Jet Lag and a Park

Well, jet lag sucks. It is now 3:45 in the morning and I am lying face down on my bed. The fan is blowing at absolutely full power across my body and I'm praying that the smaller-than-my-freckle mosquitoes are not eating me alive. It's my sad and delusional belief that the fan is blowing them off my body, however, due to the fact that I still have around 150 bugbites, this is apparently not the case. However, thankfully, these mosquitoes are the type that bite but only last for about 5 minutes of sever itchiness, which, if you can manage to not scratch at, disappear. In general I can avoid it, but they have begun to conquer my steel resolve of non-scratchiness by biting me on the bottoms of my feet, which I find thoroughly unfair. However, other than the mosquitoes, everything is pretty good.

 I went adventuring yesterday! On a whim I decided to test my directional and bike riding skills simultaneously. Unfortunately, neither are really at the level that they should be, but I still managed to make it back alright. I left at around 3:00 and rode out into the road. The area where Scott lives is basically a housing development that is still being built. Now, for any americans this is going to sound pretty sketchy but I literally rode through major construction sites. I'll try to take pictures and post them so you know what I mean because its hard to explain, but imagine a construction site like in the middle of the city when they're rebuilding or tearing down an old building and how everything is blocked off and they have all the scaffolding and safety cables and stuff. It was like that, but without and sorta blocking off of stuff, I couldn't find a single hard hat in the entire place, and safety cables from the roofs of the building were not even worth looking for. I would guesstimate that there were probably 200 people working on maybe 25 different houses simultaneously. And the houses were anywhere from just flattened ground with posts in it, to the wooden outline of the house, to the fully completed house being tiled. Anyway, after wandering around this construction area of a while i finally found the exit of the area and went onto the main road. Now, people who have been to Thailand, you understand the insanity of the road, however, for those of you who haven't been here yet, I will attempt to explain. Essentially, there are no traffic laws. Now, people will generally go the same direction on the same side of the road, however, this is a very loose thing. It is not unusual to see a motorcyclist go towards oncoming traffic along the edge of the road and then getting back on the correct side of the road whenever they feel like it. You follow red lights more when you feel like it than when they are there. Whose ever heard of a turn signal? This is a very different type of driving that the type all you wussy Americans are used to.

Ok continuing, I rode across this fairly lethal street and ended up on the left side, with a lake next to me. It was surrounded by a fence that looked more decorative than anything else, however, i wasen't really able to get inside the park. There was a trail that looked a lot like the Iron Horse Trail back in California. I wandered around the edge of the park till I finally found the "entrance". The entrance consisted of a 3 foot by 7 foot cut in the fence and a piece was just missing. However, to keep things like cars? or something out, there is an iron bar going across the entrance at about 1 foot up. I was able to simply lift the bike over luckily and then continue my biking from there. So the lake I would hesitate to guess is approximately half a mile by half a mile? It's obviously not a perfect circle and if needed you could easily swim the distance, though it would be long. Idk, I'm not good at judging distances, but it took me about 15 minutes to ride around the lake around the edge. In any case, this lake has numerous kiddie playing zones around it. I found these to be absolutely hysterical. Most of these things would NEVER be able to be in a US park. I'll post some pictures of them and I guarantte you will laugh. For example, one of my favorites was two slides that were facing directly towards each other. So, if two people went down at the same time, they would run directly into each other. My other favorite is the one I have dubbed "The Cage" due to the fact that is is simply a circular cage with an entrance. It actually kinda looked fun, though it also looked a lot like a prison for smaller children. Maybe it was used as a holding cell for the children before you smashed their heads together on the slides. Anyway, there were probably 6 or 7 of these parks, however, there was one SPECIAL park on one side (steady yourselves). This consisted of a dinosaur park! It was awesome! Every play structure and slide and climbing thing was a different dinosaur! I thought it was awesome.

There weren't many people around these parks aside from a couple of other couples. However, there were a large number of stray dogs. Now, before you panic, these have all been pretty docilized or they get killed. So they all seemed pretty harmless, just kinda bored and hot. They walk around everywhere and see what scraps they can find. I wouldnt recommend touching one and they make me a little nervous just because they're stray dogs and all that, but they seemed perfectly content to be sniffing each others butts.

Around the edges of the parks were a large number of temples. I'll go more into more detail when I have a chance to take more pictures. I didn't do that much investigative riding for the sake of time. I'll look into it more and write about it later.

Alright, that's all for now, I'll post my pictures here and hopefully you can get at least some of what I'm talking about.

Good talking! and I'll write more later! Hopefully I can get to sleep for a bit now.

Living and loving =]