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At any rate, the islands in Thailand are a great cheap place to relax
and soak up pleasure, if that's what you're after, but I got kind of
depressed by the roadside mini-malls in Thailand. I did like the people;
I liked their sense of humor and directness. One time a group of us
went out to eat at a nice restaurant and this guy at our table got a
nosebleed. Being a polite English bloke he was mortified, but the
waitress, completely unfazed, brought him a cup of herbs and insisted he
shove them up his nose.
 The Thais have a sense of pride about the fact that they have never
really been colonialized by a Western power like their neightbors
(Indonesia was Dutch, Cambodia and Laos and Vietnam were French). They
are also a very charming people and very fashion-conscious. Bangkok is
a massive sprawling city, and I was impressed that they had cleaned up
the trash problem I had heard about. Sometimes Western values bring
positive changes. Of course Western values also brings the plastic and
stuff that are causing the trash problem in the first place---palm
leaves and coconuts weren't too much of a problem. At any rate I didn't
see many traditional buildings in Bangkok, and the shiny tiled
appearance of many of the wats (Buddhist temples) wasn't really my
style. The museum too was unimpressive, it had only a few relics of the royal family (it's
interesting how such a cheeky, hedonistic people as the Thai worship the
King. There's a picture of him in every establishment).
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