This Friday, April 25 is the last day to receive your early registration discount for the MAPH Reunion Dinner on Friday, June 6. Our reunion of MAPH alumni, preceptors, faculty and staff will take place from 7-10 pm at Chicago’s Landmark Grill and Lounge, located at 1633 North Halsted. I hope to see you all as we come together to raise a glass to MAPH!

Register now at http://alumniweekend.uchicago.edu/ to receive a $10 discount on each of your tickets (normally $20.) Anyone who wishes to register at the door may do so, but each ticket will be $30 rather than $20 (cash or check.) If you have any questions, please contact Heather Upshaw in the Humanities Division at hupshaw@uchicago.edu or 773.834.2502.

I look forward to seeing you all on June 6!

Best wishes,

Patrick Reichard, AM ‘02″

Hi guys!

Since last I wrote you all:

I was happy to leave Bangkok behind because after a week the incredible pollution and stink wore away some of the City’s initial charm, such as it is. But first I had to have my lunch with my Philipino friend from the weekend market. She picked me up in a taxi near my hotel and we drove to her family’s house, which was a nice-ish bungalow kind of place. I met her brother, Alex and her cousin. I thought it was strange that her sister wasn’t there though, the whole reason behind this lunch date. The story was that their grandmother had had a heart attack or something that morning and that the sister and their mother were at the hospital with her. Of course I thought it was bizarre to still have me over with their mother on the verge of a triple bypass operation or whatever, but hey, foreign hospitality and all. Alex and I drank tea while Ana and her cousin made lunch. He’s a croupier who deals cards on cruise ships, in the VIP rooms he claimed, and in the occasional under-the-table private game in Bangkok hotels. In any case, he told me about his line of work and what not and that he had some players from the night before coming over later in the afternoon for a private game of “Poker Blackjack 21,” which is essentially Blackjack but with betting like poker. As a favor to me, after lunch he’d show me how to cheat in this game, as I was doing his family a good turn educating this absent sister about Chicago.

Lunch, as I feared, was centered around this scary looking fish. Not Fear Factor gross, but pretty unappetizing looking all the same. I ate as much as I could and then made up a story about a bout with a past stomach illness that limited how much I could eat in one sitting. So then Alex sets about showing me how to cheat at this game he deals. His system basically consisted of watching signals from him since he could control the cards. This way I was guaranteed not to lose and in some hypothetical future in which he dealt cards in American casinos we would defraud the house, the other players at the table, and split everything 50/50. His system worked, but was incredibly obvious cheating to anyone with half a brain, but I played along until he told me that he wanted me to help him cheat this Indonesian woman out of her winnings from the night before. Well, I’ve fallen for this you and I cheat an unwitting third party scam before on the subway in St. Louis and although the terms were different this basically looked like the same thing to me. What his angle was I have no idea, assuming I really was somehow the target and not this woman, but with visions of a life sentence in a Thai prison for God knows what transgression flashing before my eyes I was not about to find out. I declined as politely as I could and made my exit shortly after the Indonesian woman arrived. So whether or not there ever was any Red Lobster bound sister I have no idea. They were extremely nice to me at any rate, gave me all their contact info, extended family info around the country in case I was ever in a jam, and offered their house as a room next time I was in Bangkok.

The train to Kanchanaburi the next morning was ricketty and old and absolutely perfect. You could slide the windows all the way down and there were rotating fans on the ceiling and just wooden benches inside. It seems that you often see parts of a city from train tracks that you otherwise wouldn’t and this trip was no different. On either side of the tracks there lived people who were clearly extremely poor, living under bridges, etc., and often in shacks that looked like little more than piles of garbage. Some of them were farming little plots fed by the runoff from the train tracks. From conversations I later had I gather that much of Thailand’s very poor have been where they are for a long time. Thailand is growing wealthier very quickly, but these entrenched poor are not seeing any of that and just sort of stay put where they are while the country grows around them.

My guesthouse was really cool. It floated on the river Kwai. My little front porch looked out over the river onto the mountains and at the bend just downstream there was a temple. It was quite idyllic. I met some cool people there and made a travelling pal, Sanna, from Sweden. Sanna and I both wanted to go to Chang Mai so we took the bus back to Bangkok on Tuesday to catch transportation up to Chang Mai. This time I checked out China town in Bangkok which was amazing. Each little street sort of specializes in something. My favorites were the streets selling fish and other sea creatures that were frightening looking things: lobsters that looked like they were pumped up with steroids and high on crystal meth, things that looked like giant oceanic insects, etc. . . actual Fear Factor animals. Also amazing was the shoe street. There must have been millions of shoes for sale on this street. You shoe-aholics out there would have been in heaven. Some of the stores sold shoes by their individual pieces, basically letting you pick them out one by one, designing your own shoe. So you could really make yourself a pair that literally nobody else in the world would have. I thought that was pretty cool.\n\u003cbr\>\u003cbr\>\n”,0] ); D(["ce"]); //–>It was about three hours to Kanchanabui. About 50 kilometers outside the city the landscape stopped being flat and those iconic, forrested Southeast Asian mountains started appearing. They were really beautiful. Kanchanaburi itself was somehwat uninspiring since it is more or less just a stop for backpackers because of its history as a Japanese POW camp from which they built the Thai-Burma railway to connect the newly conquered Singapore to Burma. I met some interesting people though. This used book store was a sort of impromptu bar for American expats. So I hung out with those guys for a few hours drinking 40 oz Thai beers for the equivalent of like a dollar each. It was pretty chill. Most of them were midwesterners, though the guy who owned the store was from San Francisco. One of the guys was an Iraqi vet from the third infantry working at an orphanage on the Thai-Burma border to “ease his soul” as he put it from what he’d seen in Iraq. He was one of these guys who loves the United States above anything else. He signed up after watching Colin Powell’s speech in front of the UN, convinced that Iraq was a threat to us. But now he just feels lied to and that the whole reason he joined was a fraud.

My guesthouse was really cool. It floated on the river Kwai. My little front porch looked out over the river onto the mountains and at the bend just downstream there was a temple. It was quite idyllic. I met some cool people there and made a traveling pal, Sanna, from Sweden. Sanna and I both wanted to go to Chang Mai so we took the bus back to Bangkok on Tuesday to catch transportation up to Chang Mai. This time I checked out Chinatown in Bangkok which was amazing. Each little street sort of specializes in something. My favorites were the streets selling fish and other sea creatures that were frightening looking things: lobsters that looked like they were pumped up with steroids and high on crystal meth, things that looked like giant oceanic insects, etc. . . actual Fear Factor animals. Also amazing was the shoe street. There must have been millions of shoes for sale on this street. You shoe-aholics out there would have been in heaven. Some of the stores sold shoes by their individual pieces, basically letting you pick them out one by one, designing your own shoe. So you could really make yourself a pair that literally nobody else in the world would have. I thought that was pretty cool.

I’ve been in Bangkok for 5 days now and have just found an internet cafe here in the Sukhumvit subway station.

First, it takes a long time to get here. It didn’t help that when I started I was in the extreme southwest of England and had to take a train for 6 hours to London. Rugby mania is in full force with the Rugby World Cup on and at Heathrow I found myself in the midst of the English national team which was pretty cool, even though in my complete ignorance of the sport I at first mistook them for the New Zealand All Blacks because they were wearing all black track suits… Anyway, I got to checking my email at the airport and completely lost track of time. When I looked up the board said my flight to Dubai was in closing so I sprinted across the entire airport and all that summer running proved handy as hell. But then I got there and not one person had gotten on the plane yet so I looked like an idiot. I then got to sit on the runway for an hour and a half because of “engine trouble,” which is not what you want to hear when you’re about to take to the sky. But after a takeoff that had me and the guys next to me all scared, the flight was fine. The Dubai airport was not made of solid gold and diamonds as I’d hoped, but it was pretty damn nice all the same. Cooler was that on the way there you could see the flames from oil wells in Iran 37,000 feet below.

Yada yada yada, another six hours to Bangkok, and I was here and wanted sleep so, so badly after being awake for like 35 hours straight. My taxi driver from the airport to my hotel was freakin’ crazy and I was convinced that he was going to deliberately rear end cars at 80 mph on the highway on the way into the city. Apparently people around here in general, have a karmic view of driving and drive with according abandon, the idea being that on the day you are destined to die a feather can kill you so you might as well drive like a maniac. That said, outside of that one ride, all the state department cautions about the insanity of traffic seem overblown. I’ve been walking everywhere or taking the ultra modern and very cool sky train and subways, that and motorbike taxis, which are very, very fun. Much of the city doesn’t really have sidewalks so you just walk in the street and it’s fine.

All in all, Bangkok is pretty awesome. It’s really dirty and really noisy, but also really alive. The juxtapostion of super modern buildings, shopping, and super hip clubs with street vendors galore, night markets, and the old shanty pockets that dot the city is really cool. I can find my way around pretty well now but at first I was completely confused. The Sois that shoot off the main roads are where most of the stuff is going on but you can get turned around in them easily. I spent the first day here wandering aimlessly around the Sukhumvit district. It was cool to see all the golden statues of, I think, Krishna around with offerings of Fanta and other sweet drinks that people had put out in the morning. I managed to get a haircut and learn some Thai from the hairdresser that I immediately forgot because the language is really hard. (I mean, it has like 22 vowels, which are then surrounded by markings that dictate their tone. Basically, reading it just ain’t gonna happen and speaking it is very difficult outside of a handful of basic phrases.) I then couldn’t find my way back to my hotel and had to break down and get a motorbike taxi. My driver couldn’t then find it either because apparently I’m staying in one of the newest hotels (and it isn’t very big) in Bangkok and a lot of people don’t know where it is. So we rode all over the place trying to find it. I didn’t mind at all because it was extremely fun. That fare cost the equivalent of 22 cents.

Everything is cheap in general. Even eating in an extremely fancy restaurant costs the equivalent of like $10 a person. What hasn’t been cheap is beer in clubs. On Wednesday night I went to this place called Q Bar which was very enamoured with Jay Z and beers at 190 baht were not a very good deal. Still, it was cool as hell and a lot of fun.

Anyway, the highlights so far would have to be Q Bar because that was a ton of fun, taking the river taxi up the Chao Phraya to Tha Tien pier and seeing Wat Po, meeting up with a guy I know from my internet baseball dorkdom who lives in Singapore and was in Bangkok for the week, and this morning at the Chatachak weekend market which is absolutely amazing. HUGE, and you can buy probably everything conceivable except a car or a laptop. Maybe even those as far as I know; I didn’t even see the whole thing. I wanted to see the section selling fish and pets but I couldn’t and eventually gave up. I only bought some t-shirts and along the way met a Philipino woman because she complemented me on my shorts and asked me where I got them. I told her the USA and she told me her sister is just about to move to Chicago on a VISA to work at the Red Lobster downtown. When I told her I was from Chicago she was agog and insisted on buying me a Coke to chat about it because apparently her mother is really worried that her sister isn’t going to know anyone there. She then basically cajoled me into going over to her house for lunch tomorrow so that I can meet her sister and give her info about Chicago and set her mother’s mind at ease about the trip. It should be pretty interesting and it’s exactly this sort of thing that I was wanting. Temples and what not all sort of blend together after you see a couple of them.

On Monday I’ll take a train northwest to Kanchanaburi and find a guesthouse by the River Kwai. I’ll probably spend a couple of days there and then go further north to Chang Mai. What else? Everyone here is so skinny! Not malnourished or anything, just really skinny. It makes my feel like some kind of beef-cake in comparison and I am far from that. I was watching CNN and a news report about the American economy showed shoppers at a Costco or some such place and I was shocked at how obese they looked all of a sudden! The weather: it’s not that hot really, about 85 F most of the time I’d guess. The monsoon is still wrapping up, so there will be maybe one downpour around noon and then another one a little before midnight. I think this is a good thing because the city does need to be washed off. After walking around for a day you definitely feel pretty filthy and are convinced you stink and have to take a shower before dinner.

I hope you’re all doing well in your respective parts of the world.

Much love,

Adrian

Laura Browning (05), who studied writing in MAPH, was recently hired as a senior conservation writer by The Nature Conservancy, which promptly shipped her off to Panama. From the edge of the jungle she writes:

I got up this morning at 5:45, did yoga on my sleeping porch, and then met the rest of the early arrivers in the lobby at 6:30. We met up with a guy named Hernan who is apparently the best birder in all of Panama–and I have no doubt after what we saw this morning: Keel billed toucans, three or four kinds of red headed woodpeckers, trogans, and lots of North American migratory birds. Oh yes–and we heard howler monkeys.