people

Most of my actual travel time getting to/from/around the south of Thailand was done solo. In my last post, I talked about the boy who gave me his watch necklace. He sent me an e-mail telling me he had worried about me riding the train alone. He also attached photos of some of his artwork. I think I have a new pen pal.

I met my second random stranger on an overnight boat from Koh Samui back to the mainland. He introduced himself as Nik -- short for Nikolai. He said he was from Russia and handed me a CD called "Guitar Sounds by Onyx: Shadow of Your Love." He plays on the streets of Moscow for money. He tried it out on Khao San Road in Bangkok, but people weren't so generous.

Nik told me he was cutting his vacation short because he wrecked a motorbike into a car on Samui and had to pay for the damages. He also shared that it was his father's lifelong dream to play music on a Mississippi riverboat. I guess I looked like the right kind of person in which to confide such factoids.

Several days later, I was waiting by the pier on Koh Phi Phi to start my trip back to Bangkok. I had a couple hours to kill before my boat arrived. A Thai man working for a tourist agency sidled up and struck up a conversation.

He was 37 years old and unmarried. I asked why, and learned that he'd spent 14 years living in a forest in the northeast as a monk. He meditated for 10 hours a day for the first seven years. Sometimes he fasted for a month at a time, surviving only on sugar water. For the next seven years, he lived in a room with a bed surrounded by a thousand books. He read them all, and people thought he was a little crazy.

He studied international relations and philosophy in college, including some Western philosophy. His favorite, though, is Indian philosophy. His dream is to move there to study. His other dream is to go to the U.S.

I'm back in the U.S. now, sitting in the Seattle airport. I suppose some sort of reflective post is in order soon. My first observations:

1. It's weird seeing fat policemen.
2. It's weird hearing English spoken without a foreign accent.

More to come.