I remember a few years ago when I used to have my sanity and I would see people driving in the back of pick-up trucks and think "What Idiots! Don't they get how dangerous that is?"
Yesterday I was making my 3.5 hour (each way) trip to the dentist in a truck I borrowed and a guy flags me down. I stop the truck thinking he would want a ride. When I stopped (why do I do these things?) the guy speaks to me in Thai and happens to use 3 of the 10 words I know. Yes he wants a ride and he wants to go to the same city as I am going. He says in broken English "bring 10 friends?" Then, a whole group of kids jump into the back of the truck.
We rode the hour and a half to the town with the guy trying his best to make small talk. This involved calling his friends, telling them he was sitting next to a foreigner, a lot of laughter, a couple of times practicing the sentence with his friend on the phone, more laughter and then a question like, "Where you go?" It turns out they were a group of university students on holiday. At the end of the trip they were quite pleased to get such a long ride to their location and they decided to take many pictures of me.
You may think 9 people is a lot of people in the back of a truck, but the other day I counted the number of kids getting out of the back of a pick-up truck (which serves as a school bus). It had already made two stops and there were 41 children packed on it.
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