Travelling With Hope

For a finale in Thailand I flew down to Bangkok to visit a friend so we could do fun stuff around the city. It was quite an experience. Growing up in upstate NY and living in Chiang Mai was no preparation for going to a massive 3rd world city. There was so many things to see and do, so much that I enjoyed just walking around and staring at things. I visited a wat because it was at least 4x bigger than all the wats in Chiang Mai and I ended up talking to a Thai man for about an hour. I think he just wanted to practice his English, he was enjoyable to talk to.

The two days that I spent in Bangkok were very fun filled, although not necessarily relaxing. On my way into the city I had some confusion as to which guesthouse I was supposed to be meeting Vic at, so I didn't get to the guesthouse until 1:30am. Then I wasn't tired and I figured I could sleep in late so I stayed up to 3am to write emails, followed by an early 6:30am breakfast, a couple days of heavy tourism, and now flying to the other side of the world. My body should be sufficiently confused by the time I arrive.

As I left Bangkok, I boarded my flight with 90 seconds to spare. Things have fallen into place unusually well, despite unfortunate situations. All this continually reminds me that I'm completely in God's hands; all I can do is trust Him. If I get to see Kerianne safely, I can consider it a blessing and a gift from God. If I find a decent job in a timely fashion, I will have no one to thank but God for watching over me. I've found a lot of comfort in this.

Thanksgiving

I went walking around the city again this morning. It is a lot of fun to just stroll around, grab some mangos and sticky rice, sit down for some coffee, have a Thai-style massage, and generally just chill out and relax. Here are some good pictures.

http://houghton.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2011492&l=be4db&id=100300825

When I went to Wawee coffee (a coffee shop), the lady before me spoke English and so I noticed the cashier could speak excellent English. However, I ordered in Thai anyway and he responded in a long string of Thai to which I responded, "In English?". We both burst out into laughter.

I also got a Thai massage. It's a specialty in Northern Thailand so obviously I was obliged to do so. It was very relaxing, minus the bending me in half and beating on my head, and a few other things. I picked up a few Christmas presents from a couple different shops. Church tonight was especially fun. It was a very active Thanksgiving service, and quite a joyful one at that. There's a lot that I'm going to miss about Chiang Mai, but when juxtaposed with the thought of seeing Kerianne I really can't wait to get home.

There's a lot to be thankful for. I'm thankful that I've had the opportunity to come here. I've also learned a lot about hope and prayer. Things in my life like family and friends are now extremely valuable to me. Yes, I think I've changed.

Doi Suthep revisited

This past weekend I took a song thao up to the wat on Doi Suthep. It's a rather famous one, so I figured I should go see why everyone visits it. It was quite amazing, lots of bright colors. I took a video of some Lanna dancers dancing to the northern Thai style music.

I also posted more pictures with comments to facebook, so feel free to browse them.




In other news, I leave Chiang Mai December 1st in the afternoon and arrive in the L.A. airport in time to spend the night on a terminal bench, perhaps I'll make it worthwhile and visit Hollywood.

Banana Rotis

A while back I took these videos. It's an India food that made it's way all over Asia, I think it should make its way around North America too. Although, it takes some practice (as you can see)

Time and Its Dramatic Effects

In the last 20 minutes the sun has been setting and I inadvertently found myself at http://nist.gov trying to set my computer clock to auto-update it's time. However, I found a wonderful applet that shows where the sun is shining all over the world (link). Here is a screen shot of what it looked like when I was looking at it, I added some red dots to show locations. The sun is almost shining on both me and all my friends and family in NY at the same time...so close. The applet is animated to show the the map in real time, so I can actually sit here and "watch the sun rise" over NY.

Since I've been in Thailand I've noticed a characteristic of people around my age in that Thais aren't really much different from Americans. For instance, they listen to the same music as I do. There was a Hardcore/Metal music festival in Chiang Mai earlier this month where bands from Bangkok, Chiang Mai and other parts of Thailand gathered around to play some of the crazy extreme music that I've come to love so much. I was talking to a couple Chinese teenagers last week who listen to the coolest emo/punk bands from the US - and have all their tee shirts and other paraphernalia! They also watch similar movies, go shopping, wear the same kinds of clothes. I've also noticed that the younger generation of Thais tend to be obviously bigger than their parents (I assume because of increased wealth and so increase food, especially as they were growing up).

The trend of increased communication lines like cell phones, TV, IM, email, Facebook and text messaging allow Chinese kids to hear about trends on the other side of the world on a daily (or hourly) basis. In an increasingly real sense, my generation is defined by the Internet and technology that surround us. Because of the dramatic sense that it unites people from opposite cultures, we may have earned a name for ourselves as being the first generation that can be recognized as spanning the entire globe. It's also obvious to me that these characteristics aren't common with the older generation. We are truly a unique generation.

Spell Center and Linguistics

Kerianne pointed out to me that I haven't posted in a while. Realizing that this is in fact true I've come up with a cohesive topic to write about. Since I've been working on Spell Center for the past 3 months, I'd like to formally introduce it with some explanation for why it's necessary.

Translation projects are often initiated by some sort of linguist, sometimes a PhD candidate looking for a doctoral thesis or some similar situation. These high class intellectuals perform detailed analysis of the language including phonology, morphology and several other words ending in -ology that most normal people never utter.

Often, a written language doesn't yet exist, so linguists have to work with locals to decide what alphabet should be used. Lots of times they choose the alphabet of a trade language, like Thai or English (Latin) because the similarity will make learning the trade language easier. One language project that I've seen in progress started in script very similar to Lanna (Northern Thai), then was converted into Thai, and has currently been converted to Latin letters. This sort of change is sometimes done for political reasons, other times for practical reasons (language learning). Sometimes an entirely new alphabet is designed. Computers make these conversions rather easy, especially if converting amounts to respelling (like ที่น to Tim).

Once the linguist has done initial work and created an alphabet with phonology and grammar, the written language is taught to local people and a translation project begins. SIL has found it most effective to make use of local people for most of the translation. And so computers are introduced to tribal people at an early stage. The translation work is typed into computers (usually running Windows XP and sometimes Mac OSX or Linux) using tools like Paratext and Translator's Workbench developed by farang non-profit organizations.

Enter Spell Center. In trade languages like English, French, and Thai there is usually several dictionaries and word lists available for spell checkers to check against. However, in minority languages, the only list of words is the corpus of work that has been created. In Spell Center (and other apps like Paratext) we parse the entire corpus of work and get a list of all words used. In Spell Center, the user can look through this list of words and decide which ones are spelled correctly and fix the ones that are spelled wrong (pictured to the right).

While existing applications do this already, Spell Center exists so that we can add additional algorithms to help out the translator. For instance, we can make an assertion that if a short word occurs only once or twice (rather than 125 times), its probably a typo and we can mark it wrong. We also allow the translator to be unsure, and use a '?' to come back to later when someone more knowledgeable is available. We also allow the user to see every place where the word was used in the context that it was used in the bottom pane to help them remember the meaning of the word.

We'll be integrating this with an open source application called Enchant (link), which is an engine that can be used to provide spelling suggestions for translation editors and word processors.

After Spell Center comes to a relatively stable place, we can consider extending the functionality to create a concordance very quickly.

A requirement of Spell Center is that it should be easy for new users to learn as it probably won't often be used so much by PhD linguists, but more by local people doing translation work. The interface I have here in the screen shot will actually change quite a bit before it's actually released. The current plan is that I'll have it at a relatively stable place by the beginning of November so that we can try it out on a user and find all those design issues that we never really thought about. I'm quite excited for this stage. It's the time of truth, when I get to find out if all the work I've been doing has been worthwhile, and I get to see it in use. This suddenly isn't some obscure project for school that has no life cycle beyond getting a decent grade, this is actually going to be used by people!

Google Earth

Tonight I became interested in Google Earth and went exploring Chiang Mai. This is quite fun to see where everything is on a realistic looking map. I highly recommend it. Download Google Earth and search for "Chiang Mai, Changwat Chiang Mai Thailand" and it should take you on a flight directly to "my city." Have a look around and do some sight seeing!

Penang Pictures

I uploaded a lot of pictures to facebook. I'm not sure how this all works, but I think most people should be able to see the album without having to join facebook:

http://houghton.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2010376&l=08167&id=100300825

Visa run in Penang

So I've found myself on the island of Penang, Malaysia. I dropped off paperwork this morning for another Thai visa which I should get back tomorrow at 2pm. My initial impression of the island is that I miss Chiang Mai. People were much friendlier in Chiang Mai. I also have a better understanding of the currency and the Thai language, whereas the language here again sounds like gibberish (square one again). I find that even with the little Thai I know, I can always use it to clear up a conversation when the person has a thick Thai accent. Here in Penang I can't do that. From what I've gathered from conversations with taxi (taksi) drivers, the Malay language is actually an English slang. A good comparison is what French, Italian, and Spanish were to Latin, Malay is to English. They became languages in much the same way that Malay has become a new language.

The most shocking thing about Penang is how multicultural it is. Chinese Buddhism next to Indian Hinduism with Muslims living in between them. Then there actually is a Christian presence also. I've talked with a Muslim taxi driver, a Hindi taxi driver and a random Hindi man on the seafront, and a Christian homeless man playing guitar on the street. Oddly enough I haven't talked to any Buddhists, possibly because they're mostly Chinese and, as one taxi driver was complaining, Chinese don't tend to learn English. I suppose there's so many of them that the don't need to, but I don't know. Another complaint was that Muslims didn't integrate with society. Rather, they tend to try forcing their culture on the rest of society. At dusk I can hear men chanting from the mosque a block away.

The homeless guitar playing Christian that I talked to was convinced (and trying to convince me) that Muslims were out to spread hate. Oddly, I sensed a gigantic hate against Muslims radiating from him, despite his agreement that Jesus intended us to love our enemies. I know it's easier for me to love Muslims since I've never lived among them, but I don't think it makes it any less true.

Tonight I got an expensive 12-inch sub at Subway and only ate half of it. Then when I was talking to the homeless guy I realized that he hadn't eaten today, so I forced him to take the rest of my sub (he tried to turn it away). I also gave him a little money. I suppose I did it because I got to talk to him a little bit. I don't usually give money to homeless people. I think it's partly the number of them, partly the proximity (I usually don't see many), and partly because I don't personally feel bad for them (by that I mean that I've never had any interaction with them, so they carry no emotional significance unlike a good friend). I read an interesting article about why the world needs more people like Bill Gates; it hypothesized that he's successful in philanthropy because he can conceive millions of oppressed people and not become daunted by the number like the rest of us. So I suppose I often see 10 people laying around on a particular street (with the obvious notion that they'll be sleeping there tonight) and walk past simply because there's 10 of them and not just one.

I was drinking a 1.5 liter bottle of water, but I saw an old woman lying on the street as well as some other men. I realized that I didn't need all that water, and water in Malaysia costs money (unlike the USA), so I gave it to her speaking as little as possible as she probably wouldn't understand me anyway. A man I was talking to today was saying that there are so many jobs in Penang that anyone who wants a job can just walk into the right place an have one. He said that Malays that don't work are just too lazy to work. So I'm not really sure about the ethics about giving a lazy man food and money, or giving a poor old homeless woman water to drink, but I feel like I did the right thing. For some reason it seem so much harder to help a homeless man when you're convinced he's homeless only because he's lazy. Since I'm not yet convinced that these people are lazy I might as well help them.

Observations on Language and Community Living

In George Orwell's book 1984, which was about a fictitious totalitarian government. They created a completely new language (related to English) called Newspeak that embodied the principals of the ruling party to remove the "unneeded words" from English and add new ones. The big word/theme of the book was doublethink which meant that you say one thing but think another (if the Party tells you that 2 + 2 = 5, then you doublethink that 2 + 2 = 5 and you don't question anything). This of course embodied the very nature of the totalitarian government and enabled them to hold a deeper control over their people through language. George Orwell as well as many other people (including SIL) would agree that in order to learn about a culture it is necessary to learn the language of the culture.

I had a lesson tonight from Tong and I learned a bit about classifiers and how to talk about many things and possessing things and stuff like that. Something I found interesting is that the statement "mii dinsaaw kii theeng krup" means both "how many pencils do you have?" and "how many pencils are there?". I find it striking that one of these questions implies ownership and the other implies only the existence of pencils, but in Thai they are equivalent ideas. In English, the questions "how much money do you have?" and "how much money is there?" are dramatically different questions and can cause someone to become offended if the stakes are high enough.

If China, Vietnam, Laos and all the countries in the surrounding area are anything like Thailand in this respect, it's not surprising that they are more ready to accept Socialism. For Americans, possessions are what defines us, and our language makes it very difficult to forget about ownership. This might explain some of the hostile feelings towards Communism. However, I'm not particularly sure how far this would extend, as there is an intrinsic hierarchy of Thai society, and the flat level of importance of the theoretical socialist society would be disagreeable to Thais, I would think.

The past couple of weeks I've been helping out with the youth group at Chiang Mai Community Church; last night's discussion struck me as interesting. We were talking about a description of the Early Church in the second chapter of Acts and the topic of conversation drifted to the notion of selling all your possessions to give to the poor. Understandably, these farang teenager boys had a difficult time accepting this idea. Someone mentioned that they don't think the poor deserve to be helped since they had the same chances and they didn't take advantage of them. Another kid disagreed saying that isn't necessarily the case, it's just hard to give someone so much of your own possessions to the extent that their possessions exceed yours, and do this purely out of goodwill. One guy summed up it up nicely by saying that in Jesus' days, all they had was their sandals and cloak, so it must be easier for them to give up everything since they had less to give up than we do. Most people agreed with this last one.

I would be curious to see how Thais would answer that question. I have a feeling that the number of cultures in existence that would gladly give all to anyone is minimal to none. However, I could be wrong about this and I actually hope I am. Perhaps it's just my Western notion of possessions that makes it difficult for me to fully understanding this passage. I've heard a lot of people say that it doesn't actually mean to sell anything - it's just about attitude. I'm not sure exactly what it means, but I'm pretty sure Thais are closer than I am to start!



As a post script, blogger is now offering a new feature to upload videos, so I've taken advantage of this and I'm posting a short clip that I took about a month ago when I went to see the elephants. If you can't see the video, it's of two elephants that are playing soccer and one kicks a nice goal into the corner.

Language Learning

I started Thai lessons last week. My khruu, or teacher, is a young married guy named Tong. I finally learned some much needed phrases like "what is this?" so now I can go around learning Thai anywhere I go. This past weekend I walked down to the old city: the part of the city that existed before industrialization, it has a wall and moat around it; however the wall has long since crumbled and the moat now has fountains in it. I suppose that's what industrialization does. The city has sprawled much farther than the reaches of the wall, but the old city retains a much different atmosphere; hence why I like walking around there.

Anyway, this particular weekend I decided to sit down outside a museum to write in my journal. Eventually a teenage girl walked up to me to "ask a few questions". I found out later from Melinda that this probably meant she was taking English in school and probably had an assignment to go find some farang to talk to. We ended up talking for over an hour. She taught me the hours of the day (which are actually quite complicated) and a few other useful things like "knife". I taught her some useless things like how to say "y'all" with a southern drawl. I might have taught her something else, but the point is that I was a good conversation partner! Her name was tangmo, which actually means "watermelon". Now, when a Thai tells you what their name is, they're actually telling you their nickname. Real names are much longer and hardly ever used. I'm told that these nicknames also serve as pronouns, so they're usually short one or two syllable words that are usually assigned in the first few years of their life (but not at birth).

For lunch we typically cross the street and eat at Eddie's, a nice 20 baht restaurant that has good kraphao. If I'm in need of change for the songthao I usually go to the grocery store and get some ice cream to quench the burn from the kraphao. This week was a week of daring change so I bought a bag of rambutan. On my first attempt I didn't know how much it was going to cost because fruit is sold by the kilo. I ended up breaking a 1000 baht bill on 2 baht worth of rambutan. So that was strike one for me.

The next day I decided that I didn't like the extra grocery bag that they gave me, so I pointed at the bags and said, "nii arai khrup", which was supposed to mean "what is this", but judging from the look on her face I'd guess that I got a tone or vowel wrong (strike two). It turns out that a bag is called a thoong. So today I used my new knowledge: "mai thoong khrup", which was supposed to mean "no bag please" but, as I now know, I actually said something more along the lines of "that's no good" or "that's not cheap" with a very rude style (strike three, now I have nothing to lose).

Dear cashier-at-Tesco-Lotus-who-is-working-tomorrow, please forgive me when I attempt to say "mai aaw thoong", which is supposed to be correct grammar. I'll probably mess up a tone or vowel. Please be gentle on me.

Traffic

Today I had the aggressive song tao driver from work. I've had him once before, he always takes the unintuitive detour that miraculously becomes a shortcut due to his excessive speed. It's actually quite entertaining. I took a picture of a songtao as I was hopping off. I'd say there's 16 people in that one, but that can easily increase to 23 at peak rush hour. When there's five or six people on the back it gets tough to hold on.

I took the next picture of Chiang Mai-Lamphun road. This particular image has been engraved onto my mind as I've spent about ten minutes every week day staring down this road in wait for the blue song tao. I've become so numb to absurdities in traffic (like the lady carrying all her groceries on the motorcycle) that I hardly notice anything except the shade of blue associated with my songtao route.

The trees that line this road were planted by a former king to give him shade as he drove to his vacation home in Lamphun. There is so much traffic on this road that they considered chopping down the trees to make extra lanes for traffic, but to chop down these trees would be disrespectful to the king. When Mark was here we were marveling at this sense of respect, something we felt is lacking in American culture.

When I first arrived, the first shocking thing to hit me was people driving on the "wrong side" of the road. You may know that vehicles in Thailand drive on the left as they do in England, but it's the motorcycles driving on the right side of the road that scare me. So if anyone reading this is planning on coming to Chiang Mai, I've put together a list of de facto traffic laws that will save you much astonishment and shock.

1. Smaller vehicles always yield to larger ones. Whenever a motorcycle attempts to pass a car, there is always a moment of assessing the size of the oncoming vehicle before making the attempt.
   
2. Motorcycles have a looser set of rules to abide by. Driving on the left is required, unless you're only going a couple blocks real slow, then its OK to drive on the right. Motorcycles are smaller, so they can fit in places cars can't. They can even drive off the shoulder or on the right side if it means passing a few extra cars.
   
3. A stop light means "stop if you're going to get hit", otherwise the intersection is free game. You might notice a two second gap between red and green lights; in America this is observed, in Thailand this is taken advantage of. Other than this two second gap, the light is mostly observed though.
   
4. No more than three persons may ride a single motorcycle. Of course, there are exceptions to this. If a whole family needs to go somewhere, small child may ride in front of the driver.
   
5. Most important: Maximum traffic throughput is always reached when Tim Kellogg tries to cross the street with an open cup of coffee. (So far it's been well proven)
   

In The Matter of a Week

It's been a while since I've last posted. Perhaps this is because there is so much going on. Tonight Mark, the other intern, left for his home in Texas. So the past week was spent fitting in all the things he wished to do while he was still here.

One day we went to a Lahu village, which was probably the best day so far. I entirely loved the small town feel of the Lahusi and their genuine hospitality. I also enjoyed the food, some of it a bit strange. The thing that struck me the most was how different Lahu culture is from Thai culture. Yes, the Lahus came from Burmese hills, but it can't make that much of a difference, can it? Not only is the language different, but the food is also entirely different, the attitudes, values, and world views are all different also.

Thursday night I went to a Blindside concert. Blindside being a band that I've loved since 8th grade. I saw them once in high school during a summer music festival, but Chiang Mai, Thailand was the last place I would have thought to see them again. The show was good, but I have to say that the Thai bands that warmed the stage were just as good. Reckless Madness was probably the better of the two Thai bands. I'd label them somewhere in the hardcore/metal genre, but quite good at it. I should warn you that I've been a huge fan of heavy metal and hardcore for years now, and these Thai guys can really belt out some good riffs.

Friday we hired some guides from the Chiang Mai Rock Climbing Association to take us climbing in the hills outside Chiang Mai. These were world class rock faces and were entirely fun. The rocks aren't worn out from too many climbers: there's still plenty of vegetation and interesting rock outcroppings. In fact, the rocks are still sharp enough to leave good sized cuts on my hands. The guides were helpful and showed us some very nice climbing routes as well as a beautiful 180ft rappel into a cave.

Yesterday I walked down over the moat and into the old city. I grabbed some food from a street vendor then walked around for a couple hours. I passed lots of wats, I feel as if there was on every street. I stopped at a street cafe and ordered a rambutan smoothie. Rambutan is a fruit found in Thailand, you can get it at just about any market. So I'm putting a picture of some Rambutan here so you can see what It looks like.

While on the topic of fruit, I must say there's so many different kinds of fruit here, some that I love, some just aren't all that great. One such fruit is the durian fruit, a large spiky fruit that grows all over Thailand, Malaysia, and Southeast Asia. It's hard to crack open, but at once you are hit with a shock wave of stench. The odor is so bad, in fact, that there are "no durian" signs in hotels and public transportation. I also hear that eating durian with alcohol can have fatal effects. The fruit comes in stringy pods that surround the seeds. They remind me of Martian offspring arriving in a self-protecting escape pod.

Perhaps thats it for this post.

Doi Suthep pictures

This post is mainly for pictures, since I haven't posted any in the last few posts. This morning I climbed Doi Suthep with three other farangs and a Thai woman. On the top of the mountain there is a wat, or temple. This particular wat is somewhat of a tourist attraction and now costs 30 baht per person for entrance. While walking up this staircase Linda was able to strike up a conversation with some Mong children. I didn't get a picture of them because they were charging a fee for pictures of them. I think its kind of sad that these children are being used for a sort of child labor.

On the way up we passed through several wats so I took a few shots of them. There's a picture of a cave with something like eleven Buddha images. Then below that I have two stone lions protecting the wat from spirits. These are actually very common all over in front of every wat you find. Sometime I'll have an opportunity to attend a monk talk, I think I'll ask them about these lions. Lastly I took a mountain outlook of Chiang Mai.

Success and distress

Today I find myself feeling very successful. I summoned a song tao and negotiated a price for Billy, Mark and I to get to the mall. I tried negotiating in Thai, but the driver knew his English numbers and so the scene was with me holding up three fingers and saying "houg sib", and him holding six fingers and saying "sixty". Apparently we were saying the same thing, except he was multiplying 20 and 3 in his head.

I also successfully ordered khao soy at the mall. I think it's my favorite dish here. Melinda took me to an export store this morning and I bought three shirts and two pairs of pants suitable for work all for 420 baht ($12). These clothes of course all have some sort of defect, some of them nasty dirty, of course not the ones I picked up though. This is how it is possible for Thais to live on 170 baht a day.

Towards the end of the work week I had been feeling somewhat glazed over all day long. You could say its from the stress of a different culture or language, or from the jet lag, or the lack of coffee, or any number of things. I don't really know what it is, but it gets hard to work and even harder to communicate effectively later in the evenings. I end up feeling somewhat cut off from society both here and back home.

One of my biggest desires is to be able to hop on a song tao or walk into some public place and strike up a meaningful conversation with a Thai person. I don't really care much what language this conversation should be in so long as it's meaningful. There's so much I'd like to learn about this place. Someone here told me about how he liked living in Papua New Guinea because he was very motivated to learn the language and integrate himself with the culture. Here in Chiang Mai, however, he doesn't feel like there is a need to learn Thai, and that even if he did the social structure wouldn't allow him to really form strong relationships with Thais. There are people who have learned the language and penetrated the social ranks, but they've dedicated themselves to the task; if I were to do this I would have to split my attention with working on software engineering at the office.

Flaming Lips Disease

After nearly a week of living here I'm finally able to stay up a little later than 10 without getting overly tired. The jet lag is wearing off. I'd like to blog to you today about a disease I discovered and very quickly contracted upon my arrival here in Thailand. I call it flaming lips disease although in reality it's just a syndrome involving the consumption of normal Thai food under the impression that it is like normal American food.

Normal Thai food is defined to be a fairly typical East Asian dish like rice with pork, chicken, or beef with the important addition of approximately 30 flavors of the most intense peppers thinkable. A popular theory among my co-workers is that the extraordinary release rate of endorphins heightens the subjects' happiness level and therefore causes addiction among Thais and farangs alike. Whatever theory you like, there is definitely something exciting about food that causes one to sweat and grunt in a heavily air conditioned room.

The second point on my agenda is that song tao's are a display of Asian ingenuity. The simple phrase, song tao, means "two row" which is exactly what it is: a pickup with two bench seats and a roof overhead. Of course you can't forget the handrails standard to most public transportation, and of course the platform in back for tall farangs like me to stand. I once rode on a song tao with 21 other people, not counting the driver. Another time there were only 16 people but six of which were hanging off the back. Probably the best way of getting to work!

Crash Course in Thai-ness

Between the 1.5 days I had in Chiang Mai and the 2 days in the mountains, I've seen more than I thought possible. There is too much to write about so I've decided to talk about a few points that have been on my mind.

Thai culture is service oriented
In Thai, thank you is Kup Koon Kup. When you interact with a waiter/waitress/shopkeeper, they say Kup Koon Kup, as if saying "thank you for allowing me to serve you" and if you say it to them they will often be embarrassed.

Farangs have little use for Thai Language and Culture
A farang is a person of European descent, however it doesn't carry the negative connotation that gringo does in Spanish. I've observed many farangs that I work around that have lived in Thailand for more than 5 or 10 years that can get themselves around the marketplace, but that's where it ends. It's true, you can get most anywhere in Chiang Mai on just English and hand motions, but I feel like something is out of place. Why are they so eager to learn about us but we can care so little about them?

Things are cheap
Food especially. We can walk across the street for lunch and eat a whole meal for 20 baht (about $.60). We were walking around a market last night and I found things like silk shirts for ~200 baht (again, 1:35 exchange rate, so $6). The coffee here can be good, but I've found out that when remote villagers harvest coffee beans they are often underpaid. Minimum wage is 156 baht per day, but coffee companies will sometimes pay only 20 baht per day (enough for a single meal at our favorite restaurant). Fair trade companies will usually pay a more decent amount, but not necessarily enough to survive on. So if you buy coffee, at the minimum please try to buy coffee labeled as fair trade.

These are the things I've been learning about Thailand. There is actually so much more, but these are the things that have been plaguing my mind. I'll try to get some pictures up later.

Thai is a great language, just really different

My flight went unpredictably well, I kept waiting for something to go wrong but nothing did. People were even waiting for me at the airport. Extremely long flight but I'm here. I think I've conquered the jet lag already, but we'll find out tonight. I came to blogspot to do another blog post but all the labels are in Thai so I'm having an unusually hard time finding my way around the site and making posts. Speaking of Thai, I've picked up a little bit from the conversations I've overheard. They have this great word, pronounced kup that can mean this or that or yes, and it's even used on the end of sa wa dee (hello) to make it formal and polite. Also, if your a girl you pronounce it ka.

Driving around here is pretty crazy, people don't necessarily stay in their own lane. There's a zillion motorcycles and they'll pass you on the right or left, two or three at a time. I saw one motorcycle with four full grown people all riding on it. When I have a chance I'll try to get some insane "you don't see this in America" shots. I'll be camping for the next two days up in the mountains somewhere so I'll be back on Sunday in time for church.

My Luck

If you are familiar with my past experience with flying you should know to be worried for me right now. The first time I flew, I was alone and I lost my luggage and on the way back the plane broke down and I had to spend the night in Pittsburgh. Last Christmas I was flying with Kerianne's family on a separate flight (and fate qualified this as flying alone) so my flight got bumped too much and I had to spend Christmas alone in Kerianne's house.

Basically the point is that whenever I fly alone, something goes wrong without fail. Since I know something is going to go wrong I can at least hope and pray that whatever is going to go wrong isn't going to be a big deal.

Visa update

Today the word is that I'll have my visa the next business day after Friday (so Monday). I'm not really sure what the hold up was, but the good news is I'll have it.

We started our Independence day by moving rocks under the scorching sun, then went to a parade in Spearfish, hoping to see the outhouse races which never happened. Later we drove through Spearfish canyon and hiked up over the bridal falls. Then we hiked to little Spearfish. After that we were all so tired we didn't even watch any fireworks.

Still Here

Unfortunately I'm still in South Dakota. I was supposed to be in Denver Right now going through security, but my visa hasn't yet arrived. My flight has now been moved back a week to July 10th. In the meantime I've been experimenting with software art. In my last entry I included a link to Don Relyea's blog, an artist who writes code to generate art. The picture I'm including is my own failed attempt at creating a Hilbert space-filling curve, but the botched attempt actually turned out pretty neat. If you're interested I can send you more information, if you ask.

I don't have much to do from now until next Tuesday except wait for my visa, call people to tell them to work faster, and entertain myself with my computer and guitars. Currently I'm working on generating a bigger and better picture like the one here, so my computer is lagging pretty bad. Pray that everything works out well and in time

Harney Peak

This morning we woke up at 5:00am to hike up to the top of Harney Peak, probably the most hiked trail in the Black Hills. It comes complete with a stone and concrete watch house at the summit used for spotting fires during the summer. Since we woke up so early there weren't much in the way of tourists, but on the way down (even at 8am) we passed another group about every 200yds. While we were up there we had the chance to hike around and check out the pregnant mountain goat and see an amazing view. We also took a billion pictures, so hopefully you can enjoy some of these.

I'm attaching one of me making friends with a US president that was frozen in bronze by the white witch, and another of Kerianne because she's beautiful. Of course the one of me isn't on Harney Peak, thats because we took some time the other day to walk around downtown Rapid City.
While we were down town we took a stroll through "art alley", as they call it. To some it might seem like the city is honoring their homeboys for graffiti, but in reality these works were placed here very intentionally, and its quite fun to walk through.

In other news, I haven't gotten my visa yet for Thailand. It was supposed to come late last week and I'm hoping and praying that it comes Monday. If it doesn't come in time then it better come by Tuesday, and if it doesn't come by then, I don't know what I'm going to do. I'm scheduled to leave from Denver at 4:45pm Tuesday July 3rd and I'll arrive in Chiang Mai in the afternoon of July 5th (my shortest July 4th ever).

For those of you that are interested, I found an interesting screen saver that generates postmodern art on the fly. I'm interested in this because of the computer algorithms involved, but I imagine most of you (my mom especially) are just interested in the pretty colors. here is the link

Lifting weights (Rocks)

The past few weeks I've been working with Kerianne's brother John in moving rocks and making them into rock walls, staircases, and terraces. My mom and dad have insisted that I show them pictures; I decided that since I don't have anything to talk about on this blog yet, I'll just show all of you some pictures. So on the right is a picture of the terraces we've been working on, imagine them filled with rich black dirt and lush green tomato plants (now forget that thought, the Black Hills have been in a six year drought). I was listening to the radio the other day and I heard a deejay say that the thing he likes most about South Dakota is that you can experience the four seasons to their fullest extent. I mean, 110 in the summer, -50 in the winter, summer thunderstorms come complete with F5 tornadoes and baseball-sized hail, winter snow storms often form drifts that cover houses...who could want more?

So when I'm not sweating in the 105 degree heat and hauling large rocks, I'm either reading or playing cards. I don't typically read at all, so when I've read 800 pages in a week purely for leisure, something must be up. I guess I've just been a bit bored and anxious to leave for Thailand.

On the left here is John shuffling a deck of cards for entertainment's sake. I kid you not, we weren't even playing a game but he was shuffling them anyway. I taught them some good wholesome games like Texas Hold-em, Scum (aka scum bucket or Presidents), golf, and rummy (my G'ma's favorite game). I think John's addicted. When he's not satisfying his addiction for reading or cards he's playing the Wii. If you haven't tried it out you should. I find it quite entertaining that rather than make a bigger better faster console, all Nintendo did was create an ingenious new controller and games are suddenly 1000x better.

So I looked at my airline tickets today, I'll be leaving from Denver at 4:45pm and arriving into San Fransisco two hours later. Then I don't leave again until 1am July 4th. So if you know anyone that I know that lives in San Fransisco that I might want to hang out with, you should let me know.

I got shot

Yesterday I went to the travel doctor to get my vaccinations. My shoulders currently feel like I was lifting 300 pounds yesterday, but I keep trying to convince myself it was just needles. I finally uploaded the pictures from the camera to my computer, so you can see them here.

To the left I have one of me standing on a tunnel, bright in all my angelic beauty. This is one of six places where road workers weren't paid enough, so they tunneled through a rock rather than blasting it completely (my theory anyway).

If you walk into the cave and turn around you can see the view in the next picture. Actually, you'd have to get up on top of the rock, like where I am to see this. Actually actually its in a completely different spot on the mountain altogether, but honestly now, who takes pictures of the entire Mount Rushmore? Usually you just see an up-close shot of just the faces.

Kerianne and I have actually considered having the wedding reception up in these parts, by Sylvan Lake. That way all our guests could enjoy a beautiful 6 mile drive in Custer State Park through the mountains and careening around 180 degree corners. We'll see if it works out...

Next we have what I'm certain is a jack-ass on the loose, or a wild donkey if you prefer the more mild approach. I tried to get a good picture of him, but he turned around at the perfect time (or worst time, depending on your point of view). This particular donkey roams the plains but isn't nearly as unfriendly as the buffalo, shown at the end. I also got a good picture of a pronghorn, but who wants to see pictures of animals? I'll save some picture space for the shots in Thailand.

Home on the range

I've gotten all my funding, and I have a ticket for Thailand leaving July 3rd. I'm flying with China Airlines from the US to Taiwan to Chiang Mai. Until I leave I'm staying at Kerianne's house in South Dakota. Since I've seen deer and antelope playing, and skies that are not cloudy all day, its really quite beautiful.

Yesterday we took a drive up through needles highway, a paved road that weaves through large vertical rock spires. Some of the corners are pretty intense, on the edge of a cliff with nothing but a guardrail between you and destiny. We also took a drive through something called wildlife loop. I was entertained by herds of buffalo crossing the road. One particular one waddled into the middle of the road, paused for a few minutes to relieve himself (quite a road obstacle), and then continue to the other side. We stopped to take pictures of a friendly wild mule, and some pronged horns.

The day before yesterday (Friday) we drove through Spearfish canyon. Of course we stopped a few times to take pictures of the canyon. One time I convinced the others to go with time and bushwhack to the top of a rock cliff. I wandered around up on top for a bit and found that there are actually lots of trails, so we ended up taking a trail back down through a deep crevice; it was quite exciting.

Finals et al

I've been dedicating my life to finals the past several days. Very little sleep, very much caffeine, and unhealthy food is the recipe for finals week. I've noticed a phenomenon that people often form new and unsuspecting social connections during finals week due to extremely irregular schedules. Finals week is actually my favorite time of the semester because it ends up being the most interesting. Some people you never even knew existed sometimes become your best friends.

In other news, I'm at 42% of my required funding for Thailand; I got a lot of money this past week. Currently my plan is to audit the Linux class with Dr. Hu for Mayterm and leave for Thailand after that. This way, I'll be able to be with Kerianne for my last month in America and be able to make a lot of money via working at Tech Services.

Introductions

Good morning!

I've created this blog as a sort of web log (or blog as they say) of my trip to Thailand with SIL. If anyone is unclear on what I plan on doing over there, the plan is to write software that aids in linguistics. After all, linguistics has a lot of monotonous work which can be trimmed down with the help of computers.

Currently I'm finishing my work at Houghton then graduating next month. My plan is to leave for Thailand on June 1, though it isn't looking hopeful as I still need about $3,000. Much thanks to everyone who has given thus far, and thanks even more for the prayers. If you know of anyone who would like to help out, checks can be made out to me and sent to either:

Tim Kellogg
CPO 1113
Houghton College
Houghton, NY 14744

OR

Tim Kellogg
136 Turner Street
Greene, NY 13778

Whichever is more convenient as I won't be in Houghton after graduation. It would be nice to have all the money by May 1, but anything that comes is welcome. I'll try to post my progress, in the meantime you should leave a comment!