Written April 15, 2006 on the bus from Siem Reap to Phnom Penh During this visit to Bangkok we again stayed at Wendy House in Siam Square. It puts us close to the action. And by action we mean heavily air conditioned shopping malls and movie theatres. After getting settled into our room on Thursday afternoon we headed to Siam Center to dine at our favorite food court where we usually get some combination of papaya salad, thai iced tea, stir fried chicken with holy basil with a fried egg on top, and mango sticky rice. We’ve now been four times [View Full Entry]

---

---

Written April 14, 2006 in Siem Reap, Cambodia There’s something about a town that is built around a single event or attraction made famous by a movie. Tens of thousands of people every year head to a small Iowa town that boasts the famed “Field of Dreams.” Most probably don’t get to toss the ball around with Shoeless Joe so we wonder what they think of the town and the peripheral tourist-oriented businesses. Movies can do funny things to the places in which they are set, and from the various cinematic treatments of World War II we’d suspect those funny thing [View Full Entry]

---

---

Written April 3 at 1:15 pm on the bus from Ko Samet to Bangkok Monday - We woke up early so that we could get to the university pharmacy to purchase malaria pills before departing Bangkok for Ko Samet. The generic pills cost 2 baht per tablet, roughly five cents American. When we went to Mexico for Thanksgiving 18 months ago our brand name malaria pills, which were not covered by insurance, were six dollars each. We took a 1:00 bus to Ban Phe in Rayong Province where we caught the ferry to Na Dang Pier on Ko Samet island. Although [View Full Entry]

---

---

Written March 31 at 10:15 am Saturday - We started the morning early because we needed to get more cash and a new room before checking out of our existing hotel. The 680 baht room was not so appealing the next morning when they revealed that their policy was to not show rooms before you book it. We therefore decided to book Wendy’s House even though it cost 900 baht because we really liked the vibe there and they had wireless internet access. We wanted to get everything resolved quickly so that we could go to the Chatuchak Weekend Market, a [View Full Entry]

---

---

Written March 27 on the bus to Ko Samet Sunday -- It may come as a surprise to many of you that Amy can be somewhat cheap, particularly when it comes to lodging and food. She is keeping a daily breakdown of our expenses that she records into a black book that she carries everywhere. At most locations, as Roger is paying for something, Amy is making a note of the cost in her book. Due to the budget restrictions as well as space restrictions, Amy had previously enacted a strict “no buying” policy which as we noted in a previous [View Full Entry]

---

---

Written March 21, 2006, 10:07 pm We were picked up early on the morning Friday for our hill trek by a pick-up truck. We settled in to the bed of the truck and were soon joined by Lukas and Valeska, a pair of German students also joining the trek. Our final trekker, Amnon, an Israeli on sabbatical from his life in the software industry, made our group of five significantly smaller than the “6 to 12 people” we were told to expect and we were very happy about that. This was our first interaction with others and we seemed to luck [View Full Entry]

---

---

Written March 21, 2006 8:20pm in Chiang Mai After a few days of the heat, bustle and pollution that is Bangkok in March we were eager to escape to the north for a visit to Chiang Mai, Thailand’s second largest city and effectively the capital of the northern provinces. Our train ride, a jerky 14 hours of fitful sleep, left us in the Chiang Mai train station at about 10am. After gathering our thoughts and calling ahead to a well regarded guest house to secure a room we were courted by several cab drivers for sight seeing or passage into the [View Full Entry]

---

---

Written Wednesday March 15, 2006 at 8:22 am Here we are on the not-so-shinkasen train from Bangkok to Chiang Mai. We’re still adjusting to the extreme differences between Thailand and Japan but one of them is definitely the trains. Right now we are about an hour behind schedule, which isn’t too bad, but the ride is much jerkier and significantly louder. This wouldn’t matter if we were traveling during the day but we left last night at 7:40. We paid for a second class sleeper car for about $20 a piece rather than splurging for our own little cabin which would [View Full Entry]

---

---

Click here to see our photos from Japan: Otherwise, paste in this link: http://www.snapfish.com/share/p=317141145019399346/l=91617566/otsc=SYE/otsi=SALB [View Full Entry]

---

---

NOTE: Our hope was to post a link to a snapfish album with all of our Japan photos but uploading the pictures is painfully slow so the complete album will come at a later date. The toilets in Japan vary wildly from the Japanese toilet to the western toilet to the super-duper deluxe western toilet. The western toilet is like the toilets that we are all used to so no picture is attached. The Japanese toilet is designed so that there are no germs from sitting on a toilet seat which means that you squat over a porcelain trough on the [View Full Entry]

---

---