drunk from the night before in a dizzying frantic run around the hotel room for last minute things with only 30 minutes of sleep. We left our rooms in Shambles with empty beer can and cigarette butts wet towels scattered around from the rain that leaked into our room. I felt like a rock star!
We ran down the 7 flights of stairs and ate our breakfast
of bread and butter. And the boys I met in Ha Long bay, Pete and Adam waved us goodbye from the doorway(that was cool) .
In the last few days I feel like i came to live in Saigon. Watching DVDs in our room bought from the shop down below.. smoking away in a foggy haze... Ben Stiller and Will Farell seemed to be a favorite among us. lying on beds and jumping on them too! The angry Dutch people below us banging on our floor after we blasted our music and laughed like drunken fools running around our room. running back to our room with the big Saigon rat running in front of us and seeing the only black man who rode a vietnamese cyclo. funny cause his legs were much larger then the little vietnamese. lazy and crazy dayzzz... but needed after the war remanants musuem.
We've watched the rain fall down on Saigon below from our 5th floor room with the giagantic window. listened to countless thunder storms reminding us of Vietnam war bombs. And how can I forget the condoms under our window and more cigarette butts (not ours though!)
We even frequented the same bar in the evening in the back packer quarter drinking Large BGIs the local vietnamese beer. We watched the streetlife and listened to the wierd expats who live there, who all seemed to have lived in Thailand years before... and the Australian undercover cop... who everyone seemed to know about.
We met the famous rock paper scissors" girl who hardly ever seemed to ever loose a game. IF she won you had to buy 3 packs of gum. if she lost you she had to give you three packs. she was a real actress playing up her roll with a bitchy sulky attitude if you didnt play. she; all of 12. and she continually flicked her finger at this American guy I think she faniced. ew! her little friend wore some skimpy outfit and sold cigarettes from a briefcase. another man sold fake gun lighters from his breifcase. and a 5 year old boy sold roses and packs of gum. I bought a rose for myself and a pack of gum feeling sorry for him... the last night in Saigon we sat at teh same place while time flew by in a crazy fun frenzy by all the people around us. Weve been saying we;ll do Karoke for about a month now but it never seems to happen!
LAter as the bar packed away it outside tabels cause the cops didnt come that night... We had to sneak past our hotel receptionist at night as if not wake him. I felt like I was in High school again.
It was good to have a home for a short bit complete with a group of good people :)
anyways goodnight... I smoked too much and I kicked the wire on my computer and had to write this all over again!
good night to all!
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| A One sided display... |
| 06.02.04 (6:03 am) [edit] |
So I went back to the war remants museum cause I felt I didnt' have ample time there and came to the conclusion that it was a one sided display. there was nothing about the Vietcong side of things and the atrociites that they conducted during the war.
as a matter of fact I read in my travel book that the musuem used to be called the American War atrocities museum,. but was changed as not to affend American Travelérs .well it wasn't the museum that did. it was more of the commets that people wrote... such as " Fuck the USA and American's ... blah blah... I just felt the need to write something in the book from an American perspective underneath the Fuck American;s statement. and the "Now I hate American's even more!"
War make' human's unhuman. Most of the people in the Vietnam war were drafted on the American side. fighting in the army is a complete mindfuck. you become desesitized. there was one quote i wish I could remember but it was about just that. the Ugliniess Of war and what it does to humans. [b]NOT[/b] Just Fuck'n AMerican's"anyone who fight in a war!!!!!!!!!!!! sorry just kinda pissed off!
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