fotografia.

My supply of photos is getting larger by the day so please forgive me for posting so many at once. I am not trying to force you to view my photography (um...maybe just a little), I am only hoping that these photos are a welcomed glimpse into my life in Thailand because I am truly in awe of this place.

For those of you that have been here, I'm sure you can appreciate my obsession with trying to capture the essence of life in these places- it feels untameable and resistant to cohersion into a simpler more easily digestible form, because all at once the atmosphere seems tragic and stunning, messy and systematic, satiating and depriving.

To me Bangkok is an extremely complex place. It is intriguing and frustrating to be unable to understand the intricacies of the sociological and psychological truths of how life works here and I am constantly grasping for that last piece of the puzzle to make sense of this culture.

Maybe this is my cue to STOP trying to make sense of everything, screw logic and understanding, and resign my analytical nature in favor of appreciation and limitless abandon.

moments of color.

friendship:

photo taken at Doi Suthep, Chiang Mai, Thailand

Also, a friend sent me an interesting article on friendship and I thought it worth sharing. Check out the NYTimes Opinionator blog piece here.

elephants!

Riding an elephant isn't the most comfortable activity in the world. For one thing, I was actually sitting on a platform seat attached to the elephants back while the Thai elephant trainer sat on top of the elephants head. My legs were too long to rest on the elephants back so I had to sit awkwardly with my torso twisted so that my feet could rest by the elephants side. Also, my elephant was a bit of a rebel and tended to wander away from the group to stare at butterflies or ravenously attack bushes when hungry. I learned that elephants eat bananas like they are peanuts, so when we bought a bag of bananas for 20 baht, little did we know that we would had an empty bag and an elephant trunk probing the air around us persistently in a matter of seconds. The ride through the hilltops of Mae Wang, a rural area of rice fields and forests about 45 minutes from Chiang Mai, was really beautiful, and being in the fresh clean air after a month of being in the dirty city of Bangkok was a treat in itself.

I can't say that I would ever get on an elephants back again, just because it felt a bit sad and degrading to be sitting like a lazy log on such a beautiful and proud-looking animal being forced to parade me around. However, I'm glad to have done it. The view from up there is spectacular, and there is something very enchanting about sitting atop such a regal creature.

The rest of my day after the elephant riding was really fun and I'll have more photos to post of that soon!