Magical Dream Trip: November 2008

Alicia and I at the caves.

A couple of the zillion naughty monkeys at the Batu Caves.

Alicia noticed these amazing lightposts in KL that are shaped like Hibiscus flowers.

A shot of lush green inside central Ubud, Bali.

It is very typical for Baliense home compounds and temples to have stone carvings (or made from concrete) representing protective deities from the Hindu pantheon. Here is one with some creepy eyes.

Typical intracite doorway.

Beautiful statue outside a temple.

Alicia and an interesting door. We are thinking this may be an expat's home.

Typical Ubud road.

There are rice paddies all throughout the town. Behind the paddy is a big expat home.

The creepy spider outside our room. My fully extended hand just might cover this scary thing. It has not moved since we arrived over a week ago.

Turkey dinner. The whiny people were right below us. Tempting me to dump some gravy on their heads.

A rare clear evening (constantly overcast here). Laura, you'd like it here - very few sunsets!

My favorite of the temple statues.

A man cutting down a tree, and then expertly cutting it into perfect boards outside our guesthouse. This guy was a super expert. The end product looked like it was out of a lumber mill.

A blurry, but funny shot of us in the Ubud Monkey Forest (part of a local temple). Over 400 macque monkeys live here creating chaos. We bought some bananas from some local women and then were attacked (sort of) by the monkeys. They make good use of their opposable thumbs in holding on to you. Alicia got quite a fright when they would not let go of her dress. The trick was to give them two bananas, one for each hand. This would cause them to let go and then you had to get moving. Very fun when they were well behaved and came up and nicely took a banana from you. The forest park itself is super beautiful and lush.

Warning: the monkeys are officially crazy!

Monkey Temple statue.

This Saturday there was a big free concert in the local football field. This was the event for everyone under 40, or so it seemed. The sheer number of scooters and people on the streets made it almost impossible to move. The entertainment was terrible (we witness a bad girl band) and the hosts from the local TV station made Alicia want to leave right away. We heard from people later that a local rock band was not so bad - but we didn't stick around. Other strangeness is that people here don't applaud, and young men wear their helmets around in the crowd to show off their scooter-possessing-status (or so we think). As Alicia hates it when people walk around with helmets on, this was a point of distress!

Photo time again:

A monster temple (wat) in Bangkok. I forget the name of this one, but it is huge and famous. We didn't actually go :)

Typical Bangkok street (often quite nice with the trees) along the 'Amulet Market'. This is a busy daily street market of people selling amulets for protection. Typical clients are anyone with a dangerous job: police/guards, taxi drivers, construction workers, etc... Very interesting spot.

This is the top of a very bizarre half-finished building in downtown Bangkok. This building is really, really big. Probably around 50-60 stories. Totally empty. I suspect this might have been a victim of the 97 Financial crisis that never got started up again. It is a surreal sight.

Alicia mailing a stack of postcards to 'Other Places'.

Dragon detail from a local temple off of Khow San Road.

The view from our room at the Sathorn Inn to downtown Bangkok. The river is just past the line of high rises. Directly below our room was a small, very dense neighborhood of lower-middle class houses. All wood framed and stuffed together. I'm not sure how long enclaves like this last against the omni-present development.

Alicia very much wanted to go dancing in Bangkok, and on a Saturday night while we were there I was lucky enough to come across an online announcement for one of my favorite DJs, Nick Warren, playing for the first time in Bangkok. We had a lot of fun!

Alicia and I at the dance party.

The lovely lady and I in the garden of the 'Jim Thompson House' (an expat in the 60s who founded a silk empire and built a crazy Thai style house. Then he mysteriously disappeared in the mountains of Malaysia...).

The escalators at the Skytrain stations in Bangkok have these hilarious stickers to make sure you don't clank your head on the steel supports riding up to the station. I really want one of these as a t-shirt.

Scary Barbie-like dolls in a alleyway market in the Silom area of Bangkok. The lady in the store said to Alicia: "They are like you!".

Bamboo outside a building. We want some at our home (someday).

Typical upper-middle class high rises in Bangkok. Pictures of the King are everywhere.

Chinatown in Bangkok, pictures of the long walking markets below.

This is a shot from a yearly festival in Bangkok. A gazillion candles are put out on the water on little floating rafts (made from a plant). The shot is hard to make out but in the back are big floats on the river, and in the middle are lots of candles being set on the water with the help of a bunch of guys wading around. Very crowded and packed, but interesting.

A bit of art in the park during the festival.

This classic sign was on the rooftop of a hotel nearby to our place in Bangkok. Advertised in the Lonley Planet as a budget option for a rooftop bar, and being close by, we thought we'd check it out. The place ended up being bizarre with a terrible band, lots of old white guys with tiny 16-year-old looking Thai girls on 'dates', and really bad cocktails. But the don't pee sign made up for a lot, and the view was good.

Our bags at the Bangkok airport (now shutdown by crazy self-defeating protesters). If you need some scale to see their absurd size there is a rolled up beach towel in the bag to the left and a normal-sized blue book in the small red backpack in the middle.

Bad quality shot of the Singapore harbor. The number of ships at anchor is staggering, and really neat if you like boats (like me).

The street in front of our million-dollar-a-night-hostel in Singapore's Kampong Glam neighborhood. At the end of the street is a huge mosque (as the neighborhood is traditionally been Muslim). Turns out this area is probably the coolest spot in Singapore. A classic urban renewal spot, they kept the old Chinese shophouses and made the streets cute with the cafes spilling out on the street. The rest of Singapore, for the most part, is super bland.

Funny sign at a shopping mall for construction and 'hacking'.

Oh the horrors of American Christmas spread throughout the world. Note, this was taken before Thanksgiving in a country with virtually no Christians. What is wrong with the world???

More Kampong Glam.

This is the National Mosque in Kuala Lumpur (for those not on the up and up, Malaysia is a very Muslim country, enough so that Israeli's are turned away at the border!).