Saxophone

I have a pet. A lizard. And a plant, but that’s a different story. But about my pet lizard… it’s a wonderful arrangement. He’s about two inches long, and has the uncanny ability to stick to the wall much in the same way that I stick to the ground. I don’t feed him, I don’t give him water, I don’t watch after, and I definitely don’t clean up after him. He just lives behind the picture frame outside my door. Every night, when I come home, there he is: hanging out on the wall a few feet from his home. I say hello, and he acknowledges me by quickly running back behind his picture frame. The next time I come out, there he is again. This has been going on for a few weeks now, to the point where I look forward to getting to see him when I come home. Maybe, if he’s not to camera shy, I’ll snag a picture.

Tonight Josh and I went out to a restaurant/pub called Saxophone– recommended by my Lonely Planet and by another traveler I met in Tokyo. I walked through the door, and suddenly felt as though I was in New Orleans– the atmosphere the decor were quintessentially Cajun, and a Thai jazz band was warming up on a small stage in the middle. We were seated at a table close to the stage, and over dinner and a few drinks we were treated to some surprisingly talented and soul-ful jazz and blues. Although the rest of the band was of mediocre talent, the lead singer drawled out the blues and burned up licks on his guitar as though he had been born black with a guitar in his hands.

Yeah. It rocked.

In other news, I think I’m becoming partially nocturnal. I haven’t been up before noon for some days now. Fortunately, my schedule allows for it: Wednesday is the only day of the week that I need to be out of the apartment before 12:00 to make it to class. Of course, I also feel like I’m living a lot more in the dark than in the ‘States, owing to the 6:30PM sunsets. But Bangkok’s like that– partially nocturnal. The sidewalks restaurants don’t close down till the wee hours of the morning, and it seems that there are just as many people up at 1:00AM as 1:00PM. I went to the mall the other morning to pick up a couple things before class. I arrived around 10:30AM, and was quite shocked to find that nothing was open. Finally, around 11:00, the mall lethargically started to come to life with vendors turning on their lights and departments stores raising their gates…