More Thai Monday

We also went to DPU, a university in Thailand with a business school that offers a DBA, which is a Doctorate in Business that is not research-focused. Sounds pretty interesting. They've got an international staff of professors, including several from the states. I think that will be the next degree for me. We'll move to Thailand and Caroline can teach English while I work on the next degree....

One big difference between this university and those in the US is that the undergrad students wore uniforms! That was interesting.

They gave us a great Thai lunch (if I'm repeating myself, please forgive me.)

We went out that night. I think to the night market? That's a crazy place. Not only can you get knock-offs of any name brand you can think of, but there are also all kinds of wacked out sex things there.

After all this traveling, it's interesting to compare the markets. All of the places we've been have the same market-type areas, and many of them at that. The locals all seem to shop there, and so do the tourists. This is really free trade at its best, with a little piracy thrown in, too.

It's amazing that so many people can get by selling the same basic product mix, but I guess when you're talking about millions of people in a small geographic area, with a healthy dose of tourists, there's a decent amount of money to go around. Not a lot, but hopefully just enough.

That said, there's a lot of poverty in Bangkok, but nothing like we saw in Cambodia and VN. If I've written this already, again I'm sorry, but Jeff, John and I noticed that each city we visited was one step ahead of the last in regard to poverty and living conditions, from Phnom Penh to Ho Chih Minh to Bangkok to Hong Kong.

In our group discussions in the combined group setting, we've wondered about what path Bangkok will take, especially given their tenuous government situation (By the way, we were actually there the day the coup happened, and rode through it. But that story is a pretty neat one, so it'll get separate coverage).

Here are picks from Monday and Tuesday. The yellow shirts are protestors on the day of the coup:

http://picasaweb.google.com/John.Purcell.3rd/ThailandMondayAndTuesday