Doggies

It's the cool season in Southeast Asia and temperature averages have plumitted to blistering room temperature conditions. All the mangy Bangkok streeg dogs are wearing sweaters and old T-shirts, no joke. It's a weird scene, almost like some art school prankster is secretly distributing the contents of his little sister's closet each night. In the morning, all the dogs are sporting her threads. I mean, how else would a flea-ridden quadraped get his paws on a Winnie the Pooh skirt?

Actually, I'm pretty sure the anthropomorphic winter tradition stems from a Buddhist concern for all life, including that of those with fur and scabies. But still, it's a bit dizzying to walk through an ever-growing circus of stylish muts each morning on my way to the train.

Holiday

Today was the first day of our winter holiday. We woke up before dawn to catch and overcrowded bus to Nong Khai, the Thai border town across the Mekong River from Laos. Thirteen hours on the stuffy, slow-moving vehicle gave me a numb ass but also plenty of time to defragment my mental harddrive, allowing backed up thoughts to process and finally settle in my brains's filing cabinets. After four months of screaming students, vegetating on a bus all day ain't half bad, even if I do have to share my seat with a flatulating weirdo who stares at me for half the journey.

Neo-colonialists

"My husband and I own a garment factory in Laos. Yes, the government there just loves us because we give all those poor people jobs."

-lipsticked woman standing in front of me in line at the American Embassy in Bangkok.

Bangkok Construction

Seriously, when will this city be complete? All over Bangkok, on every thoroughfare and back street, towers are being raised by fraggle-like teams of flip flopped migrant workers. Dressed in denim, matching T-shirts, and colorful helmets, these guys spend their waking hours climbing around in tangles of rebar and scaffolding. The racket of their jackhammers and bulldozers is inescapeable. The fraggles begin their work early each morning soon after sunrise. By noon, a thick cloud of orange dust has risen around them. The fraggles shuffle around in this hot dust cloud all day, hammering into the night. Finally, long after the sun has set, they quit their mess-making (construction) to collapse in hastily built shacks lining the construction site's periphery. These dudes are tough.