
Thailand: Poop and Jasmine
Here’s what I told my daughter about Thailand. It smells of jasmine, I said. Dreamily. Mom, she said, three months later when we met at her uncle’s expat compound in Bangkok, it smells of poop. Poop and jasmine. It took awhile to process that. I’m embarrassed at how long it took. Then I got it. She was young and backpacking on a budget, a tiny almost imperceptible one, a minute percentage of ours. She was staying in places that charged seven dollars a night for two, with toil