This Land is Your Land, This Land is Thailand

And it’s a pretty excellent land, at that. Here we are, sitting in our room at the KMUTT guest house. 3:10 am, planning to depart at 6:30. Conventional wisdom says that we should minimize our sleep time tonight in order to sleep more on the plane and begin the arduous adjustment process back to US Eastern Standard Time. With that, I’m suing these final hours to type this final dispatch from the Eastern Hemisphere’s City of Angels. This may not be the last post on this blog entirely, mind you. I’m hoping to flesh this whole narrative out with the elusive photos that inferior internets have prevented me from posting yea these long two months.

Anyway, I think everyone in my party would agree that today was a very appropriate conclusion to our time here. We began this morning with our final presentations of our research. Mine went very well, with the only problem being a small technical glitch getting my movie demo of my device to play. Occupational hazard for a Mac user in a PC world. Managed to get it to work eventually, so no harm no foul.

For lunch we went to a small out of the way place that served these awesome lettuce wraps, vaguely similar to the “Thai lettuce wraps” they serve at The Cheesecake Factory, but, you know, real. Then, Joey and I headed off to the grocery store for some last minute food shopping, which, of course, had to include one last batch of mangosteen. Even though they’ve gone out of season, I wasn’t about to leave the country without eating a few of these one more time. We also stopped for our last cup of cha yen, delicious bright orange Thai-style iced tea that I’m going to try to make in the States but inevitably will never be able to get quite right.

Packing and dinner were about as interesting as one might expect. I will say that I enjoyed one much more than the other (guess which one, I’ll give you a hint: it involved shrimp). The aftermath of dinner, though, was far more exciting. You may recall a few weeks ago, around a certain holiday celebrating American independence, when we picked up some semi-legal fireworks. We were a little nervous about setting them off without a fluent Thai speaker present, just in case “the man” decided he didn’t appreciate bright lights and loud noises. So, when Joey and I were cleaning our room and found a trash bag full of explosives, we decided something should be done. Some of the grad students suggested that we bring them to dinner with us, and set them off in the parking lot just like any respectable hooligan might do. However, this plan was soon quashed by the restaurant parking attendants, and we were forced to retreat back to campus.

Not to be deterred so easily, we split up with various groups of grad students for typical goodbye style gatherings at the nearby watering holes. Eventually most of us wound up back together, and the subject of the elusive pyrotechnics still lingered on everyone’s mind. Fortunately, these grad students (different ones than we ate dinner with, for the most part) were a little more adventurous, and offered to accompany us on our quest for detonation.

After wandering around campus for a while trying to negotiate with security guards while scouting out safe launch pads, we wound up in the middle of the football pitch. Seems like a logical place to me. Some of the others had lingered behind, and as I was walking back towards them to tell them that we were go for liftoff, all of a sudden the rockets red glare behind me at full force. Let’s just say that this display..um..exceeded all our expectations in terms of sound and light. Our immediate course of action then became to run for the hills. We survived though, and nothing burnt down, which is always good. Plus, we managed to go out with a bang.

I don’t think I could live with myself if I closed this entry with such a dumb pun, so I won’t. Instead, I’ll just reiterate that Thailand is a nation like no other. It’s people are polite, welcoming, yet ever the pragmatists. The scenery is rich and varied in terms of sights, sounds, and scents. Working in such an new and contrasting environment causes one to examine aspects of our normal western lifestyle under a different light. For example, you can eat unrefrigerated meat products purchased from random people on the street, and you will not die. In fact, it may likely be absolutely delicious (aroy mak!). At any rate, they say you spend one night in Bangkok, and the world’s your oyster. After 9 weeks here, I’d certainly agree.