My last days in Thailand were some of the best I’ve had in Southeast Asia. After a fun night saying goodbye to my friends in Chiang Mai, I spent six days in Bangkok with a two-day beach escape in Hua Hin.

Yet as I am typing the names of these places one thought keeps on creeping into my head: they are all completely irrelevant!

It was the perfect timing for me to be in Bangkok: three friends were there at the same time and so having fun was simply guaranteed. Besides, my couchsurfing guy happened to be such a cool person that staying with him enhanced everything – I couldn’t believe that was possible – even more.

So it was indeed a brilliant time: chill pubs, cheap whiskey, amazing music, and, most importantly, the sweetest company. My plan to fill out the famous places gap and visit some palaces I didn’t seen during my first visit to Bangkok  failed completely. What didn’t fail, though, was to significantly increase the level of nostalgia for Thailand after I have left.

However – and this is something that has crossed my mind before – I understand that all those engaging discussions with a proper element of absurd jokes could have happened anywhere. Surely, having an exciting city and its reggae bars or a nice beach with its cosy pubs does facilitate the process of having fun. And yet, what happened at a live music place in the outskirts of Bangkok or by the Gulf of Thailand could have happened, really, anywhere else.At my friend’s place close to my hometown in Lithuania, in my friend’s apartment in Toronto, or in good old Gettysburg, which could be so easily seen as a painfully boring place by the ones who haven’t studied there.

What you do when you don’t do anything – I attempted to provide a deep reflection on this issue in my previous entry about my trip to Isaan. An alternative conclusion I could have reached in that entry is the same: the place then, too, was simply irrelevant. And, to be honest, it is the same with towns that I have mentioned in at least half of my entries. Why I still mention them instead of talking about my experience in a sterile geographical vacuum? Well, because they simply occurred there. Arbitrarily, for no particular reason that could be attributed to that specific place only. Definitely, it would be difficult to do mountainbiking in a country that doesn’t have mountains but the essence – the ridiculously hard exercise and my absurd struggle to overcome it – isn’t place-specific. 

I guess it only makes sense I always insist on my blog not being a travel journal.  Because if it was – man, it would be a terrible one.