Today I got up at about 6 am to go to the floating market in the outskirts of Bangkok. Considering I’ve lost complete understanding of time it seems really early for me. My best guess is that it’s 4 hours ahead of dubai time, but when I thought that the wakeup call that I received this morning was an hour late it turned out that I was working yesterday an hour ahead. So although I think I’m on the right time right now, I know that I was ready for my plane ride on time, and it’s the right time zone… so who knows for sure… actually does it really matter? :)

So today I went to the floating market. I’m not sure if anyone is familiar with it or not, but I had seen it in several movies, and it was one of the things that I was desperate to see… I mean if I didn’t get to see it, I think I would have felt that this time to Thailand would have been less than successful. It was great though, we took a speed boat to the market once we got to the staging area… the kind of boat that has the old car engine attached to a really long bar and propeller. Once we got to the market, we rented a row boat and they took us along the market. The whole thing was really tourist”y” but I really enjoyed it. I met some nice people and got to see something that I’ve always wanted to experience. The tour also took us to some other spots, the snake farm, for elephant rides, and to the national crafts school, namely it’s for wood working. The snake farm was interesting, but it was really kind of shameful the way they treated the snakes. One guy teased a king cobra for a while and then paraded it around to show all of us. That in itself was interesting and really not too bad, but then they put cobra into a glass box with a mongoose. That was really kind of pathetic, almost like watching a dog fight. Two animals trying to survive/kill just for the pleasure of humans. Just for the record, they didn’t let the animals kill each other, but the mongoose had a death grip on the cobra and they actually had to pry it off. Some of the people I was with really got off on it though.

Later on I went to a computer center. I have never seen anything like it in my life. If you can imagine a bunch of small shops all condensed into a building you would get the idea. The difference is, is this place was huge, five storeys of nothing but computer shops… for a geek I thought I was going to go to nirvana. Not to mention the prices. As I write this, the baht is 32 to 1 dollar. So things like a gps that sells for $366.00 in Dubai is selling here for $200. I got so overwhelmed on prices that I started to think that I was making a mistake on the exchange rate. Everything is like that, jeans sell for less than $10, clocks for about 2. I kept thinking that there was some mistake, but I guess not. I think I’m going to go back and buy the gps tomorrow.

In about an hour I meet up with my tour group. I’m looking forward to being around people that I can talk to. I hope though that I’m not the odd-man-out. You know the only American, the only single person, the only…I don’t just the only, only.