No Rain, No Rainbows

On Monday, I finally gave up on carrying around my DSLR camera and mailed it home with a bunch of other stuff I've been lugging around, in total shedding 5kg (11lbs) from my pack.  I still have my point and shoot, and I think that is enough for me right now. 95% of the time it takes just as good of a shot as a DSLR and I can live with missing the other 5% when I'd like to tune the image plane or aperture. Besides, everyone goes to the same places, so I don't think I'm taking any original photographs. Perhaps I can assemble an entire collection of photos from Google Images -- you would be none the wiser.

On Tuesday, I parted ways from Ethan and headed north to Chiang Mai on a "VIP" bus leaving at 8pm and arriving at 8am. VIP might stand for Very Irritable Passage. The bus wreaked of exhaust fumes and old urine that was leaking from the toilet on the bottom level; every couple of hours people were dropped off along the way and the fluorescent lights were turned on full blast from pitch blackness; and all the while, I listened to the women sitting directly behind me puking into a plastic bag from motion sickness. I imagine that Wednesday will be a better day no matter what.

Jay Walking, A Blog

There are a few reasons that I decided to title this blog "Jaywalk the World". For one, in the first few weeks of traveling, Ethan and I were both scolded by police (first in Donghae, South Korea; then in Khabarovsk, Russia) for jay walking. At one point early on, I figured I'd try to jay walk in every country I visited just to see what the reaction would be, but soon realized that no one cares about traffic rules in most of Central, Eastern, and Southern Asia. In fact, if you aren't willing to break every rule your mom taught you about crossing the street as a child, you probably wouldn't ever cross a street in Asia.

The second reason comes from the original meaning of the word "jay", which was another name for a hick, rube or a country-bumpkin.  Back in the days when the first automobiles were hitting the streets (and consequently, occasionally hitting people too), new rules for crossings streets were put in place for the sake of safety and efficient commerce. The people that didn't walk in the cross walks were referred to as jays, as the assumption was that only country-folk would be so naive, ignorant, or just plain stupid.

In the context of traveling from country to country with new cultures, social rules, languages, money systems, methods of travels, English proficiency, etc., travelers are very often jays (though many try their best). Unfortunately, I'm not going to tell you all the naive, ignorant, or stupid things I do, but it does happen.

I hope in the coming months to post every week. I'm hesitant to promise it will be coherent, merely because I don't want to spent a lot of time writing out what I know I've done. For a short time I considered using twitter, but 140 characters seemed too limiting. I am thinking it might be more like multiple detailed tweets at a time using a blog format. When I shared this idea with Ethan, he replied snidely, "Oh, you mean paragraphs? Like in a blog." And I replied, "No, it's a twog."

For now, I'll let Ethan do the writing at v-w-x.blogspot.com until we part ways in the next week or so.