The Highway Wedding

Planning a wedding (I'm guessing) is all about compromises. Your family wants to invite 300 people, you can only afford 200. Your fiance wants filet mignon, you settle on chicken fingers. Reception on top of the gondola becomes a pot luck in your back yard.

Somehow Thai's are able to stretch a wedding budget in ways we would never conceive. Need a venue for 200 people? No money to rent a place? No room in the backyard (or no backyard)? Have it in the front yard. Only have a 6 lane divided highway in front of your house? Move the wedding tent into the first two lanes of the highway. Put some cones up and blast some music to cover up the sound of the traffic. Problem solved. Check out the venue: video here.

Like any good Thai wedding it did not fail to disappoint. The bride's family was so sweet to put eight of us up for two nights- room, board and some of the nicest company I've ever kept. Check out the updated photo gallery for some highlights- including the cockroach crawling up an unsuspecting wedding guests shoulder. Some day I might be nice enough to take the roach off before I photograph it. Today is not that day.

The Rainiest Season

So I showed up 2 weeks early to surprise Pui this year. I didn't have a specific plan, but I though I could wing it when I got here. Unfortunately, I totally botched the surprise this year by inadvertently calling her office's cell phone. After she saw the caller id, she knew I had slunk into town early. That being said, she was still surprised, just not a blog-worthy surprise.

This is my first time back in Thailand for the rainy season; and September is as rainy as it gets. The deluge that pours forth from the sky can turn into a sketchy flood pretty quick. Last week it went from dry streets to shin deep rainwater in about 20 minutes. It's a little disconcerting when you realize that some of that water is overflowing from the sewers.

If you're riding your motorcycle, you can either brave it out (and hope you don't get any splashes), or do what I'm becoming fond of. Pull the bike over to the closest Thai masseuse and go for the 3 hour massage.

Even though it can be hard to get out of the rain, I'm definitely making up for it by catching up on all of the craptastic reality tv I ever wanted to. Click here for the Paradise Hotel 2 homepage. Or don't.

Always Leave a Party Wanting

I had a really hard time trying to decide between titles for this entry. It was either going to be this title, or 'Best Summer Ever'. The title I chose is comes from one of my favorite quotes from Jeff Burke. The basic idea is that whenever you are really enjoying some thing, some place or some experience, it's a good time to leave. That way you'll always want to come back.


When I came back to Jackson this summer I was so not ready to leave Thailand. Life was good in the land of smiles and I didn't want to jump back into the fast pace that my U.S. lifestyle is. Oddly enough, 3 months later I'm not ready for that fast pace to stop. From snowboarding early season, going out with friends, hiking the classics, spending time with family, hitting the music festival weekly, to swing dancing at the cowboy and shutting down the bars every night, life was very full this summer. I have to give most of the credit to my partner in crime, Erin Roy, who was always up for a good time. Here is the video of us dancing at the Cowboy. Watching it definitely makes me nostalgic.

One of the tools that made this great summer possible was my new monster truck. Purchased for $5000, this 1995 Forerunner on a liftkit was nothing short of 'high school awesome'. At 13 miles to the gallon, standing 7'2" tall with the biggest subwoofer you've ever seen, listening to nothing for 3 months except for this hip hop group out of bozeman, EightTrack Mind; it provided me with hours and hours of entertainment.


Finally, my summer was spent growing out my ridiculous haircut. What started as some misguided attempt to be the first person to actually try to grow a comb-over, turned into a full on obsession. Now I'm stuck somewhere in the middle of bad high school teacher hair and full blown clown hair.

Homecoming

So I finally came back to Jackson. Flying into the airport gave me an odd sense that I was only visiting as a tourist. I've tried over the last few years to work out a system of 9 months over there and 3 here and I think I might finally be there. I was a little reticent to come back at first because the lifestyle is soooo different. Turns out though, that it is different good. First off the weather here is much easier to just exist in. The last few months in Thailand (before the rains) it was well over 100 degrees with all the humidity you could handle. Going to sleep at 10am and waking up at 4pm just to stay out of the hottest part of the day was starting to wear on me.

So the good news for my family and friends in Jackson is that I'll be here for the whole summer (winter if it keeps up). I probably won't be blogging that much (unless some really crazy stuff goes down), but looking forward to getting back to it in the fall. Stay cool this summer -josh

The Things That Go Bump

Ever since I moved to the giant house in the old city I've been cataloging the zoo that my house/front yard is. From gecko's to squirrels to bugs to you name it, we've got it. You can sit out on our front porch and just watch the nature come to you (or crawl on you, as the case may be). I updated the photo album with the highlights from the last 4 months. I also got a pretty sweet video of a gecko eating right outside my office window.

Any Given Sunday

So I got back from Japan about 2 weeks ago and I haven't had a thing to write about since. I got this great quote from a friend in China: "Visit someplace for a month, you can write a book, 6 months you can put out an essay, in a couple of years, you're lucky if you can squeak out a sentence." As it goes no matter where you live. The things that once were mind blowing have a way of becoming pedestrian. So I looked at some photos I've taken recently and tried to recreate the last 2 weeks.

• The Return of Song Krang. A week long water fight dressed up as the Thai New Year celebration. The old city of Chiang Mai is surrounded by a 6km moat. About the most fun you can have is getting up around 9am and walking the perimeter with a bucket. For the next 8 hours you enter a shoulder to shoulder procession of the walkers vs. the drivers. Continually getting hosed down with ice water from the backs of trucks while in turn dumping on them the grossest, dirtiest water you've ever seen on them dredged out of the moat. I think maybe the most important thing is to make sure that you keep that moat water out of your beer. Video of the festivities.


• Zip-Lining throughout the forest. Usually reserved for moviestars and reality tv-show contestants, a zip-line company opened up in Chiang Mai about 6 months ago. Honestly it isn't half as exciting as it would appear on TV. I think the most exciting thing that happened was my shoe came off during one of the flights. Actually, here is a video of Pui. This is what happens when you don't carry enough speed to make it between platforms.


• Hiding in the masses. I really appreciate the anonymity that living in a large city affords you. I can now grow the mustache that humility would never afford me in Jackson. And really why stop there? I let my hair grow back for the first time in 4 years so I can shave my girlfriends name in the back, just like I always wanted.

The Things You Do for the Ones You Love

Whenever you travel somewhere with a camera, you usually have some idea of the photo that will capture the experience. For instance you've got your: DisneyLand/Mickey photo, Jackson Hole/Elk Antler Arches photo, Moon Landing/Earth in the background photo, etc. For Pui and Japan that photo meant getting dressed up in a traditional kimono and getting her picture taken (think the old west photos on the Town Square). The second day in country we drove 2 hours with Pui's aunt and uncle to visit Japan's answer to Universal Studios (not to be confused with the real Universal Studios which we visited on 3rd day). So anyways, we come across this place that does the full on geisha makeup and photo shoot. It was kind of pricey and the makeup took over an hour and we were with her aunt and uncle, so we talked ourselves into finding another place while we were on vacation and had a little more time. Which brings me to a very, very important travelling postulate that I've come up with:

While traveling: If you come accross anything that you really want to see, do, or buy, but at the time it seems inconvenient, pricey, (insert excuse here)- forget all those excuses, just see, do, or buy it RIGHT THEN. Because if you wait, there is a very good chance that later it will be much more inconvenient, much pricier, much more whatever at a later date.

After 2 more weeks in Japan we had yet to see another one of these photo places; and beleive me, we asked just about everyone we knew or didn't know. So we find ourselves with 2 more days in the country. I could write a 3 page story here of what I did to go through to get that photo, but here are the highlights:

Day 1 (Started at 8am):

• Made a reservation at a photo studio early in the day. (this was accomplished by drawing pictures for a travel agent and having her guess what we wanted)


• Travelled 2 hours via railways to Nagoya (tickets cost 2x what the original photo shoot cost)


• Spent a good amount of time trying to follow a map that I had taken a digital photo of to get around Nagoya.


• Finally make it to the photo place at 4pm. After 1/2 an hour of more picture drawing turns out they will only take a photo of you if you have your own kimono


• Rode the train all the way back home

Day 2 (Started at 7am):

• Freaked out that the only place in all of Japan to get this photo was in Kyoto (the first place we started)


• Turned down Pui's relatives offer to drive us there (2 hours), because damn it, I love an adventure and I know everything in the world about Japan's railways


• Got confused by the train system no less than 5 times resulting in missed trains or boarding the wrong trains (we would board no less than 12 trains in the 13 hours we would spend travelling that day)


• Got to the theme park exactly 1 hour before they closed (looking at your watch all day count down from 8am until 4pm, knowing that if you don't make it there by 3:30, you're screwed is about as nerve wracking as it gets)


• Tried everything under the sun to get the manager to allow us to get into makeup to take the picture. Even after Pui crying, me pleading and offering 5x the asking price, I was turned away.


• Was referred to the low rent place down the street with bad costumes and no makeup. I convinced Pui I could photoshop all the makeup in later.


• Looooong train ride back home.


• At the train station we boarded the bus to go 15 minutes to the house. Got on the wrong bus, which was also that last bus of the night and ended up parking the bus at the bus depot 1 hour out of town (we had to call the relatives to come pick us up)

And with no further ado, here is the photo in all its glory.

Also, this isn't actually part of this story, but it's worth mentioning that for our final flight leg from Bangkok to Chiang Mai we were held up in immigration so long we missed the flight and had to buy new tickets for a later one.

And lastly, just so you know I updated the photo album with the Japan Photos.