The Bangkok Amulet Market isn’t on the street corners outside the Tha Chang boat pier, it’s further down the street – though there is a thriving business along the sidewalks – and this is the amulet making supply district. If you want your completed amulets – or statues or any variety of iconographic items for your home altar, you’ll find them in this neighborhood.

I bought three things – an actual amulet for protection and two hammered metal pieces that are just the prettiest things and have prayers or some kind of text scrawled around the images.… continued…

For lunch on our first day in Bangkok, we had Thai food. It’s all very familiar, but hotter than the Thai food we get in Seattle. Delicious plates of phad thai, a big soup bowl of green curry, and a shrimp salad, swimming in lime juice, lemon grass, oh so delicious, oh so nice. Travel weary,  I skipped the markets headed back to the hotel to take a shower and a nap.

I arrived in Bangkok without Julius – he opted to take the bus.… continued…

I was pretty sure my head was going to explode when I saw the gates to the Angkor complex, but when there were elephants inside, Actual Elephants… well. I walked up to them – there were five – and put out my hand and one of them started snuffling around with her trunk. “Bananas?” asked the girl standing there. “Bananas for elephant?”

I said no and my pachyderm friend was a little disappointed, but she didn’t turn away, she continued to reach for my hand, spreading a little elephant snot on my palm.… continued…

Guidebooks are full of advice about how to behave at Cambodia’s religious sites. You’re not supposed to wear a hat, you are supposed to dress modestly, not show your feet to the Buddha, oh, and a bunch of other things that are relatively easy to manage. I did forget to remove my cap in the palace, to my extreme shame, but I was happy to do so upon stern reminder from one of the guides. Hey, it was very hot and it was keeping the sun off my melon.… continued…

Our guide was three years old when the Khmer Rouge fell. He lost a brother and a sister, and his parents lost everything because they were urban intellectuals. He looked at me. “You wear glasses,” he said, “that means you are an intellectual. You are not going to the fields, you are going to die.”

I don’t know how other people manage, but when we walked into the monument at the Killing Fields, I just kind of fell apart.… continued…