Suit Yaut! "awesome!"

Hello my beloved blog fans! I apologize for the eternity since we last spoke, but as previously mentioned Thailand is a wonderful and distracting place. It is difficult to sandwhich time for serious internet nerdery between trips to island paradises and Baptist church services. So, to catch you all up on what I have been doing I have tried to make this update less wordy and more photo oriented (which naturally failed, welcome to Atlas Shrugged revisited!), which is probably a great relief for most of you who just like to look at the pictures anyway! So here is the format: I will post a picture then I will describe it and tell you why its hilarious, then you will laugh and tell your friends to read Jeff's hilarious blog!

Several weeks ago, me and the squad went to Phuket, the largest island in Thailand. It was a island paradise that met and exceeded all expectations for island paradise vacations. All sorts of crazy stuff went down: partying, motorcycling, looking at big Buddha statues, and other manifestations of pure debauchery. The trip ended with the mojority of the people who went (about 30?) being stranded in the Phuket airport because we bought our tickets through a dubious third party cash only ticket liaison, and when we attempted to check in...our tickets were no longer valid. Wild right? This picture is of Sehrish and Shane, my beloved friends, standing near the offending counter fully ready to "choke a bitch out".

A few days after returning from Phuket, I decided I was tired of being a hippy with a pom-pom on top of my head. I walked into my friend Bpoy's salon "So Cute" and said "anything" in Thai, "aria gawd dai", and pointed to my hair. She grinned and went to work. About 15 minutes in I was thinking: "alright, this aint so bad". At the 30 minute mark I was wondering why I hadn't learned how to say: "can I please have a cool haircut" instead of "anything". The results speak for themselves.

A dish of Green Curry with chicken "Gang Kioaw Waan Gai" which translates directly to "curry green sweet chicken" which just rolls right off the tongue in English! This was taken in my Thai cooking class which is taught by a foxy babe.

Pictured is a couple of buddhists dressed in white attending a ceremony at the Wat Phra Dammakaya. This day was special because they were casting an image of their master, some awesome dead monk, out of gold. Solid GOLD! A TON OF SOLID GOLD! More than 300,000 people went, including yours truly. They even gave me a gold nugget that I personally blessed and piously tossed to the pile to be melted down and casted.

I went to JJ market which is like 300 square miles (a mild exaggeration) of small shops and stands that sell...everything. Animals, knives, clothing, cameras, art, food, even psychadelic drugs! Above is some adoreable sea creatures in a small basket closely simulating their natural acquatic environment.

A fine pair of original riveted Live's club jeans, 501. JJ market, keeping it real.

My creation from the next weeks cooking class. This is pinapple fried rice...in a pineapple! It actually came out pretty bad, so to make up for the taste we overcompensated in presentation. Suck it Goldfish(c), you are no longer the only snack that smiles back.

Erik, Cynthia, and Win sitting in a songthaew on the way to a ferry that after a relaxing 3 hour wait, would take us to yet another island paradise: Koh Chang. We arrivied at 3 am...unaware that the first ferry didn't leave until 6:30. Alas! We waited and waited and finally...

Out of the darkness emerged the island Koh Chang (elephant island).

This is the porch of the Siam Beach Hut where we stayed in Koh Chang. Yet another tropical paradise, but aren't they all. Like temples, island paradises are a dime a dozen in T-Town.

At the Siam Beach Hut there were mostly European backpackers on their compulsory holiday vacations around the world. Some of these holidays last longer than a year. Slackers. Other than the backpackers there were also several hundred quasi domesticated animals, mostly cats, that reinvented chilling. These cats would set up camp on a sitting pad for hours at a time, eating the occasional dropped snack and smoking the occasional joint. Pictured is one such feline looking at Win's delicious foot.

This is a photo of Erik the giant and little Jeffrey sitting at the entrance to a waterfall we did not visit. We saw the sign the indicated the price of entry was 200 baht (about six dollars) per person and balked, audibly. It should be noted that in Thai script it was posted that entry was only 30 baht (๓๐ บาท) **i wrote that by myself!** what a deal. I tried to get us in for the indicated sum, but no suck luck. Even white devils that speak perfect Thai must pay. Instead we just recruited a young Thai lass to take our picture by the sign and sped off on our rented motorbikes.

The next day we visited another waterfall (and jumped into a slow moving river pool with a Thai family) that was about a 40 minute ride away. On the way back a torrential downpour struck and we awaited its stop. The Koh Change terrain is steep and deadly. The road (the one road the goes all around the perimeter of the island) is two lanes or pure fatality inducing asphalt. Anyway, after it slowed down to flashflood status we decided it would be safe and departed...

Well, we were wrong. Apperently mopeds lose traction on 45 percent grades when there is three inches of rainwater on the road. Pictured is the corner looking suspiciously unthreatening. Somewhere on this very road is the flesh and blood of yours truly! As we slowly, like walking pace slowly, tried to safely crawl down this street, my bike lost traction and I fell over and slid...and slid. I was rattled and bruised but ok. I picked up my bike, sunglasses, and pride off the soaked street and continued precariously down the mountain. We left and returned to Rangsit the next day.

Some time later (a week? a year?) my friends Bryan, Erik, Kara, and I woke up at 4 am to go run a 10km race, a "mini mah-rah-tone" in Thai. We met at one of the omnipresent 7/11s and were off to Bangkok. The race was attended by at least a thousand Thai people and maybe 15 foreigners. We stretched and jogged around a bit while about half of the Thai people participated in the national exercise: dance aerobics! While we tried to get "fired up" the high pitched vioce shouted over techno dance music "one, two, three, come on! One, two, three,yeaaaaaah!" Fired up indeed. Anway after the countdown "haa, sii, sahm, song, neung" (5, 4, 3, 2, 1) we made a mad dash into the dawn. Forty five agonizing minutes later I was done. When we all finished we met and got ready to leave...after we waited for Bryan to collect his trophy and winner's jacket (which actually is proudly emblazoned with the text "winner"). Bryan is the kind of man that goes to charity and prize 10k's, half, and whole marathons and WINS them. Wild!

After the race, Bryan convinced me to come to the church he translates for (he goes out every thursday night at 6pm to 'save souls' as he puts it". This church is possibly the only Baptist church in all of Pathum Thani, and this was one of the grand opening services, so it was a pretty special occasion. The place is an old Thai house in the middle of sugarcane and corn fields, strange place for a Baptist church indeed.

This picture was taken during the actual church service. The service was great! It was very fascinating to hear the rhetoric used on these people, who were all of course from a very long lineage of Buddhists. The bottom line seemed to be that Christianity is EASY! No need for merit, rituals, or anything. Jesus "yeh suu" died for so that you would never have to deal with Satan "suh taun". It was a pretty impressive feat, and I think he convinced the Thais in attendance Some of these were actually souls that Bryan had saved personally. After the service we ate fried rice made by the preachers Mexican wife, which was delicious.

This is Erik, mentioned frequently, in his halloween costume: a "kah too eh", a ladyboy. He thought he could just get a quick makeup job and put on a dress, but our friend Bpoy, the same one that gave me the euro discotheque haircut, went bananas with the idea. The process became an hour exceeding feat that resulted in this. She did a wonderful job; Erik was beautiful.

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The next pictures are of the halloween party, people drank, danced and drank more. My costume was a motorcycle taxi driver, and in my opinion it was pretty authentic. I got a sweet shirt from Bryan, and got a vest that closely approximated the real thing.

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Win, whom I went to Koh Chang with, dressed as a pumpkin, being a stud. Hey that reminds me! The girl in the top left is a genuine ladyboy. She is in my cooking class. Transvestites in Thailand are everywhere and totally accepted.

Me being a stud, covered in hos as usual.

Still being a stud, no longer covered in hos.