SEA tour

It has been awhile since I've had a chance to write on our blog. For the last 2 weeks, I've been traveling around SEA (Southeast Asia) for work. It started with a trip to Singapore, then back to Bangkok for the weekend, followed by a trip to Jakarta (in Indonesia), back to Bangkok for the weekend, and then Singapore again. Jakarta was an interesting city. Initially, I was somewhat nervous on account of the terrorist bombings they had in Jakarta in 2003 and Bali in 2002 & 2005 but everything went smoothly. Once I got settled in, I was able to enjoy the city and its people. The food isn't quite as spicy as Thai - I loved the roasted lamb served at a roadside vendor. Delicious! The day I was to leave Jakarta, there was torrential rainfall which resulted in a lot of flooding - the highway was more of a river than a road. By the time I got to the airport, it was shutdown and my flight was delayed for 5 hours.

During the weekends when I returned to Bangkok, Meg and I tried to get out and experience more of Bangkok. We went to the Chatuchak Weekend Market for the first time. It's a ridiculously huge market full of vendors selling everything you could possibly imagine. After a couple of hours of looking around, we called it quits - the heat was just too much. We also ventured to Ko Kret ("Pottery island"), a refuge of the Mon tribes who still practice Mon Pottery - baked red clay with carvings. It was somewhat disappointing because we'd hoped to witness the process of making the pottery but instead the island was quite similar to the numerous markets throughout Bangkok. It seems we'll have to venture a little further to truly experience the Thai culture without the tourist trap element.