Kornography

I started my Thai lessons this week, waiving goodbye to the complete freedom I have been enjoying, and returning to the real world of alarm clocks and appointments.  On Monday I had to swallow my apprehensions about learning a new language, one so very different from my own, and just dived in, taking one-on-one lessons for two hours every morning.  It helps having a good teacher, and mine is awesome; she is in her early seventies, about 4 and a half feet tall, and has me laughing out loud at least a few times a day.  (more…)

It has only been a few days, but I am a complete convert to the life of bicycling, and this only made things worse when Mao decided to cease cooperating.  In the midst of a typically strenuous bout of peddling that follows the changing of a light, all at once I noticed something amiss.  I looked down at my left foot, thinking that perhaps my sandal had broken, but instead was faced with the shocking vision of a barely dangling pedal.  (more…)

I biked down the road to my neighborhood wat, Wat Suan Dok, and again, while wandering around, started chatting to a monk. Gee, who turned out to be a high school English teacher, talked with me about Buddhism and Thailand and the King, and invited me to come visit him at his wat, on the other side of the city. Our interaction ended with him giving me his cell phone number and email address and telling me to contact him when I wanted to come by.

I cannot describe how amazing this past week has been, (more…)

Today I really got a chance to explore the city under the attentive stewardship of Mao.

This day of biking around the city taught me a few important lessons about the traffic, and specifically about the place a person on a bicycle occupies in its larger scheme. First of all, in direct opposition to Boston and DC (well, America in general, I suppose), people are very open about letting one merge. Now this is true even if one happens to be riding a bicycle that may predate the first computer, as long as said one happens to have said bicycle up to the speed of traffic, despite the aforementioned shortcomings of said bicycle. The key, I have learned—regardless of the limitations of one’s fitness—is to think of one’s self as riding a moped, in terms of (more…)

Today marks the official end of the ludicrocity (it’s a word, look it up) that has been 6 AM wakeups. Today I got up at the completely reasonable time of 8, reasonable being said with a hearty measure of skepticism.

Today I set out to get the bike that the wonderful people at Gabfai had for me, and apparently have spent the week fixing up. However, whenever anyone mentions the bike, I can see the sidelong glances of all present, and given that the bike has been named Mao I didn’t have too high hopes about its merits. Anyway, when I was presented with this lovely machine, and the lock with which to secure it, I was all smiles knowing that the lock was merely cursory. In fact, as I parked the bike for the first time, I considered the merits of locking it up, in the hopes of discouraging (more…)

Yea, so this whole waking up early thing is apparently more than a fad, and I was up and at ‘em at 6:00 again. I worked on setting up my room, enjoyed the sunrise out my balcony, which looks out over what I have been calling the moonscape —little more than a few glorified puddles flanked by bulldozer tracks and two inexplicable towers. Now whether these are air-traffic control towers for small sea planes set to land in the largest of the puddles, or just the most tempting potential tree house within a tin-can-phone’s distance of my balcony, is up for debate. Notwithstanding, (more…)