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There are two parts to this. The following post about my weekend, and an announcement that follows many of you may not be too surprised to at.

I need a new toothbrush.

This weekend I went with my friend Amp and several other members of the Thammasat Speaker’s Union to Amp’s weekend house in Kanchanaburi province. We stayed in a boat-turned-guesthouse that Amp’s father bought a few years back when it was retired.

(From left to right: Amp (nearest head), Poy (left-most head), Sonya, Vicky, Billy, Pat and Ofoon. Not pictured: Steve (American), Prau, and yours truly.)

We slept late on Saturday, and then drove to the nearby Erawan National Park. We hiked in few kilometers and saw five tiers of a waterfall.

(Tier one)

We stopped to swim in the naturally formed pool under the fifth, which was quite refreshing, little fish aside. Owing to how clear the water was, we were able to see fish swimming in most of the waterfall pools on the way up– ranging from no longer than an inch to fourteen plus inches. On entering the pool, however, I was most disconcerted when I was actively attacked by fish no longer than three inches. Every time I stopped moving, one of the little suckers would come up bite my feet or hands! I can’t say that it hurt, but imagine the sensation of being nibbled on in the nebulous, sometimes murky water of a Thai waterfall pool! Fortunately, once I moved into the deep water and eventually under the falls I gained some respite (which, of course, makes no sense– how does a fish have the audacity to bite something literally a THOUSAND TIMES its size but not the courage to swim in 5′ deep water?!). Once I managed to get away from the biting fish, the water was cool, clean and very enjoyable. While we were swimming it began to rain, and by the time we came out, it was just as wet to stand near the pool as in it. But even that was pleasant– a slow, heavy monsoon rain, coming from clean clouds through clean air… not at all like Bangkok’s acid rain.

Sunday we slept late again, and then drove to the town of Kanchanaburi and had lunch at a floating restaurant (built on pontoons over the river).

(The fish, needless to say, was fresh.)

Although we had a lot of good food on the trip, this was the highlight:

It was a veritable feast! Spicy Papaya Salad, Tom Yum Goong, Sweet and Sour vegetables, fried fish, steamed fish, several other chicken dishes, some sort of spinach salad and so much more… Mmm.

On our way back to Bangkok, we stopped at Prapathom Chedi, which supposedly is Thailand’s oldest.

All together, the trip was great– most of all because of the people I was with: intelligent, well-informed, funny, and fun-loving… And, as always, it’s wonderful to be away from Bangkok. I love clean air, trees and solitude, all of which were available in a-plenty this weekend. Saturday morning’s half-hour before everyone else awoke spent reading The Return of the King out on the boat’s prow with the rain softly pattering all around was, for me, an absolute manifestation of tranquility and contentment.

Yeah. It was a good weekend.

This morning was spent at the “United Nations Youth Forum on Millennium Development Goals & 2005 World Summit” which I found both encouraging and enabling. Read more at http://www.un.org/largerfreedom/.

There’s always this interesting temporal gap between when I write an entry and when I post it, due to the cost of internet access and the fact that I don’t have it in my room. In this case, I no longer need a toothbrush because, between the start of this post and its conclusion, I have purchased a toothbrush. So there ya go. =)

I will be returning to Montana State for the spring semester. I am returning early for the single reason that the quality and availability of education for a native English speaker at Thammasat is severely limited. Talking to one of my British professors, he put it quite plainly: “if [I] stay here for a full year, [I] will be behind when I go home.” There are two reasons for this. First, the course offerings are limited. Within my faculty, there are only two 400 level course offerings (one of which I’m enrolled in) and a handful of 300 level courses, of which only two or three may transfer to Montana State as history credit rather than elective credit. Frankly, I’m unable to find eighteen transferable credits of classes for this semester, and judging by the course-listing for the spring semester, I anticipate that I will be even more taxed to take at least fifteen credits. I should have been more cautious of this when I made my choice to stay for a year rather than a semester, but at the time I was thinking in terms of culture and not education. In terms of a cultural education, I can’t saw how much more rich or full my Thai experience would be for staying ten months rather than five, but in terms of academic education, there’s no question that I will be greatly advantaged to return home in January.

Secondly, my courses are being taught in English (by American and British professors) to almost exclusively non-native English speakers. Most of the Thai students are conversant in English, but far from fluent. As a result, most of the lectures are superficial and repetitive, so as to give the non-native speakers a fighting chance at comprehension. The scope and depth of material covered is not nearly the equal of similar courses at Montana State. As my American History professor commented to me, “this must feel like high-school for you.” Unfortunately, with the notable exception of my Thai language course, he couldn’t have said it better.

As a sophomore (with few high-school transfer credits and a recently switched major) I don’t feel that I’m at leisure to take a full year away from academic rigor, regardless of the concurrent cultural education. Many of the other international students here are seniors who have already completed all their university requirements or need only a few credits to transfer. If that were my position, I would be much less concerned about transfer credits and my academic education here. As it stands, however, I fear that two semesters here may set me back from my goals for the foreseeable future, rather than advancing me towards them.

As a positive side note, depending on when my professors give their finals, I may be finished with Fall Semester by December 1st, rather than December 15th, as my ISEP materials stated. This will give me an unanticipated additional two weeks travel and enjoy Thailand and surrounding areas, in lieu of the traveling I would have done during Spring Semester.

For the last four months or so, I’ve been receiving an increasing amount of spam. Granted, my filter gets 99.9% of it for me, but I’ve been a little disconcerted just by the fact that the amount I receive seems to be going up instead of down, despite my efforts to the contrary. So tonight I had a brillient idea: why not google my email address and see if its posted somewhere on the ‘net that I missed. And, sure enough, google found a page on ibforums.org where my email address has been posted. Figures.

So anyhow. I edited the post and obfuscated my email address, and now I fully expect the amount of spam I receive to flowly trickle off over the next few months.

There’s really no point to this post, other than to celebrate Google for … helping me deal with frustrations in my personal life. =)

For the record, I then tried Yahoo and MSN, neither of which were any help.

I have twenty minutes until I need to leave to get to campus, and my cup-of-noodles is still too hot for me to eat, so I guess it’s time to put throw together an update of life. (edit: it took me all day to put this together, but it was STARTED before class this morning.)

On Sunday I went down to an island about 130km southwest if Bangkok called Ko Si Chang. It’s a smaller, less touristed island, and made for a wonderful two-day escape from Bangkok. It was great to be there. I haven’t spent much time on the ocean, but I think it’s beautiful. Although seeing an elusive and endangered white-squirrel in the wild was great, and seeing the temples and beach and such was interesting, the highlight was certainly the time spent down by the water, sitting on ragged rocks, thirty feet above waves breaking on the cliff-face below, and talking away the waning hours of daylight and then the passing lights of ships. Setting sun, ocean– grey infinity, breaking waves, quite, timeless conversation as the light fades and disappears altogether. It was great.

(A view of Ko Si Chang’s township)

(A view of the west side of the island. Our bungalow was one of the small buildings visible in the center of the photo.)

(One of Ko Si Chang’s huge motorcycle taxis (tuk-tuks), unique to this area of Thailand)

I went with Caitlin, another student who is studying at Thammasat. Ironically, she’s from Denver University, which is all of an hour and forty-five minutes from my house in Cheyenne. She’s of no romantic interest, but was fun to travel with, and a source of some valuable information. For example –Josh makes NO sense. It’s a 20-30 minute trip between campus and the apartment. He came back from class about five minutes ago, made himself a peanut-butter sandwich, ate it, and he just left again. To go back to class. There’s food stands all over campus. There’s a decent, cheap cafeteria. There’s a hundred good restaurants and noodle-stands within a five minute walk of campus. I don’t understand…– there’s a building next to my apartment, whose purpose I couldn’t fathom. I would see cars driving in and out, and I could see from walking by that there is a series of car-stalls with curtains in front of them. I assumed that it was some sort of parking garage, or a super-sized car-wash, or something to that effect. No. I found out from Caitlin that it’s a “carpark,” and it works like this: the driver comes in, and pays for a stall for, say, two hours, then drives to his/her stall with his/her special someone and– here’s where the curtain comes in– closes the curtain. And has two hours of privacy. Ha ha. Go do the math. =)

The sexual hypocrisy in Thailand is laughable. Nudity is banned not only on national television, but in national cinema as well. Sex (and the sex industry) is never mentioned in print or any formal situation. Monks are not– in any circumstances– allowed to be touched by women. If you’re a woman, and you want to hand something to a monk, your’re expected to set the object down so the monk can pick it up without the chance of touching a woman. On balance, the Thai people try to pretend that they don’t know what sex is, that it doesn’t exist, that certainly none of them have ever HAD sex (it’s strange being in my classes where the students are so skittish and gigly when the professor mentions sex, and knowing that no more than a handful of the students are virgins…). And yet, in spite of this, the sex industry in Thailand is considered to be the most prolific in South-East Asia, and probably all the world. So. You want to see some skin? Forget the national cinema. Go to one of the dozen “karaoke” joints you walk past on your way to the theatre. Go to one of Bangkok’s hundreds of go-go bars or massage parlors (there certainly are reputable, decent massage parlors as well, mind you). Sure, prostitution is illegal, but you need to understand something: if it isn’t profitable for the police to enforce a law, it’s not enforced. There’s a lot of things that are illegal here, but everyone does it just the same. Put the right amount of money in the right person’s hand, and they’ll overlook anything. So sex is everywhere except in public view.

God. I really didn’t want this to turn into a rant. Time to turn this around.

So the island was great. But strangely, as much as I enjoyed being there, and as much as I thought to myself while there “goodness, I could just stay here forever,” I find that I don’t have any desire to go back. And I don’t understand why not.

I miss Bozeman. A lot. Reading Ken’s blog posts makes me smile, and at the same time it makes me infinitely sad that I’m not there in Quad E hanging out with the people I grew to know and love last year. It makes me sad that I’m not hiking in the hills and playing informal games of Ultimate on the green grass in the courtyard. As Meekyung reminded me, home is where the heart is, and in that regard I haven’t been gone for five weeks, I’ve been gone for four months.

Walking down the street.

Just sleeping there…