Flying Time: That's Funny

So, we've only got 6 weeks left here in our lovely city called Melbourne. Then we're off to embark on our next adventure in El Salvador.

I just finished making a video on Final Cut Express about our travels through Cambodia and Thailand. I have to admit, it came out pretty cool. My degree in Visual Arts is finally being useful. That film production class I took really, really helped. I've remembered all of the basics as well. I just have to progress to actual films instead of videos. My next project is going to be about Peace Corps and the whole process of what's like to apply and work with Peace Corps. I also want to do a people documentary. The DV camera Will got me for Christmas is turning out to be so valuable!

I was just rereading my entries about our travels in Thailand and Cambodia. It made me yearn for more travel. Last night we were talking about going to India. That's our next big trip. When we finish paying off our student loans we going to take a month and travel around India. We have a lot of friends here from Bangladesh and India, it seems like such an interesting place to see. When we move to El Salvador, one of my goals is to visit every country in Central America and finally make it to Brazil. I'm going to study Brazilian Portuguese every day so that when I get there I can have a proper conversation with people. My Portuguese in fine, but I've spent my time learning european Portuguese and it's really differnt from what is spoken in Brazil. Sometimes I like to pretend I'm from Brazil and no one questions it because I look Brazilian. I'd love to do my teaching certificate program there...but we'll see. Should I decide to, it will probably be Argentina.

The countries I most want to visit in south America: Brazil, Argentina and Peru.

Ah, the places I've gone and the places we're going. When I was in highschool I never imagined I'd come this far in life or do all the things I have done. I'm going to be married to an American with the last name of Smith, I went to university in Spain, I learnt a third language, I will have a masters degree, I've ridden in the back of a smelly mini-van in rural Cambodia, I've met someone who thinks I'm a fabulous person and I like red wine.

I've even had a bacterial intestinal infection in Thailand. Huh. Boy, do I feel lucky to be me and have the life that I have. I wouldn't trade places with Jennifer Lopez if they paid me.

Life as we know it

Life as we know it will turned upside down on June 7th and we will be living in the sky. No, we're not going to commit suicide together or build a castle in the sky. We're moving to El Salvador to work for Peace Corps as municipal developers. Fancy job title, huh?

For more details visit: The New Chronicles: In Search of Something Other

Sofia, Not the Bulgarian Capital

We have a new flatmate who moved in today named Sofia. She has red eyes, seems to bathe constantly and can jump quite high for a tiny mouse.

Final Semester: A Day in the Life

Today didn't start out as well as I had hoped, even though it's only 2pm. I woke up at 6:45am this morning because our placement officer from Peace Corps (they are in charge of having the final say of where you will get shipped off to and are all in charge of sending you an invitation) was meant to call us at 8am. 9:30am rolled around, I became very tired, both from lack of sleep and calling the placement officer but getting her voicemail each time, and Will had to leave for uni to get to work on his big thesis project. Right when he was about to head out and I was about to take a nap for "30 minutes", the phone rings and we both stare at it. Then I picked it up and the phone call resulted in setting up another arranged phone meeting later tonite around 12am.

After I awoke from my "nap" I sat down to get working on my own thesis project. I've been translating more or less steadily since 11am, that's about 3 hours worth of work. However, I've now translated enough to calculate how many words there are per page and how many pages of The Collected Short Stories of Roald Dahl I actually have to translate--the results have left me feeling rather unmotivated to work anymore for today. Here's why:

Each page packs about 430 words and I have to translate a total of 15,000 words. That means I have a 34-35 page allowance of stories that I can choose from. The short story I've been translating is a total of 24 pages, which eats up most of my allowance, and while it's a good story, there are ones that are considerably more packed with black humour. So I've translated a total of 1,300 words and I'm not even going to use them for my project. And to think I was going to translate ALL of the stories I found interesting first and THEN figure out how many words I needed!

So, I've decided on 3 short stories totalling 36.5 pages and approximately 15,695 words: A story called Pig, where a naive child ends up getting turned into ground meat; A story called The Man From the South, where a compulsive gambler from South America who's fond of chopping off the fingers of people who lose bets with him, and Lamb to Slaugher, about a pregnant women who kills her detective husband with a frozen lam leg and ends up feeding the evidence to the detectives who come over to her home to investigate the crime.

I quite like black humour and this is possibly the most boring blog entry I've ever written.

Back from Thailand: Birthdays and Drinking Water

The first thing I need to say is that Hat Rai Lay was disappointing. It was so disapointing I didn't take a picture of it at it's most disapointing point. The coolest things about it were the bungalow we stayed at--mosquito net for sleeping, bucket baths, basic anemities and chickens--

--and the kayaking trip we did through the mangroves with a special visit of pineapple-eating monkeys.


Everything else about the beach was uncool. The water is so shallow that when the tide goes down, it REALLY goes down. The tide happend to go down when we were kayaking and it revealed a disgustingly muddy and slimy beach. The beach is also seriously lacking in the nightlife department. I suppose an upside was that we saw a Thai boxing match against at a bar we were having drinks at. We stayed there for 2 nights and then spent 1 night in Phuket because we had to catch a flight back to Bangkok the next day. We stayed right next to the airport at Nai Yang beach, which I quite liked.

I accidently booked an expensive bed and breakfast for $46 online, but it turned out to be so worth it when we we got upgraded to a bigger room because there were only 2 guests staying at the B&B and the room was absolutley amazing compared to the places we'd been staying at for $9.

How do you accidently book expensive accomodation you ask? Well, when you book at hostelworld.com the prices are per person and not per room. It was the only place near the airport and spending $23 didn't seem that bad. However, after I booked it I was reminded that upon arrival the B&B, a total of $40 was due. Ha!

Well we're back in Melbourne and it's great being back home. Hot water showers, drinkable tap water, a kitchen to cook in and cool people to hang out with. We even got new furniture while we were away. When we first moved in, we had these horrible bright red pleather couches that must be the most uncomfortable couches ever made in the history of furniture making and now we have soft, blue fabric covered couches. Ah, life is good again.

Speaking of life being good, my favourite person named Bill (and/or Will) in the world turned 24 yesterday. We had a smashing martini, dancing-on-the-couches fueled afterparty:

Cheers to my favourite birthday boy!

Back on the mainland: Feeling a bit Krabii today?

"I just ate the cheapest watermelon icecream ever--just 8 baht".

About an hour or so we arrived at our next destination--Krabii. Krabbii is actually more like a "waiting room" for those going to the beaches of Ralai and Ao Nang, which are both on the Adaman Sea, Thailand's west coast. This morning we caught a taxi ride to the pier to catch a ferry back to the main land, caught the ferry, got on a bus and then got on another bus. By the time we arrived in Krabii it was already dark and the only way to get to the beaches is by taking a songthaow toi the pier and then catching a longtail boat to the beach. Apparently it's quite dodgy getting to beach at night because not only do the longtail boats charge more at night, we'd also be on the water in the dark with our hikking backpacks on. The thought of being on a semi rickety boat at night is a creepy one. So...we're spending the night in the town of Krabbii and heading out to Hat Rai Ley beach tomorrow morning.

It's not bad, the food is cheap, less English is spoken and it's so much more Thai than the islands.Yesterday we went on a boat tour through Munchies Boat Tours, which entails taking a longtail boat around the island of Ko Pangan and visiting a few hard-to-reach beaches, snorkelling, hikking up to a waterfall and free weed, as well as Coke n' whiskey. The water is so clear and blue, I felt like drinking it. However, when water splashed all over my face and into my mouth, I was quickly thrust back into reality--you can't drink saltwater and live for very long afterwards. Overall it was a good trip although there were a few momments when I thought the boat was going to capsize because the waves were quite choppy on the way back--I thought we might crash into the rocks or even worse, that the boat would split in two and we'd be stuck at sea without life jackets. The tour included lunch, weed, beverages and beaches, but no life jackets.

Well, sometimes we have to make sacrafices right?

Notes from Thailand: Ko Pangan

It's been 3 or 4 days since we left Cambodia behind and returned to Thailand bright and shiny with amazing experiences and a strong desire to have out at the beach all day long.

We blew to Bangkok from Phnom Pehn on Sunday, spent the whole day wondering around that god forsaken city with out heavy backpacks and finally caught our sleeper train to Surat Thani, the gateway city to the islands of Ko Samui, Ko Phagnan and Ko Tao. From Surat Thani we took a ferry to Ko Pagnan and we've been beach bumming since then. Ko Pagnan is home to the world famous Full Moon Parties, amazingly blue waters and whisky and vodka buckets. Yes, they really are beach pails filled with ice, red bull, soda and alcohol. So yum.

Oh, and the film "The Beach" was filmed in the neighbourhood, that's how hot the beaches are here.

Our days go something like this: wake up, put on bathing suits, slather on SPF 30+ sunblock to keep our skins young and safe, have breakfast, lay on the beach till lunch time, eat lunch, return to beach until the sun begins to set, shower, have dinner and share 3-4 vodka buckets on the beach while watching fire dancers. We usually dance the night away in the sand, under the stars (when its not too cloudy)and pretending like we're the best dancers on the beach. It's quite fun and to think we still have 6 more days of such sun and sand debauchery--or however you spell that.

Beach holidays are so fun, and to think in one week's time summe will be officially over and the new school year will have begun.

Le sigh.