Fish for dinner anyone?

Had a wonderful dinner the other night with one of our classmates who is Thai. He took us for some great street food and ordered up a feast. It was awesome.

Class has started and it is really interesting. It is lectures broken up by a lot of different group exercises, games and role playing. There is a lot of talk and debate with the teachers, it is not a top down style of teaching at all. I had a great conversation with one of the professors yesterday; I had been feeling like I didn't really fit in because I wasn't working on any international peace issues. But as I was talking to one of the professors about what I do and what I plan to do with what I learn in the program she was very excited about it. If you all don't know, I really believe planners should be trained in conflict resolution because we deal with community conflict all the time. What often ends up happening is we build consensus instead of solving conflict. So basically I see consensus building as a short term solution where usually everyone compromises and no one is truly happy with the outcome AND it doesn't solve the the root of the problem. That problem just continues to cause problems in the future.

So there I was explaining this to this amazing woman from the Philippines who is working on major conflict issues in Mindanao and she got it. She got it exactly and she called me a pioneer in my field and that I needed to publish something about it! So I thought, hey, maybe I do fit in in my own way!

Bangkok is a HUGE city, over 12 million they think but with homelessness and commuters not being accounted for I guess an unofficial number during the week is over 16 million. It is much more cosmopolitan than it was when I was here 18 years ago. (Can't believe it was 18 years ago!) There was not sky train or metro then and there weren't a million mega shopping malls either. BTW, of all strange things the campus is right near these crazy, famous shopping malls which I have to go to often. It is where we go grocery shopping,get coffee, eat dinner often, etc. etc. The malls are all interconnected with sky ways and they are busy all the time. One of the malls is set up with little vendor areas and one whole floor has cell phones, another electronics, another of fabric, etc., etc.

I have found a great 4.5 mile running route from the dorm to Lumphini Park, a great urban oasis. Cultural note: They have public outdoor exercise classes such as aerobics, Ta chi, yoga in the park and just in parking lots around campus.