This week has really gotten away from me. Between school and, well, enjoying myself, there just hasn't been enough time. Basically, I haven't done anything else other than go to school from 8 to 5 every day this week, get home, go to eat, do homework, talk to friends instead of doing homework, and then sleeping for a few hours. A few days ago a member of the Thai secret police came to interrogate all of the ISDSI students at school. This man is responsible for busting all sorts of drug rings, etc., but, because he's in the Thai government, he's wildly corrupt at the same time. He's been hassling my program for a couple years, which is completely outside his jurisdiction. There's a whole huge huge huge long story behind why he ended up at the school the other day, but basically it was to to just check things out, make sure we were who we said we were. So you'd expect something like this to be, I don't know, serious, right? You'd expect him to probe us about our reasons for coming here, our political allegiances, what countries we've been to before, and on and on. But that would be in a non-Thailand country. Seeing as this was the Thai secret police, he questioned us about our favorite fruit, and whether or not we've eaten papaya salad (a famous Thai food). Are the people nice? Are they beautiful? These are the questions he asked us and we answered in broken, confused Thai. It was beyond weird, especially once we found out what was actually going on.

Okay. So here's the deal. I leave for Mae Hong Son tomorrow morning. The course is Political Ecology of Forests, and it involves hiking through the province of Mae Hong Son, visiting different Karen villages, learning about their experiences as marginalized hill tribes. I'll be back in, like, eighteen days or so. Sometime on or around the 15 of November. Until then, I will be once again be out of communication with the rest of the world. As for now, I have plenty of things to do and things to buy before leaving tomorrow, and as such I'm going to cut this short. Sorry I didn't get more pictures up. I'll make sure to post a million when I get back from this course.

One last thing. Here's my mailing address, finally:

Noah Manger
ISDSI
PO Box 222
Phra Singh, Muang
Chiang Mai, 50205
THAILAND

Make sure to mark the outside of all packages with "Gift -- of no commercial value / personal use". Make all lists of contents vague, so that inspectors don't take things. All packages will be rummaged through. DHL is faster than normal mail, but normal mail isn't subject to arbitrary and exorbitant taxes by the Thai government (which I have to pay upon receipt). So I don't know, just use your best judgement.

Bye for now.