Michigan J. Frog does Thailand

Or is it the other way around?

June 20 - another contribution from the Language Barrier's vagabond guest blogger Michigan J. Frog in his gallant attempt to pad my blog...


Now that I am self-consciously a "guest blogger" I'm finding it hard to write. You know the feeling and now I do too. I'm not really inspired to travel-rant which is really the only time I enjoy writing at all. And now that I'm trying to craft them, the words just won't come. In this one sense at least, this trip has brought us closer together: I finally appreciate some of your artistic pain. Writing is hard and slow if you have to wait for inspiration to do it (but fuck that shit, 'cause I ain't gonna do it every day, not ever, 'cause I have NOT been chosen to write.). Photography, even as primitively as we do it, is hard. It's impossible to shoot people well. I have failed and failed. Even with objects, it is almost impossible to capture what you are seeing. You will get something and sometimes it will be nice, but you can't ever shoot what you see (it reminds me of what Dad once told me in a rare candid moment about playing jazz when he said he was always trying and always failing to play the music as he heard it in his head). And the battery ran out of juice while I was at Sukhothai. Woe.

Thai Panda blog

So today I'm going to continue my exploration of Thai historical sites. Ayutthaya, close as it is to Bangkok (about 50 miles), gets much more tourism than other places I have visited. I prefer to avoid tourist places - they can get ugly and warped like trash-eating street macaques (I tell you, the first time one of those little bastards bares his toothy fangs and stares you down while hissing at you, you will have monkey-phobia too because I don't care how badass you are on the internet, in real life you will be outnumbered by a thousand to one and those little fuckers can bite through a coconut). On the other hand, tourist infrastructure means English menus and free wifi, so it's not all bad.

Daily Mail

It's 8 AM and I'm sitting in the shade in front of a fan and already sweating. Where's my motorbike?

Thai Panda blog

--M. Lee