And the marketing strategy is..??

We're surrounded by abject poverty and very basic living conditions, if even that, but when this boat of kids pulled up alongside to beg, my only reaction is to laugh. Does that make me a bad person?



We were touring one of the floating villages of Tonle Sap, the largest lake in Southeast Asia, in Cambodia. The odd geological feature is that the water flows upstream to fill the lake during the dry season. Yes, I have actually seen the reverse current from Phnom Penh, a six-hour ride downstream.

"Floating village" to me conjures up images of houses on stilts on the water. But in reality, the "houses" are boats, boats that became homes. Dad, ever the traveling businessman he is, asked our guide if they have Internet on the boats. No, Dad, they don't. The wealthier, however, do have a television running off a salvaged car battery. Yes, whole floating on the water. No wonder why there's no OSHA here.

You know it's summer when..

... you're surrounded by Taiwanese tourists on summer break.

We don't really have seasons in Thailand or many parts of Southeast Asia. The year in Thailand can be broken down into:
- Extremely hot: February through May
- Rainy: June through November
- Dry: December and January

To work with that, the Thai academic year runs from May through February.

So the sense of seasons, for those of us used to the seasonal changes, is lost. It's only a matter of whether keeping an umbrella on you is a daily thing or not.

The dry season is the peak tourist season. The students are on break in the extremely hot season. So we don't get the flux of people on summer break flocking everywhere like many American and European locales do.

Instead, we get the Taiwanese, Korean, and Japanese tourists, who get the same Northern Hemisphere summer vacations but are closer geographically.