Time is a dress maker

September 29, 2008

Living this dual life sometimes makes me immune to all the magic that surrounds me. Thailand is pushing forward in it's love affair with globalization. The unfamiliar has become familiar. The streets I so casually walk blur. Sometimes I forget to open my eyes.

Thailand still exists within the folds of everyday. The glitz and glitter hold hands with straw hats balancing baskets of fruit on bamboo poles.

Martin and I have always lived by the code: "when in America be an American, when in Greece (India, Thailand...) be Greek".

Written in the fabrics of my consciousness.

Stamped with validation through Morocco, Nepal, Bangladesh.

When in Rome.....

And that is how we traveled. Refusing to step into 'tourist' institutions, too proud for our own good I am sure. And I would expect others to do the same. I was pretty unforgiving.

I have broken the code several times since my arrival to Thailand. But that has become ordinary since I have begun leading groups.

So perhaps my code has changed.

It is easier to hold flexibity rather than the rigidity. Oh I may believe the experience may not be as "AUTHENTIC" if I do not eat every meal tucked into tsome one's quarters if someone's home atop wobbly card tables filled with chili, peanuts, nam plaa, sugar and nom sam. But who is to say what is authentic anymore. It is all reality tangled into chapters of life.....

Time is a dress maker, specializing in alterations-Faith Baldwin