But we still have to catch up on old stories. Some of you asked about the reactions here in Thailand to the terrorism back home starting 9/11. Between 8:30pm and 9:00pm the night of 9-11 (during daylight savings time we are 11 hours ahead of DC and NY so it was within an hour of the first airplane crash) we received a call from a local first grade teacher whose broken English indicated that a police station in New York had been bombed. We were not sure if it was serious or not, so we decided to look at the news on the internet. CNN, MSN, and Yahoo were all unavailable. We managed to get one story on CNN that indicated the World Trade Center had collapsed, but the picture showed the buildings standing and smoking - we knew something was wrong, but we did not know exactly what, and all the news sites were so swamped that we could not get any other information. Our neighbors then came over and, in Thai, invited us to watch the news at their house, which also confused us, since the sentence "Do you want to eat with us?" is exactly the same as "Do you want to watch the news with us?" and only the tone is different (if you remember, a word in Thai can have five different tones to mean five different things). We got to watch the CNN coverage, but with the soundtrack dubbed in Thai. We watched for a couple of hours, not understanding the language (although we could still read the headlines running across the bottom of the screen), and not really understanding how the pictures would change the world. By the time we came home, CNN had wised up and had a bare bones text-only site up and running and we got better information. Many Thais said that they felt like they were watching a movie instead of the news. One Peace Corps Volunteer waiting at a bus station actually thought she was watching a movie since everything was in Thai, and she didn't realize what had happened until she got home.

For several weeks the most common questions from Thai's were about the World Trade Center - is your home close to New York and did you know anyone there and what does "war" on terrorism mean? (There was concern from people here, probably because the word "war" doesn't translate with other possibilities like the "war" on drugs). There were full color glossy magazines about the attacks within days, showing pictures that were much more gruesome that you would expect in the states (it is common to see bleeding dead people in full color on the front page of newspapers here). Many people gripe about the lack of ethics in the media, especially in America, but we've discovered (and appreciated) that, out of respect for the victim's family, the American media rarely shows disturbing pictures of victims. We have seen a few T-shirts with pictures of GW Bush and bin Ladin, or just bin Ladin, but mostly in Bangkok. Elementary school boys drew planes crashing into buildings on their homework for several weeks. Generally people here seem more concerned with our personal welfare than with the international implications of terrorism like this (there were 3 Thai's who died in the World Trade Center).

Peace Corps/Thailand had meetings with the Volunteers mostly so that we could give each other moral support and encouragement. Starting in October, Thailand played host to the Peace Corps Volunteers from Bangladesh, as that country went through national elections in early October. Bangladesh is a fledgling democracy only 2 years old that is predominantly Muslim and was not safe enough right now to send the Volunteers back, so the volunteers have been sent back home, with the tentative option to return in January. The Peace Corps did have an office in one of the WTC towers, but no one was hurt. A Peace Corps/Thailand staff member was in Washington DC in September, and sent our Thailand office an email on the 11th, saying that "I was saved." Amen, brother! The Thai language has no verb tenses, so often what comes out in English is not quite what someone meant.

We are safe here, and continue our adventures.

We traveled up to northern Thailand in the beginning of October to help another PCV with an English camp. We are jealous - it is beautiful up there! We took an overnight train from Bangkok, and when we woke up an hour outside of Chiang Mai we felt as if we were in a different world. It looked like the "typical" postcard shot of Thailand - misty hills, jungle, and rice paddies in the valleys. The English camp was held in Mae Hong Son Province, which is in the northwest corner of Thailand. Mae Hong Son is pretty remote - we had our choice of flying in from Chiang Mai (a 25 minute flight) or taking an 8-hour bus ride on a twisting road through such hilly terrain that other volunteers have dubbed it the "vomit comet." We chose to fly. And, since the airlines are highly subsidized here, we paid $11 each for our tickets. The picture is of us in "downtown" Mae Hong Son. It has palm trees like Surin, but unlike Surin it also has water and mountains and it is beautiful.

Once we got back into Chiang Mai, we found that all the trains back to Surin were booked for the next two days, so we spent the weekend exploring Chiang Mai. Chiang Mai is the third largest city in Thailand, and unlike Bangkok, it is not ugly. In fact its surroundings are beautiful, and the city itself isn't all that bad (we're not city buffs in case you couldn't guess). The heart of the city is surrounded by the remains of a fortified wall that is, in parts, more than 600 years old, and it has plenty of temples and a pretty river nearby to make the city itself interesting. However, we wanted to get out of the city, so we made arrangements through our guesthouse to go on a one day trekking tour which included an elephant ride, a hike up to a hill tribe village, a visit to a waterfall, and a bamboo raft ride down a river. Very beautiful, and the tour was well run. After our day trek, we "trekked" through Chiang Mai's night bazaar which is conveniently located next to the Starbucks, Pizza Hut, and McDonalds.

Before leaving Chaing Mai we walked around the city itself and took a cab (ok, a small pickup where we sat on benches in the bed, but in Chiang Mai they call that a cab) to Doi Suthep temple which sits at the crest of a hill overlooking Chiang Mai. The temple itself had a stairway leading up to it, that Lisa guessed had at least a billion stairs, although somewhere around 150 stairs is probably more accurate. The view from the top was very nice. Chiang Mai may be the third largest city in Thailand, but looking at it from the hilltop it looked only slightly larger than Fairbanks, Alaska (Note though, that the municipality of Chiang Mai has 159,000 people in its 15 sq miles). We found out only AFTER we came back down from the hilltop that there is a cable car that runs to the top about 100 yards from the stairway.

That seems about enough for one installment. We hope all of you are doing well. Please let us know if you have specific questions and we'll try to answer.

Denny & Lisa Wells