Cooking Facilities

One more day of work before heading first to Bangkok and then Beijing! Woke up to an email this morning from the law firm that is investigating the ticket fraud case reporting that additional tickets were now available at cosport.com. I quickly jumped over to the site and picked up tickets for the soccer quarterfinals (probably Italy vs Belgium...i still hate Italy for the '06 World Cup) saturday night and beach volleyball quarterfinals Monday morning. I'm pumped to see the Handball competition and will probably see some Americans win gold medals at the track and field event on sunday night.

One of the advantages of the move we made early on from the Rayong City Hotel to Kantary Bay was the cooking facilities they have in the rooms here. However, after six months here I can probably count on one hand how many times I've cooked a full meal (not counting breakfast). Early on I cooked a couple meals of pasta, but lately my cooking has been limited to microwaving popcorn:


I've never been a big popcorn guy, but it's been a good snack here. From an earlier post, you can see that I also consume a fair amount of yogurt, with coconut yogurt being my current obsession. Also, the bag of peanuts on top of the microwave are natural (non-roasted) peanuts, which was a big surprise after I tossed a handful in my mouth. I don't suggest it.

Yesterday, it poured as I noted yesterday. On the way to work there's a section of the road that always gets flooded, slowing the traffic way down. For some reason, our driver keeps going back that way though.

Happy Mother's Day!

Today is the Queen of Thailand's birthday, which makes it Mother's Day and a Thai holiday. So you get two Mother's Day this year Mom!

Last night one of the shift supervisors asked me, "Do you know it is my queen's birthday tomorrow?" I've had Thai people a number of times refer to the king or queen in this way, "my queen." I really don't think I'd ever refer to the US President as "my president" but instead "the president" or maybe "our president."

He told me there would be a ceremony this morning in the park on the other side of town that included a large number of monks and lots of people. And, that this would be happening from 8 - 9 am. Working until midnight last night, I wasn't too keen on waking up early. But figured it'd be worth it. Unfortunately, when I woke up it was raining cats and dogs, and it kept up past 9 am. I went back to sleep, then headed to the park later around 11 am. No sign of any festivities and no monks. On top of that, it started raining again. I took the road by the beach on the way back and took this picture:


For some reason, the water gets really green when there's a storm. Makes for a striking view with the dark skies overhead. Three days to Beijing!

Riding through Rayong

Missed posting yesterday...woops! It was a surprisingly busy day at work, then hit the tennis court when I got back to the hotel. Finished tennis just in time to watch China hit all of their three pointers in the first half to stick around early in the USA-China game. Yao Ming's three to start the game was a big time moment in the Olympics.

Eventually, someone rememebered to install the trampoline in front of the US basket and the high flying show began. The three dunks in a row at the end of the half were huge. Listening to the Thai announcers react to them was equally entertaining. Big ups to the US Men's Soccer team for almost taking out Holland at the Olympics. They now need at least a tie against Nigeria to make it to the quarterfinals. You're going down Tomi!

Check out this sweet photo of Phelps starting off in the Water Cube.

Today I don't work until 4 pm, so I took a trip over to Tesco to pick up some work supplies and then stopped on the way back to get a haircut from one of our friends here in Rayong, Nung. I shoulda taken a picture, but instead I took one while driving back to the hotel of the decorations you see all over Thailand celebrating the King and the Queen:

The Pink Van Bar

Working this weekend, so not much exciting to report. Richard and I grabbed some drinks at the little store at the corner next to our hotel after work. It always looked like a good place for a little restaurant/bar. About two months ago they started building a tiny convenience store, put out some chairs out, pulled up a pink van that they serve cocktails out of and before you know it, you have a nice place to grab a beer. I took a picture of the van and these guys turned around asking me to take their picture. Once I did, they said thank you. Little did they know they'd be viewed by millions online (I dream big).

8/8/08

I woke up yesterday in an alcohol induced haze after a night out at the hottest club this side of Pattaya, Rayong's very own Love Club, and fell asleep as China was walking into the Opening Ceremony. In between I got some work done. Today's photo comes from a sign posted next to one of my coworker's desk:


Surprisingly, two months later we are still on step 2. But I think we're making great progress towards step 3.

Olympic quote of the day comes from ESPN's self-appointed nickname-ist Pat Forde (or "The Dash" as he refers to himself):

Synchronized swimming (14). Any sport that features waterproof makeup and nose clips as essential equipment is on The Metric Dash's personal banned list. (Yes, it's hard to do. But it's hard to dig ditches, too, and nobody wants to see that in the Olympics.)

Competitive ditch digging, wasn't that in the Outdoor games?

My New Ride

I now have been here just short of six months. After about a month or two we first rented some motor bikes to get around Rayong for a weekend. Then some of my coworkers started renting bikes for a month before buying their own. For some reason I resisted...until yesterday.


I bought myself a nice, clean, blue Honda Wave 100S for about $900. It has 4800 km on it (about 2800 miles) and runs nice and smooth. To buy a motor bike you need a Thai person to essentially take ownership, so we had our secretary Thom help us out. She now "owns" at least five motorbikes that my coworkers and I have bought. There's a lot to see and do in Rayong and it's all outside walking distance from out hotel, so hopefully this will get me out more often.

Check out this article by Jim Caple on ESPN.com about the Olympics, why Beijing is just what it needs.

The Office

Rather uninteresting, picture today. This is our office at PTT Phenol:


My desk is the second from the back on the right side. The one with the laptop on it. We have eleven UOP'ers on site now, but we don't all work at the same time. You can see a safety harness hanging over one of the chairs that we have to wear while working at heights. On the back shelves we keep all of our design documents, known as a Schedule A.

Today it came up in the office what events some of us are going to be missing this fall. My coworker has Seahawk season tickets that will go unused and I have two ND-Pittsburgh tickets (November 1) that I probably won't be able to use (anyone want them?). I'm hoping to get in contact with the ND Club of Thailand (it exists!) to see if they have any game watches or other events in the fall. Last year I got to see a number of games early in the season at a military hotel in Tokyo (I think the Michigan game was the last that I put any effort into watching). Some bars in Pattaya claim to show American Football, but not sure I'll be able to get any ND games. Anyway, the season is coming up, and judging from this season preview it should be a fairly succesful one. Here Come the Irish!

Catholic Mass, Thai style

Three weeks ago I attended a church service for the first time in Thailand. The only other time I had attended a mass while traveling had been at St Thomas in Chennai last June. I had heard there were a couple in the area here in Rayong but hadn't found any English masses or spent much time looking, to be perfectly honest. About a month ago though, my coworker Richard found that there was an English mass at a catholic church just down the road. Tonight I attended my second service.

The church is nice but definitely different. There are few churches (at least that I've been to) that have doors that fully cover the sides of the church. During mass they are wide open, giving a much different feel to the church as well as a nice breeze. I have never been to a mass where birds flew straight across the pews throughout the mass. You also take your shoes off at the entrance. This is done at all Buddhist temples in the country, so I'm assuming that carried over to church. Also, when you give peace to those around you no one shakes hands. This took me by surprise the first time. Everyone just stands there with their hands together and bows slightly in all directions to the people around them. Other than that, it was a very nice service with the priests speaking in understandable English. Here's the church from the back:

Swimming with the Fishes

It's been awhile since I've gone scuba diving, but I didn't realize how long it had been (or how long I've been in Thailand) until I checked my Dive Log. April 19 had been my last dive which makes it nearly four months! Seeing how I had been a rookie diver back then, I probably should have been slightly more concerned about remembering everything as I dropped below the surface and started going deeper. Our first dive was to see a ship wreck called Hardeep. About halfway down I had trouble equalizing (like what happens to your ears on an airplane coming down, only a lot worse), then I got to the bottom and felt a bit dizzy (N2 narcossis), at which time I started using my arms way too much and sucking down the O2 while I tried to remember how to maintain my buoyancy. Probably should have started with a shallower dive. But I got things under control and swam around checking out the remains of the ship along with the coral and fish that now engulf it. Currently my dives are limited by my air supply and this one lasted about 30 mins. On the later two dives, I was able to stay down for closer to 45 mins after I stopped wiggling around so much and got better at staying level in the water. I'm now up to 10 dives and slightly over 6 hours underwater.

I saw some pretty cool stuff on the dives, including the wreck, some huge white jellyfish and a medium sized crab hiding in a little nook. One of the divers had a humongous underwater camera and posted some of her shots here. Unfortunately underwater, without the use of a flash, the colors aren't nearly as distinct as you see here. The colors all shift towards a blue-ish gray the deeper you go.

Here I am on the way back to the pier:


Pictures from my trip to Bangkok last weekend have been posted on my Picasa site. More to come later.

The Thai Massage

After a rather frustrating week of work, my coworker Bryan told me on the way home that him and his wife, Jen, were going for massages in Rayong. Now, I had never gotten a massage before Thailand and I didn't think I'd like them. But after a couple, that's changed. The thing about a Thai massage though, is that they're quite physical and at times painful. They like to really push into your skin by placing their knee or elbow onto specific points for extended periods of time. However, I've gotten used to it and was definitely game for it tonight. Here's the Egolf's getting their feet washed before the massage:


This was my first two hour massage (about $20) and I definitely fell asleep for a second during the head massage near the end. Here I am in my massage PJs, ready for it to start: