On to Mother Motherland

Thailand has been an amazing shopping experience for Perin and I. We got some clothes made, bought some t-shirts from street vendors, and I stocked up on fire-breathing monkey lighters whose red eyes light up and flash. While monkey lighters were quite popular on my last visit here, three years later they were very difficult to find and negotiate.

All of our consumption will be shipped back to the States so we don't have to lug it around the world with us. With one exception: warrior-grade winter coats for Russia we had made. Last week's high was -18 degrees(C).

It's difficult to conceptualize that temperature when it's over 90 degrees(F) here with 70% humidity. Cambodia was even hotter and was also a positive shopping experience. After a day of flying and touring temples, I had to drag Perin around shopping during our one night there. For the stars to align and for Perin to have a weaker shopping endurance than I probably won't happen until well after Halley's Comet comes and goes again.

Enough superficiality. Seeing the temples (wats) in Bangkok was pretty cool, but Angkor Wat was magnificent. We arranged a tour guide and tuk tuk driver ahead of time and that had positive and negative aspects. The guide was very informative and shared all kinds of information with us we wouldn't have got from a guide book, but he'd also seen the ruins thousands of times and seemed to be pushing us along instead of letting us explore the grounds of every temple we stopped at.

Back to superficiality. I almost got a Lil Wayne shirt that's even better than the shirt Perin got with a giant octopus eating a man. Alas, I was too powerful.