Yesterday was our first day of graduate school classes in the JGSEE (Joint Graduate School for Energy and the Environment), so my friend Sarah and I attended a class on Environmental Pollution Control. Unfortunately the class was cancelled, but curiously, the next day’s afternoon classes were cancelled as well. Apparently cancelled classes are very common at KMUTT, but for us Americans with no assignments yet, we’re yearning for academic stimulation! In the drought of class, we taught Pai and A to play Ultimate Frisbee which has been a wonderful heated workout under the equatorial sun. I also purchased a soccer ball for 99 baht, but after kicking it around for about 15 minutes… it exploded magnificently. I’m going to buy a more expensive brand-name ball in Bangkok. The picture of feet in the slideshow below is what the girls in my room looked like after removing our shoes and socks after a day of Ultimate Frisbee in the dirt. We are really tan and still wearing socks, we have horrible tan lines, or that’s red mud.
Last night at dinner at a restaurant called “Bang and Earn” which essentially means “By Chance”, we met three other white people (a lovely rarity). One of them, named George, works on our campus in a building called the Innovative Learning Center where, as a Senior from Radford College in Virginia, George teaches chubby wealthy preteens how to paint in a Montessori-type middle school. He’s here for the summer and we all exchanged Thai cell phone numbers.
My American crew over here (who you’ll hear a lot about: Sarah, Kevin, Angela, Brock, Dan, Elizabeth, Ruby, Lauren, Alana) had our first class today. “Energy and the Environment” is taught by Ajarn Savitri and it looks like it will be good. Tomorrow we have “Environmental Chemistry and Ecotoxicology”. A lot of beer tonight at this bar/restaurant Bud was a ton of fun, but my food was an absolutely inedible soup called Tom Yum with Coconut…it was essentially whole shrimp in a pool of butt-burning red chilies.
I've discovered a really sweet Som Tum place over near a park that I can't wait to take my family to when they visit. Sticky Rice (Kao neao) is the tastiest.Also, incase you were wondering, Thai people have never seen or heard of a Frisbee. We've been playing Ultimate Frisbee as a group every single day for a couple of hours but the Thai kids we play with are getting better every day.
