shock.

Week 16.

So, last week was similar to the three weeks before that.  I am still a refugee, and do not have a ton of things to keep me occupied.  I wound up walking around Bangkok a few of the days, taking pictures here and there.  Exploring my surroundings and whatnot.  And here is my favorite shot from the week....

shock.  Border effect from fotoflexer.com.

Bam.  And there is a dog pooping in the picture.  I love it.  It feels like art to me.  It's like, if I were a beat box poet who wrote a piece about walking the streets of Bangkok, this photo would be the visual representation of that piece.  There is the obvious stuff, like trash, a stray dog, grafitti... but there is also darkness and light, death and life.  This is less than a ten-minute walk from the largest shopping mall in Southeast Asia.  I would say that "shock" is about right.

sorry.

Week 15.

Sorry.  I guess I didn't do anything photo-worthy this week.  I must admit, I was not surprised as I looked through my pictures that I did not take one shot this whole week.  You should not be surprised either, based on how I spent my time.

Sleeping.

Eating.

Watched the entire 3rd season of Lost.

Read the whole book Blue Like Jazz.

Countless hours of Facebook creeping on every single one of my high school friends.

Yes, I'd say that this week was better left un-documented.  Life can get pretty boring as a refugee at times.  This is what I meant when I blogged about having too much time on my hands.  Let's just pretend that this week didn't happen....

floating.

Week 14.

So, I went to Chiang Mai to see my lawyer, and while I was there, my new friend Melissa took me with her to a Buddhist festival called Loy Khratong, or, "festival of lights."  I have already blogged about this, so I will not go into much detail here.  Basically, there are these awesome floating lanterns-- thousands of them.  Like a Disney movie.  It was beautiful.

Then I went back to Bangkok.  Then a few days later I went to Pattaya to visit Dana and Austin.  We wound up visiting a floating market, which was really just more of a dock with a few little boat vendors tied up here and there, but the majority of the market was permanently built in.  So that was kind of a let-down.  I was envisioning us in our own canoe, weaving around some crazy canal or something.  I guess it was still fun though.  I tried to take a few good pictures, but I guess I am just not very good at this photography thing...  My favorite one was of a fake rooster with the phrase "new year" in Thai written below it.  I liked it because it was totally random, not like a general theme in the decor or anything...

I think it is pretty cool that my week began with floating lanterns, then ended at a floating market.  And so, I will give thanks to the Lord and call this blog photo: "floating."

our honeymoon... only, not.

Week 13.

After the trek, we headed down south to Phuket to visit my friend Enjoy.  She let us stay with her, and she also drove us around in her friend's car all day to give us a private, local-led tour of the island.  We visited a temple, an elephant camp, various beaches, and a lookout point for sunset.  It was a wonderful day, but by the end of it, we were all pretty tired.  We only spent one day in Phuket, then headed to Krabi (grah-bee).

In Krabi, we stayed at a nice hotel with a beautiful balcony view of the ocean, a luxurious pool, and very comfortable beds.  We spent a few days on the main land laying by the beach or the pool, taking walks up and down the vendor-lined road in the evenings.  We also spent one day on an island called Railay just off-shore.  The beach was not as exciting as the trek-- or, at least, not in the same way.  We kept joking that we should have been on a honey moon because there was absolutely nothing to do except soak up the sun on the beach... which was exactly what we were looking for.  It was so relaxing to have no schedule, no rules, no place to be... I took great pleasure in just breathing in and out, noticing the absence of city smog.

As you can imagine, I had a lot more time to take photos than on the trek.  Here are some of my favorites.  I hope that you can smell the salt water, feel the heat of the sun, taste the freshness of the air, and hear the gentle breaking of the waves.....

trekkin' it up.

Week 12.

So, we went on a vacation.  It was the only week that Dana and I were going to have off of work at the same time during our stay in Thailand, so we decided to explore.  First, we set off for the hills in the North near Chiang Mai.  We stayed with a lady there named Lisa who used to be a missionary in Senegal with the Mashburns', and Dana just so happened to have met her while Lisa was on furlough in the states.  They exchanged contact info, and whaddaya know, we had a comfortable, air conditioned, home-y, free place to stay!  That alone was enough of a vacation for us.  :)

But alas, we could not just stay holed up in Lisa's comfy house, we were there to explore!  So we went to a sweet night market (my favorite of any market I've been too!), and we left the next morning for a two-day trek.  Our guide's name was "Jungle Jimmy" who told us that he learned English solely from movies and songs... which was not too unbelievable, given his tendency to laugh after anything he said, as if it were the punchline to some joke we were supposed to know.

The trek was hard.  But super legit.  I absolutely loved stomping around through the jungle, ducking under downed trees, climbing over huge rocks, sliding down muddy slopes, crossing rivers on bamboo bridges-- if there was a bridge at all, all the while clinging to our bamboo staff for dear life, without which we surely would have never made it to the top.  Most of the time you couldn't even make out the trail and there was a continual drizzle, as if we were marching through a cloud.  I was intense, but oh-so-fun!

It was also great fun to experience it with people from all walks of life, from all around the world.  There were three ladies from South Africa (who tooootally had no idea what they were signing up for), two girls and a guy from Ireland, the funniest foreign person I've ever met-- "Crown"--from Korea, a young American couple, a lady from Germany, an artist from Spain, Jungle Jimmy... and me and Dana.  A strange bunch, for sure, but we laughed nearly the whole way.  The greatest comic relief came from Crown, who was asking everyone socially inappropriate questions, and also named himself our "platoon leader." [You would have loved him, Aubrey!]  After spending the night at a hilltribe, we trekked back down, stopping to visit a waterfall, then white-water rafting back to the camp.  I think this trek may be my favorite thing I have done in Thailand so far.

The scenery was BEAUTIFUL.  I felt like I was in a movie.  Unfortunately, though, it was raining most of the time and we were moving so fast that I barely got to take any pictures.  The ones I did take are blurry from moisture and movement.  If the circumstances had been different, this would have been an awesome opportunity to try to enhance my photography skillz.

So, without further ado, my favorite shot from the trek....

entitled: "what trail?"  We had just come from the waterfall where my camera got so moist that the lens didn't open all the way.  I like what it did for the picture, though.  :)

the calm.

Week 11.

I think of the first few weeks of October as the calm before the storm... and by storm I mean flood.  The semester was winding down, students were finishing exams, Cody and Kimmmiey were about to leave, Dana and I were about to go on vacation, and we were all excited to prepare for the next semester.  We knew that there was flooding elsewhere in the country, but we were ignorant of the way that it was about to change everything.

"bird's eye" and "blue Codes"   Taken with my iPhone.

These are familiar scenes to me.  I took the photo of the birds while I was waiting to meet up with Kimmmiey for lunch on campus.  As we walked around later that day, we commented on how the khlongs (canals on campus) were filled higher than we had ever seen them.  I took the photo of Cody on our way back from an evening at the art museum with Jub.  I remember that on the drive, we commented on how the roads, which do flood from time to time, were more flooded than we had driven through before.

We knew there was flooding.... somewhere else.  And as long as it was somewhere else, there was no reason not to be calm.  No reason not to feed the birds or go to the art museum.  No reason to think that soon, both of the places I took these photos would be under feet of water.... that they would still be underwater.

I have no idea what Cody was listening to, but I think that this song would fit the week perfectly.