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I have now spent a more-than-full week at school. 'More-than-full' because my classes actually began tuesday but I was so anxious to get started that I spent 7 hours on monday in Freshman Introduction to English. I should have known I was in the wrong class because I chose each one and I didn't sign up for Introduction to English, but I had forgotten... The good news is that I met some girls in the class and I actually went to a movie with one of them on Friday. Her name is Meen (not "cruel" and not "the average"). We're going to hang out later today at a mall...

My real class, Electronic Commerce, is pretty good. The group of people that I'm joining have been together for two years so they all know eachother well. It's an interesting group of people. There are four guys from China, one guy from Columbia, a German/Thai guy, a lot of ethnic Chinese Thais, two Thai girls that have lived in the US (one for middle school and high school), and one ethnic Taiwanese guy that was born in Singapore but spent twelve years in an international school in Bangkok so he only speaks English (perfectly). The teacher is a german guy, U. Werner, that I had actually emailed for the first time about eight months ago. He runs the international program's webpage so he thinks that I'm proof he's doing a great job (I didn't tell him that I accidentally wandered onto RU a year and a half ago, liked it, took a digital picture of the school's logo, emailed it to my friend in Singapore who showed it to her Thai teacher who finally knew the name of the school. Then I spent at least six months trying to get in contact with any of the faculty - my "lucky break" was when I googled the Thai version of the website for "IIS" and found the email address of a student. I emailed her a few times and she gave me the program director's email. So the webpage, to use Werner's expression, "is shit").

It's funny having a German teacher. He paces around the front of the room bolt-upright smirking at his jokes that no one understands. When he gets real hot on a topic he'll lapse into a thick German accent, raise his eyebrows cuz he's so sensible, look for the horizon through the back wall, and whack the projection screen with his pencil. When people talk in class (and they talk all the time) he starts telling them to be quiet very playfully by smiling and making bad jokes. By the end of the day, though, he'll stop pacing, look the person straight in the eye, and say "wouldyoupleaseshutup"... then he waits about five seconds before continuing. The guy commutes about two hours to school every day. He lives way out of Bangkok for some damn reason. About commuting, most students in the international program spend about an hour on the bus getting to school - Meen spends an hour and a half. The international program costs about twenty times more than the normal in-Thai programs, so most of the students are somewhat rich. Being rich, their families live in Bangkok so the students still live at home. After school most of the IIS students hop on a bus to go back home to sit on the computer - a bit annoying actually. The majority of the regular Thai students are from the south so they're away from their families in Bangkok like me. They're much more independent, I think. Bumming around Ram Rd. doing nothing...

Class is definately not hard. Our only assignment so far was a complete/incomplete type thing that I did in about ten minutes. One of the guys conned me into being in his little group and it took twice as long as it should have... Also, the dress code is not enforced at all. You can wear whatever you want. All the girls wear the uniform, though; even the International Program pin. Why? It's cute. Meen wears these white socks and sneakers...

How is everyone on the w-w-w?