Just another wallet in the crowd

Hello! I'm tourist number 4,483, 795 in Thailand. And that's just for 2005! The Thailand tourist machine is a well-oiled mechanism, providing little pleasures from home (like bacon-and-eggs breakfast or the latest pirated music CDs) for us farang who have chosen to spend our summer vacation here. At the same time, you often get the sense that the service industry would prefer if they didn't have to interact with you at all. Their motto could be "just hand over your cash and move on". Admittedly, we've been to a lot of places that tourists frequent the most, and I'm writing this from Khao San Road in Bangkok, which is the mecca for foreign travellers to the capital. I wish that just once someone would actually care about the answer to the tired questions they ask me. Or at least pretend to.