Travel Log: Full Moon

1Tuk Tuk: 2 stops, 2 buses: 2 stops, 1 ferry and 17 hours later we made it out of Bangkok to our first island. The party island. The first thing I'm learning is that schedules are very flexible here. 7 o'clock could mean anything in a two hour window and patience is as good a friend as a traveler's neck pillow.  After arriving here we got settled into our bungalow near the local chickens and quickly realized that paying extra for air conditioning isn't being spoiled, it's essential if you want to sleep for more than an hour.

This place is known for its Full Moon Party, which is really just an excuse to have 30,000 tourists on the beach at the same time all dancing to the same beat. Thankfully we met some fellow travelers who are on the tail end of their nineteen month long holiday. Makes our hundred day vacation look like a qaint little getaway weekend. Glow in the dark body paint and buckets of alcohol combined with fire and water made for a pretty amazing time. I feel like I really got to know that guy crouched in the sand digging with his bare hands for like five minutes.

It's a lot of fun watching people the next day. There are those who still had paint on their faces and looked like were ready to keep going. Then you had those that had a thousand yard stare as they slowly shoveled scrambled eggs into their mouths in some hope that it would make them feel better.

The last two days have been spent laying in cabanas reading and napping. Sometimes it feels like we should be doing more with our time, but part of vacation is knowing when to do nothing until the next adventure comes along. Tomorrow is a trip to a different island and most likely learning how to swim with the fishes. Until then we'll just have to get along with relaxing in the shade.

Empty Shrine

Travel Log: Day One...or Two

I sometimes wonder how many pictures I must be in taken by people I don't know.  Today was a busy day of trying to do all the main tourist attractions.  This included at least one wardrobe change before we left the hostel.  Even though it was 90 degrees with 90% humidity The Grand Palace doesn't allow shorts or bare shoulders, which I suppose makes sense since it's a royal palace and all.  They do, however, allow tour guides to wander around with stuffed animals on sticks as they led herds of tourists carrying umbrelas into each photo opportunity.  My confused face will likely be showing up in so many different photos of the royal lawn or whatever.  After getting into line and then realizing that everyone had already bought tickets to get in, we decided it was too hot and too crowded to really enjoy, so we wandered off to our next destination.

It's strange to think that even in a strange place there are very familiar things.  Things you wouldn't even think about.  Stop signs are the same shape and color here, with only the word 'Stop' being different.  Traffic markers are all relatively the same, which makes me wonder who started what and who decided that was the best way to go about it.  Apparently the yellow dashed line means it's legal to pass and the double yellow line means it's illegal, which stops no one.  I don't know what I was expecting.  It's not like we traveled to Mars, where the people here decided to just skip all the widely accepted rules.  Although it makes me wonder if someday we do come into contact with an alien species, who will adopt the most from the other.  Will we see what they're doing and suddenly realize that the bike lane has been this ludacrious experiment that has been doomed from the start?

Traveling through the various markets it occurs to me just how hard it must be to make a living.  I've been very spoiled in my life in that I've always been lucky enough to have a job that doesn't require me to try and sell things.  Convincing someone that they need something has always been a tricky task.  It's probably even harder when ten feet away someone else is selling that "ancient" Buddha coin necklace for 10 Baht and you want 15.  I sometimes wish that everyone had some kind of low level telepathy or maybe empathy.  That way you could at least understand where the other person is coming from when you interact with them.  The problem with not speaking the language is that it's hard to know what the intention is with someone else.  Are they being nice because they are nice or are they being nice because they know you have money and respond better to a smile and friendly advice?  I think I've seen too many strange movies where there are ulterior motives for everything and everyone.  Maybe most people are what they show on the surface and it's safe to accept that as the truth.  So far it seems to be that they are simply being nice because they are so I suppose  it should just be accepted.

Tomorrow we're off to an island for a Full Moon Festival..  It will be nice to actually get out of the big crazy city and start the real vacation.  I feel like this place has been an interesting gateway to this whole adventure, but it's not what I've been looking forward to.  That's somewhere else.

Travel Log: Day Zero

Everyone keeps asking if I'm excited about my upcoming travel, which I suppose is fair.  The thing is though that this kind of travel is vastly different than anything I've ever done before so the situation is a bit overwhelming to the point that my brain hasn't fully caught up to the idea of what's about to happen.  I've spent a couple months away before, but it's been back in the safety of where I grew up, which meant I knew exactly what to expect.  The house I grew up in, my old room (with different curtains), and seeing familiar faces.  It was very comfortable.  Almost like being on summer break, but as an adult.  This trip is completely different because I'm leaving the country and going to a place I've never been, don't know the language, and am not quite sure what to expect.  Thankfully I'm not going alone.  Having someone with me who's been before will be a great way to hold onto home and who I am.

Right now we're standing on a ledge, getting ready to leap off the side.  We're pretty sure that it's safe down below, but we can't be sure until we've made the jump.  The whole thing has me thinking about how my perception of things is likely to change with this trip.  A part of me is nervous about how this new version of me is going to look back at my current life.  My life is pretty safe and on any given day I can predict how the next several weeks are going to play out.  The adventures we have in the every day world are fun and exciting in their own way.  I wonder though how I'm going to relate them after this trip.  The current me hopes that I still enjoy the things I enjoy now after having been exposed to a different world.  I like the things in my life, but is that because they've always been there and I've not experienced something completely different?  Will they have the same meaning to me when I return?

Don't get me wrong, I am looking forward to what's about to happen and I'm working on not spending too much energy thinking about what's being left behind.  Life will go on while we're away and I think that will be one of the harder things.  Because we'll be having fun off somewhere else, the people in our every day will be living their lives without us.  It's a bit like leaving for college the first time and then returning back home.  The place you knew has been going along fine without you.  It's the same place that you left, except just a little bit different now.  You realize that the world you thought you knew was so much smaller than you could have imagined, making you question your place in it.

I guess the only thing left to do is see what happens tomorrow.

Rocky Canvas

On the Familiar

Maybe it's a symptom of getting older, but I find myself seeing people in a crowd and thinking I recognize them.  Then I spend a few minutes trying to figure out where I know them from.  Finding that context for recognition and then finally coming to the conclusion that I don't actually know them, but they apparently look like someone I've met or at least seen in my time on the planet.  Then again I've met and seen enough people that the laws of large numbers would suggest that maybe I have seen them before and my brain knows that while I'm still clueless about it.  Or maybe it's possible that what seems like an infinite combination of facial configurations nature has finally given up and just started reusing combinations to save time.  More than likely though it's just that I've seen enough people that while I may not know that person, they are a close enough match to someone I have seen before and that's enough for my brain to categorize them as "known".

It's not just people that this happens to.  Another thing I've started to notice is that I'll hear a song that sounds familiar, but it claims to be new.  Then I realize that it's not a cover of a song I know, but the people playing it heard all the same stuff I did growing up and now they're making their own music so of course they're going to be influenced by what came before.  They just happen to have the ability to make music while I do not.  It's not much different than how we pick up the speech patterns of the people around us.  We tend to mimic what we see and hear.  The problem when it comes to music and movies though is that I've seen the original, or at least the original for me, and most of the new stuff feels like a pale imitator for some reason.  I know that Han Solo wasn't the original roguish anti-hero, but for me he was my first instance where I understood that while he was a bit of jerk, he was actually a good guy, even if he didn't know it.  In the thirty plus years since he was introduced there have been plenty of other iterations of that character type.  You finally get to a point where the character you see is essentially the distilled version of Han Solo or Han Solo version 27.  So you have kids today, who are growing up with Peter Quill as their version of Han Solo.  That's not to say it's bad or anything because I like Peter Quill.  It's just that I'm finding myself looking at both and saying to myself "Yeah the new guy is good, but you can't beat the original."  Is this what getting older is going to be like?

I won't say that I've lived all over, but I've been a lot of places here in the U.S.  I've lived in a few key places multiple times.  Each of those places have been long enough that it's created a sort of context for all memories there.  The problem though is that as time has gone on those start to get mixed up.  I'll see someone who is out of context and my brain can't figure out what's going on.  It's like seeing a friend from high school twenty years later while you're standing in line for lunch at your company cafeteria, which is two thousand miles away from that high school where you knew them.  You know you know them from somewhere, but they aren't where they're supposed to be.  I guess it's just something that happens when you move between the same few places over and over.

In less than a month I'm going to be traveling to someplace entirely new for me.  While it won't be impossible for me to see someone there I know, it's highly unlikely.  This is both exciting and a bit disorienting because after all this time there is a strange bit of comfort knowing that things will seem familiar most of the time.  The problem with the familiar though is that it's entirely possible for it to eventually become boring.  I've seen enough movies where it starts out with a character who seems like they're going through the motions.  They have their routine down and the world is in order, but something isn't quite right.  It's about this time in the movie that some wacky character storms in and shakes up their life or they are forced to go on some journey of self-discovery.  Even that story feels familiar at this point, but this time it's my turn to go on that adventure.  Next time you read this, it will be from somewhere halfway around the world and I'll be looking out at a crowd of people and knowing that I don't know any of them.  It's time for a little unfamiliar.

On Timing

It seems that I have inherited my father's strange timing.  Mostly when it comes to other people though.  He has this ability to draw people to him.  For instance the street he lives on could be nearly empty.  Traffic has been light all day.  Then he gets in the car and goes for a drive and what does he find?  A tractor going 15 mph and ten cars trailing it, meaning he's now stuck in traffic that didn't exist until he went for a drive.  I can do the same thing now.  I'll be wandering through a store in the evening.  There aren't a lot of people there.  I go down an aisle to look at something and within seconds not one, but several people will arrive in the same exact location and stand inches away from me, in what was once an empty spot on the planet.  The thing is though that these people may be thinking the same thing about me.

The whole idea got me wondering about all the strange bits of timing that we run into where it feels like the world is conspiring against us or no matter where we go there is resistance.  Then I started to think, what about all the stuff that we miss?  You're driving along a narrow road and there is something just slightly in your lane that you try to avoid and at that exact moment there is a car coming from the opposite direction.  You hadn't seen a car for the last twenty minutes and don't see another on the road after that, but at that precise moment your timing brought you to this meeting.  How many things are we missing?  Those instances where we're clued in on what's going on around us makes it seem like a cruel twist of fate that you can't go anywhere without drawing traffic to you.  What if though we're silently and unknowingly avoiding things that are potentially much worse...or much better?  Afterwards we tend to say to ourselves 'If only I had...' in some attempt to rationalize that if our actions had only been slightly different, we could have changed the outcome.  Maybe if I hadn't stopped for that extra minute then I would have been in the intersection when the truck ran the red light.  What's to say though that in changing that single action on your part everything else would remain the same?  The truth is that our actions are such a small part of a greater chaotic system.

Still we tend to be the center of our own universe and we tend to think that our actions matter.  That we brought ourselves to this moment and weren't carried here by unseen forces of a chance.  Maybe these little moments in time where we run into, or almost run into, something that feels like a world working against us, we're actually peeking behind the curtain a bit to see just how random everything is.  Sure you tried to make a quick trip to the grocery store and managed to leave at the exact time when the power goes out in your neighborhood.  It could feel like you have the worst timing.  Then think about all the times you read about how something happened and you were nowhere near it, but close enough to think you could have been.  Those are just the things that we're aware of going on around us.  When those weird things happen it may be helpful to think about all the random stuff that we sailed through without problem.