Sawadee.

so i'm back from that 9-day trip i talked about earlier before, and i wanted to do several 'parts' of blog posts to talk about stuff in detail but i realized i was just too lazy to compile photos and make them into collages. so here, have the highlights instead! 

note : all photos are in chronological order. :D

(from the beginning till the end of the trip!)

just picture the surprise on my face when i saw this in the first hotel we stayed in at Chiang Mai. this was at the Lotus Pang Suan Kaew Hotel. seeing this in our room really just lit me up. because i instantaneously thought about that one episode of Supernatural where Dean's motel room had a panel that looked like this, except his bed was fully equipped with massaging functions! to no avail and a slight disappointment, there wasn't any massaging controls on this panel. haha. 

this.

this was one of the things i really wanted to bring back from Thailand but didn't. the same hotel gave us complimentary bottled water but here's what's different : their bottles were made of glass! this hotel specifically gave instructions not to take away these glass bottles and i assumed that they would just reuse the bottles and replace the caps for hotel guests. it's pretty eye-opening to how green Thailand is compared to Malaysia. 

elephants are the very symbol of Thailand. they used to capture elephants and train them to go into wars, but since the war had ended, the trained elephants had not much use left for the Thais. as technology continued to replace elephants to carry logs and other heavy things, soon, the Thais began to use the elephants in the tourism industry. i'm not sure how to feel about this. perhaps most, if not all, of the elephants in Thailand, are in captive and made to work in the tourism industry. from elephant shows to elephant rides, they're now a form of entertainment. business. i don't know how they're treated behind the blinds, although i'm pretty sure training an elephant is no easy task--not for the trainer or the elephant itself. 

on a less serious note, this baby elephant followed its mom around as we rode the elephants in Chiang Mai, and it was just having so much fun when we crossed the river! LOOK AT ITS HAPPY FACE.

this boy was perhaps the only person i found very hard to forget.

truth be told, i find him cute.

i mean, you grab snakes with both hands AND your mouth, then you kiss the snake too?

okay. marry me.

this was from when we crossed over Mekong River to Myanmar. the monks here gets their money/offerings from stalls or just people off the streets like this. children dressed in monk robes do the same, and even some aunties who're in a different attire as well. not sure how this whole system works and not sure if it's entirely right for all these monks to do so, and furthermore, i'm even unsure about how some people may abuse such a form of work and turn it into business. 

not sure how 'special' these pebbles are but, 10 baht for pebbles? no. just no. 

all throughout the trip i kept thinking whether if ninjas will start jumping out of nowhere, because the wires made it look like i was in Konohagakure. :D

here you have my dad praying to the four-faced Buddha. the four-faced Buddha, according to our tour guide, is like the Guan Yin statue here in Malaysia. it is very common and can be found almost anywhere, but this particular one that's located in the heart of Bangkok city (right next to roads and malls) is said to be the more... awesome one? i don't know what's the English term. the one that people believes to work more miraculously. yeah. 

Pattaya. unfortunately i didn't get on one of these. 

this one's a surprise accidental photo. my lens fogged up for the first time ever in my hands and i couldn't understand why my photos were so blur until i looked at my lens and wiped it clean. the effect of the photo however, is rather promising. (:

photo of the trip?

(important note : the lioness did NOT want to engage in sex and was running away time after time even before the lion managed to pin her down for a bit. she sprang away seconds after this photo was taken.)

this was heart-wrenching. seeing a real polar bear is in my bucket list, but after seeing a polar bear like this, i swore to myself that i will never set foot in a zoo/safari park/aquarium/etc ever again unless i know for sure that the animals are getting what they need. also made a promise to myself that if i were to see a polar bear again, it would have to be a wild one. this polar bear was alone. her exhibit was not made for her. it was made for the people to come to see her. it looked like a pathetic, ginormous, stupid igloo. it was made with slabs of concrete and even the floors did not have any gradient or texture to it at all. the pool she had looked so poorly maintained i wondered why she hasn't tried to break out of the exhibit yet. she was pacing back and forth anxiously. 

i'm never seeing a polar bear like this ever again. never. 

this was one of the more bitter parts of the trip. sorry.

view of Bangkok city from the Baiyoke Sky Hotel. this made me fall in love with skyscrapers and city lights. heh. till we meet again, Thailand. (yeah i purposely took the photo where the roads look like a cross. :D)

the rest of the photos will be posted up on my Facebook account soon! (: