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My plan for coming to Thailand was simple: do my fieldwork and train for more triathlons. I figured with free time after the forest, endless good weather (meaning no Canadian snow), and hills as far as the eye could see, Khao Yai would be the best place for me to learn how to become a better athlete. There’s no place to swim here, but I could run and bike for hours on end. So when I arrived in January 2010, I put on my sneakers and I started to run. I’m not going to lie, running here sucks. It’s hard. It’s really, really hard. And after 1.5 years, it’s still not getting any easier. “Khao Yai” translates directly from Thai to English into “Big Mountain” and that’s exactly, quite literally, what this place is: a damn, big mountain. Even the “flat land” has hills; they just aren’t as steep as the “real hills”. :) But I made the commitment to myself to run, so I continue to put on my shoes and go. Not long after I started running was the Best Day Ever when I made my first Thai friend:

Next week I’ll be heading to Bangkok to give a talk on my dissertation work at the International Symposium for Biodiversity and Ecology of Wildlife in Thailand at Chulalongkorn University. I’ll be in Bangkok for three days with the students and professors for the symposium, and then in the following days we will travel around the country to visit some field sites to see long-tailed macaques, stump-tailed macaques, pig-tailed macaques and gibbons. I’ve been in the house most of this month concentrating on compiling some data to present and putting the presentation together, so I’ve been working late into the night and sleeping in the mornings. My schedule is kinda wonky and I haven’t been spending much time with people around Khao Yai. For the past two nights, I actually had dreams that I was trying to talk to my friends around here, but other people kept interrupting me and causing distractions preventing me from communicating with my friends. This morning Jambee came over with a