A Detailed and Purely Objective Account

2007-03-05T21:34:00.000+08:00

I don't know if this country is going to let me out alive. If it does, I will be on a plane tomorrow morning at eleven a.m., and back home a day and half later. Until then I'll continue to go crazy getting everything ready. This whole ending process is rather anticlimactic, and I hate to say it, but I'm just ready for it to be over. No big ordeals necessary, no massive emotional flourishes. I've said my goodbyes and I've packed my bags. I've eaten my last meal (fried rice, boring), and I've taken my final pictures. So I guess that's it. Study abroad you say? Well it's done.

2007-02-25T14:41:00.000+08:00

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.

2007-02-19T11:35:00.000+08:00

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.

2007-02-17T20:15:00.000+08:00

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.

2007-02-15T11:57:00.000+08:00

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.

2007-02-07T10:52:00.000+08:00

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.

2007-02-05T18:41:00.000+08:00

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.

2007-02-02T17:14:00.000+08:00

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.

2007-01-12T18:33:00.000+08:00

This will be short and sweet --- and moving chronologically in reverse --- as I don't have a whole lot of time to spare, as I'm trying to get everything together to head down to the islands tomorrow for my island ecology course. It's my final course with ISDSI, which is great. And it should be a good time. I've heard it's far more about laying in the sun, snorkeling, kyaking and drinking mango shakes than any sort of trace of academic learnin'. And in all honesty, fine with me. So yes, that's where I will be, the Adang Archipelego, for the next two and a half weeks or so. I'll be back on the 31st, I believe.

This week has been bearable at best. I've had the normal rigors of seminar week (the first week of every course, before we go out into the field), which means full school days (8-5), which I haven't had to deal with in a few years, plus a fair amount of reading. Un/fortunately, I've been able to supplement my time at nights with a pirated copy of the third season of Arrested Development, arguably the most clever show to every be put on television.

For the week before this week, my mom was over here for the last week of my break, which was fun. I probably don't need to go into that too much though, considering she's the only one who reads this. Before that I just read a ton. I read these books: You Shall Know Our Velocity!, The Hours, Beloved, White Noise, and am now working on Eggers' newest, What is the What. All are good.

Before that: Arrived in Thailand --- Sophomore year of college --- First year --- high school --- middle school --- little kid --- And then I was born.

More when I'm tanner.

2006-12-26T14:31:00.001+08:00

Last night, in all our holiday joy, Nick and I decided to go out to our favorite classy joint, Berlin, for a drink or two. We were there, minding our own business, when all of a sudden the waiter comes up and hands us a paper coaster and says it's for us. We look at it, and there's a flirtatious message, of course. We ask who it's from, but who won't tell us. We find the whole thing rather ridiculous, so we decide to have some fun with it. The following images are re-creations, in sequence, of those anonymous paper coasters, shadows of a Christmas night rendevous between two dashing (only one of whom is heterosexual) American studs and two unknown Thai women, supposedly named Niel and Daniel. If it's difficult to read/see the pictures, just click on them to open up a bigger version.

Maybe we scared them away? We are truly children.

2006-12-25T21:07:00.000+08:00

New pictures up on my photo site. Heads up.

There's not a lot, mostly because I haven't done a whole lot worthy of taking pictures in the past month, and if I have, it was probably at night and I hate the flash. So you gets what you gets. They're actually mostly pictures I've taken of stuff around the city, in a half-hearted attempt to take a quality artistic photograph. A few of these I've touched up a bit on the computer, you know, full disclosure, credit-where-credit-is-due, and all.

Merry Christmas.

2006-12-24T21:26:00.000+08:00

So, as you all should now, I've been on break for a week now.

And I've done next to nothing.

But I'm quite okay with that. It's been nice to have some down time to work things over, relax, read, on and on.

But here's what I've done:

I spent nearly every day last week bumming around, trying to stretch "going to get something to eat" into something significant enough to make me feel like I didn't waste a day. All in all, I'd say I did a pretty good job. Sorry, but there's really not a whole lot else to say on that front.

I did see some movies, though. First, the good ones (which we rented): Batman (original, by Tim Burton) and Lost in Translation. I don't really need to talk about Batman do I? I liked it a lot, enough said. Moving on::::::: Lost in Translation was amazing. It was my second time seeing it, though the first time was a few years ago, and, well, in the States. Seeing it in Asia was completely different, and so much more meaningful. The movie expressed so well what it's like being in an Asian country -- how weird, alienating, confusing, and irritating it can be, and usually is. Not to mention the fact that the movie was just beautiful. It really inspired me to try to use the rest of my time on this break working on some sort of creative project, focusing on what it's like for me here and try to express some element (or all) of my relationship with this place. Well, I saw that movie last Wednesday, I think it was, and Thursday I went out and bought a notebook, because you need a new notebook for things such as this, and went to the hip hip cafe next door and set to writing. I wrote for an hour or so, the first time I had done any sort of creative writing in a while. And then, as I was walking home and then on into my night, I was just overcome with disgust for what I had written. It was garbage, sheer garbage, and I wanted nothing to do with it. A start like that has made it nearly impossible to return to the project, though I did spend a little time today taking pictures and writing. But I'll keep it at that.

Yikes.

So back to those movies, the bad ones: Deja Vu and The Holiday. Unfortunately, these were the ones we payed the big bucks to go see in the theaters. The fact that they were in the theaters also brought the plus/minus of popcorn: delicious, but ensuring the fact that I indeed would not luck out and die of starvation in the middle of one of these painful, atrocious movies. Deja Vu clearly was the unfortunate result of Jerry Bruckheimer reading, a little to quickly, a Wikipedia article on theoretical astrophysics. The Holiday was just plain unwatchable. Suffocatingly stupid. Ghha. I can't even bear to think about it. But it did provide some very very very (unintentionally) hilarious moments. Still though, hardly worth it.

And then there was the time that I went to my host family's house and made spaghetti with pesto and baguette and mozzarella and tomato for dinner. Of course they didn't like it. But that's just the kind of subtle revenge I was looking for, payback for eating the horrible food that made me think I hated Thai food for the first five weeks I was here (when now I realize that I really like it, when it's good). This ties in with a major point, here, if you'll bear with me. I might have talked about how we've learned in Thai culture classes how a major element of Thai culture is being kreng jai -- we don't have a word for it, but it's basically the act of saving face. So, if someone asks your opinion, and you don't want to hurt their feelings, you lie, and everyone benefits... some how. We basically do the same thing in the States, except I've found we do it in completely opposite ways: we just lie about different things, and are painfully blunt about others. We're not really taught this at ISDSI though, rather, they just stress how Thais are kreng jai kreng jai kreng jai kreng jai. One of the limits I've found is gifts. If you give someone a gift, or in this case make them dinner, and they don't like it, they will make little to no effort to pretend they do. Even if they get to the point of lying to say they like it, it's still so obvious that they don't. The same goes for conversation. And maybe it's just because I'm not very good at Thai, but it seems that whenever I'm talking about something, even if I'm trying to engage them in a conversation about it, if they're not interested, they just won't have any of it. That's it. Conversation over, not gonna listen. It's really frustrating, actually.

And that is the mini culture lesson.

And that is week one of winter break in Thailand.

2006-12-16T13:14:00.000+08:00

So I'm on break now. It's kind of hard to register, after having to do stuff continually for the past four months or so. But hey, time to kick back. So this as much an entry out of wanting to do one as it is out of relishing the fact that I have the time to on a Saturday afternoon.

I figured I'd take this opportunity to talk a little bit about something that's becoming more and more common here: the occassional Larry David predicament. For those uninitiated into the ways of Curb Your Enthusiasm, it is a funny show (a comedy if you will) starring Larry David, the co-creator of Seinfeld, and one of the more absurd people to walk the planet and I love him. I won't bother explaining how my experiences mirror his -- if you know the show you'll get it and if you don't you won't. Deal.

So Larry David predicament one: The past four weeks have been kind of boring, with not much to do on the weekends or at night after work. On top of that, I've had a lot of disposable money lying around, owing to the favorable exchange rate and cheap price of food. Compound that with my temporary shirking of any sort of consumer ethic (kind of ironic, no?), and you've got a situation that just begs for recreational shopping. Well, a few weeks ago I decided I wanted some new jeans. But I didn't want just any jeans, I wanted straight and narrow lowrise jeans. Unfortunately, even in Thailand that's still not the norm for men's jeans, and even if it was my skinny little fram would still not suit them well. So naturally I decided to look into women's jeans. And so I went to the department store (which is just like any JC Penny, Marshall Fields, etc. in the States), and was looking at the Wranglers section. The first time I went, I had a very helpful sales woman who, after I asked if they had any men's jeans that were straight and skinny, directed me to the women's section. She gave me some, I tried them on, and I liked them. But I didn't want to buy them just yet, so I told her I'd come back later after thinking about it. A few days later, I did go back. Except this time there was a different guy working. I pretended to show interest in the men's jeans, just to break the ice, before making my way to the women's section. The guy followed me over, telling me in Thai that they were women's jeans. I said (in Thai), that I understood and that I liked them more anyway. He must have thought I was completely stupid (as do most Thai people), because he kept repeating it, and then said it in English. I was annoyed and told him to not worry about it, and so he just walked away, quite miffed. And so I took a pair, tried them on, found them too short, and returned to find another pair. When I came out, the I said they were too short and he replied curtly "Because they're for women". So so so rude. And so I left, completely bothered. The nerve of this snottly little twenty-eight year old Thai man with bad acne and braces telling me I can't buy the jeans I want. I decided I would just come back later when he's not there. So I went back a week later or so, and scouted out the situation from afar. I could practically hear the frumpy tuba theme from Curb bump-bump-bumping the background. And sure enough, there he was, smuggly lording over the Wranglers section, ready to reinforce prohibitive gender roles on the drop of a dime. And so just like that I left. And then I came back later yet. And he was still there. And so I left. And that's where I'm at today. I clearly can't return and try some more on and try to buy them from that man. It's not so much that he won't let me, but he's just an enemy now, and I'm vowing, with Larry David as my witness, to uphold this spontaneous grudge against this low-level retail worker abusing his power. It's a matter of principle, dammit.

There's another similar predicament, but I'm running out of time on this computer, so I'll have to save that for another day, of which there will be plenty, as I ain't got nothing to do.

2006-12-13T12:39:00.000+08:00

Before I dive into this tail of seismic happenings, I feel I have to preface it with some zoological background (if you don't feel like reading this opinion piece on the virtues of certain birds and would rather get to the part of how I almost died (YES IT'S TRUE!!!) then skip ahead). It's become common knowledge among the people I'm with here that I'm an outspoken opponent of animals. That's right, I said it, I don't like animals. None of them. I can tolerate certain ones, and I am interested in them from afar, but as soon as the start interacting with me, affecting my life in anyway, I generally, without qualms, just dislike them. Cats, dogs, mice, birds, bats, you know, the usual suspects. But since coming to Thailand I have a new enemy, who has quickly climbed the list to the top: the rooster. I'm pretty confident that there's no animal more annoying, more purely, excrutiatingly bothersome in its general comportment than the rooster. In the States, where we don't typically live with roosters, we are privileged enough to maintain the romantic illusion that roosters are Nature's Kind Alarm Clock, that they crow once a day, at sunrise, of course. After living with roosters, I now understand that they are alarm clocks in a way, except instead of being able to be turned off, they are endlessly put into snooze mode. Thus, not only do they give a proud cockadoodledoo at sunrise, but they give the same, gut-wrenching, Lord-Take-Me-Now squeel consistently for the first few hours of the day (usually beginning around four or five AM), and then continue at irregular intervals for the rest of the entire day, in addition to the crows they frequently emit in conversation with the other local roosters. I had to deal with this at my host family, as our neighboors raised them. And then when I lived in the villages I witnessed it on a whole new scale, as everyone in the village raised them, so when morning came I was typically woken up by painfully loud and dischordant orchestra of crowing. With the move to my apartment, an eighth story number in the middle of downtown Chiang Mai, I thought I had seen the last of my rooster mornings. But no. There's one lousy bird that lives across the street, and nobly carries on the tradition of his forefathers. Amazingly enough, the crow is able to cross the street, rise hundreds of feet in the air, penetrate concrete and glass, and still be loud enough to wake me up in the morning. I hate it, naturally, but I've learned to deal with it in the morning. Last night, however, the rooster decided to start crowing at around midnight, issuing his screach every ten seconds or so for a good five minutes. So there I was, awake in bed, unable to fall asleep, and now on top of it all I had to deal with that rooster.

And then the room started to shake. I wasn't so sure at first, as I was a little in-and-out of it that night, but sure enough, yes, the room was shaking. My bed was shaking. The bed next to me was shaking. Well, not so much shaking as eerily swaying.

It was an earthquake.

We were having an earthquake.

We were having an earthquake and I was on the eight floor of a concrete building. Once the swaying stopped, which only took fifteen seconds or so, and I had my wits about me, I ran into the main room, looked out the window, didn't notice any widespread devastation / rivers of lava / mushroom clouds billowing in the background, and went through the catalogue of saturday morning public service announcements I keep in my brain. Despite growing up in Michigan, the "What to do in case of an earthquake" card came right up: a) stand in a doorway, bracing yourself, or b) get under a table. I did neither, but I was proud that I had that sort of trivial capacity. Instead I threw some clothes on and went in the hall, where I found the other students. We all double checked to make sure the others felt the building shake too, and of course we all did. So we talked a bit, calmed down, theorized the possible large scale sources of such a tiny tremor, and of course joked about it. For the record, we have now joked our way successfully out of 1) a coup d'etat, and 2) an earthquake. So long story short, I've asked around and looked on the internet and it seems it was no big deal at all. It was an undersea earthquake in Indonesia, but was too far below to cause a tsunami. So all is well.

So what do roosters have to do with all of this? Why did you waste time reading about them when you could have been reading about my lived experience with complex tectonic processes? Well I was just thinking that the rooster was probably predicting the earthquake (you know how animals can do that, right?), and so thought it should go in the story. I also really do just hate roosters.

GEOLOGY LIVES!!!!!!!!

2006-12-08T17:22:00.000+08:00

It's been a while, no? Sorry, I've been busy activating. As in, that which is done by an activist. Work has been great. Great and mundane. But delightfully mundane. As this is my last week, I'm working on compiling all the research I've done over the past three weeks into (what will eventually become) a hefty ten page (single-space) memo, for use by the staff here. It's really satisfying putting it together, though writing a paper on "The Processes and Related Environmental Effects of Mining [confidential]" sounds like one of those absurdly hyperbolized papers that teachers on television shows assign kids for screwing up. One of those "you owe me ten thousand words on [mundane topic of your choice] by next week" / "but it's the weekend of the big game!!!" sort of deals. For all you teachers out there, I openly endorse such assignments. They students will hate you, but come on, it's really funny.

But I have been doing other things as well. As far as work has gone, I got to attend a conference and workshop type event for a current campaign. It was very interesting, seeing how all these different activists came together and started hammering out a cohesive plan. And then when it was all over we all went out to dinner and I got to split a bottle of brandy with [identities and ethnicities withheld for confidentiality] (Prize awarded to the person who can come up with the best joke. Points will be determined based on the degree of clever and incendiary social commentary, not on shallow, colonialistic maintenence of stereotypes surrounding marginalized and ethnic peoples [this is gonna be a lot harder now huh without me saying what the were]). But I won't suffocate you with details because: a) I don't want to bore you (even though you shouldn't be bored and if you are you're a touch on the cold-hearted side), and b) I'm kind of unsure about how much it's safe to divulge, given the sensitive nature of the people involved. This last part goes to a lot of my work here. And I'm really not trying to build it up as some sort of espionage adventure, I just don't really know what's kosher as far as writing things in a public space. That's all.

Aside from work, though, it's pretty much been anotherday-anotherdollar sort of life for me. I don't have a whole lot of time and energy to go out and explore, and I don't even really want to that much anyway. I don't really have any Thai friends or anyone to help me get into the culture here a little more, which is unfortunate. It also means my Thai is really starting to suffer, going unpracticed save for the rare time when a salesperson engages me in Thai rather than broken English.

This week also saw the official passing of the "90 days left" point. My program will end in less than sixty days, but I will be staying in Chiang Mai for a month extra, probably doing some work back at my organization. It's weird though, seeing myself pretty neatly in the middle of my time here. I'm sure I've written it before, and even if I haven't I'm sure you can all assume, that it's passed remarkably fast (see the December 1 entry of juliainecuador.blogspot.com for a terrific account of how repetition and routine have affected the passing of time abroad).

And then there's the upcoming holidays. From the look of things, you'd think Thai people love Christmas. But really it's probably just another case of them being all about some fragmented and diffused concept from Western culture without really having a damn clue what it means. And can you blame them? It's also an issue of a lot of the businesses decking the halls (read: malls piping out the Christmas tunes to get shoppers in the spirit for something completely irrelevant), while everyone else doesn't really pay attention, except for the loads of tourists here on their holiday vacation. It's kind of frustrating, but it's really cool in a sick sort of way. Just seeing how such a vapid and senseless holiday can be seen for all its vapid-senseless-ness once its taken out of the normal cultural context. That being said, I look forward to having the loneliest, most prototypically pathetic Christmas imaginable, hopefully spending it in an empty restaraunt eating a too-small portion of noodles. I only wish that I could walk past the warmly lit homes with the views of the families reveling in love and holiday cheer inside, and then listen to the faint echoes of carollers down the street as I chew my food and mull over the painful alienation from it all. But unfortunately that won't be here, so I'll have to make it up. Regardless, I say that because, even though I know you'll now pity me, I think the whole thing will be very funny. After all, how often could something that splendidly pathetic and cliche happen to me? I know! It's hilarious. But I'm jumping the gun a little bit on the holiday writing. I should have saved it for the Very Merry Christmas edition of the blog.

And with that I've effectively killed the last hour of work and it's time to go home.

2006-11-27T13:18:00.000+08:00

I need to make an important correction. I had previously captioned one of my photos as "Ninja from the future" in reference to my Halloween costume. I actually was an Indian from The Future, and should have labeled the picture so. Apologies for any confusion/disappointment.

2006-11-25T21:11:00.000+08:00

This week I started my internship at an organization in Chiang Mai. So far it has just been an amazing experience. I'm working on a research project by myself on the environmental effects of mining to be used in a possible advocacy campaign in the future. It might not be the most interesting or engaging material, but it is really great getting the chance to do something like this, to be working in a place like this with such amazing people. Working there has definitely helped give me some guidance as far as what I want to do in the future, career-wise. I feel like someone who grew up loving medicine and the human body, and then found out after twenty years that "doctor" is an actual occupation. I'm just amazed that this is what people can actually do. I'm pretty excited right now. Also, I spent today, Saturday, playing soccer with the staff from the office as well as the students that are currently attending the activist school that they run. It was fun, though I obviously have nothing on willey Burmese fellas when it comes to football. The funny thing about the whole affair is how seriously they take it. Today was the first day of the yearly tournament-type thing (kind of like offices have softball leagues in the States), and it's apparently a big enough deal to warrent a referee and professional uniforms, shirts and shorts. My team donned the uniform of Chelsea Football Club and our opponents went as Liverpool. It was quite goofy.

Apart from that, not much is going on. I've just been taking the lack of school work as an opportunity to take things easy. Last night we went to a very very very good Thai restaraunt, managing a delicious dinner and drinks for under ten dollars, which is expensive. It did help me put my unease about Thai food to rest, as I realized that good Thai food is AMAZING, and it's the other stuff that just ain't so hot.

So I'm set to be in Chiang Mai for the next month and a half or so, first working at my internship and then break and then going to the island course in January.

I posted my mailing address for a reason...

2006-11-16T18:00:00.000+08:00

I've just added a wealth of photos the my photos site, from both this trip and the last one. It's too difficult right now to put captions on all of them (I already did a few) so you'll have to interpret them yourselves. It took me a solid three hours in front of an iMac at a coffee shop to do it, so you better enjoy. There's hundreds more where these came from.

2006-11-15T12:14:00.001+08:00

Well all, I'm back. Just about. As of now I'm still in the lovely, commodified, tourist kitsch-drenched city of Mae Hong Son, but I will be back in Chiang Mai later today. Say, six o'clock or so. We wrapped up our tour of P'gaganyaw (pronounced: Ba-Gin-Yaw, the proper term for the Karen hill tribe) villages in Mae Hong Son province, which is in the Northeast of Thailand. I have absolutely no idea how to condense such an incredible, complex, insightful experience into a handful of words, so bear with me. Basically, the P'gaganyaw are a hill tribe, of which there are many, but they are the largest, and also most politically empowered. However, they still face face a fair amount of conflict with the government. They live in the mountains and still maintain many elements of their traditional way of life, such as weaving and rotational agriculture. Rotational agriculture is a fairly major one. You may know it as slash and burn agriculture, and probably learned about it (and maybe how "bad" it is in middle school social studies). Well, it's not bad, and in fact it is amazingly ecologically sustainable, as well as often providing the P'gaganyaw people with a healthy, self-sufficient livelihood. So back off. Perhaps the biggest lesson I learned, which I didn't necessarily expect to get, was in seeing how they are able to negotiate a nuanced and empowering relationship with modern forces, such as technology, culture, and government. They do not need to be shielded from these forces, as many Westerners like to think, reducing the people and their culture to a two-dimensional romanticized charicature. Howeveer, nor should they be forced to modernize and develop along traditional top-down models, which has often been the other, more common, alternative. Rather, living in these villages, seeing how they incorporate everything from televsision to GPS to modern materials to Thai schools to government positions (and so on down the list) into their so-called "traditional" way of life just convinced me of their ability as people to take charge of these issues, and what's more, in so doing, strengthening and empowering themselves politically, culturally and ecologically. This might all seem uninteresting or unremarkable to you all, but coming away with this understanding is fairly significant to me.

As far as the non-"academic" side of things, which is impossible to really separate from everything else, the trip was amazing. I stayed with a total of five wonderful P'gaganyaw families. We stayed in the villages (in order): Hua Nam, Nam Hoo, Huay Koong, Huay Hee, and Huay Tong Kaw. We stayed in each village for two to four nights, spending the days either in the field learning from village members about their ecological systems or political structures, or simply spending the day with our families, harvesting rice or just idling the time away. We would then hike for six to eight hours in between villages, going through spectacular green mountains or wading through rivers. My time was filled with so many little things that are just impossible to recount in any fair way. But just to give you an idea: there was a cat who I'm sure was convinced it was wearing an invisibility cloak, a seven year old boy with an unwieldy passion for rockpaperscissors, teaching English with Nick and Aaron in a school, herds of water buffalo roaming around and two AM, being freezing cold in Thailand, eating flying squirrel and chicken organs (rather, avoiding them at all costs), communicating surprisingly well when Thai was a second language to all involved, climbing Doi Pui (the highest point in the province), swimmin in rivers, a ridiculous fat and sassy host family, the father of which was an important governmental representative for the village but nonetheless wore a huge fleece blanket as a do-rag or wandered around in nothing but a teal spandex briefs, amazing stars (stellar, even), an adorable two year old boy with a cleft pallette named Hero, our hilarious and unfathomably jovial Thai guide Pi Wissain who looked like a forty-year-old Thai Ben Levick, and so on and so forth.

And whew. What more can I say. As much as I have loved it here, I long for Chiang Mai. And I am so happy to say that I will be there for the next two months, which will encompass my internship and a radical activist organization and my winter break, with adventures and yoga to fill in the gaps.

Here's to Rumsfeld gettin what he had coming to him, may he suffer every ounce of it. Cheers!

2006-10-29T22:17:00.000+08:00

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.

2006-10-25T22:42:00.000+08:00

I just posted a hand full of photographs from the trip. I planned on more, but then I realized how tired I am and the computer was going slow. So for now you'll have to deal with ten very random pictures, in no order of importance or chronology. But it's better than nothing, right? Also, that picture of Thai Grace doesn't do the comparison justice. [One of the girls at UHDP looked like Grace, my sister, when she was four]. I'll see if I can find one where it's more apparent. Look.

2006-10-25T22:01:00.000+08:00

The following post was written a good three or four days ago, but for some technical reason I wasn't able to post it. But here it is.

I'm really quite busy, these days. Moving in to wonderful appartments, roaming the town, eating international food, buying hip but slightly androgenous clothing, cutting my hair, late-night carousing, et cetera et cetera. The downside of this overwhelming fun is that I'm quickly falling away from all those things I experienced for the past three weeks. So I'll do my best to quickly fill you all in.
First, we went to the Upland Holistic Development Project in Fang, where we stayed for 10 days or so. It was a small institute in the country that focused on developing sustainable agriculture methods for local upland farmers. While there we spent our days doing exercises, such as counting plants, studying soil, and in general exploring the grounds. At night we relaxed in the bunk houses and coped with a creeping sense of immobility and boredom. It was at UHDP that I witnessed the slaughtering of a massive pig, as an illustration of the role pigs play in local culture. The slaughter was quite incredible. As I listened to the death wails for minutes on end until it fell silent and still, and then watched as it get skinned, decapitated and split open, I saw the distinction between animal and meat completely collapse. It's something that we just don't register as Americans so disassociated with the origins of meat (and food in general), and it's something I don't think I could have ever understood without actually experiencing that transformation. I will return to being a vegetarian upon my arrival in the States. On a lighter note, there were many adorable village children running around (children of the families who live and work at UHDP), and they loved to be tossed, spun around, and all sorts of fun that can happen when one person is four times larger than another. Also, while in Fang, we visited three hill tribe villages, which were all great experiences in their own ways. The most story-worthy one was Tisae's village. Uncle Tisae is a one thousand year old man who smokes a pipe, sings and dances, has a spirit tree that is the most beautiful tree I have ever seen, and planted an agroforest because the idea occured to him in a dream. When we visited, he took us on a tour of this agroforest, which occupies the mountains the villge is on. Whereas the ancient man was able to sprint through in knee-high rubber boots, the rest of us, full backpacks included, barely managed to survive. The climb was easy enough. The tough part came on the descent, which took us down a 45 or more degree path, consisting entirely of friction-less mud and spike covered plants. On one of my many falls I happened to grab one of these plants, and ended up with, literally, my whole left hand filled with thorns. I was able to pick nearly all of them out, at least if they were still on the outside. Many managed to go all the way in, and now, as I sit typing this, you can still see them in my palm. It was fun as hell.

Whew.

So then we went to Mae Ta, which is a small town south of Chiang Mai. About forty or fifty years ago, the formerly traditional, subsistence based community became invaded by industrial agriculture. The farmers bought into the false promises and planted chemically intensive monocrops for export. So basically, whereas they used to grow food that could feed them and their families in ways that did not damage the earth and were economically viable, they were then farming only one or two crops (which could not feed a family) and which destroyed the earth with the chemical pesticides and fertilizers and put them in insurmountable debt. And then, about 15 years ago, members of the community started to band together, with a little bit of assistance from an NGO, formed a co-op, and began to make the switch to sustainable, organic farming methods. The family I stayed with owned less than two acres of land, but they grew a many many many types of plants. Because they didn't put in chemically based fertilizers, pesticides, and regularly rotated their crops, the land was healthy and fertile, which was completely different, they said, than it was with monocropping. They ate only food they grew, with the only exception being pork. Whatever they didn't eat, they sold at a villager-run organic market in Chiang Mai every saturday, which provided them with a healthy income. It was just so amazing to see a group of people so empowered, and at the same time doing something so ecologically sustainable. It was living testament to the problems of the conventional system, and the potential and value in sustainable, local agriculture. While in Mae Ta, I also got to harvest rice. This too was amazing, standing with an aching back in the middle of gleaming golden fields, surrounded by brilliant green mountains on all sides, working along side Thai people who I couldn't understand and who like to take breaks every hour to eat fruit and make toys out of the rice stalks. Just too much. I also shared my homestay with a Thai student from Chiang Mai, who was perhaps the most annoying person I've ever met. His name was Jib, and he deserves a post all his own, so I'll save it.

There's plenty more that I did and can't remember or that I did and don't want to write about. But this should give you all an idea of what I did for the past few weeks. It was very very very fun, rewarding and inspiring.

I will be in Chiang Mai through next week, and will leave the following Monday for Mae Hong Song. Congratulations if you've read this far. Go Tigers.

2006-10-18T16:34:00.000+08:00

Well I'm back. The expedition was amazing. I'll write aaaaall about it later, when I don't have a ten page paper to write for the morning. As for now, just know that I'm having a wonderful time, and I'm so happy to be back in Chiang Mai. No major injuries to speak of, except a major bee sting while riding in a song taew and a handfull of thorns from slipping while chasing a one thousand year old man down a muddly mountain. I still have a few stuck in my hand, but I can't feel them anymore. My back is also a little sore from harvest rice for two days. All in all some good times. I learned a ton.

On a completely unrelated note. Upon my return to Chiang Mai five hours ago, we quickly ran to the computers to find out the status on the baseball playoffs. And can I just say... YOU HAVE TO BE FUCKING KIDDING ME! I have loved the Detroit Tigers my whoooole life. Twenty years, twenty painful, heartbreaking years. I leave the country for less than two months and they go to the World Series. After twenty years of watching, I'm not there to see Kenny Rogers pitch 15 shutout innings. After twenty years of watching I'm not there to see Curtis Granderson and Criag Monroe explode in the playoffs. After twenty years of watching, I'm not there for Magglio Ordonez's three-run walk-off homerun to complete the sweep. What kind of absurd cosmic mixup is this? I'm completely giddy with excitement and overcome by disappointment at not being there at the same time. I've spent the last hour and a half or so watching the highlights and reading the boxscores in an internet cafe, which has actually done quite well to suffice. I'm jealous of all you who have gotten to watch some fantastic baseball. Also, I should be able to manage to watch some of the World Series, the games that take place on the weekends at least. This will require going to a bar or renting a hotel room in the early morning, but it will definitely happen. You probably all think I'm ridiculous for writing about this instead of my experiences living with a holistic and empowered organic community, or about learning what sustainability means for the environment and societies, or about all the beauty I've seen in the land and the people here in Thailand. Well... whatever.

But really. I love Thailand right now.

2006-09-29T19:59:00.001+08:00

Well it's been quite a hectic week. It was the first week of my Agroecology course, so we spent it in Chiang Mai, going to school. Except unlike the previous weeks, I had a hefty amount of reading to do each night, with a paper and reflections thrown in to boot. So, of course, I spent my time doing homework in my room rather than spending time with my host family or exploring the city. "Why are you drinking coffee at 8 o'clock at night?" my host mom would ask, and I'd try to explain, to her disbelief, how I was actually required to read for hours. The thing is, Thai students don't really do homework. The most they might be assigned is to memorize a chapter or do some review sheets, which, I get the impression, many don't even do. So the possibility of someone staying up late to read academic articles is fairly unusual. I'm pretty burnt out now, but I have the weekend to regroup before I head off to Fang on monday.

One of the most high stress situations in Thailand is eating with the host family, which for better or worse, happens every single day. Often twice. Thai meals are set up so that each person has a plate of rice, and then there are three or four dishes on the table, from which everyone just scoops a little bit at a time until they are done. Some of the dishes I've had have been incredible, and I'd eat a ton, maybe even getting a second helping of rice. Others have been, well, really really un-stomach-able. Usually there will be a couple of each, but many nights I'll be faced with only the latter. On these nights, therefore, rather than eating until I have had my healthy fill I simply make a hardnosed effort to somehow erase the rice on my plate as efficiently as possible, taking as small an amount as is polite of curry or animal with as much rice as can fit on a spoon. As if this delicate pallette negotiation weren't difficult enough, there's the added pressure of being with my family, who, at every meal and for every dish, forcibly question "Arroy mai [is it delicious]?" to which there is only one possible answer: "Arroy mak mak [it is very delicious]!" Depending on the way this is said, it may arouse scepticism, which then necessitates eating even more in order to prove that I looooove it. Usually, if there is a couple dishes I like and a couple I don't, I can focus on the ones that I do like, that is, until they notice my lopsided eating patterns and push the other dishes in front of my, demanding (very very nicely) that I try. I'm often asked to try a dish just seconds after starting my first, before I have even had a chance to get there on my own. I know this sounds pretty harsh, but bare in mind (as I tell myself every night as I buckle down at the dinner table) that this is all done out of love and concern. Nonetheless, it is an incredibly high pressure and stressful situation, even on the nights when I am eating something that is actually "arroy mak mak". When I am feeling my most overwrought at my eating situation, I think about the sadistic pleasure I would get, subtly forcing a Thai person in America to choke down a cold bowl of Frosted Flakes for breakfast rather than freshly grilled pork, boiled vegetables and rice (which they usually eat, and which is, actually very tasty, even for breakfast). Oh, I just remembered: tonight we had boiled chicken. The pivotal moment came when I noticed there in the bowl with all other shreds of meat were two feet (okay, I've eaten before) and a shrivelled little head that looked unusually human. It was kind of tough to eat the rest of the meal, and now I'm a little hungry.

All in all though, frustrations with the program and the difficulty of living in a foreign country aside, I'm doing fairly well. My language continues to progress and I can have basic conversations in Thai. I'm going to spend tomorrow bumming around with friends and shopping for the expedition. I will return October 19 (I believe), which will hopefully bring me in before the playoffs are over, so I can at least read about the games. If not, cheer the Tigers on for me, and pleeeease tape the games for me (I'll be sure to remind the necessary people later).

2006-09-23T13:05:00.000+08:00

So I finally got around to putting some photos up. You can find them by clicking on the 'My Photos' link to the left, which will take you to my photo site. Thailand photos are in the album 'Thailand - September(ish)'. It takes a fair amount of time to load the pictures on, so I had to do some picking and choosing, and unfortunately there's not a lot. But it should give you an idea of the kind of deprived and desperate life I'm leading in a developing country.

2006-09-21T20:32:00.000+08:00

So far I have to say the best part about living in a country undergoing a coup d'etat is the jokes that inevitably come out of it, most of which were in fact true statements. We got to say things all day long like: 'Sorry I didn't do my homework, there was a coup...' and 'My mom said I can't go to the gym after school today, because there's a coup d'etat and all'. The last one was mine, and it was true. Maybe it's because Thailand has no snow that they have coups -- otherwise there's no way for students to just get a free day here and there. A common saying in Thailand is 'Mai pen rai' which roughly translates to 'forget about it' or 'no big deal'. At the beginning of 'coup day', as we called it, we were all wondering -- can you mai-pen-rai a coup d'etat? It turns out that you can, and most did. Not only did our head instructor basically joke it off, at least as far as a legitimate safety concern, but we found out later that many Thais were going up to the tanks and soldiers surrounding the government building in Bangkok, taking pictures and putting flowers all over. We saw many troops just hanging out and joking around... with their assault rifles. This officially puts 'coup d'etats' up at the top of the list of things you can mai pen rai, just beating out the death of your youngest child (true story: one of my friend's Thai teachers told of how her child died, and when the students reacted sympathetically, she just said 'mai pen rai'). We're wondering how much higher you can really go, as far as what can be mai-pen-rai-ed. Further jokes were made about the likely polite and 'unoffending' nature of the coup, with the invading military officers appologizing profusely for seizing control of the government, dismantling the constitution and dissolving all elected government. Malaysia has already coined the Thailand coup 'Coup Lite' -- all the military seizing of control, but none of the unsightly violence. This is the eighteenth time it has happened since Thailands switch to democracy in the 1930s. It also conveniently fell on the same day that we were scheduled to have a lecture on Modern Thai Politics. Naturally, the lecture centered around the day's events, which only made it a million times more interesting, and was very useful for actually giving us an idea of what's going on. If anyone's interested, I'd encourage you to just find a New York Times article about it, all the ones I've seen so far have been pretty comprehensive.

Right now my Thai family is watching Mr. Bean on DVD. Yesterday one of my uncles came with about six pages of printed out comics (I forget what it's called, it's the one with the birds at the bar in the tree) and asked me to translate them. I also just heard 'Holla Back Girl' come from my host brother's phone, but I don't think Thais understand 'Awwww dis my shit...'. It's like I never even left the States.

I have a three day weekend now, because my first course just ended. The next one I start is Agroecology, so the week after next I'll be going a few hours north of Chiang Mai to Fang, where I will study the more ecological side of agroculture. Unfortunately this will interefere severely with my following the Tigers in the playoffs, which I can only assume is going to happen.

2006-09-20T08:50:00.000+08:00

And some times you wake up and you find out your country has a undergone a military coup d'etat. (Ask your teachers what that means).

Everything is safe so far. There hasn't been any violence and there isn't supposed to be any.

Nobody here is really sure whether this is a good thing or bad thing. The country is completely split -- half loves the (former) prime minister, and half hates him.

So basically don't worry. This is exciting above all else.

2006-09-16T10:09:00.000+08:00

Last night I ate a chicken foot. It was in a soup in a Chinese restaraunt. It was bony without much meat and tasted exactly like the rest of the chicken. Despite the fact that we thought we were able to communicate with the waitress fairly well in Thai, and even pointed to what we wanted on the menu, we hardly got everything we ordered. But we did get a chicken foot.

Aside from that.

Birthdays in Thailand are apparently really really good. I gave alms to nine monks, prayed to a Buddhist statue, had two cakes at school, talked with amazing Burmese activist students, went out to dinner with my family (plus some) and was given a yellow 60th anniversary king shirt an elephant shirt and a stuffed animal dog, and then the next night (the night of the chicken foot) did a fair bit of carousing with friends.

Today I'm going to hike up to Doi Suthep -- a temple on a mountain. It's one of the more famous sites in Chiang Mai.

2006-09-09T18:50:00.000+08:00

Sorry for the lack of updates recently. I've been doing a lot. Last weekend my school took us all to a beautiful national park, which included, among other things, a one-hundred foot waterfall. I walked right up underneath it, and it was, obviously, amazing.

This past week has been a blur. I feel pretty well adjusted and in a good swing as far as family and school goes. I've been going to a gym with friends after school, which has been a good way to do something more personal, rather than diving right back in to the family situation after school. I've also, as a result, been in a much better state for dealing with the fam afterwards.

Friday we went rock climbing with school. And it wasn't like normal school trips where you only get to do the cool thing once because there's so many people. We all got to do many climbs and by the end I was fairly sore and scratched up.

Today, Saturday, some of us students went about an hour outside of town to go bamboo rafting. It ended up being one of the more exciting parts of the trip so far. The rafts were about three feet wide and twenty feet long. We fit about four people on each one, and steered with the help of two huuuge bamboo poles. We went over many rapids and on more than one occassion got thrown forward by running in to a rock. The worst time came when my raft hit a huge rock in the middle of the river. The raft had previously hit a submerged rock, which broke the bamboo that was holding the front together. When we hit the new rock, the boat got completely stuck, while water pounded on it and nobody could hardly swim or walk enough to get a good grip on it. Eventually, after breaking the bamboo rod in the middle, we were able to free the raft, which was by that time nearly decimated. We also broke several of the steering sticks, as they got caught in rocks in the river bed and we were carried away. It was an absolute blast, especially without any lifejackets, instructors or contact with anyone. We were pretty much just on our own to get down the river, and thankfully nobody got hurt.

I'm off to enjoy a bit of the Chiang Mai night life.

2006-08-30T21:41:00.000+08:00

Today was wonderful, I really got to take some good steps into life here. I've been going to school at the instituted for the past few days now, which consists of taking classes in Thai (with a teacher and four other students) in the morning, and then doing some sort of orientation in the afternoon. Today, though, we went out and took a minitour of Chiang Mai. We went to a small culture and history museum, and then to a market, where we had to do a scavenger hunt of sorts, which had us trying all sorts of exotic meats... they love meat. All of it. And I'm learning to love it to... because sometimes that's all there is to eat. Sausages, meat balls, fried chicken, fried pork, fish (right off the dead animal), octopus, shrimp, boiled pork. The site of meat still in it's animal form doesn't even bother me anymore, either, because it's pretty normal. At the market we had to eat an insect. My group chose dried silk worms, which turned out to be pretty good. Very salty, kind of like little potato chips. I enjoyed buying things, because I got to speak Thai to the shop owners, which really makes it real. So anyway, that was the market.

Normally, at least the first two days of school, my host mom would pick me up from school. But I convinced her that today I would be able to take the song taew (literally 'two seats' because it is a pickup truck with two benches in the bed -- an ingenious form of public transportation for less than 30 cents a ride). I take the song taew in the morning wiht a cousin, but today would be the first time I took it alone. I realized I had to do it after I started getting the impression that my host mom thought I was inept at everything I tried (there's many examples to back this up... but most of them were just simple mistakes that couldn't be explained as such due to language/cultural barriers... and I am very klutzy on top of that). So anyway, I built up the moxy to take the song taew by myself today, and it was great. First, I had to cross the 'superhighway', which means a road that Thai people drive on like they normally would -- which is fairly crazy -- except very very fast. But I made it ok. I then waited for the song taew, and was able to finally identify it by using what little I had learned to read the sign (written in Thai) which said that it was heading down Mae Rim road. So I hailed it, asked in Thai if it was going down Mae Rim, the driver said yes, and I went to climb in the back. The back, however, was completely full, maybe 15 people in the bed of a pickup truck, including three or foor standing on the back, holding on. There was no room. But then the driver and the Buddhist monk sitting next to him in the front seat moved over, and I was able to climb in the front. So that's how I road home, squished next to a Buddhist monk. The driver asked me a couple basic questions in Thai which I was able to answer, which was fun. The real twist came when I couldn't remember where I had to get out. I eventually decided to get out at a place that I recognized and though twas close to home. It wasn't. So I walked maybe a kilometer (do the conversion), and I could tell I was getting close, when a normal pickup truck pulled up next to me. It honked, so I moved away. Then a woman got out and told me to get in. I kind of recognized her, but I definitely recognized the man driving as an uncle. I asked where they were going and they said home. So I hopped in the back with their two little girls and we got home ok. The only unfortunate part about the whole thing is that I had planned on hiding the whole getting off early part from my host mom, in order to save some face, but that wasn't going to happen anymore. But she just thought the whole thing was funny. Whew... that was a long story -- sorry if it bored you. I just thought it to be the first noteworthy thing to happen to me yet, punctuated by the lovely orange-clad monk I sat next to.

Anyway. I still love it here, and I'm definitely starting to settle in, which is both good and bad. Bad in the sense that some of the initial excitement has worn off, but good in that I am starting to feel comfortable. The language is coming more easily, and I love learning to read and write it (Thai is written in different characters that look like this: ไป (which means to go), and รน่ฟสากสาฟำสาสืก (means nothing to speak of). I'll leave it at that.

Noah

2006-08-27T21:16:00.000+08:00

It's telling that one of the first words that I have learned is 'leum' which means 'forget'. It mostly comes from the time when, during my first full day in this country, I forgot my credit card and box-with-the-charger at the cell phone store in the mall... which is quite a distance away. Don't worry mom, I got it. Kung Mae (host mom) and I just had to drive all the way back to the mall later that night. It's funny... they frequently say how I have a good memory... referring to how I remember words, but they say just as much if not more how I always forget things. Every time we go out now, Kung Mae reminds me to make sure I have everything in my bag before we leave. In a joking sort of way.

We went to a big walking market today, which they set up every sunday, and where you can buy all sorts of handmade stuff. It was very cool. Among the most notable items was a dog wearing a tie with the Playboy logo on it. I guess that's what happens when you let all the dogs have their testicles (which they do).

- Noah

2006-08-26T11:44:00.000+08:00

Well I made it -- it's my first morning here, at my host family's home. We arrived in Chiang Mai yesterday around 10 AM, and were quickly greeted by the ISDSI staff (ISDSI is the program that I am in). They rounded us all up and took us to the ISDSI compound. We got an immediate indication of what was in store when we loaded into the covered beds of red trucks called song taews and stared out the open windows and door at the beautiful city that flew past us. Anyone who had any doubts about the program quickly had a change of heart.

The ISDSI compound was no less spectacular. An old building with a yard, climbing wall, covered patio, etc. We were greeted by the program director and then we're treated to lunch. An hour later, Ajaan Mike (ajaan means teacher), took whoever wanted to to get Thai massages, for the nice price of 350 bhat (about $10). They lasted two hours, and were, of course, amazing... despite the fact that everyone had to pee during them because we chugged water before hand from the recomendation that we hydrate.

Once we returned, it was only a half hour or so before host families started arriving. We were all incredibly nervous, and those doubts began to resurface. We frantically went over what little Thai we collectively knew, stressing, most important, how to say 'pom mai kao jai' -- 'I don't understand' -- incase we were to land a family that spoke no English.

I got my family assingment somewhere in the middle of them all. My family consists of my host mother and father, host sister Nong View (15), brother Ono (18). There is also a family friend, who was there with mother and View to pick me up, who speaks pretty good English, so that was a help. My host mother also speaks some English, usually enought that we can figure each other out. Ono is studying English in school, and we've already agreed to help each other on our homework. I suppose I should also mention how much I already love them all... they are so nice and very funny. Last night we went out to dinner, a 'steak buffet'. Nancy (the family friend) and my host mother dropped us kids off, because they, it turns out, are vegetarian. I secretly wished I could go with them, especially when I realized that the buffet consisted of fried meats and french fries, as well as some salad stuff. Not quite the typical Thai meal, but it was a lot of fun spending time with my host siblings, and their cousin, Nong Kaa. We spent a lot of time trying to figure out words in each others languages, and giving rounds of high fives when we did figure it out. I'm glad the Thais appreciate the magic of high fives.

On the ride home I was falling asleep, due to the fact that I had gotten about seven or so hours of sleep over the past two days of travel. (I should note, also, how bizarre the travel was, especially the seven hour lay over in the empty airport in Singapore (where we felt like little kids at a hotel), and the 18 hour flight over the Pacific, for which we were on the most extravagant airplane, and all felt like the kid from Blank Check). Anyways... I got home and promptly passed out in my room. When I woke up, I had a breakfast of fried rice, soup, and sticky rice. Sticky rice is amaaazing. Especially with Thai custard, as i had it this morning. And now I'm here.

Maybe not the most thoughtful of all updates in the world, but I just thought I'd get yall up to date on what's going on. I have the weekend off now, and will go to school this monday. I hope to find a phone today as well. Love.

-Noah.

2006-08-13T23:58:00.000+08:00

In ten or so days I'll be in Thailand.