Your life is infinitely more interesting than mine. Africa is one of the many places on Earth that I've "exoti-fied," which is to say that I've created images of what it must be like that, time and again, are proven false by first hand accounts such as yours (I should know better than to trust my brain's creations in this regard as they've so often been proven wrong). For example, that you ate at a Thai restaurant floored me. But why not? There are Thai restaurants where I live and I'm not in Thailand. It shows poor thinking on my part that I would react with such surprise to a detail like this, but one of the main reasons to read about travel is to have your perceptions shaken up.

So thank you for shaking up my perceptions.

Every time I read about a pack of dogs, I think of this Tom Waits song.