Rachawadee Resort & Hotel Khon Kaen

... from the 70's where much old stuff was found.

Dennis and I took the motorbike to the night market to pick up food. I saw rice rats that were being BBQ'd and fish still flopping around. Obviously, I stayed away from all that. Chicken and sticky rice was on my menu!

... most generous-of-spirit people one can ever meet. I feel truly blessed to have had the chance to come to Thailand. When I leave Khon Kaen tomorrow, I leave with a group of new friends I will treasure forever.

At lunch we exchanged gifts and I was so touched by everyone's generosity. The Dean gave me a plate from the FON and a gorgeous enamel pin of a flower that is the symbol of nursing in Thailand. Dr. Siriporn gave me an adorable change purse from Thailand, and ...

... to get a headache. Rather than continue to struggle to tame my monkey-mind, I decided to leave early (around 3pm) since I will be working late into the night on article edits. I touched base with O, then walked back to the dorm to change clothes and drop my laptop off. After stopping in my dorm room, I hopped the #8 Songtaew in front of the dorm and headed to what has to be the gayest sounding shopping mall in the entire universe - Fairy Plaza. I didn't know anything about the ...

... minds around the idea that when they are working with a patient, they need to think not like an epidemiologist but rather, as a clinician. A patient who has had 50 sexual partners may be at greater risk of an STI than a patient with 5 sexual partners, but when we treat patients we're treating the individual based on their individual risk, not based on their level of risk relative to the population as a whole. We debated whether people in America are more promiscuous than people in ...

... and had invited us to attend and evaluate the work they are doing. The juxtaposition of the rustic building and the bare feet with the LCD projector and Power Point presentation was a stark one - not what I would have expected to see in rural Thailand. The focus today was on mental health promotion, and 20 community health volunteers participated in today's event, along with many members of the community. They put on an elaborate puppet show, complete with a live band. Check out ...

... Our first stop was University Medical Center Hospital, an 800-bed tertiary care center in Khon Kaen. (A heart center across the street has additional beds not counted in this total). We walked through each of the outpatient wards and everywhere we went, Dr. Orasa seemed to know all the nurses. It turns out she has trained many of them in her 30 years of teaching nursing at KKU. At each ward, she encouraged me to take pictures and a number of times, she had groups of nursing staff pose ...

... Thailand teaches an overload they receive a bonus, so even if it were possible for a faculty member to buy themselves out of part of their teaching load, there is a built-in disincentive for them to do so because a heavy teaching load = more money. Also, when a faculty member receives a grant, the university does not receive indirect cost support from the funder. Instead, the faculty member must pay the university 5% of the total amount of the grant so that ...

... 4000 baht or about 120$ for both the visas. On the street on the way to the Vietnamese consulate, we bought some pineapple and Mike got some yellow watermelon which was really good and tasted like a regular melon, just more yellowy. After the consulate, Mike bought some catfish on a stick and Katy and I bought a huge lunch. It was good and nice to sit in the shade since it was hot and sunny. After eating, we walked the streets, getting somewhat lost in the process by taking side ...

... we got on the boat, we walked the town a bit and looked at giant bags of various dried fishes and mollusks in a market. It was kind of like the Oregon coast with lots of little touristy shops selling shell curtains and pufferfish mobiles and such. Anyway, caught the ferry to the island which is about a half hour trip. Ko Samet is billed in guidebooks as being one of the more chill islands to go to in Thailand. One big draw for it (on paper) is that ...

We're here in Thailand with Pat and Ellen at their "flat" which consists of a room and a bathroom/shower. It's cute though and they've made a nice home out of it. Between the four of us, we've managed to get around KK...no one told us, though, that they dialect they speak is Issan not Thai, making our phrase books useless and ...