Songkran

I'm back....covered in beer-water, ice, holy-water, random buddhist tiger balm powder, klong (dirty canal runoff), sweat from hundreds of people...and more! You think they'll let me through airport check-in or quarantine me? 
SONGKRAN WAS AMAZING! It was a fantastic way to end my time here and totally is going to make me more depressed as I hop on that plane tomorrow thinking of how fun Thailand is. Chiangmai was definitely the spot to go it was packed with people all throwing water for the Thai New Year. You had everything from extremely drunk party-ers, to families from their small villages with buckets of water and seven kids in a truck bed. The kids seemed to have the most fun and loved being hit when you squirted them with water guns. *We went all out and got these kiddie guns with refilling backpacks in animal characters*
For the die hards Songrkan festival actually started Tuesday that week when we got here. Our Song-Tao taxi driver purposely slowed down for kids to jump on the back and bucket us with water and would weave through residential streets where he knew kids would be celebrating early. We were soaked a full day in advance because of his 'skills', hahaha. Everyone wanted to touch or soak a 'farang' - 'gringo' - 'white person' just for kicks too. So we were sought after targets.
Its a bittersweet ending here 'khom-wan' if you will...I'll definitely be depressed and missing Goi and everyone here for a while but I can't wait to see some of you soon!!! :)
A little taste of songkran: 
http://www.facebook.com/video/video.php?v=10150214337074747

Ode to BKK

Ode to the last day of work.

I showed up this Wednesday assuming there would be work but...it appears its a random Mission Holiday, the place is closed. Somehow I'm still scheduled to meet with the hospital design team however because NO ONE announces said holidays here. So I set up my computer, harddrives (techie stuff) open up my bag of papaya and behold...bad fruit from the vendor! Hahaha, amazingly somehow I can stop thinking about how much I'm going to miss all this in two weeks. This is my last week at the office, then next week is the Thai new year 'Wan Songkran' where basically the entire country participates in a nationwide water-war.
Update: This last weekend we hung out with Goi and went to a random naval museum on Saturday and then a floating market on Sunday. Fun stuff! All the shoppers basically walk on the sidewalk and the vendors all have canoe-boats on the small river and sell stuff. This one was more of a 50/50 floating market and house market. Lots of the shops at this one were built on stilts too, so it kinda felt like you were on land half the time even if you were walking over the canal. We had noodles and wandered around and on our way back we saw a monkey! I remembered seeing them farther out of the city but apparently Bangkok has a native monkey population in some of its more natural areas too...King Kong must have had babies when he came to the city, haha. This one was just sitting on a telephone pole chillin...fishermen would talk to him and throw him up bait sometimes just for entertainment while they waited for bites. *Sidenote* I kinda laughed at the fishermen here at first because I've seriously seen Thai's casting lines into puddles and ponds that shouldn't have fish in them by any common sense but then five minutes later coming up with some fish about six inches long (a local favorite around here, they salt it, then fry it head and all, and pick the meat off the bones with chopsticks or fingers). Its probably all over-grown Goldfish from Bangkok sewers but...doesn't taste too bad.

Naam Toum!

Flood! This Monday Goi and me were on our way to work when we got a call saying worship was canceled and we had to come straight to our office. It had rained unusually hard the night before (any rain, we should just say is unusual right now actually, its been dry for so long now) and the roof had leaked. It wasn't just the type of leak you could stick a bucket under though. The Mission roof is designed *un-designed* to have a giant seam/dip in the middle that happens to form right over our wing. The seam had leaked to the point of pouring everything on our neighbors P.Yuwana and P.Saipins desks. Their computers, books, printers, scanners, everything was covered in water, this wasn't everything however. Because of the giant leak there, the water had traveled into the neighboring offices too. Ours in particular was about four inches deep. We bucketed water out the windows for several hours until we could mop and use rags. The powercords to the computers were pretty waterlogged and we spend the remainder of the day moving out *incase it rained again that night* and blowdrying the equipment.
SIDENOTE: (Funny blowdrying story tangent) Goi was trying to dry her hair the other day, and I always teased her because it took her little blowdryer hours because it was so weak. So I loaned her mine...haha. I had it set on low but immediately you could sense the change, it was almost as if her hair was in some wind tunnel/vortex/jet-wash. Her hair was BLOWN backwards and she screamed in shock. A couple minutes later she was shouting 'dron dron dron' *trans: 'hot hot hot'! I was laughing SO hard but I showed her how to use the 'cold' setting whenever it got too warm. Now she's addicted of course...
So back to our story. P.Yuwana had come back from her house with a blowdryer and had started on their sopping wet books and computers when Goi walked in. She saw Yuwana and was like, "Oh! I know the PERFECT thing!" I saw her later showing them how to use it and they were ALL screaming at how strong it was! Gotta love American technology...
We've been officially relocated for the dry-time-being into the radio room down the hall and it looks like the rain should let up soon and we can move back in :) We do have another office with equipment, but it has a giant hole in the roof!! Apparently the ceiling broke a couple months back and caved in on Andrews computer so we haven't been in there since...ironically however this room didn't leak a bit!