So I just got the email that I've been waiting for.
My project in Israel was just confirmed so it looks like I'll be heading out there for the next 4-5 months. Can't wait. Thailand has been great and I'll miss it terribly, but it will be nice to get back to work...I mean other than my blossoming career as an internationally renouned sound guy for peace loving dancing fools.
Anyway, that's more than enough news for today.

My friend Aili (who is currently in Yasothon with me) has found some truely excellent shirts in the past few days. A few days ago it was a shirt with a canada flag on it and the word "CANNADA" written underneath.
Today's was even better. A red shirt that says in giant white letters:
WE WANT
TO FALL?
IN LOVES
EXACTLY!
completely and really

I think we all need a shirt just like this one.

Tonight we were invited out to our friend Yoye's mom's restaurant for dinner. Plates of rice and noodles and Som Tum and green curry and crispy shrimp fritter thingys and a mellow red coconut curry... so yummy. And then Yoye and FM took us to the video store (FM isn't really his name, Thai's all have nicknames aside from their regular names and most go strictly by their nicknames. I don't even know the real names of most of the people that I hang out with all day... But FM definitely wins the the coolest name around contest...or maybe that goes to "Jack Dawson" who is so named because he is "big like the Titanic"). Anyway, at the video store we tried to find an english copy of anything at all to watch, but the vast majority of movies are dubbed into Thai... and not really wanting to watch "Home Alone 4" dubbed into Thai, we decided to give up and go home.

I bought 5 dozen roses today. They cost me $3.50

The Super-International-Peace-Loving-Dancing-and-Singing maniacs descended upon another fine educational establishment yesterday. Thankfully the trauma was kept to a minimum this time as the audience was a little older, though I think some of the girls may have swooned dangerously at the sight of a tall Belgian boy dancing sweatily around in front of them. there were the girls that were in danger of choking to death as they giggled uncontrollably while trying to eat their lunches.
Then there was the roly-poly 87 year old mangy dog that seems to inhabit the canteen (yes, they actually call it a canteen here) at the Yasothon Technical College and kept waddling menacingly towards the performers during the show.
By the grace of God we all escaped unscathed and rabies-free and hung out with some of the kids. I was even introduced as the "sound guy" and everyone clapped for me. Or, at least I got more claps than the driver did (but less than the belgian boy). And my parents were worried that I wouldn't be able to decide on a career...and now here I am, sound guy to the international crazy dancy mixed bag of foreign idealists.

There was supposed to be more to that last post, but it's pushing on to a late hour here in Yasothon and now that there are 9 people staying in this house things are a little crazy and so it's best if everyone goes to bed together (er...that came out wrong I think) so I'm being ushered away from the world of blogging and towards the world of sleeping...
So there may be more tomorrow. I hope.

Yesterday was go-to-the-technical-college-and-be-mobbed-by-young-Thai-ladies day. Among my most favorite days of the year.
It started off innocently enough when we were invited to an english class to give the students a chance to practice their english speaking skills. But pretty soon I was seperated from the pack and lured into a room with 25 girls and one very happy boy who all stared and giggled and asked complex questions such as: How old are you? Do you have a girlfriend?
And make such statements as: You are so handsome! (a quick note to all other ugly, big nosed white boys in need of an ego boost: I can recommend Yasothon...)
After a light grilling at the hands of the nubile Asians (what is your favorite Thai food? -I was tempted to say tuna fish sandwiches) the rest of the troop tracked me down and we all sat and sang songs and I took more pictures and escaped unscathed.

Oh, and in the "Thailand is a wonderful and exotic place but not a place to store your cherished books" department, my friend found that approx. one million gajillion termites had made their home in her boxes of cherished books that were stored beside her bed. So we had to rescue the books from the evil clutches of the termite hoard. It wasn't easy. But we soldiered on. And then after when we were basking in our victory (mostly, we had to throw a bunch of stuff out...but that might have been a blessing) we congratulated ourselves on not only ridding the house of the axis of termite evil, but also providing all of the local birds with an unexpected feast. And then we realized that the termite carcases were, in fact, soaked in pesticide. So we chased all the birds away before we had a pile of termite bodies AND a pile of bird bodies decorating our front yard.

Ok, so it's been a few days. But I've busy with the crazy dancing fools and their marry adventures.
On Saturday my host overheard on the morning "news" (little trucks with loudspeakers on them that drive around and broadcast all sorts of colourful tidbits about sales at the local market, new movie reviews and other community announcements) that Yasothon was having a dance competition to celebrate national youth day.
So of course, we just had to hijack the whole thing...and our local connection called the mayor and we weaseled our way in.
Now, as this was a national celebration, I sort of expected some Thai traditional dancing, and the first number didn't disappoint, but after that the whole thing degenerated into a bizarre Britney Spears Thai Techno bang bang monstrosity where 11 year old girls in cheerleader uniforms flashed us their panties. Oh, and some Thai boys that were dressed like Thai girls flashed us their panties too.
And so when the International dancing, peace loving, foreign people started their dances about equality of the races and calling for the elimination of poverty, poeple at first really didn't know what to think. Really, the whole place was silent until the very end. And then they loved us. (Or rather, they loved them, I didn't even get to work the music this time...)
And after we were done the mayor of Yasothon (decked out in a shimmering blue/green dinner jacket) invited us all over to perform at a party he was throwing for a bunch of his politician friends. So we all jumped into the back of a comandeered fire truck (ok, so it was just a pickup truck, but it was owned by the fire station AND it had flashing lights on the roof) and drove over to the mayors party and my dancing musical cohorts performed a great dance about the responsability of the wealthy of this world to make sure that the less fortunate then themselves are not forgotten.
But a lot of the audience was all pretty drunk by then, so who knows if any of it resonated...
But hey, we got free food out of it anyway. So everybody went home a winner.

This seems to be a musical blog today...
So, we went back to the elementry school that is still reeling from it's encounter with our international dancing friends for an encore performance. It was pretty much the same as the last one, though the dancing fools were one short as one of them came down with a baffling Thai fever (The Thai doctor who we disturbed at 1am at the Yasothon hospital told our friend that "You have a fever." very helpful gentleman.)
One interesting note is that just before the foreign spectacle began, one of the teachers led the children in singing The Barney Song...in Thai.
Just when you thought things couldn't get any weirder...

Not really much in the blog department today, just felt the need to type something...
A few of us went out to visit my frined's band today. Four 50-something Thai men singing Eagles cover tunes. Not to be missed my friends, not to be missed.

So me and the random batch of International travelling band of Vagrants invaded a school this morning and completely traumatized a large group of 3-5 year olds. See, these wandering souls all seem to believe in peace and unity (or something like that) so they all went down to the school and did some dancy and dramatic thingys to teach kids about...oh I don't know, I just had to run the music. And I messed that up BIG TIME so...uh...anyway.
But the performance was pretty cool, I think the kids took a little time to get used to five variously shaded people dancing around in front of them and yelling things in english, so during the first song there were 150 little kids staring, wide eyed, open mouthed, completely silent at the spectacle in front of them. Oh, except one kid, right in the front, who got right into it and started this little sit-down arm-waving body-grooving kind of dance that was the most hysterical thing that I've ever seen.
And then at the end, we all did the "Peel Banana, Peel, Peel Banana" song. And immediately after that the new foreign stars were almost killed in the ensuing stampede to touch the funny dancy yelly (and by this time very sweaty) people. It was awesome. I've got photos of the whole thing.
And tomorrow they have two more performances.
Wish me luck, I have to do the music again tomorrow. And take stacks and stacks of photos. As per usual.

I just got an email from my dear friend Joseph Sematimba in Kampala. He just released a music video that was rated number two on the "best three of the week" on (I'm assuming) East Africa Television. If anyone out there is in east Africa at the moment and have had a chance to see it, let me know how it is would ya?

Flying in the face of all I pretend to believe as a seasoned traveller and all around ethno-open thinking guy, I had a tuna fish sandwich and fries for lunch in Yasothon today. Was strangely satisfying. But tomorrow I think I'll go back to the Pad Thai, Som Tum and Pork salad.

Oh my Goodness!
I just saw the specs of MY NEW LAPTOP!
I'm so excited!
Actually I'm not that excited, cause after all where the heck are the G5 laptops? huh? I ask ye.
Oh, and just cause I heard this, and I'm a sucker for stupid things like this, Sept 19. is national (if you're an American) talk like a pirate day.
So lets all stay home and program the voices on our macs to talk like pirates and celebrate the fact that we're all the biggest geeks around.

So here I am in Northeastern Thailand, waiting in a little internet cafe looking at minute to minute updates of the "macrumors" web site to see if they're going to be announcing new Mac Powerbooks today in Paris. And I can write to you all about it AS IT HAPPENS! Isn't the internet great? Or really really lame...I can't decide which.

Not really sure where that last post came from...maybe I've been alone on the bus too long...

A couple of days before I left KL, my back chinese friend was telling me about the oppresive Malaysians and how a few days before, a work crew had showed up unannounced to 6am to destroy a shanty town not far from her house. And how it was only the bravery of the woman in the small community and their willingness to lay down infront of giant buldozers that saved their homes. And the whole time she's telling me this, I'm thinking "man, I wish I was there!" and so we talked about people's bravery and passion and how sometimes, just sometimes a few people can make a big impression. Well, the day before I left for Thailand, I was on the train that ran past the shanty town and I was shocked to see that half of it was missing. Gone. Wiped clean. Only fresh dirt and a few dazed-looking poeple walking around where their homes used to be.
And my excitment from the day before was gone. I had wanted to be there to capture that moment and that emotion of these woman (and some of them with their children) forcing this crew to leave. But really, anything I would have captured would have been fleeting, because their gains only lasted 48 hours. And then the crews returned (probably with the police) and took everything away from these woman anyway.
Sometimes when you're a photographer, it's easy to forget that the photos you take are more than moments. Especially for the people in them.

So if any of you are wondering just what the he..ck I'm doing in Yasothon, I really don't have a good answer for that. I guess it beat sitting at my black chinese friend's house and otherwise aimlessly wandering the streets of KL while she's at school. So I showed up at my friends house in Yaso this morning at 6am and she wasn't even there, but there were 7 other people staying there. Hmm...
So now we've got: A Venezualan, an Australian, a few Canadians, a couple of Thais, a Malaysian, some guy from Vanuatu and uhh...I think that's it...a regular international house of Pancakes.

I made it to Yasothon and it only took 30 hours. On the bus.
KL to Hatyai, Hatyai to Bangkok, Bangkok to Yasothon. And I want to die.
On the plus side, I saw a great Thai movie on the bus that involved some guy who thinks he's Jackie Chan jumping over a lot of stuff and a giant tuk-tuk chase at the end when they drove a dozen moto-rikshaws off the end of an uncompleted highway bridge. Like a Thai budget Matrix reloaded.
When I arrived in Bangkok I had to race from the southern bus station to the eastern bus station in Bangkok traffic. luckily I found one of the many aspiring F-1 racer cab drivers in the city (actually, I think all of them are aspiriing F-1 racers) and pulled up at the station at 9:45 and was on the last bus to Yaso at 10pm. And as I settled into my "first class" seat, and pulled on my headphones for the last 8 hour leg of the trip, I bus passed a sign by the side of the highway, black on white, that said simply: Dream World
ahhh, yes indeed.

In preparation for my impending trip to Thailand, I went through my various wallets to pull out all of my Thai Bhat from my last trip up there and this is what I found:
25 Thai Bhat
175 Malaysian Ringgit
25 South African Rand
11,500 Zambian Kwatcha
2,500 Ugandan Shillings
70 Israeli shekels
2000 Cambodian Realis
a few Australian dollars
a few American dollars
a few Canadian dollars (home sweet home)
So, next time you all are playing "where in the World is Carmen San Diego, remember all these currencies.
Oh, and what does it all add up to?
about $100 US dollars. Good thing I'm taking the bus.

Another chill, video editing day in Malaysia. But it looks like this will be the LAST chill, video editing day in Malaysia cause the video will be done today and because I'm leaving for Thailand tonight. 36 hours from here to Yasothon (North East Thailand) and I'm aiming to do it all in one stretch. And hopefully this time I won't get ripped off by the shady bus mobsters in Hatyai. Wish me luck.

Today, in the newspaper, I read that a man had been sentanced to 18 years in jail and 10 strokes of the rotan for "outraging the modesty of a woman". Not sure what that means exactly and I'm a little nervous about about leaving the house, lest I outrage anyones modesty...

tonight was the moon cake festival, so my black chinese friend and I went down to the park and lit lanterns and tried not to burn ourselves. Jolly good fun.

First Post.
Stuck in Kuala Lumpur.
Not stuck exactly, just don't know where I'm going or what I'm doing after this.
I have a ticket to Sydney in a couple of weeks, but some other, more fun and exciting things may haapen before then. And my fun and exciting thing in Sydney isn't happening now.
But a quick recap: I left Cape Town, SA on June 26 and was supposed to be in SE Asia for 6 weeks (a quick trip to Cambodia to shoot a documentry with my film-student, Black Chinese friend). And then off to the pacific for sand and sun and plenty of photo. And now it's been ten weeks and I'm stuck in KL taking my time polishing a 12 minute docmentry about an NGO that provides education to rural Cambodian kids and waiting for something fun to happen.
Which at this point could be a 5 month tour of the pacific or six month stint in the middle east. I'm sure ya'll know what my parents prefer.