First Days in Thai

Funny how close the world is now. I was in Canada a few days ago working. Today I am on the back of a motorcycle taxi weaving through traffic in Bangkok, we were cutting by the parked traffic jammed cars coming so close my legs were touching car doors.

The noise here is deafening, my head is spinning from the combination noise and heat. I was at Klong Toey slum today photographing various people working, a sewing shop and used metal chain/wire shop. They were cutting (with a fire torch of some kind) apart pieces of metal on the street without safety gear of any kind not even gloves, thou one guy did have sort of work shoes on.

Spoke some Thai today felt funny doing that again, at times struggling for the words but for the most part people understood what I was saying. I also went to a market in the slum, live ducks, chickens and fish etc. Surprised some Thais a couple of times, they turned around and saw me and drew back in surprise! Joked with them that they had never seen a farang (westerner) before, kind of funny to see the way they reacted. One lady after being shocked, told me she was not afraid of farang who could speak Thai but was afraid of those who could not speak Thai. Fun to be in this world again, might take a week to get things working in the right direction.

So far have eaten, oysters, fried fish, large prawns, crab, sour squid soup, dom yum bla (spicy fish soup), som tam (papaya salad) and a wonderful street desert with black beans and coconut milk. I also just had some nice durian which is a Chinese fruit that sort of smells but is delicious.

Am still overcoming my jet lag will try to get my 4x5 our on the streets in the next few days, today shot a Leica M6 and 28mm lens and also with a Xpan panoramic with 45mm. Fun to shoot 35mm Trix again but need to shoot some larger formats as well for better image quality. Tomorrow I will take the blad out of the shipping foam and shoot some color heads with the ring flash.