Winding up quick here, folks. As of today I only have nine days left in this godforsaken country. Things have been going, in a word, well. Not a whole lot to report on. I've managed to work myself into a nice groove between work/gym/reading/sleeping to the point where that's about all I do, which helps the time to fly by. On Friday (as in, two days ago) I went back to Mae Ta with Ryan (fellow K student) and Pookie (Thai). We went to Mae Ta five months ago for our first field course, so we thought we'd go back and spend a little time there with our old host families. It was a good trip. The ride there was amazing -- lying in the back of a pickup truck, driving through wooded mountains at night, looking out and seeing the dark forms of the mountains cut open with perfectly straight lines of fire, which everyone had set in order to prevent massive fires from ravaging the whole forest when the season only gets hotter and dryer. It was fairly breathtaking. When we got into Mae Ta later that night, Ryan and my host family (we had the same one, though at different times) was excited to see us, which was reassuring. Shortly into our stay, however, our host dad asked Ryan if his friend had ever been to Mae Ta, so we had to explain that I indeed had been to Mae Ta, and in fact had stayed with them. After we explained that, he remembered who I was and was doubly excited. The rest of the time was spent either eating their amazing food (which they grow, organically, themselves) and sleeping in various locations: Pookie's host family's farm, their house, my host family's house. It was stupidly lazy, at best. But still it was great to get back there and see them all again, not to mention the relief at them remembering who we were. Conversation was still fairly stilted, but they seemed okay with the silences, awkward as they were. We then left this morning bright and early, taking several song taews, cramped and uncomfortable, to get back home. And that was that.

I was going to take this space to relate a couple stories from the past week(s), but frankly I'm too lazy so I'll just cut the chase. The other day I was forced (not really) to open my apartment door with a credit card, which was both a supreme boost for my sense of resourcefulness as well as an equally sizeable knock against my sense of security, now knowing that I live in a place that can be easily opened by anyone with a thing piece of plastic and a little persistence. I've of course made new friends with the deadbolt.

The second story has to do with my experience at a copy shop the other day. I was at work and wanted to get a book copied (which you can do in Thailand, what with the whole lack of copyright law and everything (I love it)), so I walked the few blocks to the shop. I gave them the book and told them I had to have it back by the end of the day because I had to return it to my friend. I asked when it would be done and they said 12:30 (as in, noon). Unfortunately, I thought they said midnight, which simply would not do, so I basically argued with them for a few minutes to have them take longer on the book than they had to. They surely thought I was either crazy or just a jerk. I didn't realize my mistake until I had already left, and when I went back at 12:30, thinking maybe they just stuck to the plan despite my pleading to the contrary, they curtly replied, "No, five o'clock". Shows me right.

Like I said, nine more days.

I just posted another link: idealist.org. I just found it, but it seems to be a good place. There's great section for finding jobs/internships, which might be useful to some of you/us out there.

Oh boy -- not much going on on this front. Things have been pretty mundane the past couple weeks. As of today, I'm the only student from my group left in Chiang Mai, with the rest either home frozen in blocks of ice, or in Mae Sot, doing some humanitarian something or other. Me? I've been working at the organization that I spent my previous internship at, pulling another four-week stint or so. The work is interesting and engaging (though I can't tell ya what it is), even if it entails eight hour days spent combing the internet for information. Throw in a half hour noodle break, generous cups of coffee, and all-too-regular checks of email, Facebook, miscellaneous blogs, and the iTunes music store and there's my job. The most exciting discovery for me over the past week or so has been podcasts, which if you don't use, I recommend you do. They've been around for a couple of years or so by now, but I'll explain anyway: Basically, they're either audio or video episodes that anyone can put on iTunes and you can download them for free. You can subscribe to one, and then every day it checks for updates and automatically downloads a new one. You then put it on your iPod or just listen to it from the computer. The great thing is, a lot of major organizations with their hearts in the right place take advantage of this great medium to spread their content for free. A novel thought indeed. So that means you can find a ton of news and other types of shows from NPR, BBC, New York Times, ABC, on and on and on. I'm simply addicted, especially to the NPR quiz show Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me!. It's great for those of us who are still relatively media deprived abroad. Anyway, I'll end my podcast soapboxing there, and will leave you with a slightly more corporate blog than before.

Highlights from the past couple weeks:

A trip to Mae Sot last weekend to renew my visa. Mae Sot is a border town, on the border between Thailand and Burma. It's a pretty small place, so we all rented bikes to get around. The end result was an ecstatic midnight bike ride through the empty sullen streets that stands out as one of the more enjoyable times here in recent memory. The downside to this all was that the next day I still had to go to Burma, which never fails to just make me feel sick and haunted.

Today a moment of the bizarre: as I was walking back from the gym down one of the side streets, I noticed a traffic cop in a little smart car sort of deal, which turned out to be just a more official looking modification of a tuk tuk (itself a modified three-wheel motorcycle in an open-air cabin). The cop was driving down the road, which was packed with cars and people, blowing his furiously blowing his whistle. But that's all he was doing. Just long metallic blasts every five seconds or so -- no motion, no explanation, no wavering from his course down the road. I just kind of starred in bafflement for a little while, still walking, impatient to get home. From what I could tell, everyone else around wasn't really sure what was going on either, and everyone either ignored him or shot a puzzled sidelong glance. Once he passed me and reached the mainroad, he turned around and continued back where he came from. I tried my best to stay deliberately in front of him out of sheer annoyance, though he managed to get around my muscular frame. Once he was no more than seventy yards from the point where he last turned around, he pulled into a parking lot and turned around again, heading back down the road in the same way he was going originally. It was absolutely absurd and baffling. He was doing nothing of observable effect, just mozying on down the road, hellbent on maintaining some oddball sense of order.

The thing is, living in this place, as confusing and random as something like that can seem, you still reach a point where you cease to be surprised, and in some ways come to expect it.

This is for Quinn's grandma -- you know what to do with it. Thanks!


As for the rest of you, you'll just have to be patient.

The new and improved photo site is up and running, complete with pictures from the islands. However, it will be until tomorrow at least until I get up all the previous pictures, too (there's some up, but not all). Enjoy.

What with all my free time I've been having lately, I've been spending a lot of it on the computer, re-immersing myself in the old internet. Today I decided to do some research and dig up some good environmental websites and resources. I found a handful of good ones and posted them over on the side there. I haven't spent too much time with them yet, but they seem good, as far as I can tell. Either way, check them out. Grist is pretty solid in general. Orion has some good essays up: one about ecoterrorism ("Green Rage") and one about moving beyond cars ("Making Other Arrangements"). Both Tree Hugger and World Changing have a ton of news and information up about change actually taking place, and Tree Hugger in particular has some guides to "How to Go Green". The New York Times article is great, a good overview of the IPCC's (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change -- the most authoritative body on the subject in the world) recent report on global warming, which is basically conclusive proof that the world is getting hotter, humans are causing it, and it's going to seriously mess things up for centuries down the road. This report is basically the point at which we say "That's it, no more arguing. Period." The Driving Green site is pretty cool. It's a carbon credit system, one of many out there. Basically, you go on and enter information for either your car or a flight you're taking, and it calculates how much carbon will be released as a result. It uses this number to calculate a fee that you can pay, which they take and invest in projects (such as tree planting or farm technologies) that offset the carbon you're putting into the atmosphere. I tried it for my return flight home, and it came out to only $48. Not bad. The Ecological Footprint quiz is just something that's kind of cool if you're not too familiar with the concept. So there you go, have at it.

And I'm back from the Adang Archipelago and comfortably in Chiang Mai, settling in for the home stretch. The course was amazing. It was absolutely beautiful, in the prototypical tropical paradise sort of way, i.e. white sand, turquoise water, vibrant reefs, normalized social/ecological oppression of marginalized indigenous groups by the state and tourism, you know, everything we love. The time basically broke down as follows:

For the first week or so, we were on Lipe, which is kind of the central, most developed island of the archipelago. We stayed at one of the twenty-odd bungalow resorts there, living a pretty comfortable life laying in hammocks, eating at restaurants, snorkeling in spare time, and completing an ethnography of the island. The ethnography was really interesting, and entailed walking around for a couple days talking to resort owners, tourists and school teachers, and also the actual native inhabitants of the archipelago, the chao lay (meaning "people of the sea"). Their story is basically this: they were former sea nomads, wandering around the archipelago for most of the century, until the national park moved in and decided to declare the region a protected marine national park, and forced the chao lay to give up their maverick ways and straighten up (including a forced relocation to Lipe, where the vast majority now live). With the arrival of tourism about twenty years ago, there was all sorts of complicated land deals made, a tricky and quite unfair situation when you're dealing with a culture who had previously had no concept of land ownership. So long story short, the chao lay got kind of pushed into the center of the island, where they now live, and work for the tourism industry as boat drivers/smiling simple natives during the tourism season, and as fishermen during the non-tourism season. So as for that ethnography... that's basically what we learned, in addition to what it's like in general for them all living there, what they do, who they work for, what they think of tourism, what they think of the environment, all that. It was a fun exercise, considering we had to conduct it all in Thai.

Moving on.

After Lipe, we spent the remaining ten days or so touring the rest of the archipelago. We visited three other beaches, each of which we reached via kayak. Once there, we spent the days snorkeling and burning and the nights making funny voices and praying the tide wouldn't steal our tents. One day we went to the one remaining group of chao lay who are still trying to make their lives by wandering about the islands and collecting things and fishing ("no tourism for us!" they say). This was probably my favorite day, as I got to help a man build a temporary house out of skinny trees (temporary because they will only be at that site for the next three months and then move on), which included having a great conversation about how illegal it all is, and then a romp through the mountain side in flip flops helping him cut down some more wood and carry it back.

As far as snorkeling, we saw some really stunning reefs (minus big fish, which have all been fished out). I saw, in no particular order: a black tip reef shark, a cuddle fish (a cousin of the squid), a puffer fish (un-puffed), bat fish, butterfly fish, a ray, legions of hermit crabs, clown fish ("Nemo" fish), giant clams, sea urchins, star fish, enormous jelly fish, parrot fish, barracuda, pipe fish (like an un-curled sea horse), and probably more that I can't recall right now.

As far as kayaking, it too was really really fun. The last paddle was easily the most exciting, and probably the most physically challenging thing I've done here. It was a four hour day, with a lunch break in the middle, that included two major channel crossings. When crossing these channels, we had to withstand not only a pounding current, but intense winds that were making three-foot white caps, pushing us in exactly the direction we did not want to go. These crossings took a couple hours each or so, which was spent paddling our little hearts out and getting completely soaked by waves and spray, and playing twenty questions with Nick (who was in a double with me), in which we picked the following people: King Tut, Rasputin, Marie Curie and Peggy Guggenheim.

And that was that.

I'm working on changing my pictures over to another picture website, and the internet is slow here anyway, so you'll have to wait until probably next week before I get them up and going.

And like I said, homestretch. My program officially ends as of midnight tonight and I'll be spending the rest of the time living with six people in a four person room and working at my former internship site. I leave March 6.