AIFF 2022 Poster And Reaching Avanos (Metacyclicly) [UPDATED September 28, 2022]

My brain has been wandering.  I've got half a dozen posts either in draft form or in that wandering brain.  But sitting down to type them up here has been a challenge.  For one thing, I just got a copy of the 2022 Anchorage International Film Festival (AIFF) poster.  

I think it looks great and I'm trying to find out the artist [UPDATE:  Jessica Thorton] so I can give credit here.  The festival will be all live this year, not much Bear Tooth, a lot of museum if I remember right.  

My summer biking Anchorage trails in real life/from Istanbul to Cappadocia in my head is complete. 

Actually, Cappadocia is a region with several major towns..  The biker whose map I was following on RidewithGPS ended up at the far end of Cappadocia in the town of Avanos.  Here are some pictures from https://visitmyturkey.com/en/avanos/.

These are out in the country side nearby.  From Wikipedia:

"Old Avanos is riddled with a network of small underground "cities" which may once have been residential but are now mainly used by the many pottery enterprises. Although there is no documentary evidence to prove when these structures were carved out of the earth, it is probable that work on some of them began in the Hittite period.

As Venessa, the ancient Avanos was the third most important town in the Kingdom of Cappadocia (332BC-17AD) according to the geographer Strabo.[5] Although it was the site of an important temple of Zeus, nothing remains of it today. [5]In Roman and Byzantine times Avanos had a large Christian population who were responsible for the rock-cut Dereyamanlı Kilisesi. [6]Unusually, this is still occasionally used even today."

Avanos, by the route map I was following, is 891 km from Istanbul.  I made it to 897 km on Saturday and today went on to 912 km.  (900 km = 559.23 miles)  Weather permitting, I'm now hoping to hit 1000 km (621 miles).  I thought that was pretty good for the summer until I talked to a friend the other day who did over 600 miles in 13 days in France.  Oh well.  

But I'm hoping that by 2024 at the latest I will have been to Istanbul and Avanos in person.  

Then there's the follow up on the Words in the Constitution post.  

Dimitrios Alexiadis

I've also got pictures from an ACLU event on prisons and the people in them that was co-sponsored with several other organizations that work with prisoners.  Just putting up pictures is relatively easy, but there were important messages as well.  But if I wait too long I'll forget the details.  

And more.  But the bike, the yard, Netflix (watching the rescue of the Thai soccer team from the flooded caves series now - finished two episodes and the international cave divers have reached the boys, and there's still a bunch more episodes to go; enjoying trying to catch as much Thai as I can; don't think this is a spoiler since we saw this live in the news a couple of years ago), and other things steal from blogging.  Oh yeah, got my bivalent booster and flu shot the other day too.  Slightly sore arms, but that was all.  

Started Day In Bainbridge, Ending In Anchorage

The day began on Bainbridge Island walking my granddaughter to school.  She had on a backpack and a yam (rising tone, like you're asking a question).  That's the Thai name for the shoulder bags you see on the left.  Those are from a blog post in 2008.  I told my granddaughter I'd bought the yam for her mother long ago.  

She said I sounded like I was asking a question and I responded that in Thai each word, actually each syllable has its own tone and yan is rising town.  In English the tone goes with the sentence, so that's why you think it sounds like a question.  When I was studying Thai, at the very beginning, we were just being taught how hear the different tones and then repeat them.  The teacher would say "mea" very flat tone and we would say it adding an English question to the word and changing the tone to a rising tone, which meant dog instead of to come.  

She was quiet for a while and then she said, "Grampa, if Thai words all have tones, how to they make songs?"    She's eight, going on nine.  Good question.  I wonder how much her piano lessons helped trigger that question.  

Then we got a ride to the ferry.  Actually, it was balmy, if cloudy, about 60˚ F.  We'd usually walk, but our daughter offered us a ride.  

I did walk around the deck, but it was very windy.  Here's a picture just as the ferry was leaving Bainbridge.  Downtown Seattle is in the middle, just to the right of the trees.  I thought about it.  Why do we think of the tall cluster of skyscrapers as an image of Seattle.  It's just a tiny fraction of the city.  

COVID and warnings about jammed TSA lines at SEATAC put us into a taxi instead of the train to the airport.  It's really fast that way - about 20 minutes instead of over an hour.  Because of the long lines, they've set up a system where you can make a reservation for a spot in the line.  Ours was for 11:15 (you get 15 minutes period).  Turned out there was no line whatsoever.  And we were in the terminal waiting for our flight.  

I thought this was an interesting sign.  Not sure where they store all the water.  Do they collect it from the roofs of the terminal buildings?  

Our flight was uneventful - the best kind - and were in Anchorage a little early.  We had a great Somali cab driver.  Hope to see him again.  You know, maybe people are afraid of immigrants because they know they are smarter and willing to worker harder than they are.  

And here's the back yard.  

I'll shovel tomorrow.  Nice to be back and to be greeted by much warmer temperatures that we were hearing about.  Our outdoor thermometer says 20˚F.    Didn't feel cold at all.  But we didn't spend that much time outside.  But not the shock that it sometimes can be when it's below 0.

The New Thai Kitchen, Homegoing to Cleveland and to Ghana, Bending Toward Justice, And Tree Shadow

The Thai Kitchen, after 30 years, was closing briefly to move a few spaces down the mall, next to the Yogurt place that they also own.  That was going to happen after we left in December, and Saturday night we went to see the new place.  Here's Sommai at the stove and some of the flowers for the new opening.

The overall space is a little smaller, but it's new and fresh and it has a door directly to the Yogurt place so you can get dessert after your Thai meal.

And it has some new menu items.  Kow Soi is a great Chiengmai noodle curry that we enjoyed while we were in Chiengmai.  (Transliterations into English from Thai can vary.)  I  Also the new spicy cabbage was good.


Today I got my teeth cleaned and picked up a book at the UAA library.  Coming out I passed the small gallery next to the library entrance and was impressed with the pictures there by Michael Conti.  The sign said he grew up in near Cleveland and last summer went back for a couple of months fine arts residency funded by the Rasmuson Foundation at Zygote Press, ant art printshop.  I liked what he learned to do with his photos.  Here are a couple examples.

There also was this poster for a free lecture Thursday (Feb 1) at the Wendy Williamson auditorium that sounded interesting.  Marika Anthony-Shaw:  Collective Impact:  Bending Toward Justice.   7:30pm












And finally, walking the rest of the way home I had to wonder about whether trees check out their shadows to see how they look.

I'm sure the appreciate the warmth radiating back from the sunlit wall next to them in any case.





The book club is meeting here tonight so I have some cleaning up to do.  I made a Ghanian peanut soup last night - we read Yaa Gyasi's Homegoing, which follows the generations of two half-sisters - one who is taken as a slave to the new world and one who stays behind in Ghana from the late 1700s to the almost present.  Interesting book, lots of insights, but you have to keep on your toes as the characters change with each generation in two continents.

The A, B, C's . . . Y, and Z's of the Farmer's Market

We're back in LA trying to do more work on my mom's house.  Despite all we've given and thrown away, it still looks packed with things.

But we have to eat, so we biked up to the Virginia Park Saturday market in Santa Monica.  It was cool in the shade and warm in the sun.





My alphabet isn't going to start with A.  There's a technical blogging problem.  When other blog rolls include a photo from the latest post of the blogs they list, it's always the first photo in the post.  Often that's not going to be the best or most interesting. (I know, I should only put up 'best' photos.)  So I have to decide if I should sneak in a better picture on top or keep the order the story would dictate.  So I'm giving you these Root vegies, mostly strange carrots I think, instead of the apple butter which isn't as interesting, though maybe it is to you.   (What's a blog roll?  If you look in the column to the right I have several, starting with Alaska Blogs.  But I only include the title, not a picture.  Maybe I should add pictures too.)



OK, now the Apple Butter. (See not a bad picture, but I guess I like the jumble better than the order.)

And the Bitter melons. 

 and the Cabbage.















And Daikon.   I like the daikon's sharp radish flavor and since they're much bigger than a radish, you can cut them up into little chips more easily and they're munch healthier than, say, chips or crackers.  I took this, and a couple other pictures, at home, after I'd thought of this alphabet theme.  But don't worry,  we won't do the whole alphabet.

 

Grapes.

And then we found the Longan!   I actually remember these from Thailand as Lamyai or  ลำไย. 

Tricky, I can't enlarge the ล in the word because it's written with the vowel attached. ำ ('um' ) (the broken circle indicates where a consonant has to be typed in) gets attached to the consonant, so in this word we have ลำ (lum).  I know I spelled it lam, but it really sounds like 'um' and not 'am' as in 'I am.'  In Thai vowels can go before, after, over, or under the consonant, or a combination for one vowel sound.  The second syllabus (yai) has the 'ai'  (ไ) vowel sound  before the 'y' (ย) consonant sound.

The folks at this stand said they grow the lamyai near San Diego.  Note, two similar fruit (with a skin you peel and a skinned grape-like fruit and pit inside)  are the  Lychee which is more commonly known, and one of my favorite Thai fruits the  Rambutan, or in Thai, gno.  

I found a video that will show you more about the longan or lamyai - what the trees look like, how to eat them, ways to use them, the seed, and the nutrients. 




Lots of Persimmons for sale today. 

The highlight of this market for me is getting to eat Bertha's jalapeno vegie Tamales.  So good fresh and hot.  We got a half dozen, two to eat  at the market, and the rest to take home. 

And here's one of the rows of Vendors.   (Is it cheating, if it's not food?)

 And finally the Yams and the Zucchini.

 [More Feedburner issues, so reposting and deleting the original.  Sorry]

AIFF 2013: The Words I Love Director On Anchorage And His Film

I still have film festival video and other posts to put up.  One film maker I almost didn't record was Thanachart 'Ben'* Siripatrachai. 


The irony is that Ben stayed with us for several days of the festival and so I guess I thought I could get him any time.  Finally, I decided as we were having lunch downtown between films, I better do it.

His film The Words I Love  won honorable mention in the short docs category.  It was a film that caught my attention when I first saw the description and turned out to be a very unique film, Ben just doing seemed right to him, not following any preset rules for how to tell his story.  The audiences responded well with frequent laughs and chuckles.

Here's video we did. 






*If anyone is interested:

His nick name is 'Benz' like the car.  But in Thai, there is no final 'nz' sound, so it just becomes Ben.  So I've decided to just write in 'Ben'.  On his website he writes it in Thai (see image on top) as a final 'n.'  There really is no letter for a 'z' in Thai, though in Thai 'Benz' would  have a final 's' [เบนซ์] that wouldn't be pronounced (the squiggly line above the 's' on the end [ซ์] makes the 's' sound silent.  But in English he writes Benz.  But when he pronounced it, he said Ben.  In the image the first letter [เ] is the vowel sound 'eh'.  Then comes [บ] the 'b' sound, and finally the [น] 'n' sound. The squiggly mark on top appears to be a high tone mark [ป็], though at first I thought it was a 'Mai Dtaikhu' which shortens the vowel sound and would be found in the Thai word เป็น which is the word for 'to be.'  

So we have - เบ๊น- the way Ben spells his name in Thai.
We have -เบนซ์ -  the way Mercedes-Benz is spelled in Thai.
And - เป็น  -  the common word for the verb 'to be.'

[Update Jan 5, 2013:  I don't write Thai very often these days and I forgot a small detail.  There are two different Thai letters that represent two slightly different sounds that English uses the letter B for.  I think it's pretty easy to see the difference between ป and  บ. The first one is unvoiced and the second one is voiced.  I won't even try to explain that but if you are interested here are two sites that explain it - one in writing and one with a video. ]

 

Two Short Notes One of Which Wanders to a Third

I posted a brief irreverent video of RG's 20 second history of Alaska earlier today, but took it down at the request of the 'historian.' As you can imagine, any good history of Alaska would have to mention Ted Stevens. Although the reference was brief and not disrespectful, this week of memorials is probably not the best time to post it. I should have thought more carefully about this in the first place.

I would also like to point out a relatively new Alaskan website - Alpenglo. The blogger is someone I know, but that's not enough reason to mention it here. My reason is that she is traveling south on the Alcan and has posted some น่าดู photos.

น่าดู is Thai meaning "Good to look at." Thai has this easy way to turn a verb into an adjective meaning "good to ____".  Fill in the blank - eat, play, see, hear, etc.  You add the word น่า (Na - falling tone) in front of the word. In this case ดู (do) means "to look at." So น่าดู means "good to look at" or "worth looking at." Less literally translated, it could be 'attractive."

My mention of this is not totally off-the-wall because the new blogger was a Peace Corps volunteer in Thailand and I think that probably made me think to use น่าดู when I couldn't find exactly the right word in English. 


น = n, the little mark ่ on top (น่) is a tone mark and in this case makes it a falling tone
า = a as in "ah".  So น่า = na with a falling tone.  You can hear the tone at Thai2English.
ด =  d
  ู =  u, and is always under the consonant so ดู = 'do'

You can listen to all five Thai tones at Thailanguage.com.

Catching up again - Broken Ribs and Dislocated Finger Mending, Dr. Brokenleg Coming

I've been a little unfocused. I had another post to put up from the Energy Conference Monday, but the video wouldn't work right. But here's a picture of the Chester Creek Bike Trail, somewhere between New Seward and Lake Otis.Going places by bike has given me some much needed outdoor, exercise, and nature time.

J1 did get to San Francisco from Seattle to take J home from the hospital Monday and to look after him for a while. Local friends there have come by and offered help. As of this evening he can walk up and down the stairs, he walked a bit outside today, but he has a lot of abrasions all over and a few missing chunks that the doctor said would heal themselves eventually. The police report won't be available for ten days, but we can talk to the police officer who took the report on Saturday. I think J1 said she has a name and a commercial license plate. Apparently no word from the person who hit J, but then I suspect he may not be easy to track down. No, I'm being generous, you can get his blog easily through google.

I woke up too late Tuesday to go to the second day of the conference and so I took advantage of the continued good weather (it's clouded over somewhat tonight) and ran and did garden stuff. Then in the afternoon I went to my Thai class. These started at Wat Alaska (the Thai Buddhist Temple near C and Fireweed) on Tuesday afternoons soon after we got back. I'm hoping to not only keep where I am, but make some progress. It's been a lot of fun. And I'm learning a lot more about monks and Thai temples and words that go with that as well as other things. We're also going back and doing some basics I skipped when I started learning to read Thai.

My regular teacher said he would be in Juneau this week and I would have a substitute - a visiting monk from Thailand. Long story short, I'm taking him to Seward tomorrow and Friday we'll try to see whales. He can't eat after noon, just drink. But he doesn't have to get up at 4 am to chant when we're in Seward.

After Thai I went to the steering committee meeting of Healing Racism Anchorage. Dr. Martin Brokenleg will be in Anchorage on Tuesday - HRA is one of the sponsors. There will be a community discussion Tuesday night at Wendy Williamson Auditorium from 5:30 to 8:30 - yes there will be some snacks, and it's free. Here's UAA's announcement.

Tuesday, May 26, 5:30-8:30 p.m.
Wendy Williamson Auditorium

The community is invited to participate in a meaningful and authentic dialogue about race and diversity. Participants will also gain an awareness of the ethnic and cultural experiences that are in Anchorage and explore how to interrupt racism. For 30 years Dr. Brokenleg was a professor of Native American studies at Augustana College of Sioux Falls, South Dakota. He has consulted and led training programs throughout North America, New Zealand, and South Africa. Dr. Brokenleg will present and facilitate the participatory, community dialogue. How can Anchorage as a community comfortably explore, interrupt and address racism?

Light refreshments will be served. This event is free and open to the public.

Healing Racism's next six week seminar, "Building Alliances to End Racism" will begin May 28 and go through July 2 on Thursday evenings. You can
email me for more details.




This afternoon I had new x-rays and the physician assistant said they were good and now the buddy finger is free and the splint is just on the recovering finger. I'm even typing normal, or somewhat normal. You can't touch type if you can't feel and the splint is over the tip of that finger. I'm supposed to call a physical therapist tomorrow. I think that's overkill for the finger, but she's a two minute walk from the house, so I'll do it. but it is straight and normal looking.

It started with the bike pump

Martial chaos in Bangkok. Clues to check out on the Stevens' case. Local outrage about the comments of the Palin attorney general pick, but with hints his nomination isn't doing well. It was already afternoon when we finally got up - not sure I can still blame this on jet lag. And as I write I realize I totally forgot about the Songkran celebrations at the Thai Wat here in Anchorage. Taxes to get organized. And I found a website with links to Thai music videos - a great way to work on my Thai since they have the Thai words below. And unlike on Thai tv, I can stop them and play them again til I get it.

The relative warmth - low 40s, about 7˚C - and the rapidly disappearing snow were calling too. The deck was clear, the back and front yards are showing a lot more brown in just the few days we've been home.

So let's chuck everything and ride over to Suttons and look for some seeds, maybe even some seedlings.

But when I got the bikes out, J's tires were soft. The pump wasn't where it was supposed to be in the garage. I seemed to vaguely remember thinking about taking it to Thailand with us back in January, so where did it end up? Not in the two most likely places.



Then I looked into M's old room which has turned into our store room. We'd cleared out some closets and drawers and cabinets to give our house sitters some room. It got a little rough at the end as we just threw things in to get them out of the way before heading to the airport. Was it in there?

Well, sorting through the old stuff and getting rid of as much as we can was also on the list of todo's and maybe the pump was buried in there. About two hours later, with a lot more floor showing, I found the pump. But it was too late to go. We lived in two rooms in Chiang Mai quite comfortably. Certainly we can get rid of a lot of stuff in here.

LOL in Thai

Instead of LOL on their emails, Thais write 55555.

In Thai, 5 is pronounced "Ha" with a falling tone, as if you were emphatically saying "No!"

Etaoin Shrdlu - Thai Keyboard Update

Etaoin Shrdlu is:

A place for McClatchy editors and others to talk about the changing news media landscape.

I stumbled onto this blog while I was posting about McClatchy and the Anchorage Daily News. I knew the title had to have some meaning, but I couldn't figure out the code. Fortunately, they have a link to Wikipedia explaining the letters:

Etaoin Shrdlu is the approximate order of frequency of the twelve most commonly used letters in the English language

Back in Thailand I did a post about finding stick on letters so I could have a Thai letters on my keyboard without getting a new keyboard. Well, time has not been kind to my Thai key labels. But we can use the keyboard to test Etaoin Shrdlu

Pretty close.

Someone told me I could get stick on letters with a plastic coating. I guess that's what I'll have to do next time

Thai Keyboard

Someone from Holland got here googling "thai keyboard shipping holland online." I doubt if he/she will be back here, but just in case, last week I bought stick on letters for my keyboard. I didn't put them on that straight, but it sure makes it easier to find the letters. 20 Baht (32 B/dollar). I don't think anyone needs to ship a whole keyboard, just the stick on letters.

ํYou Can Read Thai

Who will be the first to write the English meaning of the pink word on the sign? It's probably much harder than I think, but it's probably much easier than you think. Double click on the picture to enlarge it.

Meetings

Monday night, March 3

I did my seminar this morning. We got into things like productivity and time management - particularly identifying the task people do then trying to connect them to the organizational goals. I've had several weeks to hang out with these people and the organization. They've got good documentation because they had to set up standard international mission statement, goals, objectives, etc. for their grant from Oxfam.

My Thai continues to frustrate me at work, but I had the Powerpoint (had to save my Keynote presentation as powerpoint then fix a few things that got lost in the transition - I have to see if I actually have a cord for my Macbook to a projector so I can just present from my computer) with enough Thai and pictures that everyone could understand what I was trying to convey. Well, even American students have problems with the concepts, but they at least understand the words.

When the boss came in - he had to go visit someone in the hospital and was late - my sense was that he was pleased with the message I was giving. At the end when I told them to talk among themselves, from what I could understand, he was reinforcing many of the things I'd been saying.


Then we all had a lunch that someone brought in. The afternoon was another meeting. Same six people with several more people from another office. The pictures are of the meeting, not the morning seminar. I tried to understand and I caught phrases and words regularly, but not enough to be certain what the point was for sure. It's clear that people's northern accents are one factor, but I just don't have the vocabulary I need. So when I heard them repeating a word, I tried to write it in Thai in Thai2English.com and see if I could get the English word. The problem was spelling it right because that program doesn't give you things that are close, only the right
spelling. At least in Chinese you write the pinyin (phonetic in western letters). But I did get, finally, ข้อมูล spelled right and learned it meant data, information.

The organization's candidate didn't win - #1 did. Apparently vote totals weren't available today, since no one new how many votes those two candidates got.

When I got home, J told me about her first Thai lesson. This is out of sync for the classes so she has a one on one lesson with what she described as "a real teacher" who knows how to get the most out of their time. She likes her so much, she rather go there than to the University class (which she checked out) even though the university is much closer.

We met Melissa for vegetarian dinner. This was the third time I've been there in a week and they were very nice to us and the food is really good. In the restaurant and in the shops I can tell my Thai is much more fluent than when we first got here, something I don't feel at the office where I'm always listening to and stretching for words I don't know. Talking about the meaning of efficiency, organizational goals and objectives, and how to measure one's work output is a lot more abstract than ordering food or asking if they have a lid for the frying pan.

I've got some catch up posts and pictures and I'll do those separately.

Getting the Thai and English Together

As I try to read through the Thai in my organization's work plan, the words that I've put on my list are now recognizable. But as I work toward Monday's seminar with the people in the office, I realize that I have to use more of the Thai in my presentation and things I hand out. As I move to asking questions about how exactly they are determining whether they have reached their goals or not (and thus how they will write their next set of goals) I need to use the Thai. They do have a basic structure of goals and expected outcomes, which they needed for their Oxfam grant. So I've been reading the English and Thai and meshing the two. Without the English, I would be hard pressed to get the exact meaning of the Thai, but with the English, and Thai2English.com I can work it out. So that's what I've been been working on today.

Thais use the same word for work and party

Friday, February 22, 5:13pm
I've known the word งาน since I first studied Thai. It means work. But it also shows up in words like งานวัด which is a wat festival. But it wasn't until today when I was preparing a Keynote (Mac's version of Powerpoint) presentation for next week in both Thai and English and had to look up the word 'network' which can be translated as ข่ายงาน. (The second syllable is งาน) Thai2English.com (which is making my life MUCH easier) then takes the two parts of that word and translates each.

งาน pronounced ngaan means:

1. work ; job ; task
2. party ; celebration

I'd never made that connection. No wonder Thais enjoy life so much.

And while I'm speaking of Thai, I mistranslated the word on the sign I saw the other day. I'll make a correction in the post itself too. I said it meant 'safe from poison" and it may mean that , but it isn't exactly the same as organic. It means that no pesticides were used, but they probably used chemical fertilizers. Chiengmai University's agricultural department will have a market Saturday selling pesticide free food.

And making the Thai words larger seems to have messed up the size of the English words, but I don't have time to make it perfect, sorry.

Brief Thai lesson

This started out as a post on the village fair I went to Thursday night. But the intro seems worthy of a separate post all its own.

All Thais have nicknames. The person at work who took me to the village is nicknamed 'Doc'. Actually, I think I've spelled it 'Doc' in English because he's a doctoral student, but I don't think it means that in Thai. I'm not sure how it's spelled in Thai so it's hard to look up. I think (I started to write 'know' but I realize most things that people have told me in Thai, it's safer to think of as "might be') someone said his nickname starts with the letter ต rather than ด
The ต has a little dip on top and is pronounced as though you were saying Tea, but without breathing out a puff of air. If you put your hand in front of your mouth when you say Tea out loud, you'll feel a little air coming out. Linguists call this an 'aspirated' sound - because breath comes out. Now try to say it without the air coming out. (Unaspirated.) That's the ต sound. The ด is like the English letter D. The two letters are very similar, but not the same. Listen here to the difference. NOTE: Click on the yellow arrow NOT the link which will take you to jamglue.

Thai letter ต imported by AKRaven

Thai Letter ด imported by AKRaven

(In the second audio clip he says the Thai sound of the letter - is we would say "dee" - and then the word that starts with the letter that is used when kids are taught the alphabet. In this case the word is 'dek' or child.)

It can be pretty hard to hear the difference, but think how people learning English must feel. We have so many more different sounds and some with very subtle differences. This is no more difficult than the difference between, say, "rode" and "wrote". And if you listen to how people actually say these in a sentence, they often don't even say the sounds. The difference is really that you hold the 'o' in rode but you stop it quickly in 'wrote.' Or bead and beat. Or 'slip' and 'slipped'. We barely make the sound. For Thais who don't have a final 'd' sound or a 'pt' sound it is very hard to hear the differences.

Another subtlety of Thai are the loops in the letters. I didn't look closely enough and instead of ด, I typed ค, which is one of the aspirated K sound letters. Can you see the difference between the two letters?*

Attribution and Technical Note: I got the sounds from http://www.thai-language.com/ (You can go to each letter through the purple box on the left panel.) But to embed them in the blog so you could listen to them here instead of finding the right buttons on the website, I uploaded them to www.jamglue.com and then took the embed code and put that in my post. It is pretty incredible what tools are available to do this with. Thanks to the invisible techies who make all this possible.

*Difference between the letters: Look at the direction of the loop in the middle of each.

To Thailand Soon ไป เมือง ไทย ใน ไม่ นาน

Working this out has taken a while. The American Jewish World Service (AJWS) had a spot for me at one NGO, but political issues ruled that out. So they worked out another one. I'm not sure how much I can blog about specifics, but I will keep blogging in general. If all works out I'll be in Chieng Mai for about 2 1/2 months. Will be helping with management activities. English level is low to non-existent I'm told, so I have to get my Thai back up to speed. Actually it was pretty serviceable last spring when we were there and I have been listening to the audio for "Thai for Advanced Readers." I need to start practicing writing again. My spelling's terrible.

Here's a page from the reader. This story is about Thais in the US.



Here's the title with a little help.



Two of the words in the title are in the title of this post. (The 'h' after the K and the T means you blow air out of your mouth when you say them. So Th is like a T sound, but T alone is the same sound but without the air coming out. A little like a D, but Thais have two different sounds. KH is like a K, K without the h is a K without the puff of air, or like the G in 'go'. So, that's why Thai, has an h, but isn't pronounced thigh.)

I was trying to find a website with the Thai alphabet. But then I found this one which looks like a great source for studying Thai.

As I keep looking for a simple Thai alphabet page with the English sounds I'm finding a lot of neat resources for learning Thai. Here's a page that shows how to write the first few consonants in the Thai alphabet.

OK, after much time exploring Thai sites, many with interesting stuff, I finally found a reasonably simple Thai alphabet with English phonetics. It has more than you need, but it's good.