How I Spent My First Day In Thailand

After a quick breakfast in a cafe near my guesthouse, I headed to Mahachulalongkornrajavidyalaya University. Luckily I didn't have to ask for directions to find it. They offer free meditation classes, and free anything is good. Especially inner peace. It was just me and a girl from Chicago named Amy in the class, and we practiced some basic sitting and walking meditation. I certainly learned some things I hadn't known before, like when you are meditating (in this particular school, at least) you don't IGNORE all the distractions, you have to be aware of them, think about them, and then cut them off. But you have to be aware of them. So most of the time you're thinking about your breathing (not controlling your breathing, just breathing naturally and being aware of how your body moves with the breath), thinking to yourself "Rising, knowing, falling, knowing, rising, knowing, falling, knowing..." as your abdomen rises and falls. The "knowing" is the moment between inhaling and exhaling. So when something else comes in, like an errant thought, you go "Rising, knowing, falling, knowing, rising, thinking, thinking, thinking, rising, knowing, falling..." Much of the time my inner voice was saying "Rising, knowing, falling, knowing, foot's asleep, foot's asleep, foot's asleep, foot's asleep..." I found walking meditation much more enjoyable, for comfort reasons as well as the hilarity of looking like a pacing mental patient.

The quick primer on Buddhism the teacher gave made me not very interested in Buddhism. The way it is taught here, you must detach yourself from all earthly things. Attachment=bad. So you feel anger--detach yourself from it. Sadness--detach yourself from it. Happiness--detach yourself from it. But I fight every day to ATTACH myself to happiness. Detachment is what comes naturally for me, it wouldn't be a struggle for me to get there (I am the Buddha), but I'm not very interested in cutting my emotional connections to the things and people I love in this world after working so hard to build them in the first place. Granted, I know jack about Buddhism and this woman might be spouting some splinter doctrine, but this is explicitly what she said is the goal. So no one has to worry that I'll come back to the States as one of those Nuveau Buddhist assholes. Though I had previously wanted to do so just to exasperate some folks.

Anyway, Amy and I trekked to Wat Pho together. It's a temple, see?

I think Amy did quite well with this pose.

This I believe is the largest reclining Buddha in the world. It looks like a monster movie. Wat Pho also happens to house the most famous Thai massage school in all of Thailand, so Amy and I naturally got massages as well. One hour for about $12 (which is expensive compared to most of the places around town.) I've never had a Thai massage before, and had a good time with it. There are a lot of things they do that feel like wrestling moves. Leg locks, head locks, that kind of thing. Some of it really hurt. Especially when the guy tried to pull my head straight off. He tried awfully hard.

Watched the sunset behind Wat Arun (Wat means temple), and then raced home to tell you all about it!

Always and forever, more at My Flickr Page.

What I've Been Doing for 42 Days

So, it's been a while since I posted here. To blame: having a really great time in places where internet access was a rare and fleeting treat. But now I'm in Bangkok, where they shower tourists in liquid cyberspace for pennies. So, let's catch up.
Went to Jordan! First stop, Wadi Ram, a valley that Jordan sees as it's answer to the Grand Canyon. Spectacular. No Grand Canyon, mind you, but spectacular. We made arrangements with a Bedouin who called himself Desert Wolf over the 'net to camp out in the middle of the desert. He drove us out and dropped us off...
The next day we went hiking. The whole place was sandstone, which was really grippy and made for some excellent bouldering/climbing. There were a few spots where I thought we'd gotten ourselves stuck, but we always found a way out. Expected to see Desert Wolf that night. We didn't have any kindling to start a fire so we looked around for paper...and I realized I had a copy of Fahrenheit 451 with me. Sweet sweet irony. Anyway, Desert Wolf never came. Not that night, and not the next morning when he knew we needed to leave.
So we started the long hike out. About an hour or so in, we flagged down a passing Jeep that gave us a ride to the nearby village.
Spent most of the day chilling at "Ali's Place." That's Ali there on the left. Lots of tea, some tasty food, hooka smoke. We had missed the morning bus to Petra, so we had some time to kill and expressed to Ali an interest in a Jeep tour, but the asking price of the official guides was too much. So he found some young relative to drive his truck for us at a reasonable price, and off we went.
The muffler fell off pretty early into the tour. Nice guy, though, that driver. About an hour into the trip we realized we had met the night before, when I had helped repair a Bedouin tent in the dark. (Maya actually suspected it was him immediately, but I resisted)
That night Ali saw us drawing and asked us to draw something in his guest book. We left a drawing I had done of Maya sitting at Ali's Place earlier in the day. In the morning we caught a bus to Petra.
Petra! You may recognize this particular structure from Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark. Pssh. Back to Israel!
To a goat farm! With about 220 goats (we counted every day, but no one was actually sure what number we were aiming for), from which the farm produced...
Cheese!
It was a beautiful place, in the mountains of the Galilee, looking down at Nazareth through the valley.
It was run by Amnon (pictured here with live-in grandchildren Chumba and Ta'el)...
...and Dalia (pictured here with Maya).
I spent most of my time there making a stone pillar. I finished it once with a rounded top in an effort to be different from all the flat topped pillars around, but some people thought it looked too phallic (and maybe it did), so I had to circumcise it and refinish it. It's a sturdy pillar, with a hitching post for cows/horses.
There were a few Americans there, so we organized a Thanksgiving celebration and the locals indulged us, letting us butcher one of the turkeys they had on the farm. Cooked in sheep fat, it ended up tasting a lot like sheep. Green beans, mashed potaters, POMEGRANATE sauce, stuffing, pumpkin pie (not from a can, a first for me)... It was all there.

So I just arrived in Bangkok, and I'll be bumming around for a couple of days until the Kobayashi-Downs' get here and then it'll be a whirlwind of family fun. I'm looking forward to it, and I should be able to update this blog more regularly for a while. We'll see!

I leave you with... PUPPY CAGE MATCH!!!
As always, there are more adventures photographed at My Flickr Page.

Ten Best Photos of My Trip So Far

So I realize I have like a gillion photos on my Flickr and only two of you love me enough to browse through them (hi, Craig Durkin and Dad), so I'm going to make this easy for you. Here are the ten best photos of my trip so far, in no particular order: Theron (another volunteer at Sedot Mikha), La Pantera Negra ("I am verry dangeroos") and I enjoy dessert in a Jerusalem bookstore/cafe.

Maya was another volunteer at Sedot Mikha. Here she is reading at sunset at Qalya Beach on the Dead Sea, unaware that she'll ruin her eyes carrying on like that.

Marc (the guy whose museum project I was working on for six weeks at Sedot Mikha) swimming at Ashkelon.

Me and La Pantera Negra posing under the statue I built with Marc. The photo is being taken by Melanie, another volunteer from Germany. You can see her in some of the pictures on my Flickr page, but you wouldn't know anything about that, would you?

Ben at Ein Gedi Beach on the Dead Sea. His socks had gotten so gross after weeks of no washing that they would actually stand on end. You can not imagine the stench.

Ben took this one of me in Ein Gedi. So epic! Rarely do I look so statuesque.

In Gaudix, waiting for laundry to dry. There's a companion piece with Ben on my Flickr page, but really why start caring now?

This restaurant at the Alhambra in Granada had misting jets that would spray every minute or so. Made for some positively angelic lighting.

At the Alhambra. I forget the name of this particular structure, but I like this picture of it.

A dog in Spain! He was playing with another dog in this fountain (you can see pictures of that on my Fl... you know what, you wouldn't be interested) for quite a while. I think his silhouette here is really swell.

This Is What a Memory Looks Like

In the Dead Sea again.

I leave Moshav Sedot Mikha tomorrow. I`ve had a good run, made a lot of things, re-energized my creative side. Going to spend a couple of nights in Tel Aviv with friends, then I`m off to Jordan, maybe sleep out in the desert with a Bedouin... Then to Egypt. THEN.... Thailand!

Albert Gets All Indiana Jones

The day started out normally enough, with me sneaking into some place I wasn`t supposed to be. Little did I know what wonders were in store for me...

I stumbled upon an amazing, intricate system of caves. But what made these caves REALLY special is that they were dug by humans, not nature, over 2000 years ago. If you look closely at some of these pictures you can see the marks on the wall from their tools.

I found a small opening with a long winding staircase that went down, down, down into the dark...

...past a room from the mind of MC Escher...

And into a magnificent chamber where I discovered at least four priceless artifacts from another time.

More at my Flickr page.

Check Out This Saddam Hidey Hole I Made

Actually, it`s a septic tank. Corrugated concrete, rebar, and cement.

The Completely Mundane Adventures of Albert Thrower, Chapter One: Wherein Our Hero Gives Himself a Haircut

NOLTE AND ALBERT: SEPARATED AT BIRTH?

"I NEED A HAIRCUT, BUT I HAVE NO CLIPPERS!"

"BE AT EASE, MY CHILD. TAKE THESE SCISSORS AND DO GOOD WORKS."

"GOD? I DON'T KNOW IF I CAN CUT MY OWN HAIR WITH SCISSORS..."

"...BUT I TRUST YOU! LET'S DO IT!"

...an hour and a half of cutting and taking pictures of the back of my head and cutting more...

OH NICE

"WHAT'S OVER THERE? A GOOD HAIRCUT?"

"HUH? THAT WAY TOO?"

Debrief: My father warned me not to try cutting my own hair. I usually take my father's advice, but I ignored him on this one, and the results ain't bad. Definitely some strange quirks to my hair now, it isn't cut like a pro would do it, but I'm pretty pleased with myself. I would post some pics of the back, but... Nobody wants to see that. I'm still working on that technique. Taking pictures of it, then feeling around for what I think are the bits I see sticking out... Maybe not the best way to do it.