“Let’s go to Bangkok?”
“Ok, fuck it! LET’S GO TO BANGKOK,” and so we went to Bangkok.

Since day one in Thailand it’s been a mad rush. Hit the ground. Start looking for jobs. Start looking for apartments. Figure out how to use the transit system. Stock up on necessary supplies. Double check your account balance. Realize that your checking total only has four digits and two of them are decimals. Reconfigure the financial strategy. Start eating from street carts…exclusively.

We got chewed up and spit out of Bangkok with the quickness. Bangkok stuck it too us hard, gave us five dollars for a ten dollar cab ride home, and never had the courtesy to call back. The city itself was too much. Too much for our situation. Perhaps too much in general. Simply put, we weren’t adequately prepared for the BKK hustle.

To top the stress incurred by searching for work and housing, almost everyone in our crew had been faced with extreme financial crisis’s. As a group we were to the point financially where paying for an apartment was entirely impossible. After a late check out we sat down stairs in the hostel lobby with packed bags and nowhere to go. Ok, so what now? We entertained ridiculous options like vagabonding on the beaches of southern Thailand, banding to together to start our own food cart, or leaving the country entirely to go some place where the dollar goes a bit farther. By the end of the day, when everything was said and done, we were rushing to the BKK train station trying make the 7:35 train.

Could we have found a way to make it in the streets of Bangkok? Maybe. Maybe not. But that’s neither here nor there now. We’re already 10 hours away, sipping on 30 cent coconut smoothies in the shadow of Doi Inthanon, Chiang Mai’s highest mountain. Maybe this is where we should have been all along…