I'm back

I made it back into the country ok. There weren't any problems going to Cambodia today and coming back which was nice. It was just a draining day spent driving to the border and back. I will have to leave the country one more time before I go back to America next month, but I'll have some time to think about what would work out best. I didn't get any pictures though, mainly because there wasn't much to see other than the inside of the van, the crappy fence at the border crossing area, and the casino on the Cambodian side where we ate lunch. No photos were allowed inside the casino, though there wasn't much in there. It had the feel of being in a bingo hall to me.

Although I've beeng wanting to take some time and see Myanmar since the protests that were going on there last summer, I feel like this isn't going to be a good time to go up to the border and try to get in. Especially since they aren't even letting US aid workers in. It does seem pretty grim up there and I hope to be able to take a trip up there before coming home next month. As for our life here though it still seems like Myanmar is a world away. A lot of staging points for aid supplies and news reports are here in Bangkok, but now where we live. There isn't lots of trucks parked out front loaded with supplies, so it's hard to remember how close this really is to Bangkok. The storms never hit us here, though the original reports were that we would get some thunderstorms coming all last week because of it. We did have some storms of our own about a week before that which did some damage here. The winds tore apart the roof of the movie place nearby and even bent over a metal fence on the way to work. The metal here in Thailand doesn't seem to be as strong as the metal I'm used to back home and many of the small buildings and thrown together houses aren't meant to stand up to sever weather. When the storms hit here a couple weeks ago I thought they weren't much of a big deal since we get much worse back home. The reality was however that roofs of people's make shift house were flying off, and the food stands were sailing all over the roads. I can only imagine what is going on in Myanmar now, especially in the Irawaddy Delta where it seems there isn't a whole lot of stable building to begin with.