As I get closer to the 2 month mark here in Thailand, I think I can safely share some of my impressions of the place... & I got a little too into all the statistics in Microsoft Encarta...

The biggie is that this is NOT a 3rd-world country. I was truly shocked. It is officially classified as an "Upper-Middle Income Developing Economy". (I didn't know the categories had gotten so specific...)

• Everyone has access to clean water. You can't drink from the tap but the government provides free or super cheap purified water. I can get a meal for under a buck & get unlimited glasses of purified water with ice made in a government plant with purified water.
• Here I have only see half, maybe a third of the beggars I see in the US cities. And this includes in front of tourist stops! I haven't even seen a homeless person yet!
• They have a lower unemployment rate than the US.
• Thailand spends more on education than the US. Both in gross dollars & as a percentage of total government expenditure.
• The cities are clean & 99% of the population has access to sanitation. My only issue is with dog poop on the sidewalks... they need a national pick up your pooches’ poop program....
• For several years now the Thai economy has been growing at a faster rate than the US. With their government budget running in the black rather than going further into debt like ours...
• Women here appear to me to be treated as equally as they are in the rest of the developed world. Interestingly in both the US & Thailand women make up 46.2% of the work force.
• Thailand has more doctors, nurses & hospital beds, by far, than the US although the US spends 20x more on health care. Health care is highly subsidized too. The quality of medical care is currently, & has been for a decade, equal to that of the US.
• The national literacy rate is 96%.

...sorry, I can get carried away with statistics...

There are way more tourists here than I'd ever have imagined! Over 12 million tourists come here each year. It is the 18th most traveled to country in the world! I'm happy to finally have made it to a town without hordes of tourists. So the tourists are friendly now. There is this understandable, or at least I know I fall victim to it, phenomenon that the more other tourists a tourist sees, the nastier they are to each other. Go to a place where you only see a few people that look like you & everyone will go out of their way to talk to each other!

It seems the people are more playful than most. Pull Bangkok out of the picture & it seems the Thais are perpetually young... & that's a fantastic thing!

In general, Thailand is just a really easy place to be & travel in... it's so like the west & there are no starving children or many beggars... there's no risk of any psychological trauma or anything to make you look at the world differently... the vendor’s aren’t pushy, no hoards follow you, people aren’t trying to bleed you every waking moment, not everyone shouts out “hello” to the white person or asks you where you’re from... “oh, America... very good”... don’t miss that! I even had a person in a store stop another Thai from asking me that! It's just a beautiful country with tons of golden temples & friendly people.