Early morning Thai Time

It is now 24 hours since we landed

 here, eleven of which we

 have spent asleep.

I appear to have awoken t 4:30AM Bangkok time,.That's five hours later than Swiss time, eleven hours later than EST, 14 hours later than PST, and from this I figure that if you just keep moving westward and get all the way back around to Bangkok itself it must be 24 hours earlier here now than it is now here. 

Similarly, I figure that since there are about thirty bhat to the dollar, then a bhat is worth about three cents, so thirty US dollars must be equal to ninety Thai dollars here, roughly speaking. The rates are different at the ATMs, where you just key in the dollar amounts and out come bhats, which seems to me a bad deal, as they're only worth about a third as much. So I'm hoping to get a better deal elsewhere, maybe in Swiss francs, which are worth almost as much as a dollar, and then I can trade them in for bhats, which are worth three times as much. 

But don't try this at home. Only a lifetime of international travel makes such calculations possible.

Anyway, here are some more views of Thailand from our first bleary day. Note McDonald's ostentatious display honoring the King, the gods that have been affixed to the skyscrapers, and so on. I am prohibited by law from making any sort of fun of the Thai royal family who embody the Thai identity, so I won't. It is hard to imagine, say, the British erecting shrines to Charles and Carmella or Camelia or whatever her name is on every London block and festooning them with garlands on their way to and from work, or wearing the daily royal color -- yesterday's was yellow -- in honor of Princess Margaret.  But then they are all ninnies, and here the King is not only a sacred figure but is said to be a supremely beneficent presence, carrying on the tradition of his mid 19th century predecessor of King & I fame, who was a great social reformer and such a brilliant diplomat that Thailand, unlike its neighbors, was never colonized. 

In an unrelated story, all the blind street musicians I've encountered so far have been provided with microphones and battery-powered amplifiers.