Rapid Start

Krishan, Denise, me, Mauricio, Anna, and Jean

I arrived in Bangkok at 11:05pm local time on Thursday night by way of Seoul.  Door to door was just over 24 hours so I was pretty wiped out and happy to get to the very comfortable Pullman Hotel.  Friday (Day 1) started with meeting the team in person for the first time at breakfast.  We have nice global representation with Krishnan (India), Anna (Greece), Maurcio (Brazil), Denise (Chicago) and me.  Australian Business Volunteers representatives (www.abv.org.au), who coordinate our project logistics, include Jean from Australia and David and Tang from Thailand.  Working on about 5 hours sleep in the last 48 and it was all business the first day.  We headed to the IBM Bangkok office where we spent the day with the local team to learn more about our project scope.  Not much time to do any sightseeing but we're enjoying the fabulous Thai cuisine.

On Saturday we traveled two hours to the project location in Pattaya, Chonburi.  The city is  a lot bigger than I expected with a crescent beach and massive hotels.  More meetings today and of course some more eating.  I did run on the treadmill for two miles but I think I'm going to need to increase the distance if we keep eating at this rate.  Pad Thai with shrimp or chicken is my favorite and one of the most common dishes here.

Thai folk dance demonstration

We met our local team of translators who will assist us for the next three weeks. I made a Thai phrase cheat sheet but I'm struggling putting the sounds together.  I think I've got "thank you" down, pronounced cop-koon-kup.  Say that fast three times

We met our local translator team at lunch today.