USA Trip — #5

33ºC after I turned on the fan.

Well…. A congruence of impediments has kept me from posting here since last Monday. The first few days it was lack of time. Then I left my camera in New York with the photos I wanted to post here. And then, on the road back, I tried to post and found that some security functions didn’t recognize my newer laptop and wouldn’t give me access to my own website. Now I’m finally back in Kentucky and will give a quick post today and a fuller one tomorrow using the few pictures that I have on my phone since my camera didn’t accompany me to Cambodia. This picture is in my room where the temperature was 34ºC when I walked in Friday afternoon. That’s 93ºF. When I was in the States, both New York and Kentucky were in the 60s and 70s which was so nice…

USA Trip — #4

Arrghh…. I finished the Maryknoll Lay Missioners board meeting Saturday at noon and then flew to Louisville, Kentucky to visit my family–leaving my camera with all the photos in my room at Maryknoll. I will try to provide some text for those days and then see if the helpful people at Maryknoll are able to send my camera to me by courier before I leave on Wednesday. More on that to come!

Bangkok Trip–Day 3 (Pt 3)

These are just interesting scenes from the trip to the airport

I switched from the sangtau to the BTS, the elevated Bangkok Sky Train.
There is great respect given to the king in Thailand. Here his picture appears on a display in the BTS carriage.
I went to the Silom Road area where there is a daily night market but it was too early. Just a few shops were starting to set up and I wasn’t able to look for a cheap watch.
There was a cart full of colorful piggy banks ready for display
but I wasn’t interested.
As I went back to the BTS I passed this large and elaborate spirit house
set up along Silom Road to placate the spirits
displaced from their lands by all the commercial development.
Then it was a one-hour bus ride back to Don Mueang airport
and the AirAsia flight to Phnom Penh, just 55 minutes.

Bangkok Trip–Day 3 (Pt 2)

I had planned to meet with some experts on deaf-blindness today but they didn’t answer my e-mails and I ended up with a free day that gave me a chance to catch up on some work before I left the Bangkok Maryknoll house.

Sakhorn, the office manager, has worked with Maryknoll for close to thirty years and is one of those invaluable people who enable us to function reasonably well in another culture and another language. He does a little bit of everything, like fixing the computers.

This was my first time to stay at the new Maryknoll house and it turned out quite well. I was surprised that they even had a hard-wire Internet connection in the rooms. Unfortunately it was on the wall opposite the desk so I worked on a little night table and stool.

John Beeching and Tim Raible and I ate lunch together at a little food shop around the corner. Here Tim pays the bill.

Then it was time to head to the airport. I was interested in exploring the non-taxi transportation so I caught a songtau (truck with bench seats) for eight baht (about 30¢).

Bangkok Trip–Day 3 (Pt 1)

It’s 2300 and I just got back to the Maryknoll house in Phnom Penh. I need to get up early for a mass on the other side of town so I’ll post the Day 3 photos tomorrow morning. This is a picture from the bus going out to the old airport in a really heavy rain this afternoon. Come back tomorrow….