Where is David?

Here are some of the Thai travel videos I did for a company called Geobeats.com.

I shot and directed them, and basically produced them. It was an interesting experience working with Geobeats, mainly because it was my first paid gig as a filmmaker. Basically, I’d give the advice to anyone doing something for the first time to make sure the people you’re working with at least know what they’re doing.

After working with them, I got the feeling that they didn’t have any video production experience at all, so that meant at lot of things went wrong with this project. What I thought would take me 5 days too me instead about 20, so I wasn’t too happy about that.

Anyways, it was a good learning experience, so here are some of the videos if you’re interested. The server is a bit slow, so you might have to wait for them to download before you view.

WARNING: Slightly disturbing story
…………………………………………………

I forgot to write about this story when it happened about 2 weeks ago, but it was slightly disturbing and has stayed with me ever since, so I thought I’d share it here.

I was riding on a songthaew (see image below) in Bangkok, hanging on to the back. All the seats were taken, I was standing on the outside on the metal railing, and there were a couple of people standing inside was well. One of the men who was standing started moving his arm in a wierd jerking motion, as if in some nervous fidget or something. This guy had some thai style tattoos on him and was wearing some tattered clothes, a bit pudgy and approximately late 30’s or so. He was standing up but a bit after his arm started to shake, he tried to squat down in the songthaew as if he needed a rest. I began to get a bit nervous about what this guy was doing.

photo of songthaew, courtesy of Wikipedia


After he squatted down, he seemed to faint or something, and was about ready to roll out of the moving songthaew if it weren’t for I and a couple passengers holding him in. A short while after this, he briefly acknowledged the people who held him inside the vehicle, and then fell flat on the floor where he started shaking while lying down, not too violently, just a little bit. He did this for about a minute. Some of the passengers started alerting the driver, who stopped the vehicle and pulled it over to the side of the road. The man eventually came to, and looked as shocked as us passengers were at what happened. His tongue was slightly protruding from his mouth, as if he was biting it a little bit, but not too hard because there was no blood or anything.

The driver and another passenger helped him sit down on the side of the road, where he seemed to slightly recover and regain his senses. The driver was on his mobile phone and it seemed to me he was alerting some sort of authority, which slightly relieved me. Everything seemed to be under control, the passenger was sitting on the curb, out of harms way for the time being. He was in front of a parked car, so wasn’t in danger of getting hit or anything.

The driver got back in the car and the songthaew continued on its journey. I looked back 30 yards down the road and saw that the man had fallen over again, with his legs in the street but his head on the curb, passed out. Some other passengers let out a gasp at seeing this, and the ride was disturbingly quiet the rest of our journey. I think everyone was thinking the same thing, but no one broke the silence that bonded us in the songthaew.

For a moment, I wished I was back in America. Seeing this made me feel quite powerless, and I began to think about all the ways I could have helped this person, which then led me to make excuses about why I couldn’t do any of them.

I wish I could say there’s a happy ending to this story, but I have no idea what happened to the guy. Our songthaew continued on its journey to its original destination, the mall.