I arrived in Thailand Monday and when I walked out of the airport I immediately began sweating. It's like a perpetual sauna here. I did finally get used to it by Thursday, and by "it" I'm referring to sweating all the time. Anyway, it's been in the low 70's in Suzhou with low humidity so this was a bit of a climate change for me.
My other immediate impressions were that Bangkok had a lot of flora for a city of it's size, and the sky line wasn't one big neon sign like most of the big cities I've visited in China. The roads were a lot less "planned" like where we live in Suzhou is, so there were no scooter lanes and the sidewalks were in various states of disrepair. On the whole though, an impressive place to be. I couldn't get it out of my head how much it reminded me of some parts of Mexico throughout the trip, probably because of all of the color around me (more on that later).
No, I'm not changing religions and joining a Ronald McDonald cult. In the picture below I'm doing my best to show the gesture that accompanies the phrase "Sawasdee". It's similar to bowing in Japan. One thing mentioned to me was that it's often more of a salute and that people of higher stations in life are not really expected to return it to those of lower station (although foreigners can do what they want since the expectations of us getting anything right is pretty low worldwide).
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