Historical Ramblings

More Pictures

More pictures are up:

South Island, New Zealand
Franz Josef Glacier, New Zealand
Milford Sound, New Zealand

Pictures & NZ

It's 2 a.m. and I'm up finishing work, so I'm finally getting around to uploading all the pictures. New Zealand is fantastic. In the last week, I've seen yellow-eyed penguins, New Zealand fur seals, bottlenose dolphins, countless beautiful lakes and rivers...and I've ridden in a helicopter and spent two hours hiking on a glacier.

Pictures up are mostly from India:

Bombay / Mumbai, India
Delhi, India
Agra, India..and the Taj Mahal
On the road in Rajasthan, India, India
Jaipur, India
Udaipur, India
...and a couple more in Sydney.

Today and tomorrow we're in Wellington, New Zealand, then off to explore the rest of the North Island.

New Zealand

I give up - long posts will have to wait until I'm home. However, we've finished up India and we're in New Zealand. We'll be here until the 14th of February and...then we're heading back to DC, probably with a week or so visit to Chicago. More will be posted once we've got final details. Oh, and yeah, I will go back and post all the blog entries I've been meaning to write from Australia onward. It just may be sometime in late 2006 when they get done.

See everyone soon.

Pictures

I promised...at long last, new pictures are up:

Melbourne, Australia
Hobart, Tasmania, Australia
Everywhere Else in Tasmania, Australia
Cairns (Great Barrier Reef), Australia
Hong Kong

My personal favorite (from the Gordon River in Tasmania) is below.

India

First, happy new year to everyone!

Despite my best intentions, I'm still way behind on blogging. So, I'll let it stand at the moment by saying that we're in New Delhi, India. We just finished up a week in Mumbai/Bombay, which was truly incredible and a very fascinating experience.

I'll write up Hong Kong soon.

Pictures will be posted soon, too.

Really.

Hong Kong

We're in Hong Kong. I feel like I'm in the middle of a movie. Oh, and we just had an 8 hour flight on 3 hours of sleep, so we're going to find dinner and head for bed -- more tomorrow.

Manly Beach

We've made it back to Sydney and just spent three days in Manly Beach on the north side of Sydney. And, I fuflilled a lifelong ambition to surf. Or at least, attempt surfing. I made it up about four times and had a total time actually standing on the board of, oh, maybe 45 seconds. But it was good fun.

Tomorrow we head back into Sydney and then, on Thursday, we leave for Hong Kong!

Cairns to Sydney

We're heading back to Sydney today, after about a week in Cairns. After our diving trip, we went to see the mountain town / tourist haven known as Kuranda, which was cute, and spent the morning on a fishing charter in the inlet, where we caught nothing except a hammer head shark. Other than that, we've mostly been hanging around and lathering ourselves with sunscreen to prevent being burned to a crisp.

We'll be in Sydney for about 10 days and then we'll head out to Hong Kong for the next stage!

Pictures and more detailed posts will be up soon.

Great Barrier Reef

Just a quick entry. We left Tasmania about two weeks ago, spent a quick couple of days in Sydney visiting friends, and made it up to Cairns, in the north-east corner of Australia. Cairns is a resort town which is mostly a jumping off point for the Great Barrier Reef. So, following the crowds, we jumped, directly onto a 3 days tour of the reef. We went out on a dive boat and ended up doing 2 dives and about 7 snorkles, seeing sea turtles, sharks, cuttlefish, and an enormous amount of other fish & coral in the process. Oh, and I got stung by another jellyfish. It was worth it, though - the reef lives up to its reputation. I can now officially cross one more thing of my "list of things to do in my life".

We'll be here for another couple of days before we head back to Sydney. More to come.

Tasmania, 2!

I'm trying to get better about posting as we go along, so these postings will be shorter, but at least they're here!

On Tuesday, the day after the Port Arthur ghost tour, we did the full Port Arthur experience. Port Arthur was a penal colony for second offenders, people who had been deported to Australia for crimes in Britain and then committed a second crime again while here. It was a sprawling town-like area, with an enormous amount of industrial exports, including bricks and ships. It's now one of Tasmania's biggest tourist attractions. It's mostly ruins of old buildings now, but there are a lot of exhibits and museums detailing the lives of the prisoners.

From there, we drove up the east coast, winding our way through the mountains and along the edge of a beautiful, mostly undeveloped, coast. We made our way all to the outskirts of a town called Swansea. Most Tasmanian towns, apart from Hobart and Launceston, are very small. The ones we passed through tended to have a population of around 600 to 800. Swansea was no exception. We found a place about 3 km outside of town that rented stone cabins on the edge of a beach and, after popping off into town for a quick dinner, we had a nice relaxing evening enjoying being several hunderd miles from a real city.

The next day we drove further up the coast and into the town of Coles Bay. Coles Bay is, another, small seaside town. Its claim to fame, however, is its proximity to Wineglass Bay, a beach coastline that was voted one of the ten most beautiful bays in the world. It's completely undeveloped, as it is part of a national park, and to even see the bay you have to do a thirty minute climb to the top of a nearby mountain. It was quite worth it -- pictures will be up soon to prove it.

From there, we drove along the coast, stopping along the vary at various cute seaside towns and resorts and the like, making our way to St. Helens, a town known for its sport fishing and for its location near the Bay of Fires, another beautiful bay so named because the early settlers saw it lined with Aboriginal fires.

From there, we heading toward Launceston, and spent Friday night and Saturday night in Launceston, the second largest city on the island, visiting the waterfront and the local gorge. Sunday, we left Launceston and headed to the North of Tasmania, following a route that's listed in the guidebook as a 'foodies paradise'. Along the roads are a number of small organic food stores and farms. Along the way, we got to visit a cheese factory, a salmon farm, and a honey store. We ended our drive in the small town of Stanely, (another) quaint seaside town, this one bordered by a large volcanic rock formation known as "The Nut". We hiked up "The Nut" this morning, and are now in the town of Burnie as a stopover on our way down to Cradle Mountain, about an hour and a half south of here.

More to come!

Tasmania!

Last Thursday we departed our comfortable and homey apartment and boarded a plane to the small island of Tasmania, a short flight from Melbourne. We arrived in Hobart, the capital of the state and a beautiful oceanside town. We spent three days in Hobart, exploring the enormous Saturday Salamanca markets and eating an enormous amount of the best fish & chips I've ever had. On Sunday we explored a nearby pensiula, stopping at an apple museum and picking organic cherries along the way, and Monday involved a tour at the Cadbury Chocolate Factory and a Ghost Tour at Port Arthur.

We're on the way up the coast now, so more to come later!

Pictures, finally...

Pictures are finally up. Links below:

Coober Pedy
Adelaide
Barossa Valley
Zoe's Farm Trip
Kangaroo Island
Great Ocean Road
Melbourne

Melbourne Apartment

As usual, I'll begin by apologizing for the posting delay.

After a quick sojourn to Canberra (more to come on that), we moved into our Melbourne apartment at the beginning of last week. The apartment is beautiful; it's a two-story "New York style" apartment on the fourth floor of a downtown building. We've only a couple of blocks from the heart of Melbourne. It's a three bedroom and we share it with three other people -- a British/Irish couple and a British girl. We've spent a lot of the last week relaxing and enjoying being off the road. We've spent a lot of time in local coffee shops, exploring the various city neighborhoods, checking out art museums, and seeing some rather unusual shows at the Melbourne International Arts Festival.

More to come soon!

Kangaroo Island

As always, I'm behind on my blog posting, so I'm going to post out of order. I'll come back to the southern part of the Stuart Highway, because you have to hear about Coober Pedy and Andamooka, but I've got Kangaroo Island on my mind at the moment, so that's what you get.

Kangaroo Island is an island about an hour south of Adelaide, the largest city and capital of South Australia. Australia's third largest island, it's home to several thousand people and several hundred thousand animals. For us, the people were incidental. We were there for the animals.

We took a three day tour with Campwild Adventures, a backpacker tour operator. The first day consisted of a hike in the Adelaide hills, up to the top of the creatively named "Mt. Lofty" past "First Creek" and "Second Creek". The Australians seem to be in need of some more creative naming. Apparently, First Creek was formerly called Fern Creek, but the ferns were all stolen by hikers. The hike to the top was pretty, but nothing breathtaking, especially after the sites we'd seen in Kakadu. From there, we stopped briefly in the Clare Valley at a town called Handorf, a town populated by German settlers which, according to the Germans on our trip, looked remarkably English and not very German. From Handorf, we drove down the coast to the cape, where we boarded our 'charter boat' -- a small cabin cruiser -- for a ride across to Kangaroo Island.

Kangaroo Island itself is narrow and long, about 150 km from tip to tip. It's got a variety of ecosystems and, given that it's been largely unpopulated, has a plethora of animals. There are maybe 4,000 people -- and 1.1 million sheep. Unlike mainland South Australia, Aboriginals haven't lived on the island in thousands of years. It was unpopulated when 'discovered' by Matthew Flinders in the early 1800s. Since there, there have been some settlements, most of which run cattle and sheep, and a lot of the island has been reserved as national park.

We arrived late in the evening on Saturday night and, after a quick stop in a one-block town, headed to our evening resting place, an eco-hut across the island. The ecohut was a cabin made to be environmentally friendly. The toilets were composting, the water was heated by solar power, and there was minimal impact on the environment when it was built. The cabin was also bloody cold.

The next morning, we took off for our day of exploration. First stop was back to the bay to pick up a couple of additional tour passengers off the ferry, then over to a eucalyptus oil distillery called Emu Ridge. From there, we had a quick lunch, and made the first stop of the trip that really interested me: the Australian Sea Lion colony. The Australian Sea Lions live at Seal Bay and use it as a resting place when they aren't out hunting for food. There are relatively few left in the world, as they were heavily hunted for their fat and skins. They population numbers are still declining, largely due to a slow reproductive cycle and an 17.6 month gestation period.

Their resting beach is a protected area, but visitors are allowed to walk through the sea lions with a guide. We trekked down to the beach, pausing every few feet look over the railing and see the smaller sea lions, who had climbed up into the sand dunes to keep warm. On the beach, the sea lions where everywhere. They're beautiful hunkering creatures that, to our eye, look quite lazy. They roll along the beach a couple of feet, then plop down and rest. Apparently they can rest for days on end, saving up their energy before they go out fishing.

We holed up at Seal Bay for longer than we were supposed to and, from there, headed over to some sand dunes in the middle of the island to go "sand boarding", which is basically a form of snow boarding just on sand. In my case, I ended up quite sandy and slightly bruised, but it was worth the trip.

Our final stop before dinner was to go see the Koalas. Koalas aren't native to Kangaroo Island, but were introduced as a way of protecting them. Unfortunately, they also have no natural enemies on the island, and are eating themselves out of house and home. We visited the outskirts of a conversation park, which is lined with the Gum Eucalyptus trees the Koalas like to eat. They are, just like they look in pictures, some of the most adorable creatures you've ever seen. They plop up in the tree, eating the leaves, and looking exactly like a stuff teddy bear. (They're not, incidentally, related to bears at all). In fact, we even saw one with a baby in its pouch.

We headed to our next camp, a "rustic farmhouse", an old stone building turned into a dormitory, stopping along the way to collect firewood. The camp was at the back of an enormous farm and we drove through fields of kangaroos and wallabies to reach it. After a quick dinner, we headed out to search for penguins.

Driving through the farm after dark, what looked like hundred of wallabies and kangaroos came into view. They were everywhere; we had to move to avoid hitting them several times. We came across two kangaroos boxing, a ritual they perform for mating rights. They apparently fight until one backs down; the winner gets the girl, just like in a 1950s-style high school movie. And they're vicious. We watched as the kangaroos punched each other for a bit and, when they appeared to be getting no where, saw the bigger one lift his legs and kick, sending his competitor flying several feet away.

From there, we drove on to the penguins. South Australia has a breed of small penguin that resides in the cliffs. They're very small and very skiddish, but using a flashlight with a red filter, we managed to see about a dozen of them hiding in the cliffs. They're fascinating little creatures, and they really do waddle.

The next morning, we headed off to see the New Zealand Fur Seals, another breed of seal the lives on the island. They're smaller than the Australian Sea Lions and much feistier. They're continually jumping in and out of their swimming holes, climbing rocks, and play fighting. They're immensely entertaining. They survived extinction in the area because one of their sleeping grounds was across rocky waters that the sealers couldn't reach, although given how fast they move, it wouldn't surprise me if a few of them managed to outrun (or outsmart) the sealers, too.





From there, we visited the Remarkable Rocks, another original name from the Australians, a rock formation out on the edge of a cliff, and headed back to the tourist center. That afternoon, we had a lunch of burritos made from kangaroo meat (which, incidentally, tastes a lot like venison), then went for a brief nature hike before heading back to catch our boat across and returning to Adelaide.

Zoe and I spent a few more days in Adelaide, then rented a car and headed out on the Great Ocean Road, where we got to hang out in seaside towns, eat fresh fish, and watch whales. More to come on that soon, though.

On a blogging-related note, do you all prefer when I put pictures into the post or when I link to the whole set of them?

Melbourne

We've made in into Melbourne, after visiting Kangaroo Island and the Great Ocean Road. Will post more soon, but just wanted to make a quick update!

Adelaide

There's more to the above story, which will be coming soon, but at the moment we've settled in Adelaide, South Australia for a bit. We'll be here for a couple of weeks in total, mostly to get a lot of work done on some outstanding contracts.

Adeliaide is a beautiful city about a hour north of the base of Australia. It's got about a million people, making it a formidable city among Australian cities, and meaning it has about twice the population of the entire Northern Territories (see previous post). It's a nice place for a break and a return to civilization.

More to come soon.

Stuart Highway: Darwin to Tennant Creek

After finishing up Kakadu and three more days at our "local" wifi cafe in Darwin, we rented a car and I learned how to drive on the 'wrong' side of the road. Driving on the left isn't as bad as I thought it would be. I believe I managed to end up in the wrong lane only two or three times and, luckily, that was in the middle of nowhere.

With our rented Nissan Pulsar, we prepared for the long drive down the Stuart Highway, the paved road connecting Darwin, Alice Springs, and Adelaide, straight down the center of Australia. It's a vast distance, around 2,000 miles, and there's almost nothing between the major stops. At the car rental agency, we asked the guy behind the counter for a map. He looked at us quizzically and said, "We don't have any maps. There's only one road." And, in fact, there is only one road -- at least, one paved road. Every so often (maybe every 20 minutes), you pass a dirt road. Or, if you're lucky, you pass an "unseald" gravel road that has, at least, been leveled.

The car had a minimum rental period of a week, so we decided to take our time getting down to Alice Springs. Our first stop was Katherine, a small town of about 2,500 people, four hours south of Darwin. We arrived late in the afternoon and pulled into our hostel, a really nice place on "Third Street" -- in a town of four streets, best I could tell, with very original names.

The town of Katherine is, in itself, interesting for outsiders, as a large portion of the population is Aboriginals. I'm not going to get into the issue of Aboriginal people in this entry, as it would take me hours to even begin to scrath the surface, but the town itself is probably at least 30-40% aboriginal.

Katherine is famous for the Katherine Gorge, a series of incredibly beautiful freshwater gorges. After a restful sleep in our hostel (where everyone is asleep by about 10, since there isn't much to do in the town), we drove out to the gorge and rented canoes for an 'easy' time canoeing up the gorges. You canoe down the middle of enormous beautiful cliffs, rock formations, and sandy beaches. Unfortunately, the gorges are also not actually connected, meaning you have to climb very slippery rocks to get between them. After flipping our canoes several times and ending up with many, many bruises on our legs, we made it through to (and back from) the second gorge, returned our canoes, and headed back to the hostel.
 

The next day, we had intended to make the drive to Tennant Creek, the next stop on our trip down to Alice. About an hour south of Katherine, we pulled into a BP station in a town called Mataranka, intending to fill up on gas and continue our drive down. We filled up the car and went into pay at the counter, when the nice woman behind the desk asked if we were in town for the Rodeo. Rodeo, we asked? Turns out that we were in town just in time for the Mataranka rodeo, an annual event where locals (meaning people living anywhere within several hundred kilometeres) ride ponys, bulls, and horses. How could we pass that up? So, we spent the afternoon exploring Mataranka's famous hot springs and the evening at a real live rodeo, where they award some of the prizes early so the kids can go home and get to bed and where the emcee encourages people to cheer on their neighbors from the 200 km away cattle stations and outback roadhouses. It was, to say the least, quite an experience.

The next morning, we continue our drive down, stopping at Fran's Devonshire Tea House and then continuing on to Tennant Creek, a drab town about halfway between Mataranka and Alice Springs that's seen better days. We dinned at the only restaurant open on a Sunday night, got a brief and cold night of sleep, and got up the next morning for the remaining drive to Alice Springs.

I'll pick up the story here later, but at the moment, work calls. The story will continue, however, with a Swiss rollerblading hitchhiker, giant marbles, mangoes, and an Alien-infested roadhouse.

Pictures

Pictures are up:

Alice Springs, Australia
Uluru/Ayers Rock, The Olgas, and King's Canyon, Australia
Driving the Stuart Highway between Darwin and Alice Springs

Real posting to resume soon - promise!

Darwin and the Northern Territory

Hi, everyone.

Time flies when you're having fun. We spent about two weeks in Sydney, working on projects and house hunting. We'd found a perfect little place in a neighborhood we really liked which would have opened up toward the end of August. So, we decided we'd do a couple of weeks of travel before and, while talking to the friends we were staying with, discovered that this was the only realy time we could see the Northern Territories (Darwin, Alice Springs, and Uluru/Ayers Rock), so we headed up here for a while. Mind you, we've since decided that we don't want to rush back to Sydney, so we've given up on the house and are just slowly working our way back down to the Melbourne/Sydney area. We'll see what comes of it, but at the moment, we're having a great time.

Today we're in Darwin, Australia, a town of about 80,000 people that's the capitol of the Northern Territory. It's a cute, little town, and we've managed to find the only cafe with Wireless Internet (Wi-fi) in Darwin, called Roma Bar, where we've settled in for the last week or so to work on our various projects.

Darwin is known best for it's national parks, and we spent three days at Kakadu National Park over the past weekend. We got to see ancient Aboriginal cave paintings, beautiful waterfalls, and fantastic wildlife (including saltwater crocodiles that are 10 feet long). And I even camped, something I haven't done in at least 7 years. We went with an organized tour from Wilderness 4WD Tours (for you Google searchers) and had a great time. Nine of us squeezed into the back of an aging Toyota Land Cruiser and went flying through 4wd-only paths filled with sand (and even did a couple of small river crossings). We had a great group and a great guide and, all in all, it was a really fun time.

Tomorrow we rent a car and head down to Alice Springs via Katherine, Daly Waters, and Tennant Creek, so we'll update you more then.

More pictures are up here:

Darwin and Kakadu, including some great pictures of Zoe and me.
Blue Mountains, Australia
Sydney, Australia
Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

Pictures

We're in Sydney. It's beautiful and cold.

Posting will come shortly, but pictures are here in the meantime. I'm trying out a new photo posting service, Flickr. Please let me know if you like it or if you prefer the old method.

Hanoi, Vietnam
Ha Long Bay, Vietnam
Hue, Vietnam

Still on old system:
Burirum, Thailand (including our class, our hosts, and an elephant)
Singapore

Vietnam, Singapore, and Malaysia...to come

Happy (belated) 4th everyone -- we celebrated with a meal at the all-American TGI Friday's in Kuala Lumpur, where not only did no one realize it was American Independence Day, but we couldn't even order pork ribs because we're in a Muslim country. Still, it was pretty darn good American food.

We're in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, a beautiful and rather developed city. We've been here about 5 days, having decided to cut our Malaysia trip short in order to see Singapore for three days (and visit an old friend there). Tomorrow, Sunday, we fly to Sydney and begin the ever-so-fun task of job and house hunting.

I'll have more time to post descriptions of the rest of Vietnam, Singapore, and Malaysia then!

Halong Bay, Hanoi, and more

When I was about 10 years old, I had a fear of dying. At about age 11, the fear disappeared, only to manifest itself as mild hypochandria about the age of 22. So imagine my reaction when, jumping into beautiful water under enormous limestone cliffs, I land on a jellyfish.

Luckily, after a few minutes of deciding either my wrist was going to explode or that poison was quickly inhabting every part of my body, I learned that the jellyfish that inhabit beautiful Halong Bay, Vietnam are neither venemous nor especially harsh. The sting on my wrist stopped hurting after about two hours and has now returned to normal.

Halong Bay, Vietnam is about three hours outside of Hanoi. It's a UNESCO World Heritage site, meaning its been revered for its natural beauty. We'd booked a tour through Kangaroo Cafe in Hanoi which would take us out to the bay overnight on a nice Vietnamese-style boat with about 8 other travellers. The bay's beauty is hard to describe; it's as if someone took enormous cliffs made of a salt and pepper mix and pushed them straight up out of the bay. We visited one of the larger caves, probably half a kilometer in total with all the parts, wandered through and looked at the stalagtite formations. That evening, we went swimming off the side of the boat, and then had a relaxing night sleeping out on the bay, in an A/C room on the boat.

We returned to Hanoi the next evening and caught the famous Hanoi water puppet theater, which is literally a puppet theater where a body of water is used to cover up the poles and cords that power the puppets. Pictures will be up as soon as I get my laptop online.

The following day, after a late discovery that the day train to Hue, our next stop, took 18 hours, we booked a flight on Vietnam Airlines. Economy class was full, or so our friendly desk staff (who works, of course, on commission) told us, so we ended up in Business Class. Luckily, in Vietnam, this means the difference between a $60 plane ticket and an $80 plane ticket, so no major loss was involved. And despite my worries, Vietnam Airlines runs safe, modern, and well-equipped planes. The Airbus A320 we flew on looked newer (and safer) than the United Airlines plane we flew over from Tokyo...

We arrived in Hue and were met by a driver for our guesthouse. Let's Go, our travel book, uses this phrase to describe Hue: "Hue is delightful." And so it is. It's a relatively small town and, for all intents and purposes, is rather friendly. We ate an excellent seafood dinner at a restaurant where we clearly confused the locals. Restaurants in Vietnam, like some in Thailand, are generally 'outdoors', meaning their open-air and often don't even have front walls. In this case, the seats were all outdoors under a large roof. The seats were small, close to the ground, and plastic. The two girls who were our waitresses spoke no English and, after several attempts to speak with us in Vietnamese, gave up and got the owner, whose English was rather good and who we just asked to bring us what she recommended. We ended up with a plate of incredible mussels and a plate of huge shrimp. It was some of the best seafood I've ever had.

The day next we rented bikes and rode through the countryside, looking at old royal tombs and hidden Buddhist monestaries and pagodas. Along the way we passed lots of small, family stores. They sold food and water. There were small shacks that doubled as dressmakers stores. There were restaurants, literally small concrete buildings that held maybe three or four small tables and a similar number of small, plastic chairs. And there were kids everywhere, most of whom yelled "Hello!" at us, smiling and waving, as we rode by on our bicycles.

That evening we ate dinner in a restaurant run by a deaf family (written up in Lonely Planet) and wandered around for a bit. The next day we took a train to Da Nang, a taxi to Hoi An, and we're now in Hoi An. But I'm also out of time, so more on that tomorrow.

We hit Saigon tomorow, so I'll be able to post pictures and more blog entries, hopefully.

Hanoi

We're in Vietnam.

I have a very long entry on the laptop about our last couple of days in Bangkok, and I still intend to write about Burirum and the first part of Bangkok, but none of the USB drives on this computer work, so you're just going to have to wait.

We made in into Hanoi last night, after a bit of a delay and a switch of aircraft, and arrived in our hotel, the Hoa Linh Hotel, which is a lovely mini-hotel in the heart of the Old Quarter.

Hanoi is much more what I expected an Asian city to be. It's streets are packed with people on motorcycles. Cars are infrequent and those that do exist are almost always taxis or transportation vehicles. It's dirtier and seemingly poorer than Bangkok, too. Tourist sellers are much more aggressive; about every minute we get approach by someone selling post cards, English-language books, or offering us a ride on the back of his motorcycle. It's less comfortable, but a fascinating experience.

Today we wandered around the old lake, ate lunch at a very nice cafe in the heart of the old quarter, and booked a tour to Ha Long Bay for tomorrow. We wandered around and run into the Ho Chi Minh's masoleum, an enormous concrete building where they intered his remains, despite his wishes to be cremated. Behind the masoleum is a museum dedicated to his life.

Tomorrow we head to Ha Long Bay, which is supposed to be full of beautiful limestone cliffs. After that, on to Hue, Hoi An, and ultimately a short stay in Saigon before we fly out for Singapore on the 1st of July.

More to come!

Bangkok again....with pictures!

Yay, we have pictures. pictures pictures pictures. ahem.

Bangkok

Buriram

Buriram teaching

-Z

Burirum

We're safe and sound in Buriram, Thailand -- in Isaan, or N.E. Thailand. The town is about 30,000 people, or so says the guidebook, and is the home to several colleges and Universities, most notably Buriram Rajahabat University, the main University and the one at which our host teachs. It looks like we've been tasked with two things -- helping our host with her Ph.D. research on intermarriages between westerners and Thai women, and teaching a 5-night English course to staff and teachers at the vocational college across the street.

So, at the moment, I'm attempting to write a lesson plan to teach greetings and introductions to Thai speakers, without speaking a word of Thai. Wish me luck.

Burirum itself is fascinating; I now fully understand what it's like to be in a minority. We often elicit stares while walking around, and students like to practice their english by saying Hello or Hi as we go past. And there's an instant sense of comraderie among non-Thais. In passing, we met 6 of them last night, and all of them went out of their way to be friendly. We met the Turkish owner of a children's store, who took us to find food in the night market and invited us back to his house later in the week to meet his Thai wife. We met the Swiss owner of a local Internet shop/English school, who explained to us in great detail how he spoke 7 languages (and neglected, apparently, to tell us about his 20-year-old Thai girlfriend). We met two middle aged British ex-Military men who were both in Thailand living with their Thai girlfriends and who insisted that we stop and speak (and get a beer) with them when they saw us walking by on the road. It's a very strange experience to be in the minority somewhere, but I'm beginning to understand it better than I thought possible.

We teach this evening, so we'll see how it goes. I'll post more later.

Burirum

We're safe and sound in Buriram, Thailand -- in Isaan, or N.E. Thailand. The town is about 30,000 people, or so says the guidebook, and is the home to several colleges and Universities, most notably Buriram Rajahabat University, the main University and the one at which our host teachs. It looks like we've been tasked with two things -- helping our host with her Ph.D. research on intermarriages between westerners and Thai women, and teaching a 5-night English course to staff and teachers at the vocational college across the street.

So, at the moment, I'm attempting to write a lesson plan to teach greetings and introductions to Thai speakers, without speaking a word of Thai. Wish me luck.

Burirum itself is fascinating; I now fully understand what it's like to be in a minority. We often elicit stares while walking around, and students like to practice their english by saying Hello or Hi as we go past. And there's an instant sense of comraderie among non-Thais. In passing, we met 6 of them last night, and all of them went out of their way to be friendly. We met the Turkish owner of a children's store, who took us to find food in the night market and invited us back to his house later in the week to meet his Thai wife. We met the Swiss owner of a local Internet shop/English school, who explained to us in great detail how he spoke 7 languages (and neglected, apparently, to tell us about his 20-year-old Thai girlfriend). We met two middle aged British ex-Military men who were both in Thailand living with their Thai girlfriends and who insisted that we stop and speak (and get a beer) with them when they saw us walking by on the road. It's a very strange experience to be in the minority somewhere, but I'm beginning to understand it better than I thought possible.

We teach this evening, so we'll see how it goes. I'll post more later.

Pictures, Pictures, Everywhere...

More pictures:

Ayuthaya, Thailand
Bangkok, Thailand
Pattaya, Thailand

Comments should be functional again, too!

Bangkok!

I've got a longer blog posting on my computer, but I haven't finished it yet, so I'll give you the short version.

We've been in Bangkok for approximately three weeks now. In that time, we've:

• Visited the weekend market (several times the the size of a football field)
  
• Seen Ayutaya, the "middle" capital city (the capital from 1400-1700, or so)
  
• Visited Pataya, a seaside resort/sex tourism center
  
• Seen a "lady man" show, otherwise known as a Transvesite Cabaret
  
• Had massages from the original thai massage school
  
• Visited Wat Po, the 'original' Thai University
  
• Eaten Seafood in chinatown
  
• Eaten Chinese Dim Sum in chinatown
  
• Eaten a yuppie dinner with well-to-do Thais someplace in Northern Bangkok while listening to a Thai band do 1990's American Music covers.
  
• Discovered the joys of eating "Thai style", where you let your spectacular hosts order the food and always end up loving everything you eat
  
• Been homesick enough to eat at the Hard Rock Cafe (twice) and Tony Roma's for Ribs (once...which was plenty).
  
• Visited Khaosan road multiple times to hang out with the many, many, many backpackers
  
• Watched Star Wars in a Thai theater with Thai subtitles
  
• Been taken out to the "Sizzler" by our host (and her friends) because they knew we were feeling homesick...I've never enjoyed a salad bar as much in my life..
  
• Visited Patpong, the former 'strip' of sex tourism in Bangkok, which is now mostly a tourist attraction featuring girls in bikinis and go-go dancers.
  
• Eaten at a true ex-pat restaurant called Eat Me, owned by a Aussie and with mostly Aussie clientelle.
  
• Visited (and eaten at) the world famous Oriental hotel and were exceptionally outclassed by the many people in gorgeous dresses and suits in the lobby.
  
• Been taked around by work colleagues who, after showing us the weekend market, drove us 45 minutes in both directions to eat lunch at their mother's restaurant and show us the two square block area in which the entire family lives (and runs a neighborhood restaurant).
  
• Visited the 4th Annual Science & Technology Convention and watched keynote speeches by the Prime Minister (in Thai), by a Japanese Miniter (in stilted English), and by an Italian/Swiss Scientist (in enviable English)
  
• Eaten various street foods from push carts, the back of pickup trucks, and in "storefronts" that are little more than a push cart inside an empty with plastic chairs and tables.
  
• Eaten things covered in ice (that we probably shouldn't have)
  
• Eaten things we couldn't identify
  
• Eaten the best fruit on earth
  
• Eaten squid, octopus, some form of ray, Asian-style nobbly (Z's word, not mine) pumpkin, a lot of chilis, and more noodles than I've ever seen in my entire life.
  
• Been taken for "special" lunches by colleagues which involved cabbing to another 'storefront' restaurant and being served pad thai wrapped in egg crepes, some of the best food I've ever eaten.
  
• Been given strange stares by colleagues and co-workers when we turn down ice in our drinks.
  
• Been feed, several times daily, everything from red bean icecream to mango & sticky rice to durian fruit to spicy fruit peel, just to see how adventurous eaters we were (and passed almost every time).
  
• Been taken to the "field" by work colleagues where I saw incredibly beautiful temples, including one where birds nest in the temple and you've supposed to eat the nests for luck, visited a field office, drunk sodas on the carport of a 'local leader' while he was interviewed about fire prepardness, visited a local fire station and watched colleagues comb through boxes of pictures, visited a enormous department store that had more goods than most local K-Marts, and eaten two incredible meals...all the time conversing in stilted English.
  
• Despite various innocluations, pills, and shots, watched as the one thing I hadn't thought to protect go sick -- my computer, having picked up a very nasty virus/worm from the local computer networks at work, which we later discovered had antiquated virus protection and no firewalls.
  
• Despite various innocluations, pills, and shots and many preparations, felt our stomaches make that pain that inevitably leads to bathroom unhappiness.
  
• Fallen in love with Thailand.
  

Pictures

Pictures, part I, are up:

World Expo Pictures
Tokyo, Japan