Shock Price! Just Buy!

For anyone who's never woken up to roosters, they are loud. Apparently they crow at approximately 4:30 in the morning, as soon as the first crack of sunlight makes it over the horizon. One rooster lives right outside my bedroom window, and loves screeching across town to the others, forming a choral harmony with the stray dogs and crickets who start barking and chirping at about 4:40. How they sleep through it, I have no idea. I asked my brother Thom this afternoon why they crow so early and his response was, "They do?"

My host family gets up very early and is in bed usually around 10 or 11 at the latest. Tomorrow I start school, so I'll be able to at least get a little routine down.

My host family has seemed to come to the belief that I absolutely love bananas and have given me no less than a dozen in the past 24 hours. Every meal I've had so far is some base rice dish with these little fried anchovies with little beady eyes that look up at you from the sticky abyss as if they're saying "Help...I'm drowning in rice." I'm trying to coax my family into cooking something spicy for me, but no luck so far. My host father at least put out red pepper this morning for breakfast to spice things up.

This afternoon I went with Thom, rocking out to Brittany Spears' "Circus" as we made our way to the mall in an ancient Toyota that rattled so violently that I was sure it was going to fall apart in the middle of the road.

We drove to a sidestreet somewhere and picked up his girlfriend. The Thai drive on the left side of the road, which you don't even realize until your mind wonders why the hell it's taking so long to make a right turn. Some man walking his elephant walked out in front of us and blocked traffic, causing mopeds and cars to go screeching around him. Motorcycles - which are more like dirtbikes than what we think of as motorcycles - are about what half of all the people here drive to get around. That, or they ride in the back of pickup trucks. The lines in the road are more like guidelines, the motorcycles swerving inbetween the cars and building a pack in front of the light.

The mall was fairly overwhelming, much like an American mall, with but more intensified color and advertisements plastered in every available location. The billboards here are absolutely massive and span long stretches of the street. There Thai culture is slowly start to make my mind feel like a word search; everywhere I look is completely foreign and then every now and then there is a glimpse of familiarity that comes in the form of an English word, perhaps in an advertisement or a familiar label such as Coke. The Thai mall is humorous, with many advertisments using words that are clearly lost in translation (i.e. "SHOCK PRICE!!" which is supposed to mean that the price is so low that it will shock you...I tried explaining that in America we just have the words sale and clearance and failed). Their was also a Ronald McDonald who was Wai-ing. Slightly bizzarre. The Thai mall clowns are just as creepy as American ones though.

After five hours of shopping, I bought a cell phone for about 1000 baht, which is the equivilant of about 30 dollars. Everything here is dirt cheap. I can call the US for 1 Baht/minute...once I figure out the instructions that are entirely in Thai.

This evening I celebrated my host cousin's birthday, which was met with a rousing rendition of "Happy Birthday" where they just repeated "Happy Birthday to You" over and over again. The fried pork over open coals in red-pepper sauce was delicious though.

Tomorrow is my first day of school, so more to come later.