The BirdSpeak Blogs
AN INTRODUCTION
It’s so cool that I’ve gotten to see some of the places I read about as a wanna be traveler in the 4th grade. I’d stare at the picture of the Thai dancer, wanting to meet her & see her surroundings. She looked so, well, different from anything I had ever seen in my entire 9 year old life. Boy, did I dream up a world as mystical as the costume she wore—Bangkok, the capital of Thailand—I could hear the sound of the mandolin, [well, maybe they don’t play the instrument there but in my daydreams they did!] birds chirping, everyone gliding down the street holding parasols & bowing, someone handing me a flower in one hand as a butterfly landed on the other…
EH HEM! NOT!!!!!!
My lifelong fantasy about Thailand was promptly shattered when I read the Lonely Planet’s guide on the country. It said if you’ve got asthma, Bangkok ain’t the place for you, ya may wanna rethink things. I’m like, surely they jest & I don’t have asthma anyway so it can’t be that bad.
Oh yea, it can.
The pollution was like to havin’ someone blow a cigar directly up your nose all the time. Toss in heat that feels like Hades must but hey, I’m jumping ahead of myself. That’s an Aquarian for ya. Ok. I was in Malaysia—Kuala Lumpur to be exact. What the hell was I doing—WHERE?! That’s a tale for another entry. Anywho. I’m a narrow stretch of water away & I’ve got time on my hands, oh crap! I wanna go to Bali too—another 4th grade dream but that smiling gal in the geography book beckoned, so Bangkok it was going to be. But furg! I’m scared she-eat less because though I’ve decided on the Thai capital, I realize that not only am I going to a place that doesn’t speak English for real, I have no idea what the language sounds or looks like; I don’t even know what a Thai person looks like. But, like a parent draggin’ a kid, my grownup self told me I was going. Scared or not.