Back... again

I made it back to Thailand!

The flight over was much better this time then my flight to the US. I think alot of it was my strategy. When I flew from BKK to the US I purposely slept as little as possible. I whiled away the hours reading and watching movies. The idea was to be dog tired when I arrived so that I could easily sleep that night (the plane touched down about 6 PM); one good night's sleep would help me quickly get over the jet lag.

Unfortunately it didn't work out like that... all I did by staying up for so long was give myself a headache, eye strain, and leave me physically weaked so that I developed a minor cold. It took a good 3 days to get over the jet lag - I was sleeping in the afternoon for most of the time with my parents!

On the way back I took a less extreme approach. When I was sleepy, I slept. I probably napped a good 4 or 5 hours of the flight, which made it go much faster. And when I landed I felt good, not like I had just been through a wilderness survival trial - you know, where you have to survive a night in the woods with nothing more than a swiss army knife and an egg. I woke up early the next day, and still am, but I was able to make it through till at least 6 or 7 at night and that is getting later every day.

It's a good thing, too, because I spent about 2 days here in BKK before boarding a flight to go to Bangladesh for a few days. I spent most of my time there installing Linux on a small office network and trying to setup a thin-client workstation. That was not entirely successfull, but close enough that I think I can easily complete the work when I return. We also spent one whole day around a conference table talking about the survey questions. UNICEF is spending the money for printing the questionairres and we had to finalize the forms within 2 days. The Bangladeshies had already printed some of the forms (don't know where they got the money for that...) and were using them in the field; that was a big suprise to learn half-way through the first day as we were revising those same forms. Mike and I believed that nothing was in the field yet - Mike almost went ballistic. Well, as ballistic as he gets. He's pretty much an ice man. But it was funny to see his eyes pop open when he realized the true situation.

I could write pages about Bangladesh... but most of it can be summed up with one fact: Transparency International just released it's 2005 Corruption Perception Index... Bangladesh is at the bottom of the list, with more perceived corruption that Haiti, Venenzuala, Russia, or any African country. That's bad.

My big unhappiness now is that I haven't yet seen Jah :( I've spent one Saturday night here but she had to go somewhere up country for a meeting. There's a chance I'll see her this weekend, but she may have to give a presentation on Sunday. I don't know yet, I should find out tonight. I'll be much happier once I've seen her again.

Oh, I've also signed up for Thai Language lessons. They begin next week.

Sawasdee!

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