August 25, 2006

It's Friday afternoon and it's downpouring rain. Wow! A really big storm and we just lost electricity!!!! Dang! I'm not sure if we've ever seen a storm this intense before. Dave and I were about to go basket shopping too. There's so many local basket shops that have incredible shapes and weaves that we always see and have never explored. So we were going to go on a basket hunt. Guess it'll have to wait until tomorrow.

This week was good. I had a horn seminar most of the week in Bangkok. It was cool for my students to meet other horn players. They performed (horn choir) and I gave a clinic. It was all good except for the commute. It was in downtown Bangkok and took nearly 3 hours one day!!!! The other trips were 1 hour 15 minutes! Oh man..that was brutal. I guess there was a mini bus protest so all the mini buses parked in the streets and at one of the bridges ( in the direction we were heading) they found a small bomb. There were so many students there though. A few hundred at least...and all horn players! Pretty amazing. I had a funny moment though. Some of the clinics were in Thai and at one of them I just had NO clue what they were talking about. So I asked my Japanese friend if he understood and he said "no." He then turned to his Japanese friend and asked (in Japanese) if he understood what the horn clinic (in Thai) was about. His friend rattled back something to him and then translated that into English for me! How funny.

Dave's jazz band concert is next week and I'm the soloist. Pretty hilare. There's a new Japanese restaurant in town that has super good noodle soups. I'm getting really used to the whole noodle thing...sometimes I even have noodle soup cravings!! So weird since it's just chicken broth, cabbage, veggies and noodles. Now I kind of want some...hmmm....the rain needs to stop first.