Bangkok

After being in the Middle East for a month, Bangkok was amazingly different. Everything seemed a lot more like home than it had in Cairo. All of the taxis were newish Toyota Camrys and all had working meters instead of Cairo's taxis that are all cars from the 80's at best and all seem to have broken meters - at least if you're a Western.

When I arrived in Bangkok, I didn't know where I was going to stay. This proved to be a small annoyance as I was trying to get through customs and the custom's guard wanted to know where I was staying. I didn't know - so I used the name of a hostel I had seen in Dahab. This made the situation slightly worse because he knew there wasn't a hostel by that name in Bangkok (I figured - how could he know, Bangkok is a big city - evidently not big enough), but unable to fully express his frustration with me in English; he let me pass. Now I had to get my bags and actually review the Lonely Planet to find a place to stay. I didn't decide on a place to stay, but read that a lot of the cheap places where on one road so I'd head there. On the bus to Khoa San Road, I met two Alaskan massage therapist that were coming to Thailand for a month to learn Thai massage. (I would run into them again in two weeks to find that they decided not to take the massage classes and were just going to enjoy themselves.) They were the backpacker type so I asked where they were staying. They replied "Khoa San Road." So I was like - "Can I follow you?" I had no idea what stop I was supposed to get off at and traveling solo - it was always nice to make new friends. When we got off the bus, I went to the cheapest place I could find - they went a little more Hollywood.

For $4.50, I had a single room all to myself. With single rooms that cheap, there were hardly any dorm rooms available because people would just chose singles. This is a delima for the independent traveler in South East Asia. However, if you try, you can still meet people. You still have buses and backpacker bars.

Anyway, I put my stuff down and headed out to get some real Thai food. I had Pad Thai at a little internet cafe/restaurant around the corner. Here I met one of the characters that make traveling interesting. His name was Muhammad and he was a Ghanaian citizen that was working in China, but had run into some visa issues and was now in Thailand - trying to get back to Ghana. Instantly we had stuff to talk about because, as you may or may not know, my father is from Ghana and I had gone there back in 2004.

My next mission was to find a repair shop for my camera that had been damaged in Egypt. Muhammad insisted on helping me in my cause. We walked around together for maybe five hours talking to a number of people selling or repairing cameras. The basic take away was that cameras were a little more expensive in Thailand than buying them online in America and that getting my camera repaired was not going to be easy. Through this whole time, Muhammad was very socially aggressive - not in a bad way though. He would ask to hold babies and treat people as if he had known them forever, myself included. I think the constant reinforcement in elementary school of our "bubbles" that people can't violate makes this behavior seem very strange to me, but no one really seemed to mind.

The one thing that did bother me about Muhammad is that he would attack the Buddhist religion and its practitioners saying "They believe in nothing." Muhammad appeared to be firm in his beliefs of Islam, which I can respect, but I really am of the belief that all religions should be respected.

At the end of the day, I found out that Muhammad had no more money and no place to stay. He asked to take a shower at my hostel - which I was fine with - it was a shared bathroom so he wouldn't even have to go in my room. Though at this point, my defenses were on high alert. That proved to be unnecessary, he didn't ask for any money only soap for the shower. At this point, the jet lag was setting in, I told him I would take a nap and meet up with him later that night. I never did see him again. The next day I was off to Koh Tao.