Bangkok miscellany

One rather shameful thing one sees a lot on the streets of Bangkok. People bring in elephants (mostly young ones, like this guy here) and walk them up and down the street and try to get people to pay them to feed the elephant. Here there are tourists doing it, but you see it in non-tourist areas, too. Very harmful to the elephants - as one cab driver told me as a very large elephant was blocking the road one night while I was riding with him, "Elephants belong in the forest." Prior to the 1997 economic crisis, when the value of the Baht went from 25B/US$1 to 50B/US$1 overnight, this was illegal in Bangkok, but now it's a way for people to make a little bit of cash.