Lessons from Abroad

I am maintaining an alternate travel blog during my time in Southeast Asia that is drawing a lot of my attention away from the Monstro. This is due in large part to two reasons. The first reason is the unceasing distraction that is budget world travel. When I am trying to figure out whether I am eating dried squid or dried octopus I don't really have time to contemplate clever and sarcastic blog posts that make use of obscure pop-culture references and debates over the conglomeration of mops and puppets. The second reason is because I am trying to be as thorough as possible with my travel blog so that I don't have to call family members with any sort of freqency. As a result, I sometime have to "boil down" my travel blog posts that that grandma doesn't get offended. That being said, I have learned a few things travelling abroad that I have deemed utterly "Monstro-worthy" and so I will share some of these anecdotes with you now.

In Thailand, there seems to be a correlation with the severity of dental malfuntion and the amount of alcohol consumed on a given day. For background info, click on my TravelPod blog and read the post about Professor Whiskey.

Unequivocally every dog in Thailand is a mangy-ass dog. These dogs have none of the pride or grace common to their US counterparts. They take mangy-ass shits, they have mangy-ass barks, and they look like hell. It takes a remarkable amount of self-restraint to avoid punting each and every one of these fleabags over the nearest fence. I might sound like a hateful human right now, but when you see a hairless dog with a tuft of coarse hair as a mohawk adorning its head you will be just as eager as I to teach that dog a lesson about being born looking as shameful as it does.

Children in Asia are substantially smarter than children in the United States. While kids in the US sit around and play video games, many of the street children in Cambodia are too busy mastering a second language and starting their own businesses. I had an interaction with a shrewd ten year-old book salesman of the streets of Siem Reap and he was the fiercest bargainer I have met so far. Unfortunately your chips don't mean shit if the person you are bargaining with can hoist you off the ground by the top of your skull and wring you out like a wet towel.

Despite common misconceptions, it is very easy to tell the difference between a real Thai woman and a Thai man dressed as a woman. I have heard stories and seen pictures of very convincing "ladyboys" but I have quickly come to realize that these are exceptions and not the rule. Most of the ladyboys I have seen appear to take their cross-gender game of dress-up about as seriously as I did when I was 8 years-old and put on my mom's high heels so I could hobble into the front yard and see how far I could fling them across the street. While my accuracy was dead-on, the lady boys on the streets of Bangkok seem to be missing the more subtle nuances that the pros have nailed.

Thats all for now, more to come later.