Wat a Pricetag

First off, I'm sorry that I've not posted pictures recently. Pictures take time to download and we sometimes have little time to spend on the Internet. However, Anne is thinking of taking a cooking course in Chaing Mai during which time I may spend the requisite 8 hours I need to get all my net needs sorted.

 

Until then, dear reader, you will have to do with my written stuff, and thank you in advance for forgiving the clumsy and / or ignorant parts.

 

In world news, due to corruption (apparently or supposedly), the Thai government is being ousted by high court order. Meanwhile, due to the fact that most people don't seem to like them, the Conservative government in Canada is being ousted by a coalition of Canada's other three parties. So, there is weird stuff going on everywhere.

 

Will this weird stuff lead to violence? Probably. Will we be in the middle of it all? Probably not.

 

We've been told: "If you see a crowd of people in yellow shirts (anti-government folks) or red shirts (pro-government folks), then we should quickly go the other way. That is advice we will take if we need it. We have time to go the long way around.

 

I specifically wanted to come to India and SEA (South East Asia) for a longer time so that we could take our time and allow for whatever life, however odd, must take place. Charging through a foreign country on a quickie tour-bus timetable is a recipe for missing lots of good stuff (including interaction with the locals) and can be very annoying when, for instance, the airport is hijacked in Bangkok the day before your flight.

 

Perhaps one of our flights will be disrupted in this way. But the difference is that we will just prolong our stay in place X. Disruption can therefore be part of the experience, rather than a deeply frustrating event. 

 

Of course, terrorism aimed at tourists is a concern. However, I'm uncertain if anywhere in the world is absolutely immune to this kind of activity. Of course our Yukon friends would point out that if you want to be really safe from terror, we'd all live in the Yukon where there aren't enough people and those few are too spread out to make mass murder an viable option.

 

But, darn it, I just don't want to live in one place my whole life. And I certainly don't want to remain in one place my whole life simply out of fear that some morons want to kill us all. That's not a life.

 

So, we are currently in a tourist place called Ayutthaya in Thailand. Ayutthaya is home to many ruined "Wats" (a wat is a Buddhist monestary). The most annoying thing about Ayutthaya is that they want to charge 50 bhat (roughly 2 Canadian dollars) per person to see each wat--and there are at least 20 of these wats, so that's around 1000 bhat (or 40 CAD). And that's the biggest problem we have here: whether or not to pay $40 to see a bunch of temples.

 

If this is torture, somebody please, chain me to the wall.

 

NB