Happy Thanksgiving!

Ok. I'll try this again. I'll remember to save as draft often.

So I had an awesome Thanksgiving yesterday. Wednesday night had been an AUA teacher's birthday and we stayed out kind of late. So the 10am phone call from Mom kind of caught me off guard, but it was very nice.

Eventually I got up and made my way to the supermarket to get some cranberry sauce. I bought 2 cans of the jellied stuff and 2 little glass jars of stuff that hope is nicer than the jellied can stuff. I haven't had it yet.

So then I went to AUA to do some awesome lesson planning and then stopped at the guesthouse to change into my teacher clothes. My three lessons went really well, which was nice, because I had been like the past few days had been less than awesome. But yesterday was good.

After class I went to a Thanksgiving Day dinner at the coffeeshop with wireless run by Thai and farang Christians. I've mentioned it to some of you. I got there kind of late because I had to work, but they had saved me a plate of turkey, stuffing, some green beans thing, and there were still a lot of mashed potatoes left. It was exciting.

I think what was so cool about this year's Thanksgiving was being able to remember so vividly how I felt last Thanksgiving. Pretty much last year I was really sad, and this year I was really happy. I have a job I really like which gives me more than enough money to live a much more comfortable life than in the States, the whole friends situation is starting to come together, the housing situation is strange but interesting and I just like living here. Wednesday night we went to a popular backpacker bar and watching all the people travelling and talking about the same stuff over and over it felt really awesome to feel like I have a reciprocal relationship with Chiang Mai, and I'm not just a backpacker, getting as wasted as as many different countries as possible in my 6 months abroad.

And, definitely the most exciting news of Thanksgiving Day - it got cold enough to wear a hoodie!!!!!!!! I've been waiting for this since the day I got here and last night, after dinner I stopped by my room and PUT ON MY HOODIE!

This morning I woke up and while it's kind of too warm to actually be wearing it I'm wearing it again. I don't want to take it off now. But because it's like 75 and not 90 I've already seen Thais on motorbikes with huge, knee length, goose down coats, which is quite a sight.

Ok - so my Thanksgiving was cool. And after dinner I convinced Jeff to come celebrate the wearing of the hoodie at a little blues cafe nicely located between our two apartments. I had leftover watermelon and carrots from the Thanksgiving Day feast which I got to share with people. And then at about 2, I got another phone call and got to talk to Mom, Erica, Dad and Alex kind of, which was pretty cool. So it was a good day. And while obviously it was missing the extrememly important "being with family" component, Stephie will now be here in less than a month and we'll see everyone else in about a month. Awesome!

So some people's Thanksgiving was not as awesome as mine. So Monday night I got to the guesthouse and, as always, there was a table of Micha (owner) with his German buddies. They usually ask me to sit down and have a beer with them and I usually say no, but then I decided I would, if they would turn off the Shania Twain and put on German music. This is where the Rammstein and Enigma discussion came from. With Micha, Fritz, Wolfgang and Thomas. So that was Monday night.

Tuesday night, same set up, but I said no thanks and went to sleep. That night at 5am there started being a lot of screaming and yelling and crying, in Thai. Really loud. I've never heard a Thai person produce such loud sound. Then there was some sound with a lock, the gate and then a motorbike zooming off. At about the same time the angry German voices started. And then other German voices trying to calm down the angry one. And then the boy at the guesthouse knocked on my door thinking it was the girlfriend's room and when I answered (5:15am) he said, "Oh! Solly!" (Solly - Tinglish for Sorry). It was loud and messy and the Germans dealt with it by sitting around at drinking at from 5:30 to I don't know when. It was loud and I couldn't get back to sleep. And I actually took a pillow and put it over my head, like people do on TV. I realized that night/morning that I can hear everything that goes on there from the street through the restuarant, by each room in the hallway, to the Thai resturant behind the German place. It's noisy. And usually I try to keep myself entertained until I'm really tired so I can just come home and go to sleep and I don't notice. But Wednesday morning sucked.

Wednesday was quiet. No one opened the restaurant, no one unlocked the gate, none of Micha's buddies were at the bar, and it was just dead. I have a key to the lock on the gate, so I can just do my own thing, but it was weird. Wednesday night, was Katie (from AUA)'s birthday so we went out, and at the bar we were at I saw Micha. With a girl who was clearly not Toy, his Thai girlfriend of 6 years who he runs/ran the guesthouse with. It was some Thai hoochie! And when I got back at 5am that night (not normal, trust me) he was just re-locking gate, with the Thai hoochie. So sleazy! Thursday morning some Thai guy started came by and starting saying, "Hello, anyone here? Where is everyone?" in Thai and I went out and said, "I don't know. Sorry. I have no idea." I finally left my room at about noon and still, everything was dark, closed and locked up. At four I came back to change into my teacher clothing and finally there were people, but it was the girlfriend with all of her stuff packed, piled on the tables of the restuarant, and the boy, a Thai guy, probably gay, named Eak, who was my favorite person there, with all his stuff packed. He worked at the resturant and lived in one of the rooms and we played the "I'll try to speak Thai, you can try to speak English and we can laugh at each other's inability to actually communicate!" It was fun. He was probably the girlfriend's cousin or nephew or something so once she's gone, he's gone too. He said he doesn't know where he's going, but he has to find a new job now. It was sad to say goodbye. Micha kind of creeped me out even before the whole incident, as did the girlfriend, but Eak was just a sweet little guy. Thursday night at 10 it was still, closed, locked up. I'm not sure if this is better or worse, but this morning the gate was open and the lights were on, but Micha was passed out in a plastic chair in the restrauant.

The whole thing is weird and it makes me really not want to live there anymore.

And Stephie's coming! And I want to have a real place to live by then. That's my goal.

So Happy Thanksgiving yesterday. Sunday will be Caroline and Craig (from AUA)'s Thanksgiving thing which should be fun. They have a turkey, stuffing, and a football and I have 1 can and 2 jars of cranberry sauce. I might try to orchestrate my own parade for everyone. We'll see how it goes. I'll try to take pictures.

I do want to say that I've decided that I don't like movies where people who aren't living in an English speaking country are speaking English. Without a TV, I've started buying and watching DVDs from the night market. And watching Chocolat and Memois of a Geisha, it just seemed so sad that the characters weren't just speaking French and Japanese. Actually Chocolat does have a French option, but it was filmed in English and the French is just dubbed and looks stupid. What's cool about getting all of these DVDs in Thailand is they all have Thai subtitles that I try to read and sometimes they have it dubbed in Thai. Which is strange because I can then hear Memoirs of a Geisha in Thai, but not Japanese. And I guess there aren't many people available for voice overs because with the Thai soundtrack all the characters in Memoirs sounded exactly like the Thai dubbed cartoon characters.

Oh - last thing about the night market DVDs. They are three kinds. One kind is exactly like a DVD you'd buy in a store. The second kind is a guy holding a camera in a theater. The third kind is a DVD with a nice picture on it that doesn't work when you put it in a DVD player. So far I've gotten The Office Season 1 and 2, Memoirs of a Geisha, The Termnial, Matchpoint, Chocolat, all of the first kind. Dave Chappelle's Block Party and Scoop, of the second kind, and then Scrubs season 1 of the third kind. But I just found this out last week when I tried to watch it. Two months later. But I went back and the guy who sold them to me remembered me and when I said they don't work, he said "Ok, I'll switch for you! Solly!" And he came back with three new discs. This time 1 of three of them work, but it's still better than zero! And I can go back again and keep trying. And when I asked about the Borat DVD and if it was real or a dude with a camera and he said, "Right now, maybe not 100%, wait and later, will have 100%" Alright, honesty (maybe)!

Damn Spell Check and Pop-up Blockers!

I just spent 4 hours at an internet cafe writing a really long blog entry and then tried to spell check it and somehow deleted the entire thing and now I have to go to work.

This is extrememly upsetting. I'm fine. The German place is strange, but I need to move. It's good when I talk about polka, Rammstein and Enigma, but bad where there are really loud fights at 5 in the morning. I have a 19-year-old French boy in one of my classes and the 17 girls in the class are going nuts. Hair thingys are really expensive. I'm getting a motorbike and then hopefully a real place to live. I ate some spicy soup last night and I'm not sure if I liked the taste or the challenge, but I ate more than I expected. I got a haircut today and I like it.

It's still hot here and I have a hard time saying the month "November" because I'm sweating as we speak. But I was in a Starbucks last night and they have their holiday menu up with gingerbread mochas and $5 bags of Christmas cookies.

Happy Thanksgiving everyone. One of the AUA teachers is doing Thanksgiving on Sunday, with kickball too, which should be fun. No parades though.

I posted some more pictures a couple of days ago. Enjoy.

http://flickr.com/photos/wigramroad/sets/72157594377080500/ - open for everyone
and other one only open to people who have me as a friend or family. You'll see it when you sign in.

Fireworks and Elephants! (not in the same place, phew!)

Tomorrow I'm moving to a tiny room in a brand new German-Thai guesthouse. I'm going to try something new. It's about half the price, and there's no TV, no fridge, no internet and barely any floor space. My plan is to stay there a month while I look for a more permanent place. So tonight is going to be my music video/pb&j/upload pictures/post a blog night. But I'm really tired, so I've only gotten through the first two. And I should pack. Pictures may have to wait.

So this week has been Yee Peng Loi Krathong Festival which is a Buddhist festival held during the week of the full moon in November. It's terrifying. There are three main characteristics of the festival. First "Loi" means to float and Krathongs are these really pretty little floating things made out of banana leaves, candles, flowers and incense and you're supposed to light them and then put them in a river or canal and then watch all your bad luck float away. That's not the terrifying part. In the North (Yee Peng is a special Northern Dialect name for the festival) there's also a tradition of lighting these mini paper hot air balloons into the air. It's pretty cool looking. Tons of lanterns taking off into the sky, some with sparklers at the end, not little sparklers like that go out in 10 seconds but big sparklers that make it look like a there's a shooting star pushing up a huge orange cylinder. It's cool, but not just as it's going up with the sparks are falling on people. This is where it starts to get scary. The third part of the festival is to buy as many things as you can that you can light, which will either make a deafening noise or shoot fire, or if you're lucky, both. Usually it's little kids, teenagers and old men. They light stuff, throw it and then giggle. It might be towards the sky, it might be towards the river, or it might be into a crowd. No one knows. Ok, to be fair, I saw a couple of 30 year old women lighting some too.

So, all day, from 9am - 3am, since last Tuesday, Chiang Mai has sounded like a war zone. Some are just little firecrackers that I'm almost getting used to, some are the real screechy ones, some are huge fireworks, some are like huge fireworks but with only the sound, some sound like gunshots (another fun game - throw some gun powder into a can and then throw matches until it goes in!) and some sound like bombs. I guess I've never actually heard a real bomb, but this is the closest thing I've ever heard to a bomb. Huge, rumbling, long and really scary.

This past week has been soooooooooooooooo much more terrifying than the coup. Oh gosh. And about the hot air balloons - they get stuck in trees and powerlines all the time. And I watched each one thinking, "Oh no, this is it, there's no way the tree can't catch on fire" and then it didn't. And same with the powerlines. I don't understand why things that aren't supposed to work out seem to work out here (minus the flooding outside Bangkok and the ridiculousness happening in the South). And with all of the shooting off of things on fire I didn't see anyone hurt. I don't get it, but I guess I should just accept it.

Next, I finished my first term of English class. My classes were so cool, I'm going to miss them. Fun anecdote - on the last day we played a game called "Change Chairs" where you say "Change chairs if..." and then person left standing after everyone's found a new chairs says the next sentence. So in one of my classes someone said, "Change chairs if you're a boy!" Then one of the boys said the ladyboy, "You changed chairs!" and he said, "Because on the outside I'm a boy, but inside I'm a girl!" It was cute. He's not a full ladyboy, just on his way. He wears the boy uniform for his school, but a lot of hair gel, sometimes a little make-up, speaks with a high voice, giggles all time and always has a purse.

Last thing for now - EXCITING ELEPHANT NEWS!!!!!!

This is an editorial from The New York Times, about a study by Ossining's own Josh Plotnik, elephant researcher extraordinaire!

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November 2, 2006

Horton Sees an Image

To the very short list of animals that can recognize themselves in a mirror, i.e., humans and apes and possibly dolphins, scientists have now added the Asian elephant, or at least three female Asian elephants in the Bronx Zoo. Faced with the presence of an enormous, and rugged, full-length mirror in their enclosure, the animals displayed clear signs of grasping that they themselves were the origin of the images in the glass. One elephant, named Happy, was even able to touch a mark on her own face that was visible only in the mirror. It is still not known whether male elephants are as self-aware.

Such tests appear to mark a boundary between animals that display some form of consciousness and those that don't. But what they really do is raise questions about the value we attribute to consciousness and our inevitably human definition of it. It is always us setting the rules. How many tests set by elephants could
we pass? Can we even pass the very simple test of allowing them to survive in the wild? The clear implication of the mirror test is that animals who pass it are somehow closer to us and thus more deserving of our protection. But as the fate of chimpanzees makes plain, we are no more likely to save species with a proto-
human form of consciousness than animals whose mental life bears no resemblance to our own.

We keep probing the animal world for signs of intelligence, as we define it, and we're always surprised when we discover it. This suggests that something is fundamentally wrong with our assumptions. There is every reason to value other life-forms as much for their difference from us as for their similarity, and to
act accordingly. That may be the only intelligence test worthy of the name.
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Cool, eh? Nice work Josh!

Enjoy the video, sorry I could only find the 30 second demo, the full song is great. You'll just have to trust me. It shouldn't be hard.