I know I haven’t posted in a while. We’ve been extremely busy and haven’t had reliable wifi so I haven’t been able to update this thing very well.

We’re back. After 30 hours of marathon-air-travel, that included three hours sitting on the tarmac in Bangkok and missing our connection in Tokyo, we’re back. The trip has been incredible and definitely unforgettable. I have some more video footage that I’m going to put together for one last video and post that later today or tomorrow, but to give a rundown of what’s happened since the last post about me being sick.

We finished up our time at the resort and the missionary retreat on the 19th and took a double decker bus back to Bangkok. That evening, a large group of us went shopping at the Suam Lum Night Bazaar in the middle of Bangkok where there is some downright amazing shopping and killer deals where you can bargain and negotiate prices. The next day we went shopping, again, at a mall known as Central. This place was more like the malls we have here in the states and the prices on items here were about the same, if not more, than back in the states. Although Lindee and I did find an asian American Eagle clone we nicknamed “Thai Pigeon” as the bird on their shirts looked like a pigeon.

After our time at Central on the morning of the 20th, we met up with Ruth and Inchai from the Thai Faith and Music Foundation where we rode around in the bed of a pickup truck and went around Bangkok visiting their projects that they had setup in a few of the slums. Here are a few pictures of the first slum we visited.

A couple things that I noticed while visiting these slums was that rich or poor, eastern or western, a child is a child. When you look at these children, you see the same joy, hope, and innocence that you see with “more fortunate” children.

After visiting the slums and spending some more time with the leaders of the TFMF, we all went to dinner at a restaurant that is very popular with locals that foreigners rarely visit. This was cool because when you go to places like this that don’t really see foreigners, you get a taste of what Bangkok and Thai food is really like.

The next day, we spent more time visiting TFMF Projects and hanging out with the leaders there. They took us to a food court building next to a weekend market where we did more shopping before heading back to our hotel. After we got back to the hotel, we went shopping, again, at Suam Lum. We got back to our room later that evening and turned in for the night as we had to meet in the lobby at 3:15 the next morning to ride in the van to the airport to catch our flight.

Again, this has been an amazing adventure and something unforgettable for all of us who went. More of the trip will be revealed as time moves on and I share, either in conversation, or through more posts on here as what’s going on relates to something seen or experienced on this trip. Thanks for following the trip and for your prayers, we appreciated every one of them.

Thank you.

Dustin

This entry was posted on Monday, February 23rd, 2009 at 2:50 am and is filed under Thailand, Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.