Highlights of 2010, Part 2

After all of the excitement in the first half of the year, we were ready to get out of Bangkok and enjoy a quiet weekend together, so we took a quick trip to Bali, Indonesia in July. We were lucky enough to time our visit for one of the big festivals, where we got to hear a full gamelan orchestra for the first time.





Our hotel was within walking distance of the Sacred Monkey Forest Sanctuary, where a huge colony of long-tailed macaques live in the forest that surrounds a Balinese Hindu temple.














The temple grounds feature some of the weirdest statuary we have ever seen -- and we've seen a lot of weird statuary! This part of Bali is famous for its stonecarving artisans, and the roads from the airport to the village where we were staying were lined with workshops. Patrick had a flashback to his first summer job in 1987 when he saw a carving that looked just like the creature from Predator.











In August we accepted the invitation of one of our Thai colleagues to visit a dog shelter in Bangkok. Many of the dogs in the shelter were missing limbs (either from accidents or congenital defects) or were severely ill, and almost all of them were feral. There were also a few puppies there whose mothers had died or been killed.




The predominance of Buddhism in Thai culture means that euthanizing dogs is considered immoral, so the workers at the shelter do the best they can to relieve the dogs' suffering. Our colleague and her family brought 50 pounds of boiled chicken livers and other organ meats to feed to the dogs. We each got a metal bowl and a pair of extra-long chopsticks, so that we could walk along the rows and feed the dogs.

The oddest thing we saw at the shelter was a pig. It had been brought to the shelter as a piglet, and now it weighs several hundred pounds.


In September we took a trip to the island of Ko Samui for a weekend at the Scent Hotel. Unfortunately we don't have many pictures from this trip, as we spent much of the time dealing with a missing motorcycle. We'd rented a motorcycle for a day; when we went to return the motorcycle the following morning, it was no longer parked in front of the hotel. We reported the incident to the police and then spent most of the rest of day dealing with the rental company, who insisted we owed them $5000 for a new motorcycle. We couldn't tell if the motorcycle had truly been stolen, or if we were the victims of a scam perpetrated by the rental company, or something in between. So, we politely but firmly stonewalled the rental company all day, waiting for a Thai solution to present itself. Eventually the owner of the company called us at 9:00pm that night, saying that the motorcycle had been "found" in a supermarket parking lot. We'll never know what really happened, but that's all right.



(Note the large space in the middle of this picture, where there should have been a motorcycle.)


At the end of September we attended a birthday party thrown by a group of our colleagues. Guests were encouraged to dress appropriately for the theme, which was the 1980s. We had a lot of fun with our costume (even if Sarawat didn't make a particularly convincing cow).