Quarter Year

Lesson learned: NEVER ASK SOMEONE FOR PERMISSION TO TAKE THEIR PHOTO. Mike’s tips to becoming a travel photographer, rule #1. Expect an e-book.

So… were you a sailor?

He was particularly proud of a tattoo of a ship, so I snapped away at that one. I tried to ask if he was a sailor by doing a wavy thing with my arm (indicating the sea) but he didn’t understand.

Miming didn’t do much good in Bangkok – our cultures are just too different for a lot of those things to work. For example, what sound do you make to get a cat to come to you? Some ladies with that particular dilemma baited the cat with a falsetto “mamamamama.”

Anyway, after I took the pictures I turned the camera around to show him the result and he seemed genuinely disinterested. And we parted ways.

Both the days I was at this Wat he was sitting there on the platform, smoking. I don’t know if he fell on hard times and took refuge there, if he was a worker, just a friend of someone or what. It seemed that his platform was set up for sleeping, but why hang out in a temple without joining in the fun?

In a place where you speak NONE of the language this is about as deep as the interactions go, and it can be frustrating. I’m left guessing their story and they’re confused by my miming.

“Wait – do that wavy arm thing again.”

Looking from the side of a riverboat taxi passing under a bridge, I saw a shoeless, shirtless man in the shadow of a pillar, fishing the disgusting river.

On a one way street, with the constant explosions of motorcycles and cars accelerating past me, a girl in a polka dot dress floated in the opposite direction on her bicycle, sipping a drink through a straw.

A woman cooked rice soup on her portable cart, lit by natural light in the front few feet of a deep, dark garage.

Every once in a while you inhale particles of hot chili oil that’s being cooked at one of the street food stalls. As I was sitting behind one of the stalls, I watched a cloud of the chili oil particles float into the morning sunlight.

On the riverboat, the backs of people’s heads, the driver looking back toward me in the mirror, and an assistant standing on the boat’s banister and reaching in over a rope to take money from the young lady who just got on board. The assistant is wearing gloves with an anchor emblem on the back.

In a quiet wooden house the wooden floorboards run away from me, mirrored by the boards on the ceiling.

Wat Pho roof stuff, Bangkok, Thailand.

Dude walking down the street, Bangkok, Thailand.

Police taking a break by the banyan tree, Bangkok, Thailand.