sour.spicy.salty.sweet: blood soup and lowered standards

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I find that the major obstacle (aside from lack of time and internet access) to my keeping up with blog posts is, if you can believe it, is the fact that i'm too concerned with creating posts that are semi-coherent/readable, mildly humorous and/or slightly interesting. Sitting at my computer and writing is the highlight of my day here often. it's not as if i'm crafting insightful literary works, but i do think that if i'm going to keep it up i actually need to lower my standards further, still. So, just when one might have thought the grammar could get no worse, the structure no less organized, the punctuation no less correct (or present, for that matter) and the content no less mundane... here it is:

SSSS v. 2.0 - Not new and certainly not improved!

Now, finally some more of amelia's visit..

A week into her trip, millie and I decided to visit the ancient city of Ayutthaya. The former capital of Siam, it was destroyed by the Burmese army in the 1700s and the ruins that are left make up the Ayutthaya Historical Park, a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

We took motorbikes, then a taxi, then a bus, then the bkk BTS (skytrain) to Victory Monument where we were told we could get a van to Ayutthaya for 60baht. With limited-to-no thai language skills, flip flops on our feet and backpacks on our backs, we circled the massive bkk intersection for no less than 30 minutes searching for said van. With the help of some kind thai fellows, we found the tricked-out air-con vans. only 60 baht for the relatively comfortable, if not cramped, 1.5 hr ride.

NZ and Ivy joined us the next day and we rode around the town on bikes, from photo-op to photo-op. Despite being surrounded on all sides by streets packed with smog-belching traffic (it would seem that emissions standards don't exist here), the ruins were a spectacular sight. pictures to follow.

For lunch, we got out of the sun and enjoyed some cheap noodles. We sat down with 20 or 30 other people on tarps laid out on the ground, by the edge of a lake. We got the usual kwai tiaw rice noodle soup with fishballs and meat chunks except that instead of the usual clear yellowish broth, this broth was deep brown, almost black. Cruel sister that i am, I didn't tell amelia before her first bite that the broth gets its color from a healthy scoop of cow's blood. i deserved the punch i got after she'd eaten a few spoonfuls and i decided to tell her.