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Hello! No pictures! No scans!
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?

12_06_05

12_06_05, originally uploaded by xdrjohnx.

Hmmm... I was able to locate a scanner that doesn't believe in gray tones and this was the result. It turns out the same place won't let me upload pictures so I'd have to go to two seperate internet cafes to post anything. So I'm still looking around...

Let's see. Last update was the gay bar! The next day I paid my tuition and ran into some people that I'd briefly met before:

(I'm having to use Paint to resize and save these pictures before I upload them - Paint compresses them way too much so there's no detail at all. Aiyo, where's some good 'ol Photoshop...) When I first walked on to Ramkhamhaeng a year and a half ago I really just liked the "feel" of the place. It reminded me of the Singapore American School back in the 60's. I still get that feeling, actually. Some things remind me of the old International Baptist Church ... I love the library here. I'll post about 20 pictures of the first chance I get.

Mmm. So I was sitting around with those people for two hours or so. They're all in a club that's for people from a certain province in the south. They actually invited me on their three-day trip down there next month.

The Big Wat at the Grand Palace (could google the name but mee times running out). The girl on the left, Ning, goes to Chulalongkorn. It's the oldest, most prestigious university in Thailand (RU is tamada - "so so")

So we went over to her university to walk around and eat at an ice cream stall that's been around for a long time. Very pretty campus. We wanted to get a look around so we went up to the top (19th) floor of the science building. The other two girls went back to the ground level to use the bathroom when I noticed that one elevator went to "R". So Ning and I went up... those buildings on the right are the school's oldest, I think. I'd seen pictures of them before. Ning was really excited to be on the roof... she was smiling like she was going insane or something...

We went over to MBK to look for a phone for me. This cost 1200baht or $30 which is very cheap for over here. The phones the other girls had were 3000-4000b. I think it's good! Oh, that's my new number too.

So yesterday I was just sort of bumming around. That's when I found the crap scanner. I ran into everybody when I was coming back to the apartment. I went with them to a big dinner then we walked over and sat outside the indoor stadium for an hour or so. Then ice cream. Very, very nice evening lazing around laughing. Today:

School boy.

Drunk!

Hiya! Some very interesting days in Bangkok! I went to Chinatown two days ago to buy some tea. Took the water taxi which goes all the way to Siam Square (veddy Central Bangkok) for 14 baht. The water is sooo black... anyway, it was so different in the "city" compared to where I live. Big buildings, tons of white people walking around, swanky hotels, traffic... not so good, really. But I went to Chinatown, got some oolong tea, and found a chawsiew place to eat at. Got chawsiew mee with wontons. It was really busy so a guy, maybe 45, and his girl friend had to sit at my table. We started talking cuz he spoke good english and it turns out he'd driven all the way from outside Bangkok, parked by the train to avoid traffic, taken the train then a taxi just to eat at this particular noodle stall. It's very famous for its wontons and its noodles, he said. Well the guy was pretty wealthy and he bought my dinner and suggested we all take a cab to his car where I could also get a bus. Very nice! After paying for the cab, he said that Ram was on the way to his place so he actually drove me all the way back. Wah lau. He was an ethnic chinese from Hainan but of the first generation born in Thailand - has a son in Canada. So I experienced a bit of the high-flying Bangkok. Now to the low-flying:


This is the main road I live on. Keep following it into the distance and you'll run into my school (gotta take a pedestrian overpass though). To get to my apartment, you'd turn left where that big white building on the left meets the ground. And you'd see...

See that motorcycle driving down the street (not the red guy)? You'd turn right just where he is to get to my place.

Everyone has been really nice and laid back. It's been fun meeting new people and just walking around. So yesterday I was hanging around with these girls but mostly with those three that I met first from my apartment. We had lunch and dinner (dinner was sooooo gooooood... and a total of $6 for four people - expensive for here).

Room

Allright, many pics this time. The first one is along one of the 'klongs' were you can hop on a boat to central Bangkok. The second is the pavillion in the pond at Ramkhamhaeng. Nice, eh? Still trying to find a scanner though....
So Bangkok is good! On Sunday morning I was about to go out to look for an apartment (Max, the guy who helped me the night before, wrote down some questions in Thai) so I was about to go out when another guy from the hotel, Teung, asked if he could help me look. Good. We started looking on the other side of the school where there are more shops and, I found out later, it's supposedly safer to live. The first place we went was his sister's room to get try to get some info. We woke her and her roommate up and and it turned out there were no rooms in that building. We kept looking for at least 3 hours, going down one road (soi) until it was too far and then going down the next road. We finally found a place that looked really good and I signed for it. Twas 2500 baht a month which works out to about $65. Not bad. After that, we went over to a friend of Teung's place. We woke him up too. Teung and him had been out dancing the night before and there were glasses of stale beer sitting around. So they emptied those out and went to 7-11 to get some more... we only had a bottle each but I hadn't eaten all day except for some papaya so I was suprisingly "silly". We sat around listening to some bad, cheap reproductions of recognizable songs. They asked me if I knew who the singer was and I just laughed... but I don't want to seem like a music snob or anything. Casual listening is always good; I would rather listen to the music I like alone. Me and Teung ate some lunch then it started to rain and we got caught in Ramkhamhaeng for a while:




Back at the hotel:

And this is the new room. The front door is just to my left:

I've gotta work on the matress... it's just a thin bag of cotton. That "sheet" is from my freshman trip to Bali. We had to buy sarongs so we could go in a temple and I found it recently in a box. When I get a real sheet I'm gonna use it as a curtain.

That fan cost about $20, actually. A heavy son of a bitch. Had to carry that and my water-boiler for about 45 minutes from a department store.

Here's the water plan: 1) Make drinking water with the water-boiler, 2) Pour it into the clear, plastic bucket and let it cool down, 3) Fill up my glass bottle by using the faucet at the bottom of the bucket (not there yet)

Trash. TV and stereo gonna go there.


Hehe, I was shaving this morning when a guy from the apartment next to mine started talking to me. I was a bit shy at first about having a family right outside my window - but who cares. Best not to think about it and just do whatever you'd normally do.
Oh, I was lying bed trying to sleep last night when I got a very unexpected phone call. This was my first night in the room and no one knows my number (including me) but my phone was ringing... I pick it up and its some giggling local girls. They ask me what my name is and everything and I say, "Who.... Who are you?" She says, "My name, Nor." I'm like, "ahhh.... ok.... but, who are you?" "Nor!" It turns out that they were two floors up and had seen me move in. They came down and took me to their room (five of them in a room my size). They were really nice actually, and we sat around trying to talk for about 3 hours. We're gonna go look at a temple on Saturday morning... good! Nice to easily meet new people.
Well, I gotta go to the bank. I walked for a half hour over there then realized I didn't bring my new address... so my break is over. Bye bye.

From BKK

Well, I've been in Bangkok for two days now. It's good to sweat again. I'm actually wearing pants today because only seriously ah beng guys wear shorts. I'm still looking for an internet cafe with a scanner... may take a while. Maybe there's on at the library....

I went to every little tourist-crap/food/drink shop in Narita looking for one of these babies. I used to drink one of these everyday in High School ... still tastes somewhat off :D

Leaving Tokyo... I was looking for a computer to email matsuri but, alas....

My $7 dollar room... i thought i'd have a connected bathroom but, alas....

There's a patio outside my window with a door and it connects to the main hallway. A bit lax on the security. No problem, though. I just gotta carry around my passport and iPod in my bag when I leave.

Yah, so I realize these pictures suck. Sorry, I'll try to get some better ones. The food I've had so far has been really good. I got some Pad Thai last night that was awesome and this guy who was helping me look around for apartments showed me a stall that serves really good kwai teow tom yum. The food at the canteen at school is about 15-20 baht which is 37-50cents and veddy tasty. For apartments, I may rent a little place for about $60/month in a dorm right next to the school. At night there's hundreds of students just loitering around eating and stuff... very cool. Well, i'll try to get some actual content sometime soon...

God Bless America, Land that I snub

31_05_05, originally uploaded by xdrjohnx.

Well, I am heading to the airport in 3 hours... gotta get a final US blog in (it's actually 4:30 right now, I always change the time to 11:59 if I post after midnight). Today was suprising pretty quiet. Started out by going over to the "Ebay store" where they'll take your stuff and put it on Ebay for a commission. I got rid of about 20 DVDs, an MD stereo, an MD player, an electric and an acoustic guitar, my video camera, my Nintendo 64 and GameCube and some other junk. I should get some money from that stuff in about a month. Then I got another haircut:

Short! The tops of my ears haven't seen the sun since about seventh grade... the second picture is just to convince myself I should get some Lasik surgery. I look better, right? Anyway, I hate damn glasses. Takes all the fun out of walking in the rain. Bangkok has some of the best/cheapest Lasik around...

My final dinner at The Macaroni Grill. This here is some Chicken Marsala; $12.50, I think. It actually wasn't that good. I thought it was gonna be a Chicken Diavalo kena thing (mmmm, Spagedies) but no. The portabello mushrooms on the top were good, though.

My grandmother came over to the house to eat and play cards. I wrote a few weeks ago that she sort of made everyone uncomfortable because you couldn't look at her without thinking about my dead grandfather. For me at least, that's gone now. I'm pretty relaxed around her and enough time has passed that I don't feel I have to be "somber".... but I'm leaving the country. Bye bye!

I drove the golf cart to dinner yesterday because my parents were invited to a cookout at someone's house. It had been raining all day and when I came out of the restaurant I was cold. I hadn't been cold in a month or so. I drove down the little path frowning and rubbing my arms and cursing under my breath. It was a good reminder, though. I made the decision to go to Bangkok about a year and half ago and, since then, I've been dealing with the boring details of actually making it happen... but I always knew it would happen. Everything I've experienced the last year and a half has been colored by the fact I would leave come June. I was only passing through. From that angle, Georgia isn't too bad of a place to hang around for a few months. But shivering in the golf cart I remembered how I felt before I decided to permanently leave the US. I remembered why I'm getting on a plane in a few hours. So I got no regrets about leaving... but I damn wish I knew this S'porean:

SLEEP TIGHT, YA MORONS!

(oh, i gonna be on a plane for a day or so plus lost in bangkok for a day or so ... i'll probably post something in three or four days. gotta rent a flat, lah)

Watch your ass, Gucci

30_05_05, originally uploaded by xdrjohnx.

I saw Star Wars today. I had read Roger Ebert's 3 1/2 stars (out of 4) review, so I guess I was expecting too much... cuz it sucked. Big fucking time. I don't wanna sit here reviewing the movie because y'all probably care as much about my opinion as I care about everyone else's. I just wanna say that it was depressing. It had all of the Star Wars "stuff" (big space ships, the same costumes, the same locations, the same characters) but it just didn't feel like Star Wars. It was dead. The original three movies were so fun and these are just so fucking boring.

I've heard it rains in Thailand. Must have umbrella. How to carry? Hands? Aiya, don't want to hold umbrella for two years. In my bag? No, gonna soak all my valuable papers. How can?
Got it, lah! I go WalMart, buy some good thread and prickly velcro. Then I throw at my mother:

Super!!!

Superduper!!!

HK Painting

29_05_05, originally uploaded by xdrjohnx.

Aiya, my dad unplugged the internet-thingy yesterday so I couldn't post anything - but now we're all set up at the new house. This picture is cheating a bit. I painted this back in HK for that chinese painting class I was talking about earlier. Actually, we weren't supposed to paint anything like this; I was just messing around. But this is the only work I have from that class because I threw the rest away. I was planning on saving everything, but when I rolled it all up and tried to shove it in the tube I bought specifically for that purpose, it didn't fit. I had a cab waiting outside to take me to the bus station to get to the airport so I crammed the paintings halfway in - ripping the outer ones, - grabbed all my huge bags, and I stumbled to the cab. In the front seat of the cab I kept trying to get it to fit by removing more and more outer paintings until it was skinny enough to get in. By that time the floor of my side was covered in huge wads of ripped, crumpled paintings. The taxi driver kept shaking his head reprovingly... eventually I got so fed with the whole thing I dumped them all in the trash and got on the bus for the airport.

A Cheesy Grave

28_05_05, originally uploaded by xdrjohnx.

I'm a bit embarrassed about today. From 10AM to 6PM I helped my dad move things from a storage unit to their new house. I eventually got into "the groove of it" because we were working for so long. So we got better and faster as we went. And even though I hated myself for it, I felt a sense of achievement at some times. I know better, though. I didn't achieve anything - I just hauled my parent's shit around and for free. It'd be like feeling a sense of achievement at streamlining a Nazi death camp or something. For some reason we're hard-wired to enjoy being the best cog we can be.

This was breakfast back at the Atlanta Bread Company. It's sausage, egg, and cheese on a cheese bagel. Very tasty and pretty fast, but I'm sure it's terrible for you. It reminds me too much of McDonald's breakfasts - so one hidden cost is the shortening of your life. I think these go for about $3.50... I'm going to sleep.

No More Kittens!

27_05_05, originally uploaded by xdrjohnx.

Nothing really happened today. I bought some floss at WalMart...

Instead of sitting peacefully as this picture suggests, I was really only taking pictures of myself and looking at them on the little screen.

Me and the sun.

Just got this today. Had been rather anxiously awaiting it. I mailed my passport, an application, and a chashier's check to the embassy in D.C. about a month ago. It was supposed to take a week and a half total... very glad to have it, though. Maybe I'll be entertaining tomorrow. Bye bye.

Sleeeep

26_05_05, originally uploaded by xdrjohnx.

One thing I really, really despise is being tired and not being able to just lie down and sleep for a while. That's how I felt all day, but I knew my sleeping schedule would be totally fucked if I took a nap in the afternoon. Whenever I get in a mood like that where I'm annoyed that I can't do something as simple and natural as lie down and sleep, I always imagine how it would be to live on a beach and catch/eat fish. Annoyed isn't a good word for the feeling, though - it's more like a feeling of mediocrity or being dissapointed in yourself. Because if I really wanted to, I could pack up my shit tomorrow and go live on a beach in Malaysia. But I don't. So I have no one to blaim but myself (and my mother when we're driving in the same car and she's assaulting me with that goddam voice of hers....my teeth are going to be ground to dust before I get out of here)

Not sleeping is interesting, though. Up until about 7 or 8 AM you feel really good... then you start looking at the clock: what the hell are you gonna do for 14 hours before you can sleep again? -> boredom -> tired -> cranky. If you didn't sleep the night before, the worst time is always from 2PM to 4PM. Vedddddy bad. You better be away from any sort of bed, in the sun, moving around, and have lots of coffee at hand.

I once stayed up for three nights in HK - about 82 hours I think it turned out to be. It was very interesting. I did it because I had to; I was leaving for Vietnam and I had a ton of shit that had to get done (visas, papers, projects, finals, meetings, planning, packing). At some points I felt seriously great. I'd be listening to music, dancing around my room... but other times I was a goddam zombie. I was doing my final set of chinese paintings for a class a few hours before I left and it was very difficult. I would concentrate as hard as I could but some thought would come into my mind and it would lead to another thought and another and I'd look down and find my brush was in the middle of a huge, growing blot of ink. That happened twice and I had to trash both paintings. After painting, I sat on my bed to write a short letter to a teacher. I took me at least an hour. I would be writing but, again, my thoughts would drift off, my hand would stop writing, and I'd be sitting there with glazed over eyes just think the letter through for fifteen minutes. The finished letter probably went off on a few tangents... I did a few tests at one point and found that when I closed my eyes, it took just five seconds before I started dreaming/hallucinating. Bizarre. After I had done everything, I was seriously contemplating just sleeping like a bastard all day and putting Vietnam off till the next morning. But I had sense enough not to so I headed down the mountain and hopped on the train. I actually didn't sleep for probably 5 hours until I got on the sleeper train from Guangzhou to Nanning... I had the top bunk, the light for the car was right next to my face, there was a speaker blairing something directly over my head, and I was asleep the instant I closed my eyes. Slept for a very solid, very REMy 14 hours...

MASS

25_05_05, originally uploaded by xdrjohnx.

This drawing I didn't plan very well - too big - so you'll have to click on it if you wanna actually see it. This drawing... took forever! I figured that since there are a lot of frames where not much changes, I would just draw one frame, copy and paste it, then add in the different changes.... JESUS... I probably spent three and a half hours in damn photoshop with this crap... oh my god. It's 4:40 in the morning... I'm staying awake tonight because I gotta be up at in three hours.

I had my blood drawn plus a tetnus booster shot today. The blood was to see if my Hepatitis A & B vaccinations are still good. The rather amazing thing was that the whole thing took less than four minutes. Sit down. "How are you?" Blood gone. Switch rooms. Nurse walks in with the shot. Jab. Tape. Out.

I was gonna scan four of those "sci-fi" paintings from John Harris (buy it here) but it took a hell of a lot longer than I thought it would. So I did two and I'll get the other ones tomorrow...



The first one, After The Fall, is a pretty small picture; probably no more than 2ft x 2ft (I could look it up but I doubt anyone is interested anyway). The second one, Leviathon, is 6ft x 15ft. It'd be pretty cool to see it up close. You can't really see in the scan, but the little black specks in the middle of the middle section are actually planes/spaceships.

This stuff is awesome, I think. I wish I'd had this book when I was 5. I woulda just sat around imagining what it would be like to be on one of these spaceships; exploring. When you're little, you imagine so much more. An older person may look at these pictures technically or historically - speculating on who influenced who, who influenced who - but kids will project themselves into pictures and not feel guilty about it. I think I'm actually going to give the book to a friend of mine's kid (I think he's three). ....or maybe I'll have to buy another one. I really like this book.....

Matsuri is currently Chiba-bound. hehe, not sure what to say about that (safe flight? lets all say a short prayer? I wish I was you? Eat some tasty food for us?). Oh well. I'll be talking to you soon...