Crystal’s Adventures

If anyone would like to write to me, my address until June 11th is:

Room 207
Bed and Breakfast Inn
36/42 Soi Kasem San 1
Rama 1 Road
Pathumwan, BANGKOK 10330
THAILAND

It takes about 5-7 days for letters to go between Thailand and the U.S.

Today at work I ate lunch with a very interesting group of young UNESCO workers at the UNESCO “cafeteria” building. It is beautiful and reminds me of a treehouse, because it is slightly raised off the ground level and is pure glass on three sides, with skylights in the ceiling. Tropical flowering trees and plants surround the building, giving it a very “jungle-y” feeling while you eat and look outside. The furniture is Asian minimalist: black leather, matte metal and glass, with clean lines. The food is excellent too! I had curry and rice, with a strange tapioca pudding for dessert that had corn, fresh coconut and yam chunks floating in it.

The group of people I lunched with included two girls and two guys, all about my age. Plau is from Bangladesh but lives and studies in Thailand. Tee has Malaysian citizenship but is Chinese and lives in Thailand. Glen is Japanese ethnically but is Canadian by citizenship and works in Thailand. Alida has Dutch citizenship, but her mother is Thai and her father is Vietnamese. We talked about all the trouble we have when we travel in explaining to people what we “are”. We laughed pretty hard when Alita asked Glen whether he tells people he’s from Canada or North America. Also, she asked where Vancouver is in Canada, and we told her that it’s “on the left”.

It rained a lot yesterday — a true tropical storm with lots of thunder. So my Thai word for yesterday was umbrella, which is “Lohm”. The word for today was rice, which is pronounced “Khow”, in a falling tone.

Today at work I also attended a debriefing (?) presented by two people who recently led education program needs assessment teams to tsunami victim areas in Sri Lanka and Indonesia, called IDP camps. IDP stands for “Internally Displaced Persons”. I got to attend this presentation in the official UNESCO board room. Very fancy. I learned a lot about long-term program needs assessment, non-formal education and coordinating donor agencies for tsunami relief. They also showed beautiful and interesting photographs from their trips to these places.

The highlight of my day was when the IT manager, a Thai man named “Bang”, took me to get a security passcode for the front door. There’s a computer on the wall by the front door where I now enter my code number and put my finger on a sensor pad so it can identify me by my fingerprint, just like in James Bond movies!!!

The Thai gals next door at the Wendy House washed and ironed all of my clothes for me today for about $US 3.