Weekending in Bangkok

I took off for Bangkok over the Easter weekend and met Annemarie and her parents there. I LOVE Bangkok! Beautiful (if hot), very modern but with a beautiful old part. It is a city of huge constrasts--rich and poor, old and new. I was there for the lunar new year celebration, which in Thailand is celebrated by spraying water on anyone and everyone. I thought they meant a squirt gun or a little splash. But instead I got drenched several times with people armed with hoses and buckets. But it was all in good fun and I dried quickly!
This is the elephant (yes, a real elephant) I saw outside my hotel my second night. It's blurry, but I didn't want to cause a stampede by using flash:

The grand palace from the river:
Elephants are sacred in Thailand (and AWESOME):

Passport pages

I went to the U.S. Consulate on Thursday to get an extra 24 pages put in my passport. Because mine was almost full.
That's it. No interesting cultural insights. Just living abroad awesomeness. Rock.

My first bilingual pun!

This is the first Chinese character-English pun I've understood (not surprising given that I supposedly know around 200 characters . . . and you need to know thousands to be literate).


This is an ad for a new McDonald's sandwich where the bun is made of rice. The character part of the word is the character for rice and in Cantonese it sounds like "fan". So "fan"+tastic= a pun I can understand! I never thought a McDonald's ad campaign would make me so happy!

Cantonese class field trip

You're never too old for field trips! My Cantonese class took the ferry to Cheung Chau Island a couple weeks ago. It's a half hour ferry ride from Central, so it's kind a Hong Kong version of a suburb. But it's an island. And there are no cars.
Me and two classmates (taaitaais!) on the ferry:

Not much to do, other than eat seafood, but a beautiful spot: